Terra Invicta: 2025-2030

The alien invasion is coming and it's time to prepare.

Mar 07, 2023

EDIT: This post has been heavily revised. I’ve changed my research path to take Liberating Mainland China instead of Covert Operations, and delay Mercury colonization, as well as the Kill/Capture Hydra missions. I also cut out much of the World Peace section, which was too long and erroneous. I now think you should build fleets rather than defensive structures, and do so more rapidly, and use those ships to destroy the alien invasion fleet in orbit rather than fighting them on the ground.

It took a bit longer than I expected to write this post. During my last campaign a patch was released which improved the game, and I felt that merited another playthrough. Also, I screwed up a few things in the last campaign, and wanted to restart so that I could try to improve upon my diplomacy.

Also, I am covering more game years in this post so it won’t be as detailed. There is a lot of repetition during this period of the campaign; describing it all would be tedious to write, and also to read. Instead I am going to outline my goals and the primary strategies I use to accomplish them.

Find the Best Councilors

A top priority is to find all the councilors you want to keep for the long haul. This is much harder than finding good councilors to use on a temporary basis. Lot’s of them have solid stats, and fill an important role. Unfortunately, there are many traits that can turn an otherwise good councilor into a liability.

My Full List of Disqualifying Traits: Demagogue, Famous, Megastar, Media Darling, Elder Statesman, (-4 espionage or more from traits),1 Averse, Paranoid, Pacifist, Inflexible, Enemy of the State, Non Grata, and old age. I am also not fond of Ethical, Sociopath and Corrupt, but can deal with those.

It is hard to find clean operators. Two ways to speed up the search are to recruit flawed councilors with the intention to remove the negative trait, which is sometimes possible. It is also possible to recruit from rival factions. Some of the best councilors are working for the enemy. The best way to search for recruits is to turn a rival agent - any of them. This will reveal every councilor within that faction, and you can see all of their traits (except their age) and so quickly find those with high potential. Then you can recruit them right away, or take note of their existence, and recruit them later on. Note: a turned councilor that is later recruited from the pool will not get the bonus XP that is granted from the Crash Course Project.

Turning rival councilors is also an excellent way to search for orgs to steal.

I like to rotate through each faction; turn a councilor, rifle through their personnel and orgs, take what I want, then move on to another faction. By the time I circle back around, there are usually new orgs to steal, and new personnel to evaluate.

Turning councilors is also a great way to weaken other factions, especially if you target their dangerous or valuable councilors. I like to turn their high persuasion and high espionage councilors, as I find these to be the most dangerous.

All of this is going to take a long time; 4-6 years, maybe longer. This period in the game is exactly the right time to do it. The earlier you get a full team of councilors the sooner you can level them up, and outfit them with the best orgs, and inspire them to full Loyalty.

One last tip: It’s nice to have a criminal on your side. Some orgs are only accessible to criminals, and these orgs can be quite valuable.

Getting all the Good Orgs

At the start of the game, almost every org is useful, and so you simply try to acquire as many as you can as quickly as possible. Later on, you will need to pick and choose which orgs to use, and which to sell off, and some of these choices are quite difficult.

First, let’s talk about the orgs that offer ability points. To evaluate these orgs, I like to consider the ratio of ability points received vs. org slots used. While every stat costs the same amount of experience to improve, orgs do not treat stats equally. In general, increasing the administration stat with orgs yields the most value; typically granting +3/4 ADM for each org slot.

Because ADM is so heavily favored by orgs, I rarely use experience points to increase Administration.

Orgs also offer a good bargain when delivering a combination of Espionage and Investigation, which they typically provide at a 2 to 1 (points to slot) ratio. These are good stats to improve via orgs.

Good Persuasion orgs do exist, but are more rare. Typically I will use a lot of experience points on Persuasion. Even after reaching 25 Persuasion, I will sometimes choose to boost that councilor’s Persuasion in order to free up an org slot for something more efficient.

Command is also a difficult stat to find on orgs. There are only a few orgs that offer a 2 to 1 ratio. There is a notable exception for the Resistance, which obtains an org with a crazy high bonus to Command.

There are several other org types that grant bonuses to boost, research, national priorities, mining output, resources, or some combination thereof. The value of these orgs will often vary depending on the stage of the game and other circumstances.

Early on boost orgs are quite nice, but they fall of in value once you acquire significant space assets. Mining output is the opposite - worthless early on, then quite valuable as your space assets increase.

Bonuses to research and national priorities are great. In particular I like to stack the +project orgs as these are the easiest to manage, always delivering good value regardless of which technologies you are researching. I like to put most/all of the +project orgs on councilors with high espionage to prevent my projects from being stolen. This won’t be an issue until maybe 2029 and later. After reaching +100 project speed, the value of additional +project orgs will fall off a bit (going from +5% to +3%), and so the other research bonuses become more competitive. Social Science and Information Science are particularly useful at this point in the campaign - later on Military Science and Energy. Keep in mind that there are some faction wide advantages that come from having high science stats on your councilors (harder to steal your habs for example).

Bonuses to Priorities (Military, Economy, Knowledge, etc.) tend to be small and so most of those orgs aren’t worth holding. However some orgs have an extremely high bonus to Military, so keep an eye out for those.

Bonuses to Mining Output can be found in the 4-5% per org slot range. I like to equip a few of these and stockpile more for when my councilors have leveled up their abilities, and don’t need to rely so much on orgs.

You should also be on the lookout for orgs that grant uncommon missions: Turn Councilor, and Inspire are very rare and extremely valuable.

Acquiring Orgs: As I’ve mentioned, turning councilors is a great way to find the best orgs held by enemy factions. Another method is to Contact a faction, then scroll through all the orgs that they have available to trade. You can then trade for the orgs you want - but it will not be cheap. I usually only use this trick to determine whether or not a faction is worth targeting for infiltration.

Hydra Kill and Capture

During this period in the campaign, your faction will be called upon to kill a Hydra, then later to capture one. These tasks are part of the main plot line (at least for the resistance) ~~and it is good to get them out of the way sooner rather than later as they will both increase Alien Threat2.~~

To assassinate a Hydra, you will need a councilor with very high espionage - often I will switch the Special Activities Section org to get my espionage councilor as high as possible. You also need someone with high Investigation (though not necessarily 25) to find a Hydra, and get full intel on it. Among the unidentified operatives, the Hydras will be the ones that are difficult to investigate and often located near a recent alien activity point. When you send your Espionage councilor in for the kill you should also run the Protect Target mission so that he doesn’t get killed - Hydras have the Hard Target trait.

Capturing a Hydra is much the same as killing one, but you only need an INV councilor - first to Investigate it, then Detain it. This task becomes available a year or so after you kill a Hydra, provided you push forward on the main plot research path. By this time you will probably have more space assets, and so the bump in Alien Threat may push you over the top if you are not careful. The image below is what my Alien Threat looked like right after capturing a Hydra.

China for the Efficiency

China is the hardest nation to take control of, but worth the effort. You can delay China for awhile, because your rivals won’t be able to break into it for a couple years. I wouldn’t delay too long though. The other factions will eventually claim China if you don’t, and it is the hardest nations to purge enemy factions from. Also, the inequality in China is going to soar under vacant leadership making it harder to stabilize once you control it.

I will need Transnational Coordination and Cybernetics (plus a few other CP increasing projects) to take all of China. Typically I break into China before I have enough CP to control all of it.

Previously I would try to control India, US, and China, but this is just too much of a stretch, CP wise. India is the least important, so I dropped it.

My more modest goal is now to have full control of the US and China, and also to convert China into the ROC (req. Liberating Mainland China). This gives me a strong economic base to dominate research and influence, as well as control over large armies on both sides of the globe. Another important benefit is that with fewer nations, your councilors have fewer maintenance tasks (Defend Interests, Public Campaign, Advise, Stabilize Nation, etc.)

Councilor efficiency is really important. With fewer nations to maintain, my councilors are free to attack other factions. At first this means stealing their good orgs. Later it means stealing (or eliminating) all their good councilors. Lastly, it means stealing their nations. Even if I am at my CP limit, I often run Coup d’Etat and Purge against enemy Control Points, then abandon those Control Points immediately - simply as a distraction. This keeps my adversaries busy retaking their own nations, rather than running Public Campaign in mine.

One big caveat to this tactic is that attacking the Servants will piss off the aliens and can trigger a retaliation. Once Alien Threat reaches 4 bars, it is best to leave the Servants alone, and ease off on the Protectorate as well, unless you are about to complete a few fleets to defend your space interests as well as Earth.

Research

The tech tree is vast, and if you are not careful you may find yourself wandering down less important rabbit holes. It’s important to avoid wasting research, even when you are dominating the globe. My current tech strategy is to focus more narrowly, and get fleets out as soon as possible.

A more narrow focus means that I now ignore many techs that are of only moderate value. I also defer the Great Nations → (Specific Nation Expansion) tech path. Unifying big nations is powerful, but also extremely expensive, and I’ve found that I can’t get ready to fight the aliens by ~~2030~~ 2029 if I also try to unify all of Asia. So this gets bumped.

Preparing for the worst means that I do not chase the techs that increase Alien Threat cap (Strategic Deception, Maskirova), which are too expensive and do not help in the worst case scenario (Invasion triggers Retaliation). Delaying the inevitable space war has not worked out for me in the past, and so now I prefer to ~~just stay under the initial cap, and spend my research preparing for war~~ push out fleets as soon as possible.

Most of my research is divided into these 4 categories:

Control Point Management
Research Boosting
Main Plot Path
Space Expansion
Space Combat

CP Management. The primary route here is to get Transnational Coordination (Adv. Neural Networks), then Cybernetic Implants (Cybernetics).3 These will enable me to take control of China, as well as Taiwan, so that I can convert China over to a democracy.

Boosting Research. There are 2 techs that really help grow your research: Liberating Mainland China, and Directed Space Research.

Liberating Mainland China is the only nation building I do early on, as everything else is just too expensive. LMC does not require Great Nations, but it is still pricey. Unity Movements (10K) → Liberating Mainland China (20K)

This is a huge outlay of resources, but it allows China to jump from a dictatorship, into a democracy, and that will almost double research output (~700 to ~1.3K).

It will take ~4 years for this endeavor to payback the research that was invested, but the alternative is a ghastly slog through Anocracy (government rating 4-6). Unity will collapse during this period, unless China remains in a perpetual state of war. Additionally it will be extremely costly and time consuming to build a democratic government using the Knowledge priority, and also wasteful4.

The other big research goal is Directed Space Research for the tier 2 modules. This is also an expensive path to chase down, but there are several other important techs along the way, and building several research centers of each type will yield massive gains. Be sure to grab Autonomous Research (which shares this path) before researching Pulsar Drive to maximize the chance of being granted Adv. Pulsar Drive.

Main Plot Path. I used to think that it was extremely important to get the Kill/Capture of a Hydra out of the way early (before I had numerous space assets), so that these missions would not push alien threat over the cap. I now think this doesn’t matter so much. I intend to break the threat cap pretty early in the campaign, and so this doesn’t concern me much anymore. However, there are still some very good rewards for accomplishing tasks on the main plot path, which boost CP and grant an excellent org. And so this research is important.

Space Expansion. I want to keep pushing towards Ceres and ~~Mercury~~ Vesta. This is not an ironclad rule, but the real fight is in space and I don’t want to lose sight of that. (Tip: get Nuclear Freighters, via Solid Core Fission, before you expand to Ceres). Also, I now delay the research required to colonize Mercury until much later. This is mostly to save research for more important things, and because I will obtain all the resources I need to field fleets from Mars, Ceres, and Vesta. Trying to fit in Mercury makes this more difficult and doesn’t really help. I plan to take Mercury later, and grab every hab site when I can actually develop them.

In my previous guide I discuss switching from the Boost priority to the Mission Control priority. I make this change after colonizing Mars, around the end of 2024. I find that about 25-30% Mission Control (for all of my countries) is about right for the duration of this phase in the campaign, and perhaps much longer. I want to have a healthy buffer between my MC cap and my current space assets so that certain negative events (Solar Flare) won’t impede expansion.

Space Combat. In my previous campaign I deferred this research for too long, and it was costly. Now I start down this path in earnest around 2027.

It is important to know when the aliens are going to land, so that you will be ready to destroy their Carrier in orbit rather than fighting their armies on the ground. You can find this information on the Fleets screen by clicking the check box in the upper left labeled “Show All Fleets”. The image below shows 2 impending invasion fleets on their way to Earth. I have renamed the invasion fleets to make it easier to keep track of them.

~~If everything goes well you will not need to defend your Space assets in the year 2030.~~ It is best to push out fleets by 2029. Not only will an earth fleet prevent an Invasion, but they will also start chipping away at the alien’s forces in space, thus preventing them from growing so quickly. I will go into which techs are needed and what ship designs I use in the next post.

I have fought the alien invasion on the ground - here is what is likely to happen: The aliens will land their invasion fleet in a country that will not ally with the nations you control, which means the aliens will conquer that nation before you can defeat them. So you will need to declare war on the alien administration, then drop a single nuke on them after their armies heal up, followed by immediately invading that country with your armies. This should all go fine - but it will trigger alien retaliation in space. They will attack many of your habs and stations, which, if you cannot defend them, will be destroyed.

I now believe that it is best to prevent this scenario, and have all the technology needed to defend every hab by the year ~~2030~~ 2029. In previous versions of Terra Invicta this meant getting Layered Defense Arrays, but those don’t work as well in recent patches. You can still build 3-4 LDAs in all of your stations which will keep them safe, but it is hard to do that on all of your habs, as they will need to be upgraded to tier 2. But even if you do that, the aliens will bunch up in orbit until they have the strength to destroy those habs. You will eventually need fleets to fight off the aliens, and so it is more efficient and effective to just build defensive fleets right away, rather than defensive structures within every station and hab.

Alien Invasion

If you find yourself fighting the aliens on land, here are some more detailed notes about those mechanics. If you can engage the aliens at their landing site, they can be easily defeated. This is because their armies are at 50% health when they disembark, but then they quickly heal up (in less than an hour, I believe). To beat the alien armies before they reach full strength you need 2 things:

Control over a nation with a sizeable military force which can reach the alien invasion site in 30 days (typically the US).
An alliance between that nation and the one in which the aliens land.

The second step is usually the problem. It is very difficult to remake world diplomacy such that the US can ally with any potential landing site, and not really worth it.

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