Terra Invicta

[Geezer]

Just finished the second year in my game.  Russia has absorbed Kazakhstan and Belarus.  The Balkan States, Ukraine, and Finland will be next.  Fighting The Academy in Mexico to try and keep our control there to help influence things in the US.  There have been two violent revolutions in the US in the last year with control points changing hands often.  Our main interest is in keeping things fluid so nobody gets control.  We don't have the cap to take it over.

We are building our first mining station on Earth and will deliver it to our base on the Moon in about 60 days.  It will take every bit of boost to make that happen.  Our probe will make it to Mars in a few months and then we'll pick a site to grab.  Hopefully we'll have more boost by then.

[Geezer]

Somebody just detonated a "loose nuke" in Washington, DC for reasons unknown.  Sadly, my best councilor was there at the time and was killed.   

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Ugh, not a fan of the new patch.

They limit which factions you can play as based on total faction count now.  For example, you can't select Project Exodus unless you select total factions of five or greater.
They've also changed the priority button selection order for science projects.  For some reason, left clicking now lowers the priority while right clicking raises it.  This is the opposite of how it was prior to the patch.

Having a HOTAS system plugged in screws up menu selection and space combat.  Unless all your devices read a zero input value, the menus will start scrolling uncontrollably.  This is a problem with the UNITY engine and it's bloody annoying (especially since UNITY doesn't see my rudder as reading a zero value when it's centred).

[SirAndrewD]

Yeah, the HOTAS thing sucks. 

One of the reasons I put all my flight sim accessories on a powered USB.  I can just click it off at will.

[Jarhead0331]

Yeah, the HOTAS thing sucks. 

One of the reasons I put all my flight sim accessories on a powered USB.  I can just click it off at will.

+1

[Boggit]

I love this game! O0

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Yeah, the HOTAS thing sucks. 

One of the reasons I put all my flight sim accessories on a powered USB.  I can just click it off at will.

I did that a fair while back but Windows registered a power spike in the USB devices and I discovered that my TrackIR had turned into a tiny little brick.

[SirAndrewD]

Yeah, the HOTAS thing sucks. 

One of the reasons I put all my flight sim accessories on a powered USB.  I can just click it off at will.

I did that a fair while back but Windows registered a power spike in the USB devices and I discovered that my TrackIR had turned into a tiny little brick.

Wild.

I keep my TrackIR in the PC.

The hub goes into my power strip, I feel it's as safe as my PC.

[Ian C]

Patch Notes


Hi folks,

We've patched Terra Invicta today with a number of bugfixes and some balance adjustments.

Note that we keep multiple versions of the game available for you to play. Here's our guide to playing newer and older builds on Steam if you ever run into issues with the default build, or would like to test-drive new features while we are still making sure they are ready for prime-time: https://www.pavonisinteractive.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=29540

A new campaign is not required. (We'll let you know if it is for technical reasons, or if changes will throw off the balance significantly).

Here are all the changes. It covers several versions we have had live on our beta branches this week, but they're all in the build.

0.3.23

Content
- 4 new event illustrations, 1 objective illustration

Balance
- reverted some combat hab module power requirements from .22
- increase research university output

Bugfixes
- crash fix 2674 (buddy movie when one of the participants got killed offscreen)
- crash fixes to refits when null parts get returned
- fix to crash when a mission is revalidated against a destroyed ship/fleet

Known issues
- Bombardment & counterfire will get looked at next
- We're still chasing a crash when an org gets duplicated somehow.
- Need to fix how the the alien threat-o-meter updates. I was gonna do that today but I finally got sick after like 4 years and my brain is kinda mushy, c'mon sudafed don't fail me now

0.3.22

Balance / Gameplay
- Messed with mining profiles: more nobles on Mercury, more water on D-type asteroids, more fissiles on Stony and Metallic asteroids. Requires new campaign to take effect.
- Missiles and gun shells require less damage to destroy.
- PD weapons will fire at mag weapon shells at a minimum expected .5 damage instead of 1, meaning they will fire at greater ranges (at less damage per hit at those ranges). These two changes should address a lot of "my pd won't fire" issues.
* All space combat modules now carry three weapons: A PD weapon; your best antiship laser (if available, otherwise best nonmissile weapon); your best "gun"-type weapon (naval gun, mag, plasma). Some human space combat modules have changed power requirements. THIS WILL MESS WITH YOUR HABS IN SAVEGAMES (sorry about that). All hab combat modules have significantly reduced hit points.
- SimulateCombat() : Starting distance between combatants now equal to the range of the longest range offensive weapon in the combat.
- a coup in a nation will cancel all pending coup missions in that nation
- Hostile Takeover attempts no longer gain benefit from councilor being detained
- Several new projects to oppose alien enthralls/terror attacks sprinkled throughout the tree
- added turkey claim on Astana with United Turkestan project
- added crackdown to a couple more orgs, increased cost of t1 admin org a bit
- added beginning of AI to favor particular weapon types in design at a "meta" level rather than just via scoring for role. Right now this is only for the aliens so their ships evolve more during a campaign. Future intent is to have responsive designs and factions favoring certain types.
- dialed back AI preference for spoils in a couple of places
- Increased antimatter output of atomsmasher and supercollider by 10x. Still to look at: Harvester mechanics
- Doubled research output of Research campus. Slight power requirement increase.

UI
- New Animated Arrow! maybe next time the patch notes will tell us what it does, ben
- Added warning that mods disable achievements
- Updated Mission Buttons with Arrows to Highlight interactablity -- oh is this it, ben? did you do operations UI too lmk
- Updated Tutorial Tips to make "Next Tip" Uninteractable when reaching the end of the tutorial
- Updated Starting Tutorial to show "Dont Show Again" rather than "Hide" for increased accuracy
- nation UI shows days to exec consolidation
- destroyed hab module tooltip should now show what used to be there
- When the game is force-paused so you do something, the PAUSED overlay will turn red.
- When a save fails, a dialog will pop instead of crashing the game
- removed some alert spam when an enemy fleet moves within an orbit that's otherwise interesting to you, but not toward one of your assets
- made UI element for org stars a little larger case we keep hearing about missing stars; maybe this'll fix it

Bugfixes

- Fix for random pauses during gameplay caused by AI fleets engaging each other.
- Adjustments/fixes to AttackWithFleet goal desired combat strength. Issue #2618
1) Aliens now consider all threats in a particular system, not just from faction's they are at war with.
2) Fixed a bug with GetThreatLevelAtLocation() where system threats from war factions weren't considered when warEnemiesOnly == true
3) Moved the warEnemiesOnly logic into GetWarAdjustment(). It now returns 0 if factions are not at war.
4) GetWarAdjustment() now returns 0.1 if factions are not at war, up to 1 if they are.(with intermediate values based on hate).
5) Reduced system threat level penalty to -66% to -30%. This is necessary to not underestimate a enemy faction's strength simply because the have many fleets as opposed to one big one (this is easily exploited by the player).
6) Fixed bug in FactionGoal_AttackWithFleet.ComputeDesiredFleetCombatValue() where the threat level was mostly ignored, resulting in the aliens sending single ships to attack stations (zero required attack strength because the station had no defense modules) despite the player having fleets in orbit waiting to intercept them.
- Tiny ships bugfix. Issue #2507
- Bugfix #2623. Prevents a crash on load when the orbit period of a fleet is < 1 second and the fleet's epoch is 1 AD. There's something wrong with the transfer planner to have produced such a situation in the first place, but the save I have to work off of is after whatever went wrong. This at least lets the game load.
- More Changes related to weird random pausing
*** Added a log note if the pause is due to time event queue being overloaded
*** Removed what appears to be extraneous gameTime.Pause in TISpaceCombatState.InitiateCombat as that might trigger it on AI/AI combat. For human player involved combat there's a Pause in SpaceCombatManager
- Fix one more crash when AI fleets looking for nearby resupply habs
- fix a bunch of typos, thanks Discord!
- Fix for pip input reversal bug when tabbing in and out of game
- AttackWithFleet goal will recheck daily to ensure the target still belongs to an enemy faction to prevent hi-larious Servant bombing of alien nation while it's conquering stuff
- Fix for 2181 - Hab rename UI will now display properly when accessed outside of the hab menu list
- Removed both joystick axis from input manager so gamepads don't send input.
- Fix cohesion calculation in anocracies (effect was reversed) FULL PROPS TO THE TI REDDIT FOR CATCHING THIS ONE ↲ -
- Fix bad project prereq requirement for Initiative objective path, which was blocking progress ↲
- Fix bad monitorcontroller.cs that was putting turrets in the wrong place and causing crashes in combat
- Fix ERROR_SHARING_VIOLATION for dropbox/Onedrive installs
- fix a couple of duplicate bonus missions on orgs (2644)
- fix 2704 (CP maintenance check on un-controlled nation)
- fix 2671 crash when AI tries to refit weapons and comes up with no candidates for a slot
- fix 2651 (chs loc bug)
- 30mm Autocannon will fire at incomings again. It can barely hit anything so it's still pretty bad. Needs more work.

0.3.21

Balance
- slightly increased years until invasion for cinematic and normal
- added difficulty setting targeting human player and "attack-the-leader" behavior. For the human player, AIs will only gain extra hate if they are the most powerful faction or have announced their win goals AND (this part is new) they are beyond a minimum ideological distance from the human player. That distance varies by difficulty. So on normal HF won't target Resistance player solely because Resistance player is winning (but Servants will). This is a pretty significant mid/late game muzzle for the AI and will get adjusted based on player feedback.
- dialed back the "how much MC you can use" threat evaluation by aliens on normal difficulty slightly

UI
- updated dV tooltip
- New font for korean mod
- Small edit to CP Cap tooltip wording

Bugfixes
- Bugfix #2585: Scuttled ships will no longer attempt to run their maneuvering thrusters (which was causing a crash to desktop).
- Bugfix #2595: Now preventing circular fleet interception (where fleet A intercepts fleet B which intercepts fleet A). This was intended to be disallowed and caused a stack overflow. Note: old saves which had circular interception will now load and play, but the fleet that hasn't launched yet will have its transfer aborted silently. The old saves will also log some errors related to the circular interception, since those shouldn't exist in the future.
- Bugfix #2598: Fixed bug in apsides calculation that would try to delay fleet launch until after the sun burned out.
- Bugfix #2627: The AI was trying to get an estimate travel time to intercept a fleet via microthrust. This doesn't work, but it also caused a null reference exception when it tried to get the target fleet's inclination. I've added the code to generate an inclination -- the microthrust intercept will get cancelled later should the AI actually attempt it (the estimate travel time code is very simplified, so it may judge a transfer to be microthrust only when it isn't).
- Fix for 2596 - Force tooltip container back to the base tooltip canvas on tooltip deactivation to prevent accidental destruction of tooltip gameobjects, added additional logging.
- Fleet with NaN position causes crash bugfix. Issue #2631
- cleaned up more tutorial tips not closing when their screen exits
- CameraManager.HandleAnimations() : selectionChangeUnityRotation zero look vector bugfix. Issue #2642
- Fix for 2625 - Notifications that are too long and prevented UI buttons from being clicked and will now scroll properly in Chinese & Japanese.
- Bugfix #2630: Fixed crashes related to fleets aborting their transfers after combat.
- Fixed rare case of fleet disband destroying tooltip container on it's 15-second delayed destroy invoke call
- Bugfix #2631: Prevented microthrust transfers that are changing the eccentricity of the orbit from producing negative semi major axis in the middle of the transfer. This would cause the fleet to dissapear during the transfer (or worse, cause a crash), since it would have an illegal orbit.
- SpaceObjectSelection.SelectObject() : newSelection == null NRE bugfix
- SingleFleetOperation() : split out ships that cannot transfer from fleet.
- GetBestOperation() : defense fleet now only targets fleets that aren't docked a station (station targeting has its own logic). Issue #2586
- (Internal) - save files now store and log when mods are active at any time during the save
- Fix for 2647 - Unity returning wrong object with gameobject.Find, using our solarSystem.FindObjectinstead.
- Fix for #2666 - Combat UI needed to be updated on ship destruciton
- Updated Ship Designer DV numbers to reflect the games internal model
- FactionGoal_AttackWithFleet.bombardmentGoal : incorrect condition bugfix. Before, bombardmentGoal == true for stations and false for bases, which is backwards. Fixed the condition and then went ahead and made this a property instead of a field.
- SingleFleetOperation() : undock bombardment fleets if they do not need to repair/resupply. Issue #2662
- Fix for 2648 - Councilor will now properly find a fallback location when onboard a ship being scuttled with no other ships in the fleet.
- Added a check in AI get best operation that resupplyhab is still valid, 2646
- Fixed NRE when nation has no executive faction but asked to score improving relations 2635
- Fixed an index error crash in the giveresources terminal command FOR YOU DIRTY CHEATERS
- Fixed a crash when a fleet with a "assemblefleet" goal was destroyed and the goal checked in on how the fleet was doing 2636
- Fixed a crash when the AI had selected the disarm nuclear weapons policy 2669
- Fixed a crash when a new councilor's trait doesn't allow them to have a starting region because no region qualifies
- SingleFleetOperation() : getting rid of "low relative dv" useless ship criterion. Otherwise, this can result in a loop of joining fleets then splitting them. Also unnecessary because once the fleet attempts a trajectory and fails due to dv, the split will occur anyways.
- MergeFleetOperation : swapping absorbing/joining roles if the actor has a join fleet goal
- fix issues related to advising councilors not being cleared on nation destruction
- prevent factions from finalizing missions outside of the mission phase
- ManageFleetGoals() : primary hab defense goal NRE bugfix.
- Fixed #2683
- Fixed issue with disengaging ships not removing the UI
- added some save-fixing for councilors with null locations
- added some error handling for a funky combat state a player sent in to prevent crash
- FIX crash when badly damaged army conquers the AA this one was driving me nuts

[SirAndrewD]

I am still only in Jan 2027 in 32 hours of playtime. 

Admittedly I do walk away or tab out on pause sometimes. 

Still don't know if I've made enough progress, but I do seem to have a formidable alliance now. 

Concentrating on Admin and persuasion with management techs I now have the USA, Canada, UK, Russia, Kazakhstan and North Korea under my sway.   The tactic here is to get massive boost and as many nuclear arsenals as possible under my control, as much to prevent their use as to have them for my own. 

The Servants however, have China with 100% popular support and my councilors have no ability to do anything there.  Success chances on any actions tend to be only 1% with full spend.  Only good news there is that the Servants had to abandon India because, I assume, cap problems. 

My solution to the issue has been to send my Egyptian Super Spy operative with high Espionage and Command on assassination missions every chance.  He's wiped most of my enemies high level agents and is killing on sight every time an agent pops up. 

In space....still haven't built a ship yet.  I've got great boost and good mission control, and have 3 Moon Bases, 3 Mars Bases and 2 stations at prime Lagrange Points, but still feel like it's slow going.  Hopefully I'm not lagging behind so much that I'm already in a fail state and don't know it.

[Geezer]

I'm at about August 2028.  The filthy Servants have the US locked down and there is nothing I can do about it yet.  Just like in your game with China Andrew.  We did just get a project to break up America (forget what's it's called) but it's 5k research and I really don't even know how it works.

We've managed to make a nice Eurasian Union, and we control several points in China, plus all of Mexico.  We're steering research toward the inner planets as I've seen that Mercury is a good place to build due to the enormous return on solar power.  It's also about as far from the aliens as you can get.

We haven't built any ships yet but have been researching some projects to get better components for when we do start building.

I also have no idea how, or what, I'm doing but it's fun.  Probably way behind the curve compared to Perun, and I expect it will all come crashing down any time now.   :)

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

I keep restarting once I've discovered that I've screwed something up royally so I've yet to get past 2025.  I was doing quite well as Project Exodus.  I'd taken all of Russia, annexed Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus and also had Japan and most of the Nordic countries.  I was generating a tonne of boost (but didn't really have anywhere to go besides Mars and the Moon).  The Servants had India and had formed a mini EU with France, Spain, and the Alpine States (Not sure why Switzerland and Austria are one state in this game) and they started really coming after me.  I hit India with a single nuke, just to see how it played out.  Turns out that if you wanna nuke a country, you'd best do it thoroughly if they also possess nukes because if you don't knock them out in a first strike, they'll go tit for tat with you.  Things kinda escalated from there.  I took out France and the UK with more nukes and that pissed off the Americans so I knocked out the US as well.  There was so much crud in the air that it was getting hard to see the countries on the map.  They need to tone down the nuclear winter death cloud graphics effects a bit, I think.

[SirAndrewD]

Yeah, war with a nuclear power is ugly, hence why I got all the major nuclear powers.

Fun tip, always get North Korea for their little nuke.  You can keep it in your pocket as an emergency nuke strike if youe need it.  You won't care if the other side then glasses them. 

I think the key to keeping the Servants in check is kill their agents, early and often. 

Detain them first if possible, and then murde...er....make sure they have an accident in prison. 

[Geezer]

I have North Korea but can only declare war on South Korea.  Can't figure out how to be able to declare war on the US so I can nuke the Servants.

Edit - Looks like you can't declare war on another country unless you have adjacency or a navy.  Devs must have put that in to stop exactly what I wanted to do!   

[SirAndrewD]

I have North Korea but can only declare war on South Korea.  Can't figure out how to be able to declare war on the US so I can nuke the Servants.

Edit - Looks like you can't declare war on another country unless you have adjacency or a navy.  Devs must have put that in to stop exactly what I wanted to do!   

Yep, you checked and beat me to it. 

NK is an emergency valve for China, which is relevant to my game.  I'm not nuking them just yet, I'm not entirely sure when I should go from clandestine warfare to full scale combat. 

However, the good news is with Russia, the UK and NK in my alliance I've got plenty of invasion routes and nuclear options for when the Chinese might get reinforced with their new allies.

The Eagle and the Bear are an awful big pair, as long as I can keep them in my sphere.

I'm trying to research Great Nations right now with my extreme science income and hopefully unite NA under one umbrella.  Not sure I can drag the UK into that merger but we'll see.  I'm holding hard on the UK because of their very nice GDP, Army, Boost and European adjacency.