Terra Invicta - XCOM Grand Strategy, The Initiative #1 

I love the fact the game guarantees you start with at least one agent from the player's home nation. It's a nice touch.

Never played Initiative - I wish you much profit (and I'm keen to see the story for these guys as well)

Love your job interview technique. "Well, You're a sociopath. That's not all bad."🤣

Extremely excited for this game. Very happy to see you play it.

I understand the X-Com comparisons but for me i am getting really strong Stellaris prequal vibes. will continue to watch with interest. thx for posting :)

Initiative has such Exalt vibes.

Finally, an interesting game after EU4 and Stellaris for me.

So, slight error on the merging countries thing. To merge, the countries need to already be in a federation (EU is a federation). So it's possible to, say merge Germany with France, if you control both nations. But UK is not part of the EU at game start. So you first need to use that claim to make them rejoin the EU federation, and only then (after a significant cool down period) can you merge it into France. Note that France is the leader of EU (which can't change afaik), so you must control France to do any of these EU manipulations. Plus control whatever the other country you are doing stuff with.

Seems interesting especially when you're playing as the "bad guy". Looking forward to these playthrough.

46:52 “We are at war with Ukraine, we want to gain control of all three of those armies and then annex Ukraine” I know that wasn’t intended but 😂

lmao, your tech mogul looks like she drives Lex Luthor around by day XD.

so this is what that bald guy for the council in xcom games feels like

idea of merging uk and france into one country, you truly are the bad guy

Been hooked on potato's vids of this, he's playing the 'lets coexist with the aliens' group. I'm looking forward to this group. I must say i'l actually enjoying how your going over the interface. I tried the tutorial and just hated it, it just threw too much info without explaining the ui.. so thanks for this n00b style intro to the game. (i've never gotten into hearts of iron games so this is mostly going over my head however loved long war on both xcoms. liked and subed.

Would be interested in seeing you play as the servants next if you do this again. I haven't seen anyone else tackle that faction so far

This game literally opens with the Ukrainian war happening in the eastern Ukraine province and the UK is not a member of the EU. Gotta hand it to the devs: They have gone all in on the historic and military elements of good grand strategy games.

Can't wait to see more of this. Hopefully you play some of the other factions as well. Keep up the vids Monsters please.

The alpha centauri comparison is on point. This game scratches that old itch for me, too.

No luck stopping those war crimes then? "It's just the one war crime actually."

Started playing this game today. Absolutely amazing.

This is amazing! Really reminds me of the mega game Watch the Skies

undercover addict, sounds like a holly wood movie

Can’t wait to see the series hopefully my consular pops up!

Well damn, that's some intro! Bring it on, full on evil banker dude :)

Basically playing as The Smoking Man?

I feel like an initiative Africa only playthrough would be very cool

The one thing I don't understand is the aliens can build ships for interstellar travel, I assume in FTL, but they can't seem to manage orbital insertion? Its like the aliens in Signs not being able to figure out doorknobs Or invading a planet that 70% water not counting the rain while not creating envirosuits when water is toxic to them.

I’m sitting here salivating over the scale of this game.

Will it be possible to lower the music volume in other videos? Thanks a lot! I really liked your explanations

Van Wyk has the best voice actor.

holy shit, is this my new fav game? :O

26:22 Project Exodus: There are potentially hostile aliens out there, we don't know where they are and how much territory they have/hold, but, let us go and run away in some direction where they might already have planets colonized and/or whole armadas of warships milling about. 🤣🤣

Whats that a monstersabound vid? Liked

Turning down the volume would be good

expect 99% to fail 5% of the time if not more, Long war

"Sons of bitches. We'll see who purges who" (57:40) Jordan Peterson: Wait a minute... I don't think anyone has commented about the reference you made, so I couldn't resist, I had a big grin on my face after you said it. XD

"We'll take control of Ukraine" well....look out for Javelins.

1st time viewer and sub, had me rolling with the humour great vid!

You watch evangelion?? What episode you on? Have you watched the end of evangelion yet?

🤜🤛

So if you are being a complete banker, does that mean you are the worst of the wunch?

This game is interesting but seemingly very dry in this episode. To me, this looks like someone is presenting spreadsheet data in a more visually appealing way. But maybe it gets better as other mechanics become available?

It's weird that America is "hard to control", you should be able to simply buy politicians. That's how this country actually works after all.

Nice channel name ;)

i really don like the moving 3d portraits they look bad and robotic. and just a waste of gpu power id prefered artistic paintings of people instead

:D

Uk and france in one country. The brexit voters are having a stroke if they hear this.

5 minutes in and I really want to know: is the uk in the european union or no?

When or where is it set? Germany is still split in east and West, white checkslovakia is already two countries, austria, switzerland and lichtenstein seem to mushed together and then there is the whole crimea situation...

does brics and nato not exist here?

People keep comparing this to XCOM, and maybe it's in line with the older games, I would know since I haven't played them, but one of my favorite aspects of the XCOM was the squad-based combat which this game doesn't have.

Russia not cooperating with your global initiative? That's on brand, lol

why is east germany still divided? lol

Russia is actually fighting in Ukraine at the start?

32:45 If the Initiative is referring to itself as the World Economic Council in that brief, does that mean Initiative is a play on the World Economic Forum? It's really based if so.

The initiative shouldn't really be able to "deliver their manifesto to the world". That just doesn't make sense in any way.

Seems like a very promising game but all the RNG tasks are pretty much a turn off for me. There are way too many numbers and it's one thing when it was a XCOM mod, where you could try and move actual soldiers around to change things, it's another when it's just a static screen with character portraits. It doesn't feel very involving nor very deep, it actually seems to have joined the issue I have with XCOM overworld screen with the issues I have with Stellaris and FTL, you have very little control over things and a lot of it will only reveal itself a mistake way too late to fix it. Trying to turtle up would be hell, since you could set things up for a long time and then get a bunch of critical failures, opposed to your opponent just fumbling into a couple of lucky drops, so your campaign would be lost. Well, it was fun watching a bit of it but I cannot see myself going to buy or even watch much of this unless there is a severe overhaul until launch.

I really have to push back against your characterization of The Resistance as "racist". I feel like during an actual alien invasion, "humanity first" is a completely reasonable stance to take.

I have to say watching you play confused me about how this game works. You do many things in one place in Russia and the whole country is like OK we like you. That isn't normally how a war is fought. I mean in Risk you have to move in attack one place, eventually, win and advance in and repeat and now you have 2 places of say 7, then 3 not do things and go from zero to all 7. I will say this game seems weird, but I suppose your agents are not fighting the country they are manipulating the population, but in reality, don't you usually only need to convince one person/group of people and get the strength of the country.

Wife walked by and asked " when does the game start?" Yeah, this is NOT XCom. Good to put you to sleep, but that's about all. I enjoyed long war mods. Who really made this?

talk more precise. you tend to ramble. be concise with what you are saying and be certain what you are actually trying to say. subscribed.

Too much diplomacy.

Seems over complicated and confusing. Didn't really help that you were explaining things like merging countries etc when you were not actually doing that, talk about unneeded information overload Edit: Also how insensitive can you be by actually invading Ukraine.. Jfc

i love how controversial u are lets rolepaly putin and annex ukraine because more stats

Ukraine will not agree with their territory as this is shown on the map.

Crimea is Ukraine! Not going to spend money on a game that cant even get the map right

hey MA for an analytic deep dive of this great game see PerunGamingAU, not nearly as fun as you of course