An extraterrestrial probe is detected approaching Earth. Unknown to humanity, an alien force has arrived in the far reaches of the icy Kuiper Belt and has begun mining a dwarf planet to prepare for an invasion.
With Earth’s nations unable to unite to address the alien arrival, transnational groups of like-minded political, military, and scientific leaders develop covert channels to coordinate a response. With the aliens' motives uncertain, factions emerge, driven by hope, fear, or greed.
You will control one of these factions.
The Resistance works to form an alliance of nations to mount a coordinated defense
Humanity First vows to exterminate the aliens alongside any who sympathize with them
The Servants worship the aliens and believe they will solve all the troubles of the world
The Protectorate advocates negotiated surrender as the only means to avoid annihilation
The Academy hopes the alien arrival heralds the opportunity to form an interstellar alliance
The Initiative seeks to profit from the chaos and destruction
Project Exodus plans to build a massive starship and flee the Solar System
A distant anomaly, a mysterious crash site, and a spike in reported disappearances. Could this truly be humanity's first contact with extraterrestrial lifeforms? As your field agents investigate sightings and your scientists race to explore new fields of research, you will slowly learn the truth behind the alien arrival.
From early sightings and UFO crash sites to rampaging alien megafauna and robotic armies, it will rapidly become clear that the other six human factions are not your sole competition. Throughout the game, illustrated events will present you with difficult choices as you investigate growing alien activity on Earth. Uncover the mystery of the aliens’ origins and motives – unless, of course, you are Humanity First, and all that matters to you is extermination.
Terra Invicta has a global research system that creates opportunities for both competition and cooperation. Shared scientific advancement unlocks private engineering projects. Factions can choose to focus on private projects, at the cost of weakening Earth as a whole and ceding influence over global research direction to other factions with different priorities. Left unchecked, factions like the Servants or the Initiative may steer the world’s efforts toward developing methods of social control, rather than propulsion or weapon systems.
You begin on Earth as the head of a shadowy organization devoted to your chosen ideology. The aliens are coming – soon – but your first enemies (and perhaps allies) will be other human factions.
Lead a faction united by ideology, rather than a nation defined by territory. This is a stark change from most strategy games – in Terra Invicta, you will not paint the map with the colors of some chosen nation. Instead you will rule from the shadows and compete with other factions for control points representing a region's military, economic, and political leadership.
Geopolitics is your sandbox – unite or break apart nations as best serves your ends, while using those under your influence to conduct proxy wars against the other six factions. Earth’s regions are modeled in detail, from educational levels and unrest to GDP and inequality. Gaining command over regions with great monetary wealth and military power can allow you to implement your will on Earth, but the war for the Solar System will not be won without also securing regions containing space launch facilities.
Enact your will through a council of politicians, scientists, and operatives sent around the world (and even into space). The starting abilities of these councilors will improve through gaining experience and acquiring control over powerful organizations like intelligence agencies or wealthy corporations. A veteran commander may make the perfect choice to lead a tactical team under the council’s direction, while an experienced diplomat works to secure the funding needed to resist the alien invasion.
Seek out like-minded populations and politicians and take actions to convert followers of opposing ideologies. Public opinion is modeled along multiple axes – the Servants’ alien worship and the Protectorate’s advocacy of negotiated surrender may largely align in terms of support or opposition to the aliens, but events that show the aliens can be defeated have the potential to convince followers of the Protectorate that resistance is a realistic choice.
Terra Invicta bridges the gap between our modern-day world and the vast interstellar empires of other space strategy games, asking you to take humanity’s first steps in colonizing our Solar System, where over 300 asteroids, moons, and planets in constant motion create an ever-changing strategic map.
Take your faction beyond the confines of Earth, building space stations to act as shipyards and fuel depots, constructing mining stations to acquire advanced resources, and establishing bases to serve as research or construction facilities. Terra Invicta zooms into the strategic geography of the Solar System, presenting space not as a series of isolated stars that you order units to move to and from, but rather a rich and varied landscape of asteroids, moons, dwarf planets, gas giants, and other celestial bodies creating texture and tactical opportunities at every turn.
The expansive map is constantly shifting as celestial bodies orbit the Sun. This means your space stations and forward operating bases are constantly moving as well, forcing you to plan accordingly and adapt to the evolving circumstances – your colonies among the Jovian moons could find that a once-distant alien military outpost or Initiative privateering base has suddenly become a close neighbor.
Terra Invicta explores what might be – how colonies on Mars might function, what plausible engines could power our spaceships, and the nature of how space colonization and warfare might proceed. Players may find themselves establishing a mining base on the asteroid 16 Psyche after noticing it is rich in metals – and then learn that in our world NASA is planning The Psyche Mission for the same reason.
Exploring and eventually colonizing space will require access to many resources: water for life support and propellant, metals for manufacturing, fissiles for nuclear drives and weapons, and more. At the start, you’ll have no choice but to acquire such resources on Earth and suffer the high cost of using rockets to escape Earth’s gravity, but over time you’ll increasingly choose to instead rely on asteroid mining and other means of securing local supply.
Spaceship design in Terra Invicta draws from the best of scientific speculation and hard science fiction. You can design your own ships, selecting from an array of weapons, drives, and other modules to place on a variety of hulls, ensuring each ship has the right mix of fuel capacity, maneuverability, and other capabilities.
Tactical combat is built around a realistic simulation of Newtonian physics, where momentum and maneuver in 3D space are just as important as the firepower your ships carry. Fire missiles and use point defense cannons to destroy incoming projectiles; build up momentum then swing hard to bring the enemy into your firing arcs; or grapple with the difficult decision to retract radiators and sacrifice heat dissipation to achieve better armor against an incoming enemy barrage.
Terra Invicta is built with modding support in mind, and much of the game is accessible to modders without a coding background. We hope that the Solar System setting and geopolitics simulation will provide a useful framework for modders to realize their own creative visions.
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User Reviews
Mostly Positive
71 user reviews
75%
Positive
User #652547english
61 hrs at review
Not Recommended
Can't recommend it.
One, it's simply a game that does not respect your time. Any time you start to get into a groove in the space phase, it pulls you out to go do earthside chores (shuffle your councilors and orgs around, whackamole enemy councilors fiddling with your shit, etc).
Two, the developers seem far more interested in crushing whatever new meta a youtuber has highlighted recently rather than QoL features to make the game less tedious for regular people to play.
User #865082english
440 hrs at review
Recommended
This recommendation comes with a heavy disclaimer: This game delivers a unique, fascinating, and rewarding experience, but not for the casual player (meant not as a pejorative, but simply, if you don't want to invest a lot of effort to get to the enjoyment).
While Pavonis is best known for the well loved "Long War" and "Long War 2" mods for Xcom/Xcom2, this is nowhere near the same genre. This time, instead, you fight the alien invasion as the shadowy "Chairman" you take orders from in XCOM. For those familiar with Paradox games, it is best understood as a mix between their historical titles and "Stellaris".
A huge part of the game unfolds on a globe-style map of Earth (beginning with realistic political and economic stats in 2022), with EU4/HOI/CK-style divisions into provinces, Nations etc. You play not as a nation, but as an organisation, with a handful of agents that can in turn control nations and contest rival organisations' control of them via crackdowns, coups, and purges. O...
User #520766english
93 hrs at review
Not Recommended
There was zero ushering/explaining on transitioning into space so my 80+ game was completely over with by the time I got there.
Maybe in a few more years this early access game will have some sort of guide as part of playing the game that informs you that you should be doing that and also what you should be doing instead of just getting shit on one day out of the blue.
User #728995english
7 hrs at review
Not Recommended
I mean, I know I've only played it for a few hours, but I just don't have any drive to play it any longer. I don't feel like I'm making any progress or contributing in any way. The game play I experienced in that time was just staring at a map with an occasional button click
User #260302english
292 hrs at review
Recommended
My first game, as Exodus, lasted 260+hours.
I can honestly say that it was only in the last 2 years of game time that i was cruising. The rest of the time it was never certain if kicking the alien hornets nest was going to come back and bite me.
Think of it?
When was the last time you played a game for 260 hours and never got bored, always felt challenged?
And now i have 5 other factions still to play.
[b]I cannot recommend this game highly enough. [/b]
I also want to shout out to PerunAU whose YouTubes directly led to me buying this game.
His YTubes also [u]greatly[/u] assisted me in climbing the VERY steep learning curve of TI.
User #903263english
18 hrs at review
Not Recommended
After watching the Earth spin for 18 hours, I definitely agree that this is a Vaporware (for now).
Like every x4 game, the computers are blatant liars, watching tube videos helps nothing as things are different, calculation make no sense at all, way too many failures on 85%+ missions, pitiful tutorial...
Will visit the game again in an year - hopefully things are better.
User #192870english
12 hrs at review
Not Recommended
I gave it 8 more hours.
It doesn't get better. Every step of the way it's an overload of bloated dataspam, RNG, the game telling you to do impossible things, and disadvantages out the nose. It's a tedious self-punishment sim. Don't waste your money.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tell people to do things. Sit there and watch the world spin.
Game rolls invisible dice, maybe you succeed maybe you don't.
Aliens take over the world.
You wonder, "who thought all of this clutter I can't do anything with was visually appealing?"
Then you ask, "who thought that fussy repeated dice rolls were game play?"
It occurs to you to ask, "was the VO done by robots?"
Then you start concluding, "this is overambitious and fails to be engaging because it's trying too hard to do too much".
You think, "wow, so all I do is watch this planet spin and roll dice that I need to roll other dice to influence?"
Or, "Oh, this search tool in the codex is useless?"
Then, hopefully you get your refund in time.
User #596249english
259 hrs at review
Not Recommended
Yet another game that is addictive, but doesn't respect your time, and offers little payoff for your trouble.
User #022672english
1,222 hrs at review
Recommended
Terra Invicta is a game that I have enjoyed the absolute hell out of so far, even with its obvious flaws like the tech tree or the insane array of 99 percent useless noob trap main ship drives or some of the more frustrating geoscape interactions. I am finally nearing my first ever campaign win, as Humanity First and I just wanted to post a bit in appreciation for this underrated gem of a game that absolutely needs to be refined and iterated upon until it can pretty much let you be Yang Wenli or Ender Wiggin in entire, which I think is all a lot of young nerds ever wanted a chance to act like growing up reading science fiction novels (well except for Wiggins' xenocide- but then again I *am* playing Humanity First).
I recently hit a bit of a setback in my campaign because while I can reliably beat the aliens with my main forces in the inner solar system, my space economy is struggling to maintain my fleets, which requires me to expand, but that means I either build more expensive...
User #630980english
86 hrs at review
Not Recommended
Vaporware. Hooded Horse fund raising demo strikes again.
