Terra Invicta Review Solar System X-Com Strategy With incredible Scope AND A Great Execution! 

One of my favourite statistics in this game is the "Number of missing nukes" one. Because if that number is anything other than 0, you should be very fucking afraid

I’d heard of that team’s new original project but I’ve seen so many such projects crash and burn over the years that I assumed it would either die during a poor development or be severely underdelivering. It’s nice to see that there’s still some level of competence left in this rotten industry.

Vitalia Kush...is that Sola from the Sunrider series? And why am I not surprised the first thing Arch does is mod his game with waifus. Even moreso that the devs actually built it to accept mods even in Early Access. Now that's some dedication there.

Ah, good to see that you decided to play the objective good guys of the game.

Running out of volatiles... Oof. The aliens never came anywhere close to doing as much damage to my space economy as I did to myself when I unlocked the tier 3 space stations. That massive resource stockpile I had disappeared awfully fast once I started upgrading everything.

Closes eyes, crosses fingers and repeats the mantra "Please don't sell out to Paradox, Please don't sell out to Paradox, Please don't sell out to Paradox".

this looks like another game arch might be able to get a whole playthrough series out of, if he wanted.

It's such a shame that having a game actualy work is so rare these days... Props to this one for working. XD

Notes: Ships build heat very fast when using thrusters because you're not/can't move your ships your not building a lot of heat to go into heatsinks. Also you can change resource display from per day to per month in the settings menu makes it a lot easier to plan upkeep and expenses.

For the different techs, they often are cheaper in some way or use different fuels, so are useful to research if you're lacking certain resources Also if you right click the techs it shows more information, like which prerequisite techs

"I'm twelve hours in and now getting into what is probably the late game." xD Also, some things I like: -taking every single good +space mining output org is a great way to never worry about anything. I had half a million volatiles when I won, and infinite money thanks to selling everything else. -Unifying nations is good to raise their shared stats (economy, welfare, knowledge, military, basically the stuff above spoils) faster overall, but a unified nation will have less points to spend on the things below that (say you unify twenty point japan and thirty point china, you'll end up with probably less than forty). So: take over those places, build mission control and defenses first, then unify. -If your cohesion in those nations is high enough, you can unify places with claims on the capital region only and take every other part of that nation too. Example: japan can take over the philippines and some of the SEA islands below those, then get unified into the pan-asian combine (which doesn't have claims on those parts) and now those islands are part of it too. The best use for this is probably unifying russia and the EU into a giant superstate version of the european union (don't unify into russia, they have a permanent population growth debuff). -If you really want to game the system, taking a capital region of a country in a war permanently moves that capital somewhere else. If it gets moved in a place another country has claims on, you can now unify those two countries. Using this, it is possible to unify the entire world into india right now (will probably get patched out later though)

Arch having “delicious brown girls” as a councillor is hilarious. I also noticed the Templin Institute, very cool.

Arch check the armor effectiveness of those laser batteries, those percents are of the enemies armor at the designated range.

From what I remember, the advance pulsar drive is quite worth getting. But yes, there are too many redundant drives and powerplants

You're at the beginning of the mid game at 2033. You've got a long way to go to get to end game.

You should do a let's play of this. It would be interesting

For anyone looking for an indepth guide, look for perungamingAU Humanity first run. Not only is it fun but the emergence story telling in the comment section is fun too

On the different sized lasers, the smaller ones may deal more damage per slot used, but they also have a much lower armour penetration looking at the percentage damage reduction at various ranges. If an enemy ship is unarmoured, having loads of smaller lasers would rip them apart, but if they're coated in armour, you'd be doing little more than bug bites and need the heavier lasers to punch through.

“It all works” is an incredible endorsement lmao

It's actually out and I don't have play a shell of a game for years

I rather enjoy that each faction has its own goals, where certain techs give you completely different story bits, focusing on each factions perspectives of what they want to accomplish, though since it is a long game, I can see why someone wouldn't want to play through a game 7 times to get different story tidbits.

Nice. Thanks for pointing this out, Arch.

YOOO thanks for reviewing this, just wanted to tell you somethings: -Yes the research tree is fucked, the devs already said that they will include a "ignore" project button in the near future, in the meantime, what i like to do is apply 1 month of research to the tech you dont like so it appears later on top of the tech list and you can differentiate the useful techs from the useless ones. -Single mounts vs double or triple is not as straightfoward as it seems, in the video you compared a single laser to a battery one, the double slot one (appart from having more damage) its also more effective at longer ranges and has a longer targeting range, this is crucial for damaging heavy alien fleets. However there is a big plus to having smaller mounts, you have more individual lasers so you can deal with pd better, this also works on the offensive with railguns, smaller railguns/coilguns do less damage and travel slower, however by throwing more projectiles at the enemy you can overwhelm enemy pd better. -The multiple drives are somewhat useful because the game has a system where you arent garanteed to unlock every tech each playthrough, if your preffered drive doesnt appear in the game, you can compromise for another one or use a drive that serves your resources (resources sites are also randomized each playthru) -Farms seem kinda useless in their t1 and t2 variants because you need lots of them for a base to be self sufficient and cut the volatile/water cost (it can add up REAL FAST), the t3 farms, provide food for 3000 ppl, my late game stations have around 5000 ppl so only 2 of them are needed, they help you soo much when starting to conquer space. -The priority tab on your china is fucked, your inequality is extreme that makes you loose cohesion and to counter it you need to waste ip on unity, this is not good for the long term, you should be lowering the inequality in the first place by putting lots of resources on welfare. Also you shouldnt use spoils in the nations you want to keep/grow in the future because it reduces your ip and gdp and increases your inequality and makes climate change worse, for those nations use funding instead. -The academy doesnt want to "befriend" the aliens, they want to sign a peace treaty as equals, they are one of the most badass factions in the game and their story line is so fucking goood. The protectorate are more extreme than the servants and are the basic bitches of the game, the servants end goal is more favourable to humanity than the protectorate one, their story line is retarded and nothing about them makes sense, the actions you take against then make the aliens less angry than if you targeted the servants instead, so in my games they are the punching bag faction or i just remove the faction from the game in the settings.

I can see Arch has already made it so Anime girls rule the entire world

It reminds me of a much more indepth version of Starsector with the Nexerelin mod lol I might have to check it out and do a "Rule Britannia 2.0" playthrough, if its possible😂

27:00 - I actually find this approach to a tech system to be an interesting attempt at trying something different. In many games tech is just a straigth forward thing, where you know exactly where to go to get the optimal bang for your bucks. But here you get a slightly more realistic case, where you just have to try different things without a predetermined path. You may gain advantages and disadvantages by your choices and you can either try to move onward to other technologies or poke around to get the best choice.

I finally gave it a try after your recommendation. Oh man, you can IMMEDIATELY tell it's going to be a special game like no other, from the very beginning. So many things are simulated, it feels very authentic and down to earth with it's interpretation of "what would happen if aliens invaded?", it makes the process of getting into space feel very awkward and painfully slow. No, seriously, you've no idea how much you have to do before you can get even remotely close to where the Arch is in the video, and he's barely in the mid game. You don't even get to sniff space for a few solid hours of gameplay. And all because that's how it would be if we were forced to scramble and try to do it ourselves right now, it would be a mess and it would take forever. And I for one appreciate it, It makes the game feel unique.

I'm upset that Tsun Fish wasn't Houki.

Great game. And I wonder if Barch knows the anime characters he's using. Muv-Luv Alternative is the best of the bunch.

Another game from Arch nice but we gotta talk about the TSUNDERE in the room. 2:09 Delicious brown girls?? has Arch finally fallen in the weeb wars? Congrats! We welcome blond nordic degen brothers.

Ah that is a very readable tech tree I can follow each line to what it unlocks lol

This game is big, sevral hundred space objects, all the nations, man made and natural disateers.

Loving the game so far, my earth is a nuclear wasteland, but the resistance holds. Agree with the UI, could present information a bit better. And manual space combat could definitely use a second pass, it isn't too bad but could be better

This game is awesome. It is in early access but feels pretty complete.

Sounds like they put some useless things In the tech tree to fill it out

For tech I'd prefer a councilor system where you have some labcoat tell you what you can expect from your tech options. Ex: Instead of outright telling you stats he tells you that the grid drives utilize tech that humanity is familiar with and thus would work better but that nerva drives would open up improved drives further down the line. The advisor could also tell you which techs would be useless to you if you already have better things but that they would open up research options for ____ and blank ____ which would ____.

Batteries are better for long range laser combat. Check the Armor Effectiveness drop-off difference at range when comparing them. They also have a 40% increase in Targeting Range. Different engines are useful on ships in different parts of the solar system. Close to Earth you can use whatever. Out by Jupiter you might use something that runs on noble gasses harvested directly from Jupiter's atmosphere. By Mars you might prefer the reliability of a solid fission rocket. The Hall Drive runs on metals which could be mined from asteroids far out from any planets. (I am assuming that ore and gasses mined and refined out in the solar system doesn't just get dumped into a magical chest that can be accessed from anywhere.) Also, the Grid Drive had a thrust of 10 000 newtons a per engine, the Dumbo Drive had 400 000 newtons of thrust per engine. Sure, the exhaust velocity is low, but the mass of that exhaust is much higher than the noble gasses used in the Grid Drive. Uninformative UI? I played Dwarf Fortress back when the UI wasn't as intuitive as it is today. I play Shadow Empire and enjoy that I have barely half a clue of how to wage a war successfully and still don't quite know how a quarter of the game works or what some buttons or decisions actually do after 42 hours of play. It's like playing Minecraft or Factorio for the first time. Oooo . . . Cavity fusion drive. Nice.

I could see the weapon system thus: - Missiles; Very long time on target, very low heat. Customizable (can be EW, can launch drones along the way, can turn into cluster bombs, can fire short range lasers or flares to dissuade enemy CWS or anti-missile measures or even just mow through debris if that's a factor, can be nuclear, can inject an AI to hack the enemy, can carry troops to board the enemy, etc.). Heavy and expensive, longer to reload (even if you have lots of them on a ship). You can have hypersonic missiles which are faster, but are still long time on target in the scheme of things, and that also tend to be quite heavy due to fuel capacity or perhaps the need for a mini-nuclear reactor (if you want to be sci fi). - Railguns; Lower time on target, lots of heat. Ammo is light and cheap. Good for making barrage specific ships that can tolerate heat, since there's lots of ammo. You can also launch plasma, which offers some variation on what rail guns can do (eg. melt the enemy rather than just stab or make it explode). - Lasers; Very very low time on target, lots and lots of heat. Ammo is infinite, but you can't expect to do a lot of damage if you want to shoot a lot of lasers at very long ranges. You could have a 'sniper ship' that tolerates lots of heat and has a very powerful laser that can travel a very long range and hit a target instantly at thousands of km for decent damage (pulse beam); but, like a sniper, it would shoot very slowly due to need for cooling. Lasers could appear in sustained beam (for drilling and assisting accuracy; targeting vulnerable components), pulse beam (concentrate lots of damage in short amount of time) or scatter variety (strobing lights that burn in many directions to hit lots of targets for lower damage)

Tex over on the BlackPantsLegion making great videos with this game.

The first thing I did was make a mod adding in colonial empire claim projects. Britain with a population of 3.3 billion and an economy of 50 Trillion dollars is busted beyond belief.

Unmooded X-Com(2012) was , for me, an exercise in anger and patience; I could never play something like this, its absolutely bonkers!

The Laura Bodewig in the corner of the screen is staring into your soul

Ive found Couping enemy nuke states for takeover really helps, and once you get your army tech up, conquering doesnt even take a month, which becomes rather satisfying

ive decided to give it a try. Depiste my reservations about XCOM this seems neat

That tech tree UI is STRAIGHT out of Rimworld. Which I have downloaded various iterations of mods to improve that UI to something that's actually functional.

I want to like this game but it feels like they they don't have a single artist or UI/UE designer over there.

The "Templin Institute" (Nice RU-vid Channel by the way) is a ingame faction? Wtf ^^ , thats nice.

Humanity First, and councilors look like anime girls. Yep, that's Arch in a nutshell.

Purge the xenos!

i was in the beta for this game and i love it :D

Mr. Tex has some fun streams of this as well.

all i want is to see arch do a playthrough

This game looks fun and very good from a tactical level and let's play would be fun to watch.

If this is Multiplayer I can see a Bickering Bunch Series incoming 😍 this isn't for me but I love watching others play.

Ah; Yay. A game I'm interested in

Arches weebery at its finest... god bless you

Happy to see you reviewing terra invicta, but once again I gotta ask....skaven campaign continuation when? I've been dying at work for those vids m8...

Shameless pirate here. Had the cracked version 5 days before i paid up. Worth every penny and more, and its not even finished yet. Fanfkntastic game. Arch on the money with this review.

Arch, with your - sparse, but still good - gaming comment you take care of that itch that only Total Biscuit would scratch for me. You come close with the radio voice and the sense of humor. I know... I miss the bastard, politics be damned. I'd watch some of his old videos, but... It's a bit too hard.

The spaceship navigation mechanic seems very realistic. Delta-V is an actual real value that determines how far rockets can go IRL. At the same time, you can reach your destination faster by spending more delta-V. Maneuvering in space is also represented very well, as it’s really hard to change your direction if you’re already flying very fast.

When reading the modding section on the store page, I wonder if they had 40K fans in mind. I mean this screams Unification Wars.

I'm playing through X-com 2 ( Ironman, Veteran) right now. This sounds perfect for me.

I explain this game as "Illuminati civil war while also fighting mind-controlling aliens, basically Alex Jones Was Right The Videogame" Also, where did you get the waifu counselors mod?

Arch are you a fan of infinite stratos?

I like how it looks like a real complex and visually active game of risk. It does genuinely look pretty interesting at the very least. Also waifu leaders are the best leaders no?

Are you planning on doing an LP of this?

I simply don't know what your complaining about, I'm in love with the overly indulgent tech tree. But yeah the game needs a better wiki so you can for example figure out what obscure niche this or that tech fits into.

This game looks amazing and very very complicated!, I only have one question though… is their planet to planet teleport or a sort of star gate device you can research?

would love to see a letsplay for that game... but i would never play it way to high of a learning curve

*Sees "Delicious Brown Girls"* God damn it Arch, lmao XD

[libationes deis algorithmi]

i think the larger guns while less efficient in damage have less power consumption per shot and less heat generation as well as opposed to their tiny compartriots. not to mention a longer range of 700km as opposed to 600km. looking at the armor effectiveness as well the larger guns appear to punch through armor more effectively with armor effectiveness against said weapons at 100km is 30% (large guns) versus 90% (small guns). then at the higher end of the guns range, 500km armor punch through, both guns are effectively tickling the enemy based on the effectiveness but you can see the smaller guns have an armor effectiveness of 2,238% whereas the larger ones has only 753% again armor will block both easily but the larger guns have an increased effective range in comparison. in fact the larger gun against armor at 500km is about 66.35 (rounded down) percent more effective than it's smaller counter part. you may lose out on stopping power, but you gain a lot more armor penetration in comparison. smaller guns should be used against lightly armored targets that need to get in close while the bigger guns should be reserved for the chunkier boi's who strap on plenty of armor.

FINALLY a developer that has not sold their soul to greedy and impatient publishers like activation.

Those councilor names though LMFAO.

10:46 I have two enemies councilors here... I wonder which ones are those...

Of cose he uses an anime mod, nice way to show that there is mod support.

There is like 4 times the difference in armor coef. with smaller laser weapons. So if you soot less armored targets small lasers are better, if you shoot harder target you need more umf in each shoot.

Pretty cool that the Templin Institute is in this game, wonder what they're up to.

3:22 Okasi ko, Conspiracy theorist, aware, cynic, wealthy. Looks like choolgirl, age 46 I like this game already.

Pion torch best drive, out fly the aliens so they can't flee.

Warzone 2100 also have cool techtee

Humanity first always

when Arch goes hehehehe... it must be a good game

Arch doesn't understand that bigger trust means faster acceleration. KPS is top speed. That's why his huge ass ships are slow.

Any chance we get Let's plays of this game with historic rants about obscure warfare and logistics? I miss rants with Arch over some gameplay 😢

Ever wondered if this was a game to train military personal for what is happening right now 24/7. "Doom" (PC) was the first free training mechanism for what is coming for all of us "players".

first 30sec and I'm very interested

>Sunrider >Muv-Luv what sorcery is this

Is it possible for the Lord arch to do a let’s play series on this game?

I love the amount of managing and mechanics. But I think id miss the squad combat that im used to from XCOM 2 now :(

I like that anime waifu mod!

>Anime women >refuses to elaborate

"You can't know what tech to go for unless you've already played the game" Well someone wasn't around in the Long War 1 days I see

0:36 did i hear.... GROUNZ warfare?

9:30 Helse, Miljø og Sikkerhet Taxi !? =P

"Delicious brown girls diplomat" LMAO

Do Children of a Dead Earth next.

Tolkien crater is that the left overs of rings of Power?

I open the vdo See Tsun Fish Sold

You say having 2 smaller lasers is better, but look at the armor effectiveness at range with the smaller lasers. They do much lower damage at longer range.