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I've done the EU but it forces you to go for getting as much CP cap as possible as quickly as possible, preferably by getting a ton of Administration and good Orgs that boost whatever you need as well as researching every CP increasing tech you can get. It also means you can't really get into the other big nations because you're currently trying to grab as much of the EU before the other factions make them leave and drag out the process by like two years.
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Apr 15, 2024 22:10
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My preferred strat the last few games has been to restart a bunch of times until I get a high-PER councilor from China, preferably with National Hero. I then immediately start spamming 20%-chance Control Nation rolls until I get one point in China, which I then throw 100% into Unity and leave there for several months, focusing all my efforts and CP cap elsewhere. No one else is going to be able to break into China that early, the Unity investment will slowly passively build up my support so long as I have a CP there, and eventually I'll have majority popular support there. By that point I should have leveled up my main persuader to 20+, and they can roll in and take the rest of the country easily. Once you're in, between the sheer size of the country and the censorship bonus, you are all but impossible to dislodge. Even the aliens aggressively enthralling people can be easily countered by periodically taking the entire country off its regular prios and into 100% Unity for a couple of turns, until you're back to unanimous support again. If you need to save CP cap for something else, you can easily get away with taking everything except the Executive point and leaving that empty until you actually need to take it, since no one else is getting in as long as you've got the rest of them.
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Apr 15, 2024 22:21
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Mister Bates posted:If you need to save CP cap for something else, you can easily get away with taking everything except the Executive point and leaving that empty until you actually need to take it, since no one else is getting in as long as you've got the rest of them. That's similar to my India strat, if I can't get it early on at least I'll steal the Religion CP so they can't use Unity to make the country impossible to interact with.
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Apr 15, 2024 23:05
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One thing I'm starting to realize about the combat system: If like me you rely on a slow-moving brick wall of heavy vessels with interlocking point defense fire, and if also like me you don't remotely have the patience or ability to perform fancy coordinated fleet maneuvers, it's actually more efficient to split your fleets up into small squadrons of eight or ten ships each instead of forming a single giant deathfleet. Reason being, your brick wall works best when it's in formation facing directly at the enemy and steadily gunning down everything in front of it, so basically the conditions at the start of any given battle. But as the battle progresses, you start taking losses and the aliens start maneuvering to flank you from every direction. The reinforcements are coming in slowly and piecemeal as your ships die one by one so they're inherently out of formation, and with the aliens dispersing you aren't really able to point them at one thing and plow forwards anyways. So while the first ships in your starting formation can potentially punch well above their weight, the follow-up ships will be far less effective per vessel. The clear solution: Split up into squadrons only just large enough to fill out a starting battle line with maybe a reinforcement or two, and send them towards a hard target staggered out over a few or two before squadrons arriving. In theory you'll end up hitting the damaged enemy again and again with fresh, well-positioned squadrons and can do a lot better than you would if you'd thrown the whole lot into one apocalyptic battle. In THEORY you could arguably do better by creating a wall but then "aiming it" to one side of the main enemy target and then angling it to provide maximum firepower on approach so that you make one big firing run before regrouping and turning around for a second pass once you're well clear (assuming you have plenty of DV) or even just skimming out of the battle entirely so that you can come back later with the same squadron instead of committing it to a death grapple from the start, but Jesus Christ just imagining how much fiddling you'd have to do with maneuvers to make that work gives me chills.
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Apr 15, 2024 23:31
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Grabbing the US is definitely the most effective strat, but I still like the early China play just because of how secure a power base it gives you - once you've got the PRC, you have the PRC, and unless you gently caress something up really badly, the AI ain't gonna get it, which gives you free reign to develop it in whatever direction you want. It's also pretty easy to get enough CP cap to also gobble up Russia to lock down the majority of the world's nuclear weapons, additionally giving you extremely early expansion paths that you don't have to spend tens of thousands of research points on.
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Apr 15, 2024 23:59
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One thing that became clear to me is that I drastically underestimated the amount of the blue resource (liquids?) I was going to need. I had been prioritizing volatiles and fissiles because I felt more strapped for those early on, but I hadn’t realized that the cost of refueling a ship was so high. I lost a fleet after the first time I used it because I didn’t have a stockpile big enough to refuel and the ships just had to sit there and get swatted by alien retaliation. That’s made me very hesitant to invest in larger ships—I can build them, but they severely limit how often I can conduct fleet actions if I have to budget for refilling their tanks.
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Apr 16, 2024 05:38
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The aliens seem to be going all-in on missiles and mag weaponry so far this playthrough, which has led to the very funny tactic of engaging them with squadrons of heavily-armored escorts armed with nothing but point defense weaponry and then just sitting there until they run out of ammunition, at which point I can engage them with the missile escort fleet without fear of losses. This can't last, sooner or later they'll start sending things armed with lasers and I might as well scrap all of these, but I'll enjoy the reprieve while it lasts.
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Apr 16, 2024 07:08
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Pirate Radar posted:One thing that became clear to me is that I drastically underestimated the amount of the blue resource (liquids?) I was going to need. I had been prioritizing volatiles and fissiles because I felt more strapped for those early on, but I hadn’t realized that the cost of refueling a ship was so high. I lost a fleet after the first time I used it because I didn’t have a stockpile big enough to refuel and the ships just had to sit there and get swatted by alien retaliation. That’s made me very hesitant to invest in larger ships—I can build them, but they severely limit how often I can conduct fleet actions if I have to budget for refilling their tanks. You always need more propellant. The blue Resource is Water (mostly for the hydrogen for fuel) and is the single most important resource you're getting from space. Until you get to advanced fission drives, let alone fusion and beyond, water is your fuel 90% of the time. Luckily, 0.4.15 really did a number on Human AI factions and their space programs reducing the amount of armor they'll put on their ships. The biggest effect being, for the most part, the end of 3x+ fuel mass. No longer are the days of AI factions making 1000 decaliter fuel tanks on their Nova rocket monitor hulls, destroying their space economies with one burn to Luna from LEO. So yeah, Water is most important with the Metals being tied or just short of water. Volatiles and Fissiles are close thirds, maybe tied with metals depending on your loadouts. For me, I don't put more than 15 tanks on a ship. 10 is my usual, 20 is my hard limit if I need that class to have longer legs but they need to be a bigger hull for utility slots. That's no more than 200, and usually 100 units for fuel. Even a mediocre Mars should allow you to fill that from a month's take, which has been building up since that one lovely mine on Luna you went with.
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Apr 16, 2024 12:43
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Yeah, Water is Life even for spaceships. Grabbing Ceres and getting those mines upgraded will help a lot, it's basically a petrostate in space. Likewise, putting farms and agriculture facilities on your stations will end up saving you a lot of water (and volatiles).
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Apr 16, 2024 12:56
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There are other considerations as well. There’s a soft cap on the number of mines you can have, past that you face escalating MC costs to manage them. This cap goes up when you research Mission to XX global techs. With Mars, Asteroids, Moon, Mercury and Jupiter my limit is 25. Mars alone has 25 sites, Mercury 6 or so, etc. There are usually around four or five exceptional noble metal asteroids that the aliens beeline for too. Basically you’ll want to be selective about sites. Don’t just grab the first asteroids your probes reach. Beyond that, fissionables are the rarest type, so if you see a site with 6+ fissionable I would prioritize it immediately, even if it has nothing else. The other recommendations I would have are to upgrade your mines when you can afford it, and get as many “mining output +x” organizations as you can without compromising your agents primary missions. They’re absolutely vital since they increase your resource output without increasing upkeep. I’ve got well over +100% yield in 2035 in my game, and it shows; some of my colony mines (none of which were exceptional) are able to produce over 100 fissionables a month each. Oh, one more longer term consideration. Ceres is great, but Callisto is even better; there’s a reason the aliens beeline there. But before that Mars usually has a number of great volatile/water/metal sites and frequently ill put down 10+ mines there, and get all 25 late game. Velius fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Apr 16, 2024 |
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Apr 16, 2024 16:06
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This game  I didn’t make a mistake an hour ago, I made a mistake twenty hours ago
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Apr 16, 2024 16:17
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Pirate Radar posted:This game Haha, I know exactly how that feels. I was rather irate on the official discord about how impossible it is to deal with (late game spoilers about mechanics) a nuclear armed alien nation, since you can’t conquer it without being nuked and you can’t stop it respawning aliens infinitely. I was told “don’t let them get a nuclear armed AA, stupid.” But in practice despite it being irritating, it wasn’t all that much of a problem. I ended up using armies to free the EU since the capital was Monterey and they only nuke if you take their capital, and they ended up with a rump state there. I proceeded to annihilate it from orbit until they had about 100 per capita gdp, and ignored it the rest of the game. The AA is only really a game ending threat with alien armies and nukes. For the servants I ended up chain detaining their counselor who had the “give nation to the aliens” org for years until I took China from them. What’s the issue specifically, most likely it’s solvable. The aliens are our benefactors, after all, and generally don’t make things unwinable. Velius fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Apr 16, 2024 |
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Apr 16, 2024 16:40
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You can overthrow a nuclear AA by raising unrest enough. Bombard their armies to death from orbit (target their space defenses first—nose-armor, large mounts and number of ships all play a factor), then send in the councilors to raise unrest until the revolution comes.
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Apr 16, 2024 16:48
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Oh, that was just in reaction to my resource situation and realizing I'd put mines down in the wrong spots. I think I can handle the AA though the Servants having China is a huge pain (I should have gone for it at the start I guess) but it just seems like it will take ages for me to both get a fleet that can hold LEO and have the resource income needed to resupply the fleet after the fights.
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Apr 16, 2024 17:01
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Pirate Radar posted:Oh, that was just in reaction to my resource situation and realizing I'd put mines down in the wrong spots. I think I can handle the AA though the Servants having China is a huge pain (I should have gone for it at the start I guess) but it just seems like it will take ages for me to both get a fleet that can hold LEO and have the resource income needed to resupply the fleet after the fights. Yeah. At least you can relatively cheaply construct more mines. And your LEO fleet should be like 10 fuel tanks or fewer per ship; you need like 8 dV max.
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Apr 16, 2024 17:08
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Okay, last post for now. One of the reworks in 0.4x is that they've made the cost of direct influence proportional to economic size and generally 'more realistic'. So the cost of increasing knowledge is in some way related to the cost of educating X people Y better percentage, which ends up being enormous. 1 point of welfare direct investment in my 1.7 billion person African Union is 10,200 credits. So fixing nations by yourself is way less viable. What also changed, though, is that the 'funding' priority now costs only influence to raise. So emerges the Pledge Drive strategy. One of the hab modules you probably have ignored is the Broadcast Outlet. It costs money to maintain and gives a tiny amount of influence per month. It is the key to this strategy. The level 3 broadcast outlet is the media center. It costs a significant 61 credits per month in support cost, plus a bit of water/volatiles. You can fit 10 per ring hab with solar support in Earth orbit. Here is WGBH Boston:  It costs 585 credits/month to maintain. In exchange it produces 315 monthly influence. That's enough for over 20 'funding' direct investments a month, or $300 in yearly income. After two years, it has paid for itself by increasing your monthly income by $585 credits. Two years later, another $585, and so on. There is no downside. The limit to funding is on the order of $90000 per year for my EU, 68000 for the US. The only practical limit is the number of countries you can influence fully every year. Right now I have 4 of these, and it's already let me start turning off hospitals. I plan to get around 8 or 10, which will be enough for 6 meganations to constantly fund raise for me. We'll need the money to save the world, in the end. The pledge drives will take over every possible wavelength, saturate the solar system, and I fully expect to receive money from the alien homeworld in time, to get it to stop. For just a 20 dollar a month sustaining membership, you can get this great tote bag!
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Apr 16, 2024 19:06
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do they got reruns of Zoom on that thing
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Apr 16, 2024 19:13
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Koorisch posted:I've done the EU but it forces you to go for getting as much CP cap as possible as quickly as possible, preferably by getting a ton of Administration and good Orgs that boost whatever you need as well as researching every CP increasing tech you can get. I formed the EU once and then America had a civil war and one of their missing nukes exploded in Paris.
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Apr 16, 2024 19:24
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Pirate Radar posted:One thing that became clear to me is that I drastically underestimated the amount of the blue resource (liquids?) I was going to need. I had been prioritizing volatiles and fissiles because I felt more strapped for those early on, but I hadn’t realized that the cost of refueling a ship was so high. I lost a fleet after the first time I used it because I didn’t have a stockpile big enough to refuel and the ships just had to sit there and get swatted by alien retaliation. That’s made me very hesitant to invest in larger ships—I can build them, but they severely limit how often I can conduct fleet actions if I have to budget for refilling their tanks. One thing I will say separate from what others have noted: One of the quirks of Terra Invicta is that the main benefit of a lot of tech isn't strictly that they improve the stats of your ships, but rather makes them cheaper and more efficient. A late-game dreadnought could actually be cheaper and more efficient (and far more effective) than an early game battleship. More efficient drives can significantly cut down on fuel requirements, while more efficient reactors can slash the price of building a ship in the first place down to less than half the price necessary for an older reactor. Better armor and radiators sometimes means that you can use less weight, but often a big draw is simply that you can spend less to get the same performance. And so on. So yeah if you're having costing issues, teching up is one way to help solve it a lot of the time.
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Apr 16, 2024 19:48
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Velius posted:There are other considerations as well. There’s a soft cap on the number of mines you can have, past that you face escalating MC costs to manage them. This cap goes up when you research Mission to XX global techs. With Mars, Asteroids, Moon, Mercury and Jupiter my limit is 25. Mars alone has 25 sites, Mercury 6 or so, etc. There are usually around four or five exceptional noble metal asteroids that the aliens beeline for too. Basically you’ll want to be selective about sites. Don’t just grab the first asteroids your probes reach. Beyond that, fissionables are the rarest type, so if you see a site with 6+ fissionable I would prioritize it immediately, even if it has nothing else. I have questions about some of the "hidden" stats. What decides a faction's natural ability to resist enthrall attacks?
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Apr 16, 2024 20:48
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Kraftwerk posted:So is it worth upgrading the mines? Because in the past it seems like building a lot of tier 1 mines was often preferable to going tall and upgrading pre-existing mines. I'm reasonably sure the resource and MC upkeep was pretty intense for level 3 mines. Yes. This is one of the biggest changes in 0.4x, you pay more MC for colonies or settlements but the mines cost no MC anymore, and the difference seems larger than before going to higher tiers. This has the minor side effect of making robotic mines not worthwhile anymore I would say, Since they still count against your line limit. I upgraded my best mines immediately when the techs unlocked and don’t regret it. Velius fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Apr 16, 2024 |
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Apr 16, 2024 21:35
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I started a new playthrough last night and Humanity First and The Initiative have somehow managed to get orbitals in LEO by May 2023. I have Khazakstan, and nobody has the US so I have no idea where they got the boost from but the AI did a thing!
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Apr 17, 2024 00:33
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Phrosphor posted:I started a new playthrough last night and Humanity First and The Initiative have somehow managed to get orbitals in LEO by May 2023. I have Khazakstan, and nobody has the US so I have no idea where they got the boost from but the AI did a thing! Probably organizations, some give 1-2 boost per month. It’s pointless to do since there’s nothing to do with it until you get hab modules, and just costs you more boost.
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Apr 17, 2024 01:33
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Velius posted:For just a 20 dollar a month sustaining membership, you can get this great tote bag! I'm already a sustaining member, do I still get the tote bag?! e: Also, yeah, that's a pretty good strategy. Just not as cool as being the main antimatter purveyor for the rest of the world. Get those suckers going in the Mercury-Sun Lagrange points and make $12500 per unit sold. habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Apr 17, 2024 |
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Apr 17, 2024 04:10
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25 sites on Mars and only 6 on mercury?? Is it randomized now?
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Apr 17, 2024 04:17
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Nessus posted:25 sites on Mars and only 6 on mercury?? Is it randomized now? It's 9 on Mercury, I think. They did increase the number of Mars sites in part to keep any faction from getting blocked early in the game.
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Apr 17, 2024 04:19
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habeasdorkus posted:I'm already a sustaining member, do I still get the tote bag?! Yeah, the antimatter racket was good, but I think they nerfed it; the most recent patches mentioned reducing consumption and production levels. I have intentionally not gotten it yet in my current game so I can’t confirm. I was trying to see how well I could do pre antimatter/exotics (not great on brutal!).
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Apr 17, 2024 04:32
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Another thing I’m unclear on: I’ve lost a few councilors to assassination, but I’ve never had a time when I’ve thought “this person’s in danger, I should take action”. When am I supposed to know that they should go to ground or get protected to escape getting whacked? Am I missing something or is the game just being obscure?
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Apr 17, 2024 14:41
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Pirate Radar posted:Another thing I’m unclear on: I’ve lost a few councilors to assassination, but I’ve never had a time when I’ve thought “this person’s in danger, I should take action”. When am I supposed to know that they should go to ground or get protected to escape getting whacked? Am I missing something or is the game just being obscure? Generally it's a combination of having a low security stat, low espionage stat which makes your councilor more easy to casually detect when others are present in the same region and if that councilor is valuable to you in some way. If you've got a high PER low SEC councilor with all major factions detecting them as you're running control missions in European countries then you probably want to go to ground asap to remove the detection flags.
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Apr 17, 2024 14:48
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Kraftwerk posted:Generally it's a combination of having a low security stat, low espionage stat which makes your councilor more easy to casually detect when others are present in the same region and if that councilor is valuable to you in some way. Okay, just making sure there wasn’t an extra flag or indicator in the UI that I was missing. I should be proactive about it and go to ground when factions I’m beefing with have detected them.
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Apr 17, 2024 15:45
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So, uh, anyone else seen this behavior? The aliens have been trickling ships into LEO, and immediately joining them into this doomstack. I don't think they've replenished their on-earth agents, but they've sent two assault carriers so far - one I crippled in orbit and the other landed in the middle of Academy-run China.
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Apr 17, 2024 16:10
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A Renaissance Nerd posted:So, uh, anyone else seen this behavior? That group is on a surveillance mission. Every time the aliens complete one of those they get an abduction in every region of the world, which leads to them getting a bonus to every one of their activities. This can get out of control very easily. I would put a high priority on engaging it and at least disrupting the mission to delay its completion if not kill it outright.
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Apr 17, 2024 16:21
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Kraftwerk posted:So is it worth upgrading the mines? Because in the past it seems like building a lot of tier 1 mines was often preferable to going tall and upgrading pre-existing mines. I'm reasonably sure the resource and MC upkeep was pretty intense for level 3 mines. Mines no longer cost MC in 0.4, so upgrade everything you can.
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Apr 17, 2024 17:10
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Last questions for a while, I promise: are crash landings the only way alien operatives get to Earth? That is, if I keep notes on how many crash landings there are, will I know how many aliens I need to hunt down and whack, or can they show up by other means too? How early should I be aiming to have Earth orbit clear and secure? In my current farthest game I could intercept assault carriers when they started to show up but I had no hope yet of fighting the 2k stack of other ships (similar to what A Renaissance Nerd had above) chilling above Earth and making life progressively harder. I only had about 500-600 in a fleet by that time so it got wiped by retaliation after I splashed the second assault carrier.
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Apr 17, 2024 17:29
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Pirate Radar posted:Last questions for a while, I promise: are crash landings the only way alien operatives get to Earth? That is, if I keep notes on how many crash landings there are, will I know how many aliens I need to hunt down and whack, or can they show up by other means too? Certain lategame events can give aliens the ability to directly recruit new operates on Earth, but until then the only way new ones show up is crash landings. Trying to keep a tally won't necessarily work because other factions can kill alien operatives too. Aliens have a limited number of councilor slots just like you, if you're seeing crash landings when you didn't kill/detain an operative it's because someone else did.
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Apr 17, 2024 17:34
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This alien landing control sounds like a whole new realm of terror to deal with when I get back into it  And I even play on Cinematic!
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Apr 17, 2024 17:36
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Velius posted:That group is on a surveillance mission. Every time the aliens complete one of those they get an abduction in every region of the world, which leads to them getting a bonus to every one of their activities. This can get out of control very easily. I would put a high priority on engaging it and at least disrupting the mission to delay its completion if not kill it outright. I was blowing up the surveillance missions, which I suppose is why they were doomstacking them now? In any case the aliens hosed off to Callisto for some reason and now Mars inward is clear of aliens for now. I finally got Neutron Flux Lanterns, which will actually let me catch them next time they come by - even if 3 fissiles per fuel is a mean cost.
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Apr 17, 2024 18:58
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Can confirm that the hilarious Academy alien hate management strat of blowing up a bunch of alien ships, then immediately negotiating with an alien agent and trading them a bunch of spare boost or other useless poo poo to improve relations, still works, and has allowed me to kill three assault carriers so far while avoiding any significant retaliation
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Apr 17, 2024 19:15
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"You wouldn't hit a little guy while he's wearing his glasses on his birthday, would you?"
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Apr 17, 2024 19:19
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does the ai actually respect non aggression pacts? I got one with HF but they seem to keep trying to take over my countries
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Apr 17, 2024 19:41
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