Terra Invicta (Video Game)

"Being shot at is easy. The hard part is convincing someone they're drowning. Before it's too damn late."

"We remember the day the stars answered. The day we learned we were not alone. As a familiar sun rose on an unfamiliar universe, some of us saw wondrous possibility, and others existential danger..."

Terra Invicta^note"Earth unconquered" is a Grand Strategy game created by Pavonis Interactive (also known for XCOM: Long War). It raised funding on Kickstarter in 2020. A free demo was available on Steam from June 12-20 and September 1, 2022, while the game's early access came out on September 26, 2022. The game officially released on January 5, 2026.

On September 30th, 2022, an alien ship crash-lands on Earth, and its pilot disappears into the wilderness without a trace. More such ships appear in the coming months, and then the abductions start, proving that humanity has caught the unfriendly attention of an extraterrestial species. The nations of Earth begin to fall under the influence of seven international factions, each with its own plan:

The Resistance, who aim to resist the alien conquest of the solar system and preserve human independence;
Humanity First, who want to exterminate the aliens and their human collaborators;
The Servants, who worship the aliens and want humanity to submit to their rule;
The Protectorate, who want to figure out the aliens' true motives, hoping to appease them and foster a form of peaceful co-existence;
The Academy, who wish to prove humanity's worth to the aliens and establish an alliance;
The Initiative, who just want to profit from the turmoil; and
Project Exodus, who aim to build The Ark and flee the solar system.

The player takes control of one of these factions and aims to establish their supremacy across the Earth, expand across the solar system, and lead humanity to its fate.

A small DLC named "Dark Skies", featuring several new scenarios and ship skins, was released on July 27, 2026.

Tropes Found in Terra Invicta:

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Tropes #-B

Absolute Xenophobe:
- Humanity First believes that the only way to safeguard the human species is to exterminate the aliens and anyone who defends them. It's stated plainly that they've gathered most of the Earth's xenophobes under their banner.
  Colonel Hanse Castillo: They are not 'lifeforms' or 'xeno-sapients'. They are demons incarnate. They and the traitors who support them will face our judgment.
- The invading aliens' homeworld was destroyed by a planetkiller from a species of these. The victims managed to pull off an upset victory through mind control, but their dreadful ordeal, complemented by the destruction of their culture, traditions, and virtually entire civilian population, resulted in them joining the club by deciding to enslave all intelligent life that can be potential threats to them... or so it would seem, as there actually are enough of them who either openly doubt the viability of this modus operandi or can be persuaded to do so. This can give the Academy the opportunity to open peace talks with the aliens after sufficiently intimidating them away from the consideration of invasion.
Achievement Mockery: One achievement, Solomon's Curse^note, is for failing a roll with a 99% chance of success^note.
Africa Is a Country: A justified instance as the African Union supernation can potentially span the entirety of the continent. Meanwhile, the lesser federations are confined to specific areas of the continent and either connect on ethnic or purely geographic manner, some of which are corresponding to real-life organisations, too. In later builds of the game, it became semi-enforced: because various African unification projects are some of the cheapest to research and taking over large chunks of the continent is also cheap in terms of control points, even without pursuing the goal as a human player, the AI factions are actually capable of pulling various federations. So by mid-to-late 2030s Africa tends to consist of maybe half the nations it starts with and it's relatively common for anything south of equator being rolled into 2-3 nations.
Alien Abduction: A common occurrence in the early-game, with the aliens seizing people and animals for the purposes of intelligence gathering and, eventually, turning their victims into spies. Research reveals that the early abductions are so they can experiment with their mind-controlled pherocytes and fine-tune the effects. When those are successful, they become more brazen and start abducting elites and powerful people to influence nations to accept alien rule.
Alien Invasion: It quickly becomes clear that the aliens are in the early stages of an assault on the inner solar system, and will soon begin to launch attacks on Earth and humanity. Their invasion of Earth usually begins around 2035, although you can provoke them into launching it early by repeatedly attacking their ships and agents.
All for Nothing: One faction's philosophy is hopelessly flawed and doomed to fail, especially if they come out on top. It's the Protectorate, who believe humanity can't hope to fight a star-faring species, and must reach a conditional surrender to avoid a slaughter. Only, what incentive can they give to make it conditional to an enemy they can't hope to fight? They never find the answer to that one, and have more or less ideologically blinded themselves to the possibility of such an answer. Instead the Hydras exploit the Protectorate's terror to pressure them into handing over everything the Hydras wanted, while leaving the Protectorate to do the hard work of subjugating humanity, and to do this, they wind up having to cause a slaughter, using orbital weapons to "accidentally" wipe Southern Manhattan off the map, killing millions while convincing themselves they're saving billions. The only "consolation" is that they're still given power over mankind, at least for so long as the Hydras are content. For all intents and purposes, despite their stated agenda, the Protectorate's cynicism and defeatism backpedals them into an unconditional surrender. Even the alien-worshipping Servants get humanity a better deal by at least sticking to their ideals of how this subjugation business is supposed to go, while the Academy can bring humanity to meet the Hydra more as equals.
Alternate History: The "Broken Earth" scenario, introduced in the "Dark Skies" DLC, has one presume that the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted into nuclear war. Fast-forward a century later, and the various nations have been fragmented into many distinct sub-states, putting humanity at a distinct disadvantage when the aliens begin their operations.
Ambiguous Ending: All of the faction-specific endings leave on an uncertain note with regards to how humanity and/or the aliens will further develop:
- The Resistance: Closes the wormhole that the aliens use to travel to Earth's system, ending their invasion and preserving status quo... but who knows if/when they could open another one.
- Humanity First: Sends a bioweapon that's intended to kill all the hydras... but has no way to know if it actually works or not beyond the fact that the wormhole closes. Humanity turns deeply expansionist and xenophobic, and will likely end up in another war with other aliens if they're ever found.
- Project Exodus: Flies themselves away to a distant habitable planet to rebuild civilization elsewhere... but has no way of knowing whether the destination also has alien life, or if their ship will break down on the way there.
- The Academy: Secures a fragile peace with the aliens after sufficient threatening... but this may develop into a cold war or break down into war again.
- The Initiative: Mind-controls the aliens using altered pherocytes and assumes de-facto control over both species... but has no way to know that the mind control won't wear off.
- The Protectorate: Humans are placed under Protectorate-governed Vichy Earth and must pay tribute to the aliens. Pockets of human resistance continue to be active, time will tell who will secure the final victory, or if the aliens might get fed up and just remove the Protectorate from its role.
- The Servants: Humanity becomes Dragon-in-Chief for the aliens, and secure a relatively respected position within the alien hierarchy. Pherocytes are employed en-masse, but pockets of human resistance still remain active. Will the Servants be able to continue "fixing" the aliens and get a better deal? Or would the resistance efforts continue to hamper the conquerors?
Ambiguous Situation: In-universe, in the case of a Humanity First victory, it is unclear to humanity why exactly the wormhole closed down after the Hydra were attacked with bioweapons. Some humans speculate that the Hydra closed down the wormhole in a desperate attempt to stop the bioweapon from spreading, while others believe that the equipment controlling the wormhole was accidentally destroyed in the fighting between the now-insane infected Hydra.
And the Adventure Continues: In Project Exodus' victory cutscene, their leader remarks that "After mountains there are mountains ... We begin our climb anew", and there's a shot of a computer screen displaying data on "Project Zerzura".
Anti-Frustration Feature: Of a small sort. Under the control of a faction, a nation's investment points are poured into certain aspects of said nation to its benefit (and occasionally otherwise). Certain ones — such as Mission Control, number of Armies/Navies, etc — have limits as to how high they can go, whether period or at that point in a game. If a priority completes and the nation's cap for such is reached partway through an ongoing turn, it'll turn itself off and disappear from the list to avoid wasted investment, while allocated portions will re-adjust themselves accordingly.
Ape Shall Never Kill Ape: Sort of. The Nuclear Weapons Taboo exists for human-controlled nations regardless of their ideology. Even Humanity First and the Servants, mortal enemies they may be, are loathe to start nuclear war unprovoked. However if the Alien Administration gets hold of a nuclear weapons stockpile, then Humanity First will no longer have such compunctions: they'll fling nukes around without a care.
Applied Phlebotinum: Alien construction uses a material referred to as "Exotics", allowing them to operate at a level far beyond that of human technology. Human scientists are completely baffled by what it is, and resolve themselves to settle for what it can do, which is make anything it's applied to, better. Stronger armor, faster electronics, more efficient reactors... Project Exodus, in particular, eventually determines that their planned colony ship is completely unfeasible without large amounts of Exotics to fortify it. Unfortunately, humanity has no idea how Exotics are made, and you can only get some by salvage or, for pro-alien factions, trade.
The Ark: The goal of Project Exodus is to build one of these to carry some of humanity to a new solar system.
Artificial Brilliance: The AI has a surprisingly robust suite of tools and choices for what they can and will do, even with limited resources and a large number of possible outcomes.
- During the initial rush at the beginning of the game, factions will grab control points wherever they can. After the initial rush (about a year in-game), factions will determine what they have, what they want, and how to get it, and those goals are determined by their modus operandi: The Initiative will place a high value on large and/or corrupt economies, Humanity First will prefer militaristic powers, Project Exodus will focus on nations with high or potentially high Boost production, and so on.
- Much like the player, the AI can take a long term strategy. It's not unusual to notice a faction grabbing control points that don't seem to make much sense, until you realize that they're all allied with a superpower, and you get a bonus to grab a control point in a superpower if you have control points in their allies. The AI knows this, and knows that, for example, Israel is a relatively small and easy-to-grab country that provides a small but noticeable bonus to grabbing a control point in the United States.
- If and when the aliens invade Earth and establish the Alien Administration, factions that don't want the aliens to succeed will voluntarily seek alliances with other factions to enable easier military cooperation against the invaders, even if they would never normally take that alliance (such as, for example, the Initiative allying with the Resistance despite being in a "War" relationship).
- Councilors will take actions in-line with their factions goals: if their next goal is to capture or kill an alien, they will prioritize surveillance missions; if they need to recover alien technology, they'll prioritize control points with high Mission Control or Boost so that they can build a fleet to attack an alien fleet. While you always have access to the other faction goals, knowing what they're trying to do can be vital to preventing them from doing it.
- The aliens are just as capable of seeing fleet strengths as you are, and won't bother to attack if they don't think they can win (or if they know they can win but it will cost them). If you build up a sufficiently large and powerful fleet and keep it in Earth orbit, it can delay the alien invasion significantly, or even in perpetuity. But the second that your fleet moves out of Earth orbit on a trajectory that will take some time, the aliens will immediately send their invasion fleet. And the aliens can and will attack your other assets if they can't get to Earth directly.
Artificial Stupidity: The AI in early development was quite dumb, particularly in regards to control points on Earth. There was no long-term strategy or viable design, and the AI was therefore pretty easy to outwit. With the full release of the game, however, the AI has mostly settled into consistently better, if still lacklustre choices. It does, however, still come up with some bone-headed moves.
- AI will gladly try to build a space program everywhere, with zero regard to its feasibility or profitability. There is not a single line of AI script to not even stop, but simply discourage it from trying to either build a space program in places like Norway or New Zealand (having very low boost gain thanks to its close-to-pole position) or in poverty-stricken nations in tune of Equatorial Guinea or Micronesia. AI also doesn't take into account possible federations, even if controlling most, if not all, of the members, so it will be building separate national space programs in, say, Nigeria, Togo, Benin and Chad (three of which will spend years building theirs), even if all of them can be rolled into a single federation and thus share a single space program among members. Or build separate boost within federation members, like in case of European Union - rather than simply expanding the French Centre Spatial Guyanais that is close to equator. This single-minded pursuit is the key reason why, by 2030, non-human-controlled nations are in such an awful state, since AI is too busy building boost. Oh, and boost, while important early on, rather quickly becomes a total non-factor, so AI is wasting an enormous amount of resources on something that will stop having any kind of importance by the time Mars is colonised (which takes 3-5 years from game start).
- If a country's control is split between two AI factions, they will refuse to coordinate their priority spending, slowing down progress on things that might be useful just to spite the other faction and enforce their own priorities.
- Likewise, if a country's control is split between two factions, one of those factions might declare war on that country in an effort to flip it completely to their control. That is, they waste time, effort and resources fighting themselves because they don't like to share.
- If you've pissed off a faction, they will gladly launch attacks against your habs to punish you. The AI is smart enough to not attack a heavily defended hab, but they're not smart enough to realize that your fleet might be within range of defending an apparently-vulnerable hab, letting you use it as bait to draw out the faction's fleets and slap them around.
- Factions will gladly fight wars for years, doing significant damage to each other's armies without destroying them, unable to score a decisive victory, just in the hopes that they will be able to win somehow. The only reliable way that a faction will stop a war without player intervention is if the faction gains control of both sides, at which point they will declare peace. And if both sides have atomic weapons, they will never surrender, yet not use their nukes, either. Part of this was rectified later on, allowing surrender when the fighting countries don't share a land border and the attacker got soundly beaten - so, say, the US invasion of anyone who is not Canada and Mexico can be theoretically beaten off (good luck with that), but a Pakistan-India war can go forever.
- If the aliens bombard a hab with defenses, and the damage they sustain is sufficient to prevent the fleet from continuing the attack or withdrawing to repair and resupply, the alien fleet will simply...orbit the planet. They will never voluntarily scuttle their ships or bring in another fleet to reinforce or repair them^note. And even worse, the aliens will occasionally split their fleet up in an attempt to continue the attack, realize that their new fleet is too weak to attack anything, and rejoin the fleet they just split from, generating endless "a new alien fleet has been spotted" notifications to clog your timeline.
- The AI seems to think that being punched, being kicked, and being spit on are all the same thing: if you antagonize a faction, they will respond with force. But they won't use a proportional response: if you, for example, antagonize them by assassinating one of their councilors, which could be disastrous^note, they might respond by blowing up one of your habs, consider it a just reprisal, and then leave you alone. Even if the only thing they blew up was a dummy hab with no modules and no benefit to you, they blew it up and that's good enough.
- The pro-alien factions, when controlled by the AI, will move to complete their objectives even if it's not a good idea. If you have Earth on lockdown, no alien fleets in orbit, and the aliens aren't sending any fleets to attack, the Servants will still try to establish the Alien Administration in one of their controlled countries. If they do it in something like Russia, China, or the United States, that makes sense. But they'll also try to do it in Singapore, Chad, or the Congo if they have no better options. Declaring the Alien Administration will immediately make that country hostile to their neighbors and most of the rest of the world^note, likely prompting war, and if the new country can't benefit from alien ships in orbit raining death on attackers, or powerful alien armies fighting off human military power, then it will quickly capitulate and the Alien Administration will fall, reducing the power of the Servants.
Awesome, but Impractical:
- The Pion Torch uses an equal mix of water and antimatter for fuel. It's a very light drive with the raw power of a much larger and heavier drive, allowing for high acceleration all around the solar system... but fueling it takes tons of antimatter, so even a single tank will consume the yearly output of multiple supercolliders. The only use case you might have for one is for when you need to send a councillor to the outer system and you need them there yesterday, damn the expenses.
- Hull Armor. Armor can never negate damage from a hit, only reduce it, and no amount of armor will provide absolute protection. In addition, the more armor mounted on a ship, the more mass it has, which reduces acceleration, maximum speed and delta-v, which means limited range. On top of all that, armoring the sides of the ship massively increases mass, as there's more to protect there, so you're either creating huge, slow ships that require a lot of resources to survive a little longer, or you're cutting back on armor, which means your ships will have little survivability. Higher end armor provides better protection at lower mass, but the best armor (Exotic and Hybrid) requires exotic materials, which are difficult to acquire, and no matter how much armor you can mount on a ship, you will likely never fully armor a ship, as the weight will be wildly prohibitive^note.
- Mark-III weapons. While they are demonstrably better than even the Mark-II versions of the same weapons, Mark-III weapons require an investment of exotics in order to build them. Unless you have a surplus of exotics, it's generally not a good idea to mount Mark-III weapons on all your ships, instead focusing on Mark-II with a couple of Mark-III guns.
- Nuclear missiles and torpedoes for your fleet. They are extremely powerful, to the point that they do millions of points of damage, compared to about 1000 points for extremely advanced missiles. As a result, they will kill any ship in a single hit. Mounting a ship with them, however, requires fissiles, which are generally rare, valuable, and required for ship drives and fuel... and of course, they're missiles, which means they can be shot down by point-defenses, and likely will be. They're great for a kill shot on a big enemy, but unless you're mounting dozens of ships with expensive nuclear missiles, they're unlikely to score a hit. And if they do, they'll vaporize all the salvage, including those extremely valuable exotic materials (if present), meaning you'll pay through the nose for expensive missiles, and get nothing back if they work.
- Nuclear-powered engines. Most engines use a mix of hydrogen and volatiles as fuel, with some adding a small amount of fissiles to the mix. Nuclear-powered engines, however, use fissiles as their primary, and in some cases, only sources of fuel, at the hefty cost of ten units per fuel tank. While that fuel tank will provide a ridiculous amount of delta-v, you will be paying a serious cost to fill it up, which is even worse when you consider that your Mars-and-beyond habs all but require nuclear power to function, meaning that fueling one nuclear-powered engine might shut off the lights for your most profitable habs.
- Exofighters are very cool, as single-pilot ships that can be summoned to defend or attack habs in low Earth orbit... however, they have a number of drawbacks. Launching a single Exofighter requires significant Boost, usually on the order of 25-30 points per fighter; a single fighter has two missiles, which are not nearly enough to overwhelm even a single ship's point defense under normal circumstances, and after those are fired, the exofighter has only a 40mm autocannon (which can do damage to the thinly-armored sides/rear of a ship, but not the front); if an Exofighter is destroyed, it will take several weeks to build another one, draining priority funding points until they're replaced; they can only launch to Low Earth Orbit. There's not a lot of reason to focus on Exofighters unless you have a lot of extra boost, or other factions keep attacking your stations in Low Earth Orbit. Against aliens, Exofighters are essentially extra targets; if you're lucky, they'll hit them in the sides for critical damage, but often they'll just absorb a few hits and explode.
- While comets are a good source of water and volatiles, they have highly eccentric orbits compared to most other stellar bodies. This can be both a blessing and a curse: if you land a colony on a comet while it's close to Earth, then wait a few years, the comet will be much farther out in the Solar System, giving you a kind of mobile base from which you can launch an assault. However, if you miss the window for getting a base on a comet, you'll have to wait a long time for that window to open again...and that colony had better be able to defend itself, because the aliens will not take kindly to a human settlement close to their main base of operations.
Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: Deliberately leaving specific countries for specific factions allows to abuse their build orders without having to face the infamy yourself. The most obvious would be letting just about anyone finish the Iranian nuclear programme (it is almost online at the game's start), taking the hit of popularity for doing so (which also makes that specific faction weaker globally), and then taking over the country with the nukes already in place. But there are many, many other applications of this.
Bait-and-Switch: You would be forgiven for thinking on first impression that the Protectorate are the moderate and reasonable pro-alien faction, and the Servants are the insane alien-bootlicker one. Playing through both story lines reveals it's actually the inverse - ultimately, the Protectorate gives the Hydras everything they ever wanted and more with little contest, while the Servants are able to negotiate for an elevated place in the Hydras' empire.
Balkanize Me: There are projects that create separatism movements in various countries. Some are based on movements that exist/ed IRL (e.g. Catalonia, Western Australia) while others are more like "take this huge country and dissolve it to smithereens" (such as the ones for Russia, Brazil, the USA, China and India.) In practice, you will mostly just try to do this to your rival factions' countries to weaken them, though there are some techniques involving splitting your own country up to do Direct Investment more quickly, then merging it back together.
Bavarian Fire Drill: This is effectively how the Protectorate manage to seize power over the Earth in their ending. They bomb the UN Headquarters in New York City with their orbital weapons platforms (also taking out a good chunk of the city in the process), blame the incident on an accidental misfire, assume a position of leadership amidst the public's confusion and shock, and sign an agreement with the aliens to end the war. However the actual sovereignty they have supposedly secured for Earth in the aliens' new empire is very dubious, and their authority over Earth only really exists as long as the Hydras are content to leave them in charge.
Beam Spam: Late-game laser and phaser weapons are quite useful for both point-defense and directly damaging enemy ships, especially at close range.
Be Careful What You Wish For: The Protectorate's plan of a conditional surrender to the Hydras does technically succeed, with itself serving as Earth's rulers on their behalf. This comes, however, at the expense of having to accept and enforce just about all of their demands. Even that hard-won sovereignty is hinted at as being much more tenuous than its members are willing to admit.
Biological Weapons Solve Everything: The aliens use biological weapons to control humans and xenoform Earth. The human factions develop countermeasures to both, and Humanity First and the Initiative turn the tables and use biological weapons to exterminate and enslave the aliens, respectively, while the Academy steals Humanity First's bioweapon and uses it as a threat to force the Hydras to the negotiating table.
Bittersweet Ending:
- The Resistance succeeds in destroying the wormhole device, albeit at tremendous cost. While there remain some Hydra holdouts across the solar system, humanity is saved and will rebuild. However, the core Hydra territories remain intact so there is no guarantee that they will not find a way to eventually return for a rematch. On the other hand, humanity is much more technologically advanced now and knows about the threat the Hydra can pose, so they should have a much easier time defending themselves should the aliens return.
- Project Exodus manages to launch a large arkship just in time to sally forth to a new world. For Khalid Al-Ashgar and those fortunate to get onboard, however, they take a moment to look back melancholicly at Earth one final time before setting off for their destiny.
- The Initiative stops the Hydra from conquering Earth but this comes at the cost of humanity falling under the total control of an Illuminati-like cabal of corrupt businessmen and politicians while the Hydra are reduced to being humanity’s slaves.
- Humanity First saves humanity by wiping out the majority, if not the entire Hydra species with bioweapons, making mankind guilty of genocide, finalizing humanity’s transformation into a xenophobic and aggressive species and, now that humanity is aware that interstellar travel is technologically feasible, it will fully dedicate itself to developing such tech so that it can find and hunt whatever few Hydra remain into extinction as well as subjugate or destroy any alien species inhabiting the galaxy before they get a chance to attack humanity. Humanity is safe but at the cost of becoming just like the Hydra... and the player's just seen what became of them in the end.
- In a more general sense, it is possible for humanity's war of resistance against the Hydra to end in a Pyrrhic Victory with Earth becoming a polluted, chaotic, and impoverished Crapsack World undergoing nuclear winter and the human death toll potentially being in the billions.
Blue Is Heroic: The Resistance, the default heroic faction, has blue as their color of choice.
Boring, but Practical:
- The "Advise" mission, even with lacklustre councilors. Rather than doing anything fancy, it bolsters the economy (and thus, the nation's priority point pool) of the country they're parked in, along with research and military. But this is something that both sticks and stacks over time, and really fast too for larger nations, making it a very reliable option to use whenever any councilor has downtime.
- A single point of armour on the sides and back of a ship. That one point won't protect against squat in direct combat, but the goal is to provide resistance against stray shots that slide or miss the heavy-armoured nose. It's cheap and doesn't increase weight too much, but completely alters combat calculations and battle outcomes.
- Missile-based weapon systems. Early game space tech is effectively what we have in real life and could get with the right funding. It is still more than enough to defeat any alien ship and speed up research on alien technology, not to mention preventing abductions and early game orbital scans for the aliens, denying their snowballing. Despite being effectively oversized cruise missiles, they get the job done all the way till advanced mid-game, and their cheapness allows them to simply build a boatload of ships that are little more than just launch platforms for swarms of missiles - some are bound to reach their targets.
  - 40mm chainguns. Yes, it's an awfully simple weapon used since the 19th century, but with a targeting computer and being multi-role, will let you spew a hard to intercept fusilade down the line that will likely manage a critical hit and crack an alien spaceship like an egg at best, still cripple a system or two at worst. This goes without saying that an agile spaceship that can get behind or around a heavily armored front of an alien ship will tear it apart in seconds. This weapon is the easiest to research.
- Picking the European Union as your faction's staging ground. EU is already a federation and has most of its woes sorted out, allowing it to rapidly consolidate power, get high research income and utterly ignore any issues smaller member states have, which eases the gameplay and doesn't force players to use any advanced strategy, tricks, or rely on luck: all it takes is getting control over France and then keep adding more members to it. Compared with the tricks/stats needed to get into the USA or especially China, the underwhelming early game for India or the enormous effort for any other starting location to be useful at all, the EU is easy to get into, comes with great stats and can be both easily taken over and consolidated. Sure, it will eventually get weaker over time due to the low population, but the game is usually wrapped before that turns into a real issue.
- Taking over any of the oil-rich countries in the Middle East and just setting the entire focus on Spoils. Funding gives you a ton of money after many years, but a single year of running Spoils will give you quite a hefty early-game cash reserve. Then once money stops being so important, it can just be freely abandoned.
- Ships using hydrogen (and thus Water) as their fuel. They are rarely anything fancy and there are engines and power-plants that might provide better stats. But Water is the easiest and cheapest fuel source, while Fissiles (to say nothing of Exotics and Antimatter) are hard to come-by and huge quantities are often used for simply refueling, while also becoming a bottleneck for ship construction in addition.
- Surface-To-Space Defenses are guaranteed to change the balance of power. They take a significant investment to cover an entire country (with larger countries taking even more investment), but once built, the region is completely invulnerable to nuclear weapons, and all but invulnerable to a conventional orbital bombardment. Even bombardment at high orbit will take significant damage from STS Defenses, protecting the region from otherwise devastating damage. Negating nuclear strikes means you can attack other countries with near-impunity^note, and you're relatively safe from orbital alien invasion (though not from land-based invasion).
- In ship designs:
  - Lasers come in three varieties with three power levels (infrared/green/ultraviolet, normal/arc/phaser) and generally don't have the best power or range; even the basic alien violet laser will outrange your best laser. But they can be used defensively and offensively, and have no ammunition requirements, meaning they can last for a very long engagement, only requiring power, which is easy to supply with batteries. A fleet with enough lasers can eventually kill anything, meaning that the biggest factor on laser mounting is how much armor you need to put on the ship to make sure it survives the engagement.
  - And as a corollary, green lasers. They're not as powerful or long-range as UV lasers, but they have an important ability: they can bombard through atmosphere. UV lasers can only bombard planets with no atmosphere (which is less of a problem the farther out in the Solar System you go, but it's still a consideration).
  - Railguns and Coilguns. They're reasonably powerful for their size and requirements and have large magazines and decent range. Their projectiles can be shot down, but that's actually a good thing: when a target is shooting down the projectiles, they're not shooting at your ships. And if you mount enough coilguns on enough ships, point defense will be overwhelmed. Individual shots aren't very powerful, but a single ship can shoot 200 rounds before running out of ammunition, which is a hefty amount of damage if they start making impact.
  - Point Defense Turrets. Even when you develop colored and ultraviolet lasers, massive plasma cannons and nuclear missiles, the humble point defense turret remains viable and useful for one simple reason: cycle time. Laser turrets can only fire so many times before they have to cycle for 20 or more seconds, while a point defense turret fires 4-6 times and then cycles for 5 seconds. This makes them invaluable for their actual purpose: shooting down projectiles.
Brainwashed and Crazy: Victims of Alien Abduction tend to become spies or agents for the aliens, resulting in the Servants gaining a foothold in the region in question. Over time, the alien's xenofauna planted in nations will achieve the same effect as well.
Bring It: There is a cap on how much MC human factions are allowed to use for their habs and ships, and exceeding it will cause an alien reaction in the form of targeting the space infrastructure. But if one plays particularly cautious mid-game, it is entirely possible to suddenly build an entire fleet of powerful ships from scratch in a very short timespan, greatly exceeding what the aliens consider "acceptable" for humanity's space presence and not giving them enough time to react when they still can. Naturally, seeing such massive buildup, they will send a fleet of their own to teach you a lesson - which means they will fly straight into the newly built ships, eager to fight and not even thinking about running away. By then, the game will just turn into a mop-up operation.
Butt-Monkey: In a game with all seven human factions, it is almost guaranteed that, around the mid-game, one faction will be left unable to compete in some way. Either they will not have sufficient control of human nations to reliably get into space, or they will fail to secure sufficient resources from off-world mining to build up a competitive fleet. As a result, they will be stuck trying to establish a foothold somewhere, and largely ignored by the other factions. The only faction that this realistically can't happen to are the Servants, who can use their alien contacts to bootstrap themselves into competition, but everyone else is fair game.

Tropes C-D

Cardboard Prison: Trying to arrest any agent is going to stop them for at best four turns, which is two months, and usually just one turn. Somewhat justified, since it is an arrest rather than actual sentencing to jail. But they are easier to investigate and far more vulnerable to assassination while contained.
Casual Interplanetary Travel: Strongly averted. No matter how far your technology advances, interplanetary travel is always difficult. Finding a way to build a ship with sufficient delta-v to reach even Mars or Venus will take years in-game, and once you do, travel times will still take several weeks unless you're using wildly powerful (and equally inefficient) drive systems, and even that will still only cut the travel time down so much. The fastest method of interplanetary travel from Earth to Mars will still take several days no matter what you do. Fleets will also not launch for their destination immediately, instead waiting for the optimal launch window, which might mean a wait time of several weeks on a particularly extreme manuever.
- And that's only the first part of travel: if you burn all your fuel getting to another planet, your ships will be stranded unless and until you figure out how to refuel them. Mid-game technologies allow the use of ISRC^noteIn-Situ Resource Collection modules to refuel at unclaimed stations, or a Remass Scoop to refuel while in orbit around Jupiter, but those don't work for every possible drive. You'll need to develop a network of resupply platforms, in addition to collecting the resources for fuel, in order to travel consistently. And those resupply platforms will be vulnerable to enemy action.
- Even the aliens can't casually jump from planet to planet: once you have the Deep Skywatch global project completed, you will be informed well in advance of alien fleet movements towards Earth, sometimes giving you more than a year to prepare for them. If and when the aliens decide to send a ground invasion force, you'll be informed a year and a half in advance; the size of the fleet prevents faster movement.
Cap: Finding your caps and removing them is a vital gameplay aspect.
- There is a cap on how many control points you can maintain. A control point's costs towards that cap depends on the country's economy, population and other factors, with countries like the USA and China having a severe cost (40+ points) and smaller countries like Sierra Leone and Belize having bare minimum costs (1-2 points). Increasing the cap on your control points management is a slow and difficult process^note with occasional boosts when you figure out how to solidify your public support with special projects. As a result, you can't control the entire world, and you need to prioritize what parts you do want to control over others.
- Councilors have a cap on their stats: 25 points in a stat is the maximum, even if they have more points invested or organizations boosting the stat higher.
- The maximum number of orgs that a councilor can have is 15, even if they still have administrative capacity for more. Likewise, the maximum number of unassigned orgs that a group can have is 5.
- Mission Control determines how many off-world bases and ships you can maintain. This cap changes as countries you control increase their Mission Control priority, and you can build special hab modules to increase the MC cap directly (though these then become vulnerable to direct action). Going over your cap is disastrous: your habs and ships will experience failures that will cripple or outright destroy them, with the frequency increasing the greater your gap between current and max. The good news is that you'll quickly be back under the cap as a result.
- Countries themselves have caps on how much they can produce of a specific resource: smaller countries can only grow their economies so much before they simply cannot provide any more funding to your group, for example, and countries not close the equator are limited in how much Boost they can provide, even with maximum investment. Once these maximums are reached, it's no longer possible to invest in that priority.
- Investing in Environmental priorities will reduce the amount of greenhouse gases they produce, but it's not possible to eliminate pollution early on no matter how much you invest; the cap on environmental pollution is just above 3. Global research needs to increase significantly before it's possible to switch to a fairly non-polluting society, which is around 5. Once that's done, it's possible to continue investing in Environment until you reach the actual cap of 10 (with all specific techs researched), at which point the nation will start reducing the amount of pollutants in the world, reversing climate damage. This will take a decade at minimum to even be possible, and even longer to have an appreciable effect.
Changing Gameplay Priorities:
- Early on, the goal is to secure as many lucrative countries as possible, be it for their overall economy, Boost output or potential for rapid growth. Then it is about consolidating early-game federations. Then it's a rush for Luna and Mars for basic supplies to keep your growth and cheap space expansion. Eventually, the Earth-based politics can be ignored entirely beyond Research and Mission Control income, while the game turns into a series of skirmishes over the most important and resource-rich locations in the Solar System, while bringing the fight against aliens directly, rather than sheepishly keeping things under their radar. But because Earth is still the cradle of humanity, you still need to make sure that you have a strong foothold there: if the aliens take over, you're in serious trouble.
- This is also represented by resource progression. Early on, Money and Boost are all that matters. Then it's Volatiles and/or Water. Then it's Mission Control. Then Noble Metals, and eventually Fissiles and Exotics. By the time you start hunting for Exotics, which only come from trading with the aliens (pro-alien factions) or the salvage of defeated alien ships/habs (all others), Boost is almost entirely irrelevant except for supporting exofighters and residential/medical modules.
China Takes Over the World: The Pan-Asian Combine, a super-state based off China, is one of the biggest and strongest super-states in the game, spanning from the Asian part of Russia through Japan, Korea and all of continental SEA. On top of that, with a bit of positioning, it can in the process swallow all of Indonesia, the Philippines, and even Australia and New Zealand. Pan-Asian Combine is built on Red China while the Republic of China (which has the option to return to the continent from Taiwan) can not form it. Even ignoring the union country, China starts the game one step away from eclipsing the USA and usually does so in the first 4-5 years of the game, even if both countries are carefully maintained by a human player to maximum efficiency.
Church Militant: As the Servants become more aggressive in advancing their plans, they become progressively more militarized. By the end, they've evolved into a fanatical cult backed by a core of professional Gas Mask Mooks. Even after using mind-controlling pheromones around Earth, said troops are still relied on to crush any lingering resistance to the Hydras' rule and to protect the Servants' leadership.
Civil War vs. Armageddon: The entire premise of the game is how Earth may respond to the sudden presence of a hostile alien force that has the means and the will to bring about the end of humanity as we know it. Some of the factions aren't even necessarily convinced that that's a bad thing, or at least that Earth can do anything meaningful to stop them, but even beyond the basic "pro-alien" vs. "anti-alien" divide, some factions that are notionally on the same side differ wildly in their methods and ultimate goals, and everyone is competing for influence and control in the world's most powerful governments.
Les Collaborateurs:
- The Servants, who worship the aliens and believes they'll solve all of the world's problems.
- The Protectorate is this to a lesser extent — they believe that the aliens cannot be beaten and therefore doing what they want is the best option, with themselves serving to lead humanity on their behalf. As if to reinforce this point, the Hydras even send an "advisor" named Laventiy to serve as their direct liason and eventually, co-ruler of Earth.
Colonized Solar System:
- Once your faction has a solid power base on Earth, you can expand into the rest of the solar system, building bases, mines, research labs, space stations, and shipyards on the various planets, moons, and asteroids. The other factions and the aliens will be doing the same, mind you. Doing this is pretty much mandatory for the factions that don't want to see humanity submitting to the aliens, as space mining is the only way to get the materials needed to construct and maintain a fleet of ships capable of both protecting Earth and driving them out of the Solar System.
- The trope can be exaggerated by the player, as it's possible to colonize every single major celestial body in the Solar System, along with numerous smaller bodies along the way. Doing so even unlocks a special achievement.
The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: It's not unusual to spend a significant amount of time and resources trying to turn an enemy councilor into a spy for your faction, only for that faction to then immediately fire that councilor, even before the end of the turn, despite the fact that they shouldn't be able to determine what you've done until at least the next turn. Likewise, turning an enemy councilor into a spy where they are not immediately fired will suddenly have that faction running a number of Inspire missions to increase the loyalty of their councilors until you suddenly lose your agent when their loyalty gets high enough that they stop spying. This will happen constantly^note
Cool, but Inefficient: Any ship engine that uses Fissiles as a fuel source. Fissiles are very rare, to the point that if you made a ship with such a drive, refueling even a single one would use up your entire monthly production of the stuff even at best^note. The strongest engines, based on the principle of an Orion Drive^note require such a massive amount of Fissiles that refueling them would be wildly impractical, but they are very fast.
Cosmopolitan Council: Every faction ends up looking like this, as they recruit talented councilors from across the world and all walks of life. Even Humanity First and the Initiative are egalitarian when it comes to their fellow humans.
Covert Group: The seven human factions start out as this, pulling the strings of entire nations to enforce policies that benefit them. Depending on the events of the game, some of them might go public, though the scope of their influence appears to remain unknown to the world at large.
- Going public is a risk for every organization: being known by the world at large gives them a bonus to public opinion (especially if they do good work). But it also means that their councilors are visible and potentially targetable by antagonistic factions.
Creator Provincialism: Every region is named after its largest city... except for the region named after Denver instead of the larger Phoenix, as Pavonis Interactive is based in Colorado.
Cthulhumanoid: The Hydras have grey skin, elongated heads and red tendrils dangling from their mouth.
Cult: The Servants and Humanity First, both of whom tend to attract evangelists and misanthropes to their causes. The former openly worships the aliens and wants to help them conquer humanity, believing they'll cleanse the Earth of sin. The latter regards the aliens as "demons incarnate" and wants to exterminate them, along with any humans who sympathize or even attempt communication with them.
Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Played with. Regular cybernetics are completely harmless enhancement of stats for councilors. But try to use a loyalty chip on one and they will deeply resent it. The implant lets you see their actual loyalty at all times, but reduces their loyalty by five points (out of a maximum of 25).
I Did What I Had to Do:
- Project Exodus tries to maintain a public image of being a group of enterprising dreamers and scientists seeking to push the boundaries of space exploration. This is both done to gradually ease humanity into the idea of escaping to a new homeworld and conceal the fact that only a handful of the human population will realistically be able to leave.
- The Protectorate genuinely believes that its plans of arranging a conditional surrender are for the greater good, even if the rest of humanity will hate its members for it. Not only does it install orbital weaponry to keep Earth contained in its ending, but its leadership will even stage an "accidental" misfire on the UN Headquarters, taking out the entirety of Southern Manhattan, in order to destroy any organized opposition to alien hegemony.
Do Unto Others Before They Do Unto Us: In the cases of Aliens, Humanity First and Initiative.
- Aliens: One of their major motivations for attacking Earth is to prevent another species from advancing fast enough to get the power of exterminating them.
- Humanity First: Seeing that they themselves are in a Guilt-Free Extermination War, they work towards creating a bioweapon that would completely annihilate the aliens before they get to subjugate humans.
- The Initiative: In their ending, they manufacture a neo-pherocyte device to control the aliens before the aliens themselves fully subjugate the humans.
Difficult, but Awesome:
- The United States has everything a faction could ever want: a robust space program, lots of funding and research, SIX information age armies with full ocean-crossing capability, a stockpile of nuclear weapons, and lots of development points to make all of these things even bigger and better over the course of the game. It's also fairly difficult to get a foothold there due to the sheer size and wealth of the country, often requiring the control points of neighboring Canada and Mexico, and carrying out numerous Public Campaigns to raise popular support in the country to even have a chance of success (even before spending influence to raise the success rates). If you succeed, the USA's control points are expensive to maintain, and the country has extremely low cohesion due to high inequality - meaning unrest is going to be a constant problem, along with somewhat-curbing the nation's max research benefits - which requires significant fixing if you wish to keep the USA permanently. That being said, if you can maintain all six control points, you will have one of if not the strongest early-game power bases on Earth.
- Taking over China is even harder than taking over the USA. It's the largest economy on Earth and has a massive population, requiring a sustained effort over in-game years just to take over - and unlike the USA, it's technologically a middle power, has an inefficient authoritarian government, and its military is nowhere near America's might at first. But its economy is mighty, and China has more room to grow than any other power. If developed into a first-world democracy, China (or even better, the Pan-Asian Combine) can outclass America's Research generation, and a well-developed Chinese military is one of the few things that can match alien power on the ground.
- Due to some idiosyncrasies in the economic calculations, it's faster to build certain things individually than as a single nation. A unified mega-nation would take years to reach it's max mission control and/or funding by itself, but if all member states maxed out such things prior to unifying, it would achieve the same max in a fraction of the time. Similarly, a single large nation/mega-nation trying to upgrade half-a-dozen locations into core regions (which boost the nation's economy) would take thousands of the economy priority's completion, whereas those same locations would individually and simultaneously do the same thing with high hundreds as separate regions. Doing so requires a lot of control point capacity, extensive micro-management to deal with/keep them under your faction's banner, and specific down-the-tree projects to even be capable of splitting the larger nations apart... but if you can properly handle all that, the results are achieved significantly ahead of schedule.
- Antimatter is an incredibly costly resource, both as a time sink and via resources. In order to even unlock the research to start collecting antimatter, you need to research several global technologies that will push you most of the way to fusion technology, which is much easier and cheaper to develop, relatively speaking. If you do complete those, you'll be stuck getting miniscule amounts of antimatter through Antimatter Traps^note and Particle Colliders^note, and it'll take long periods gathering enough to be useable. Yet despite all that, antimatter engines are the most powerful and efficient engines in the game, rivaling alien technology. Meanwhile, Antimatter weapons are among the most devastating weapons ever devised, able to cripple alien battleships with a single strike. You'll pay through the nose to get them and they'll be extremely costly to use period, but when it comes down to it, antimatter is the most powerful resource in the game.
- Fusion reactor plants are a massive increase in power and efficiency compared to fission reactors, but require a correspondingly massive investment in research to become viable; fission reactors and engines are quick to develop and build, while fusion reactors won't even have their own engines until you research several other global technologies. But the advantages of fusion power are ridiculous: ship ranges and propellant costs will make traveling to the outer solar system viable without necessarily needing refueling points along the way, and they'll be comparatively light in terms of weight and heat, meaning ship radiators will be lighter and less costly, giving you even more efficiency.
  - Within the Fusion reactor tree, the best fusion reactor requires massive investment even beyond the normal investment, so that you can get Hybrid Fusion Reactors, which requires studying both Inertial Fusion and Magnetic Containment Fusion. But the Hybrid Reactor is much better than the Mirror Fusion and Inertial Fusion Reactors, to the point that you won't want to use anything else. The only disadvantage is that getting better Hybrid Reactors requires advancing your understanding of Mirror and Inertial Fusion, preventing you from focusing on one or the other. But Hybrid Reactors and engines produce more power and require less propellant than any other reactor/engine combination in the game^noteexcept Antimatter.
Diminishing Returns for Balance:
- Right from the start, each faction has basic research increasing the control points cap, along with granting basic resources. Each one has a rapidly increasing price tag for each re-research, but the number of CP/resources gained this way is static, meaning it quickly becomes very expensive past the first few times.
- Building labs will give a bonus to a specific research category, with the minimum bonus being 3%. But once the cumulative bonus reaches 50%, each new lab will grant a lesser bonus.
Disaster Dominoes: If a hab in orbit is not properly decommissioned (such as, for example, if it's blasted to pieces by another faction or the aliens), then it will spawn a "cloud of debris" in that orbit, threatening every other hab and fleet within the orbit. Fleets are usually safe, as they typically have weapons and armor that can mitigate the effect, but habs are in serious danger if they don't have any defenses. Of course, if a hab or a hab module is destroyed by the debris, it will create another cloud of debris that will increase the threat, which can then spiral to a point where nothing is safe in that orbit if the destruction continues long enough. This is even accurately referred to as a Kessler Syndrome event, and can render the orbit unsafe for colonization for weeks, months or years.
Disc-One Nuke: Though nowhere near as strong as the world superpowers, there are a handful of minor nations that are worthy of note:
- While Japan is quite far away from taking over the world, the country is fairly cheap and easy to seize control of and has an established space program, a strong economy (albeit with fairly stagnant growth), and four control points with secret development towards Build Navy. Assuming no disasters early on, Japan can quickly build an army and navy and do some force projection. Japan also has a funny way of gaining lots of miltech, and it can form the Pacific Defense League to boot^note.
- Similarly to Japan, the United Kingdom is another fairly low-cost regional power worth picking, and it has several crucial advantages over Japan: it starts with a modern army (and a navy to transport it), two nuclear weapons, good research output, the potential for good Boost income thanks to a region in the Caribbean, and claims on Ireland right from the start of the game.
- Israel is a small and inexpensive country with one modern army and a working nuclear weapon, a nascent space program and a reasonable number of investment points. If you can get unrest down and fix its democratic issues, Israel is a wonderful little launch platform to lock down for your space expansion.
- Nigeria is an African nation with an enormous population (around 250 million at game start), it's really close to the equator and has 10 IP per month which optimizes your early game Boost development, and for some reason the AI never wants it. It's also the perfect launchpad for uniting the continent into the African Union eventually, if you want to do that (it also has a decent regional union first).
- A new game option is "Starting Nation", which allows the player to start out already fully-entrenched in a single country on the list, including major ones like USA, China, India, and so forth. By default, this option randomly assigns every faction a starting nation from the same list, but the player can also choose to not allow that for them. This does invalidate the difficulty achievements, but if the player really wants a head start for their game...
Divergent Character Evolution: While all the factions start out relatively similar in their methods and position, it doesn't take long for them to become radically different in policies, tactics and general gameplay.
Divided States of America: One of the technologies unlocks American separatism, which gives cores to countries like Cascadia, First Nations, the Republic of California, Texas and a few more. This has two uses: either splitting up the USA when the player doesn't control it, so it's less dangerous in AI hands, or as a counterbalance to player power - for the tech is pre-requested to unlock a super-state covering all of North America.
Do Well, But Not Perfect:
- If you're playing as an anti-alien faction, every time you succeed in neutralizing an alien or a pro-alien faction's asset, you will anger the aliens. They don't care about individuals, necessarily, but they also don't like it when their infiltration agents are captured or killed. Doing it continually will result in the aliens getting upset, and launching a fleet to blow up some of your assets (in space or on Earth) just to prove their point of being far more powerful than you. In addition, every time you kill or capture an alien, it makes it more difficult to kill or capture future alien infiltrators. As a result, sometimes you are forced to let the aliens run rampant and try to mitigate the damage they do^note or make things much harder and more costly for yourself later.
- Global technologies are vital for your continued technological advancement, but only the faction that contributed most to the technology gets to choose the next major focus of research. However, "the most" means 50% + 1 point, and sometimes less. If it's not important to get the technology as soon as possible, once you've secured the "biggest contribution" point, you can scale back your investment and leave it to the rest of the factions to complete it while you focus your resources elsewhere.
- Allowing xenoflora to grow out of control will make it increasingly difficult to combat, and if it goes unchecked for too long, it will spawn Mega Xenofauna that will attack the country it spawned in, doing a lot of damage to the economy and military forces. While this is bad on a general scale for humanity, it can be good for you if it damages a faction's control of a country. In addition, if you successfully defeat a Megafauna, you'll get access to a project that makes it easier to kill Megafauna in the future, allowing you to potentially keep it bottled up in enemy territory and mitigating the damage it does to your holdings. On top of that, xenoflora by itself combats global warming effects despite everything else happening, so you might want it to grow, especially outside your territory.
- Having a particular country under your control makes it more attractive to other factions: it takes a decent to good persuasion score to capture a control point in a country, but it takes a good espionage score to flip a control point from another faction to your control. That means that you can take a country that's got something good going for it (income, boost, mission control), but isn't actually that valuable to your strategy, and set it up as bait to entice enemy councilors to attack your control of it. Keeping public support of your faction relatively low means that it will look attractive to other factions, who will run a crackdown mission followed by a purge to take control of a control point...which you can then flip back if you so desire, forcing them to keep their attention on an otherwise throwaway country. It does, however, mean that you have to keep an eye on it too.
- At a certain point, the aliens will land on Earth and likely take over a country, setting up the Alien Administration^note. While the aliens have extremely powerful armies, it's possible to blockade them and prevent them from attacking other countries by way of superior naval power. This is very dangerous however, as the only way to force them off the planet is to incite a revolt or defeat them through sheer military force. Because their military is stuck in their country, they will enjoy a massive bonus to preventing unrest (making revolt difficult at best), and any military attack on their forces will give them a "defender" bonus, making them even stronger and more difficult to dislodge. The alternative, of course, is to allow the alien armies to run rampant and expand their influence through military conquest...and then blockade them in a nation in which you can consolidate most of your forces, cutting off their retreat and praying you can deal enough damage to destroy their armies before they destroy yours.
Dump Stat:
- When spreading investment points for nations, military tech and forming armies/navies is best saved for a country that already has pre-existing armies, great militech score, and a robust economy; anything else is going to struggle to maintain even a fledgling force. ^note
- The environmental priority is best saved for last, if not ignored entirely for small nations, as their individual output is barely a blip on the radar even at worst. Inversely, anyone looking to stop Global Warming needs to use this on the larger, most populated nations ASAP.
- Nuclear weapons are extremely powerful and useful for a variety of reasons, but investing in a fresh nuclear weapons program is a terrible idea at the start of the game: it will take a long time for a country to develop it, and when you do succeed, it gets you an atrocity mark that tanks public opinion worldwide^note. As public opinion is vital in the early-to-mid game, this is ill-advised. Conversely, countries that already have a complete nuclear program can build as many nuclear weapons as they want without consequence.

Tropes E-G

Early Game Hell: Humanity is divided just like real life, and initially has to make do with contemporary tech. Lifting anything to orbit can only be done by a tiny trickle until resources can be stored in orbit for easier construction. In the meantime, the Aliens are much more technologically advanced and can zap anything in the solar system within a month or two of traveling. You are supposed to expand colonies and build up your fleets without attracting too much alien attention, keeping under the radar until you're ready for a protracted war of attrition.
Easy Logistics:
- All resources, mined anywhere in the Solar System, can instantly be used anywhere else. This is explicitly because the mines are all equipped with mass drivers, and are blasting the mined materials to where they're needed at incredible speeds (though not instantly, as construction still takes some time).
- While stations and habitats consume Water and Volatiles to represent food for the crew, the matter of actually getting crew to the location is largely abstracted: a station alone on a planet can immediately function at full performance even after being expanded massively using on-site resources, and goes from a crew of 15 to 500 without having to wait for 485 people to make the journey from Earth and/or other existing outposts.
- Furthermore, spaceships don't require food. Such a system would make it ludicrously expensive to maintain a war fleet. Which is realistic for the foreseeable future of space, but would put a damper on the whole 'video game about war in space' thing.
Empathy Doll Shot: During a war, an event of "(nation) accused of war crimes" may fire up. The accompanying picture depicts a tattered doll laying in rubble.
Empowered Badass Normal: Pretty much any councilors with Cybernetic Implants will qualify.
Enemy Mine: In addition to certain factions being able to cooperate with one another despite disagreements over how to deal with the Aliens (such as the Academy and the Resistance), it's also possible to manipulate or persuade rival nations into joining forces to advance your interests.
Everyone Has Standards: Generally reflected by the "Atrocity" counters for a faction. Committing an atrocity lowers public opinion of the faction, and it's cumulative and never goes away. Atrocities include pushing a country to develop a nuclear weapons program, actually launching a nuke at something, and destroying certain hab modules (particularly medical facilities).
- The Protectorate and Servants, the two Vichy Earth factions, are sent the same terms of surrender by the aliens when they contact them. The Protectorate accept the terms. It's the Servants who find the terms insulting and successfully negotiate better ones.
- As much as the Initiative is more concerned about profits and control, its members would rather that humanity or more accurately, themselves be the dominant force rather than submitting to the Hydras. It also knows that simply milking the planet dry isn't good business.
  Chairman Soren Van Wyk: He who controls the water controls the world. That's where we're headed now. But hell, even I know that a dying world isn't really one worth controlling.
- Certain factions are not able to recruit certain organizations because of this, one way or the other:
  - Al-Qaeda and similar terrorist organizations can only be recruited by Humanity First, the Initiative, and the Servants. Also, the Councilor who handles them has to be The Sociopath, because anyone with a shred of basic humanity won't work with groups like that.
  - The Academy will not recruit any criminal syndicates. Exodus is more lenient, but draws the line at drug cartels.
  - Most government organizations can be freely recruited, but Mossad and the Servants won't work together, and Exodus and the Protectorate won't work with the Quds Force or Hezbollah.
  - Backer-added organizations can also be unavailable to certain factions. Typically this means the Servants and sometimes the Protectorate and/or Initiative.
Eat the Rich: Inferred. Inequality is usually the largest factor in the game that lowers a nation's cohesion, and the penalty becomes acceleratingly large beyond the level of 4.5 as the population "divides into haves and have-nots". At extreme inequality of 9, the number will not further increase, but they will further decrease cohesion and increase unrest. Could also overlap with Kill the Poor with regards to elites looking down on the poor masses.
Evil Is Easy: The Servants have the designated easy campaign, since they are directly assisted by the Aliens. Inverted with the pacifistic Academy, who have the hardest campaign but the most idealistic ending.
Evil Pays Better: The Spoils priority allows you to plunder countries through such means as forced labor, ignoring environmental laws, and other extractive, colonial methods. It's by far the most effective way to get money into your coffers during the early-game. While developing a country's Funding priority allows for more long-term development of financial resources for your faction, it just can't compare to plundering a developing country, plus you have to defend your influence in any country where you build Funding. As an aside, Spoils is more effective in undemocratic countries, which further encourages neocolonial behavior on the player's part.
Expanded States of America: The United States of America can transform itself into the United States of North America supernation, which can cover all of North and Central America as well as the Caribbean and Greenland.
Expansion Pack: A DLC for Terra Invicta, titled, "Dark Skies" has been announced on Steam to have been released on July 27, 2026. The expansion contains two scenarios: a 2003 conventional Earth and a post-apocalyptic "Broken Earth" scenario. The devs announced with it plans for future DLCs that focus exclusively on different start dates and situations.
The Extremist Was Right: Funny enough, not the extremist factions of humanity but the Aliens themselves depending on your playthrough. They think all other life will try to enslave or genocide them again. If you're playing as Humanity First or The Initiative, they're completely correct. Granted, it is still possible to let them have some basic trust in mankind if you succeed as Academy.
- Ironically enough, the Academy itself in their faction ending also qualifies. While their goals, namely peace with the aliens are actually pretty reasonable, actually achieving said goal requires going to more extremes than any of the other factions combined. Not only do they need to resort to dirty tactics to make up for their massive disadvantage compared to the other factions, but bringing the aliens to the negotiation table requires them to not only Take Over the World, or at least enough of it for the aliens to consider peace talks, but also prove they're enough of a threat to be worth negotiating with instead of enslaving and manipulate alien politics so that the faction that's willing to consider peace in the first place gains power. To do all of this, you're going to have to fight very dirty. It ultimately culminates in stealing Humanity First's bioweapon and smuggling it through the Hydra's wormhole, putting it in a position to wipe the entire species out along with their enslaved subjects, then using the threat of it to force them to come to the table. It's not exactly how they hoped things would turn out, but it's the only chance for peace humanity's got.
- In terms of the factions in favor of supporting the aliens, the Servants prove far more successful than the Protectorate despite the latter being the more pragmatically minded, "realist" faction. You wouldn't think trying to prove your worth to the aliens through zealous service would be more effective than simply trying to negotiate a quick end to the war, but Judith Howell actually has the right of it. Once they show the Hydra what they're really capable of, they manage to get a far sweeter deal than anyone would have expected for humanity.
Eye of Providence: Featured in the emblem of the Initiative.
Faction-Specific Endings: Each faction has their own unique ending and future for humankind. Interestingly, it is possible for some factions to achieve their victory conditions after another faction has done so.
- The Resistance: An assault on the alien base on the edge of the Sol system destroys the wormhole device and severs all contact with the Hydras' homeworld, decapitating the invasion force in one go. With the Resistance's work complete, the faction disbands, and Commander Ayoade gracefully returns to her quiet life as a mother of two.
- Humanity First: Despite heavy casualties, Humanity First successfully delivers a bioweapon into the wormhole and the Hydra and their alien servants are rendered extinct. The final scene shows red human ships spreading across the galaxy, suggesting that humankind has become a xenophobic and militaristic star empire just like the Hydras.
- The Servants: The Alien Administration assumes control over the Earth's remaining nations, and humankind joins the Hydras' star empire, albeit enjoying a relatively respected position within the alien hierarchy. A public meeting is held, and mind-altering pheromones are spread amongst the crowd. Superior Howell concludes privately that she expects to be one day assassinated even after brainwashing much of the planet, but remains resolute in her belief that humanity will embrace their extraterrestrial brethren.
- The Protectorate: Orbital strike platforms are installed in Earth's orbit, and a strike wipes out the UN Headquarters in New York (and a sizeable chunk of New York City) which the Protectorate blames on an accidental misfire. The Protectorate enforces an authoritarian Vichy nanny state that leaves humanity confined to Earth (as space expansion might threaten the aliens) and subject to very harsh terms in exchange for some tenuous sovereignty. Discredited within his own organization and worn down by the heavy price he paid, Commissioner Banerjee appoints the Commander as co-ruler of Earth and retires to civilian life in India.
- The Academy: The Academy are able to steal Humanity First's bioweapon data to develop their own, and manipulate the Hydras' internal politics to ensure a pacifist movement takes hold in their leadership. By threatening the Hydras' with the bioweapon and demonstrating they can sneak it onto their homeworld, the Academy is able to convince the Hydras leadership to come to the peace talk table and hash out a agreement, even possibly leading to an equal partnership between humanity and the aliens in the future.
- The Initiative: Growing beyond simply wanting to profit from the chaos, the Initiative are able to seize control of both Earth (through secretive government control) and the Hydras (by modifying and releasing mind control pheromones among their population). The malevolent conspiracy entrenches itself and subjects the aliens to an apartheid situation where they are basically slaves.
- Project Exodus: Project Exodus manages to construct a working arkship and sally it forth out to the planet "Chara" which will thereotically be a suitable new home. For Director Khalid Al-Ashgar and those fortunate 4,000 colonists aboard, they take a moment to look back melancholically at Earth for one final time before leaving the solar system to its fate, and setting off into the unknown.
The Fatalist: Councilors with the "Apocalyptic" trait believe that the extinction of humanity is imminent and inevitable, and want to convince others of this. Interestingly, this doesn't affect their dedication to the cause, but rather makes them more persuasive during campaigns in which nukes have been used.
Fascist, but Inefficient: Nations with low government scores (Totalitarian or Authoritarian) suffer from reduced economical output and research productivity, and they also require ample amount of spoils to fill the needs for corruption. Coups and revolutions are much more likely to happen (but conversely harder to start due to oppression). Military is also more often used to squash unrest rather than upgrading militech, which is undesirable if one is aiming for the latter. And since they raise their cohesion to the highest point, they suffer additional penalties to research from having too monolithic of a cohesion. They do, however, have the benefit of investing in the Oppression priority, which will forcefully keep stability low, and they don't need to spend on Welfare or Government, which means they can become economically powerful in a shorter time than a more democratic nation.
The Federation: At the beginning of the game, there are two of these, and more can be created. The European Union is the first, a union of several nation-states with the potential to become a single united force in service of a faction, or to splinter over response to the aliens. The other is the Eurasian Union, though that's more of a Hegemonic Empire composed of Russia and its satellites, yet it's interested in bringing in more countries.
The Fettered: Of all the factions, the Resistance is this. They recognize the threat posed by the aliens immediately, and begin working against the aliens and the pro-alien factions right away, but they don't determine their ethos until much later, when the threat is clear. When they finally sit down and figure out what the Resistance is all about, they basically come down to "we want to be left the hell alone": they don't want world domination or to usurp power or to destroy their enemies. They just want the aliens to go away and let humanity exist in whatever state humans prefer. That being said, the Resistance has no issue with world domination (except that it's cumbersome) or committing atrocities if it helps to get the aliens out of the Solar System, they just don't want power for the sake of power.
First Contact Faux Pas: The Protectorate attempts to arrange a diplomatic meeting with the aliens, with the help of Lavrentiy. This goes horribly wrong, with some of the attendees getting killed over being resistant to pherocytes, while those who try to escape being silently dealt with by the Protectorate to prevent word of the incident from reaching the public.
Foil: Four of the factions act as foils to one another, representing combinations of two dichotomies.
- The Resistance is Practical and Anti-Alien. They fight a fairly standard (for sci-fi) guerrilla war with the aim of driving the aliens off.
- Humanity First is Fanatical and Anti-Alien. They aim not only to kill every single alien, but also every human who worked or sympathized with the aliens.
- The Protectorate is Practical and Pro-Alien. They believe that the aliens are too powerful to be defeated, and that helping the aliens get what they want will result in the least amount of suffering for humanity.
- The Servants are Fanatical and Pro-Alien. They are an alien-worshipping cult that tries to brainwash everyone into becoming the aliens' slaves.
- In terms of the in-game public opinion axis (pro-alien vs anti-alien and idealism vs cynicism), both the Initiative and Project Exodus are neutral on the aliens but Project Exodus is on the idealistic end while the Initiative is on the cynical end.
- The Academy stands as a foil to all the other factions: they refuse to believe the worst, like the Resistance or the Protectorate, and they also refuse to resort to extremes, like the Servants or Humanity First. They also don't want to personally benefit from the alien invasion, in contrast to the Initiative, and they believe that Earth must be protected, in contrast to Project Exodus. Fitting, then, that their campaign is the hardest.
- Servants and Humanity First. Outside of being obviously polar enemies with regards to aliens, are also (almost) opposite with regards to idealism, with Servants being very idealistic, and HF being somewhat cynical.
Gameplay and Story Segregation: Part of the Resistance's ideology, as described in the 'Set Our Goals' mission, is rejecting the idea that a single group should determine humanity's future, and instead trusting individual countries to decide their paths. "Our goal is not to change the world. Our goal is to stop the alien invasion, and nothing more." In gameplay, the Resistance is the same as every other faction in their willingness and ability to change the world: forcibly balkanizing or merging countries, turning democracies into dictatorships or vice versa, making countries build or disarm nuclear weapons, colonizing other planets with up to hundreds of thousands of people, etc. Though they justify it by saying "whatever it takes to get the aliens to stop".
Game Mod: Terra Invicta is a moddable game, as might be expected given that the storyline and dev team derive from the Long War mod to XCOM: Enemy Unknown. There is no friendly modding API or even text files ala Paradox Interactive, rather, one must decompile and mod and recompile the code in Unity.
- One notable mod is a total conversion mod, set in 1983, called, Red Dawn. This mod provides a beefed-up Soviet Union, with 10 additional armies overbuilt above the nominal number they can build to. Environmental hazards, such as global warming and atmospheric CO2 are set to appropriate (lower) 1980's levels. There are a number of Communist Organizations, like TASS and each KGB directorate. A reskin submod called "The International" changes the faction names and localization to a more appropriate set for the Red Dawn scenario.
Genre Blindness:
- The Protectorate hope that the aliens will be reasonable, civilized, and enlightened even when they detect their heavily-armed battlefleet in the outer solar system. They insist that anti-alien xenophobes are to blame for the alien abductions until the evidence becomes not just strong, but undeniable. Even then, they equivocate and are more concerned about the potential diplomatic fallout than the fact that people are being abducted. They are every Wide-Eyed Idealist and Obstructive Bureaucrat in the genre, without any self-awareness.
- Downplayed with the Initiative. Its members are opportunistically taking advantage of the chaos to fill their pockets and to accumulate more power. Even as the organization becomes more cohesive and develops more of an identity, it's not until they're forced to defend themselves from Hydra attacks that they treat the extraterrestrials as anything other than a means to consolidate more control and they’re quick to catch on. They're a nascent corporate/government conspiracy straight out of Metal Gear and Deus Ex, thrust into an Alien Invasion setting.
- Also downplayed with the Academy, who start the game believing that the aliens can be reasoned with to treat humanity as equals. When the Hydras make their true intentions clear, they suffer a massive credibility hit with most of Earth's population which they will find hard to recover from. Ultimately subverted, as their continued efforts to try to understand the Hydra menace ultimately allows them to discover that the Hydras are just as splintered as Earth itself, and they end up adopting a measure of Realpolitik to achieve their goals. A Space Cold War enforced by the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction may not sound particularly idealistic on the face of things, but the fact that they manage to acquire a credible threat to the Hydras and don't immediately use it to conduct a genocidal first strike allows their opposite counterparts among the Hydras to gain credibility, potentially forming the basis for a lasting if uneasy coexistence.
Glass Cannon: Missile escorts are usually able to flush their entire cargo of missiles before the aliens get into attack range, allowing them to be combat-effective even if they aren't built for survivability.
Global Warming: A significant game mechanic: at the beginning of the game in 2022 (or 2026, depending on the scenario), global warming has increased average Earth temperature by about 1.3 degrees Celsius, and as the game continues, it will continue to increase. As it gets worse, environmental events will become more frequent, such as methane explosions in the Arctic, droughts, heat waves and unseasonable cold with massive blizzards. The events themselves cause economic damage, reducing the GDP of a country and also possibly the population, while potentially also damaging armies, and likely causing significant damage to inequality and cohesion. Climate change is the second most dangerous GDP damage in the game^note, and because GDP-per-capita is a vital component of keeping stability in countries low, and therefore making the country more productive in terms of funding, mission control, boost and research, environmental damage is a snowball effect. Even worse, while you can have individual countries invest in their own productivity, environmental damage is global; individual investment in reducing the effects of climate change is a drop in the ocean, and it requires global effort to reduce the effects of damage significantly. And you don't control the world, and won't for a significant period of time, if at all. Getting positive climate change by reversing damage isn't possible until you have clean energy^note and research Climate Change Mitigation, which is at the end of the global tech tree. And even then, there's no guarantee that the other factions will invest in the environmental priority, meaning you might still be stuck watching the temperature and sea level rise higher and higher.
Golden Ending: Arguably The Academy. They are by far the hardest faction, considering their massive loss of support and control points early in the game, alongside having one of the most brutal and expensive victory conditions on top of that. However, in return, you get what can be considered the morally best ending: you have saved Earth AND the aliens; you've ended a cycle of violence that began with the almost complete genocide of the aliens long ago, found peace, all but united Earth in the process and probably increased its prosperity, and you did it all without completely relying on bloodshed. Bonus points if Project Exodus manages to succeed in its efforts to send a colony ship to another star system prior to the Academy achieving its own victory as humanity no longer being tied solely to the Solar System increases its long-term chances of survival and independence.
- However, the peace is not certain. You’ve only taken the first steps toward a ceasefire that could either collapse or lead to something more. It’s ultimately up to the player to decide whether idealism is worth the uncertainty.
Good Colors, Evil Colors: Played with but largely upheld.
- The default protagonists and all-around heroes, The Resistance, have a brilliant, Eagleland flavored Blue and White color scheme. The Academy, the most moderate of the pro-Alien factions who desire a free Earth that can cooperate with the aliens as equals for mutual benefit have a majestic Green and Gold color scheme. Project Exodus, who seek to avoid conflict with the aliens by leading humans to escape Earth, have a Gold and Blue color scheme.
- In contrast, the genocidal fanatics in Humanity First have a blood red icon of a human hand with slight black overtones, the utterly unscrupulous opportunists of The Initiative have a sinister Orange-Red color, while Alien-worshipping fanatics of the Servants have a teal flame offset by a pitch black background and an eerie purple frame.
- The Protectorate are perhaps the biggest exception to this, since they largely have a reassuringly bright green-orange-blue color scheme in spite of favoring conditional surrender to the aliens. But, they are ultimately trying to save humanity in the only way they think possible.
Guide Dang It!: All-in-all, while the game does has a codex function that explains certain things, many elements of gameplay remain up to the player to figure out through trial-and-error. As for notable examples:
- Regarding unification, you can create union off-shots states while inside another federation — eg, Czech Republic and Slovakia can merge back into Czechoslovakia while inside EU, or the Nordic countries can form a Nordic Union without having to leave the EU first — yet there's zero mention of this anywhere.
- Also regarding unification efforts, some non-claimed nations can be unified into a super-nation, but only after they're unified into another nation beforehand. For example, the Pan-Asian Combine has claims upon Malaysia, but not Indonesia. It's possible to add Indonesia into the Pan-Asian Combine if you unify Indonesia into Malaysia first, and then add the new, bigger Malaysia into the Pan-Asian Combine. If you don't, then Indonesia can't be added to the Pan-Asian Combine, and they'll have to go to the next supernation, which will require more research and time to establish.
  - Most hostile claims can be peacefully unified, though the larger nation will deal with several debuffs till enough investment into Government/Unity priorities legitimizes the claim(s). Certain ones though — such as India's claims on Pakistan/Afghanistan, China/Pan-Asian Combine's claim on Japan, Russia's claims on Germany/France/UK ^note, etc — can only be unified via war conquest from the larger nation.
- One of the game settings is "Alien Progression Speed", dictating how many years it takes before certain alien milestones start occurring. For most factions, this works as you'd expect - lower equals them working slower, higher equals them working faster. Playing as the Servants though, particularly on the easiest difficulty? The rest of the factions play on the hardest difficulty settings to balance things out more, and thus the aliens will arrive fairly quickly regardless of this setting's percentage, as the other factions will piss off the aliens and force the invasion to begin earlier than usual.

Tropes H-K

He Who Fights Monsters:
- After the leading alien barely prevented an extinction event of their own, the Hydras become xenophobic and militarist like their oppressors. They even make use of their mind-controlling abilities to enslave other alien species they encounter.
- If Humanity First succeeds, mankind itself becomes no better than the invaders, being a xenophobic, militaristic empire in the making.
Heroic Sacrifice:
- Project Exodus considers those who either choose to say behind or simply refuse to go as doing a valiant service to mankind, buying precious time for the faction to finish its arkship. If Project Exodus does manage to launch said vessel, it's all but stated that any members left behind will try to buy more time by taking out as many Aliens as they can before dying.
- The end-game of the Resistance involves shutting down the wormhole device in order to stop the invasion dead in its tracks. Those who take part know that it's practically a suicide mission, but nonetheless sacrifice their lives to ensure that their loved ones get to survive.
- While less benevolent, Humanity First throws just about everything it has at the Hydras to get just close enough to deploy its bioweapon, its forces ready to die just to see it through. Though at tremendous cost, it nonetheless succeeds in giving mankind a decisive victory.
History Repeats:
- The implied horror of a Humanity First victory. While mankind stands victorious over the invaders, it has adopted the "shoot first, ask questions later" approach of the Salamanders and Hydras... the same approach that, ahem, led both races to extinction. Hanse may well be leading the human race out into the galaxy, and into oblivion.
- Arguably more fitting for the case of an Initiative victory, since Hydra's motive for invading earth is subjugation, not extermination. One could expect if they ever expand beyond the solar system to conquer new alien civilizations, expect a similar faction split up that is found on Earth.
- Potentially the case in the ending of Project Exodus, as they get sent out to a distant star system, if that star system is also inhabited by aliens, expect some amount of conflict and squabbling to repeat
Homeworld Evacuation: Project Exodus considers fighting the aliens to be pointless, and are instead building The Ark to leave the Solar System entirely. Though the resulting arkship can only carry thousands at most and the launch is made potentially by the skin of its teeth, Project Exodus can nonetheless succeed, giving humanity another chance at civilization. After succeeding in that, Project Exodus pledges to fight the alien invaders till victory or defeat (and to grab more of their juicy exotics to build more arkships.)
Hope Springs Eternal:
- Despite potentially losing Earth forever, Project Exodus can succeed in launching its arkship, giving humanity a fresh start to rebuild civilization in another world free of the extraterrestrial threat.
- As the Servants soon discover after managing to mind-control much of humanity, their ploy wasn't quite as thorough as hoped. There still remain sizable pockets of free people ready to take Earth back.
Hopeless War: In real terms, every faction starts with this mindset, though it hits hardest with the Protectorate and Project Exodus, who Exodus believe that any civilization capable of interstellar travel is one that humanity doesn't have a prayer of defeating in battle. The former wants to appease the aliens to stave off extinction, while the latter wants to flee the solar system entirely. But Commander Fiona Ayowade, who serves as the spokesperson for The Resistance, points out in her research quotes that humanity is doomed if they can't figure out how to bring the fight to the aliens. Being purely on the defensive would ultimately result in defeat, no matter how good the defenses are; if the aliens are determined to subjugate or annihilate humanity, then humanity will fall.
- In gameplay terms, every faction starts off with this viewpoint. Most of the factions don't even know what they want to do about the alien invasion, and have to spend considerable time and effort to decide on their course. Even then, the mid-game doesn't really start until your faction determines their "win condition", at which point you actually have a goal beyond "unite Earth as much as possible and research stuff". Until you have that win condition unlocked, you can't actually win the war.
Humans Advance Swiftly: Humanity starts the game with present day technology and, in the span of just a few decades, can end up consolidating itself into stronger nations, colonizing the entire solar system, stopping Global Warming by creating a sustainable nuclear fusion-powered economy, and building a space fleet strong enough to defeat aliens who have been engaged in interplanetary conquest for at least decades, if not centuries and put at least two other species under their belts.
Humans Are Divided: The early game consists of navigating the fractured political landscape of Earth to try to coordinate a unified response to the alien threat. One alien captured by the Resistance laughs at the notion that humanity might unite against them for this reason. Downplayed, in that said alien is speaking from experience - the Hydras are in an even more dire situation and they, if anything, are even more fractious, even with their Mind Control. It's why humanity has a chance, as the Hydras are too busy arguing to put their full military potential into operation.
Hoist by His Own Petard: if Initiative wins the game, they control the aliens via altered versions of the aliens' own mind-control pheremones. The Irony.
Industrialized Mercury: As one might expect, solar power is extremely efficient on Mercury (and in Mercury orbit), and it's a good source of base metals. Mercury can end the game as a major hive of human activity, though one should be mindful of the radiation upkeep.
Infinity +1 Sword: After your faction defines their raison d'etre, they get access to a special org that only they can use (the Resistance, for example, gets the Special Activities Section). This org is extremely powerful, giving bonuses in a variety of faction-favored research categories, massive bonuses in a number of stats, income, and more. It also has a bonus to administration greater than the cost to equip it, meaning any councilor can use it, and the cost to equip it is only one cash, meaning you can swap it around whenever you want, as often as you want. It also is unique to your faction, meaning that it cannot be stolen or even targeted by other factions for a hostile takeover, and it can't be destroyed by random events. The bad news, of course, is that every faction has one (and some factions have more than one).
Interface Spoiler: Several, regarding the aliens:
- During the course of the game, researchers are shocked to discover that the aliens are pulling Hostile Terraforming on Earth. Despite this, from the beginning of the game you can see "Xenoforming" in the globe view options. In this case, it's not that they're doing it, it's that it's not necessarily an invasion tactic but an attempt to make Earth more comfortable for themselves.
- The aliens are labelled "Hydras" long before your faction decides to call them that.
- After researching the ability to perceive alien agents' movements, you still have to snoop them out, of course. When a councilor goes to investigate an unknown agent, their defensive bonus is similarly unknown, though it can be indirectly inferred by the mission chance... yet sometimes an unknown agent (typically found at/near sites of strange activity) has a visible, often very high, defensive bonus visible.
Irony: The two pro-alien factions are the Servants, a pseudo-religious movement who worship the aliens as divine benefactors, and the Protectorate, a movement of Les Collaborateurs driven largely by pragmatism and desire to preserve humanity in the face of a galactic juggernaut. So you would expect the Servants to be mindless and uncritical of the aliens and the Protectorate to have a more positive assimilation, right? It's actually the other way around. When the two factions are presented with quite harsh surrender terms, the Servants actually find the initial terms insulting, akin to slavery, and successfully negotiate to give humanity more favorable terms; whereas the Protectorate just buckle and agree to everything they ask for.
- The only reason why the anti-alien factions stand any chance against the aliens to begin with is because the aliens are in fact even more politically divided than humanity is. The Academy's win condition even involves manipulating the Hydras' internal politics so a pacifistic conquest-skeptic movement seizes control over the apparatus of the Hydra "government", bringing the aliens to the negotiating table.
- If the Initiative achieves its victory, humanity is saved by its greed as the oligarchs and corrupt politicians that make up the Initiative’s ranks are so power-hungry that cooperating with the Hydra is unacceptable to them because it would mean giving up their wealth and influence.
- In case of an Academy victory, Humanity First, the faction that seeks complete genocide of the Hydra, accidentally helps to achieve peace with them instead, as the Academy stealing their bioweapon and threatening the Hydra with it is what convinces the latter to abandon their goal of subjugating humanity and agree to a peace treaty.
- The quote for the "Interplanetary Polities" technology reveals that Kiran Banerjee, the leader of the Protectorate who argues that humanity should submit to the Hydra, used to argue for the independence of Hong Kong from China.
- While it would make sense to encourage the various Human nations to end their rivalries so that they are more united in the face of an imminent alien invasion in some situations (specifically when a nation experiences problems with maintaining its cohesion), it can be beneficial to create ''additional" rivalries as it helps to unify the populace of a given nation against what they perceive to be their enemies which provides a boost to the cohesion value, giving the player more time to address the other factors that worsen cohesion such as high level of income inequality and low economic development.
Jack of All Stats: Astronauts have a set of starting stats that are decent in multiple areas without really excelling in any, along with one of the more restricted mission lists. However, since they do have decent stats in Command, Administration and Science they are one of the best professions for serving as an advisor to boost the military, invesment points and science output of large nations (most other professions only excel in two of the three).
- Additionally they are guaranteed to have the Government trait and have a very high chance of having a Scientist trait which further reinforces thier role as an expert Advisor.
Joke Character:
- Central American Confederation. It's one of the easiest and earliest unions to unlock and, at the same time, easily one of the worst and most useless countries out there. The combination of population, economy size, initial set-up, modifiers to growth, and a few other factors means the whole country is dispargingly expensive to create in the first place, while taking a lot of time when done in any other way than straight-out military conquest (which also takes time and resources). Even once the CAC grows to full size, it's still a middling local power that takes about twice the effort of turning all of the EU into a single country, without much gain from doing so, even if it can be folded into the United North America union (which will also hurt its militech rating a fair amount).
- To a lesser extent than the CAC, the South American Union is easily the weakest continental union. It's formed of poor, weak, and unstable states that are highly vulnerable to rapidly changing hands in the early years of the game, lacks the enormous population base of Africa, and can't even be folded into another, stronger union. Just about the only thing the SAU has going for it is that the continent straddles the equator, giving considerable Boost potential, but the African Union and Pan-Asian Combine also straddle the equator, so that's not even a unique benefit.
- The Arab League, the secular, unified country in MENA, is just as underwhelming. MENA by itself is poor (with the exception of the UAE) and low on population (with the exception of Egypt), which doesn't really give it room to grow - especially since its economy is built on oil, which in turn speeds up Global Warming (and an end-game technology removes oil from the map, leaving Arab countries with nothing going for them, so they'd probably be better off folded into the African Union anyway). However, unlike other examples under this trope, the Arab League can be a very handy springboard to form the Caliphate, a global Islamic state that spans from Morocco to Indonesia and can swallow all of Africa and Central Asia in the process, easily becoming one of the strongest super-states.
Jumping Off the Slippery Slope:
- The Protectorate starts out as cautious but reasonable bureaucrats who want to avoid a war with an interstellar species. They want to prevent as much human loss of life as possible, and preserve everything humanity has built. It doesn't take long for them to fall into denialism and authoritarianism, dismantling everything they claimed they were trying to protect to appease the aliens.
- The Initiative, being comprised of corporate tycoons and others from high places, start off simply as self-interested opportunists who openly see a mutual interest in profiting off from the turmoil resulting from the discovery of an interstellar race. As time goes on, however, they begin consolidating themselves through subterfuge and authoritarian means to secure their growing power, and eventually become a full-blown shadowy conspiracy, running humanity and controlling the Aliens with none the wiser.
Kill One, Others Get Stronger: Every time you assassinate or detain an alien operative, the difficulty increases for the next one. Past a certain point, even maxing out a councillor's Investigation and Espionage skill points won't be much help, and you're better off shooting them down in space before they manage to land on Earth.
Kill Sat: The Protectorate's Sentinel Complexes are superpowered combat modules built on habs in Low Earth Orbit. They are used to enforce global hegemony on the Earth and to keep humanity confined there.
Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Averted and played straight: Kinetic weapons do less damage, shot-for-shot, than missiles, and more damage than lasers, with better range than lasers and worse range than missiles. The advantage of kinetic weapons is that they're cheap: it's much less costly to mount multiple autocannons, railguns or coilguns on a ship than a similar number of lasers or missiles^note. However, kinetic weapons have all the drawbacks of missiles^note and aren't good at anything in particular: they aren't dedicated anti-armor weapons and don't do extra damage to hulls. As a result, kinetic weapons end up being average: cheap, easy to use and plentiful.
Knight Templar:
- Kiran Banerjee, former UN councillor, is so driven to ensure mankind is not a threat to the Hydras that his Protectorate nuke the UN Headquarters off the face of the planet, simultaneously uniting Earth with a Bavarian Fire Drill and eliminating the people who know the truth about humanity's surrender.
- If Humanity First win, they defeat the alien invaders by genociding them with a bioweapon heedless of their sympathetic motives, and take to the stars with an unwavering "shoot first, poke bodies later" approach to alien contact. Mankind has won, but in spirit and thought if not in body, they have been conquered and assimilated by the aliens.
Know When to Fold 'Em: Both the Protectorate and Project Exodus consider the fight against the aliens to be futile as they believe that humanity has no chance against a technologically advanced species capable of interstellar travel. However, while the Protectorate believes that humanity should surrender to the aliens in order to avoid unnecessary suffering, Project Exodus thinks that the best solution is to evacuate humans from Earth to another planet.

Tropes L-O

Land of One City: Singapore is the only city-state represented in the game. It's the epitome of a Pint-Sized Powerhouse, being one of the strongest economies in the region with solid life standards and education. However, it lacks any option for meaningful long-term growth, and its main possible purpose is as a quick and cheap source of Boost and Research in the early game. Notably, a whole bunch of countries have a claim on it, allowing them to take over.
Let No Crisis Go to Waste: The Initiative's modus operandi in a nutshell. Their response to the discovery of sapient alien life in the solar system? Figure out how to make a profit from it. Early on, it's mentioned one of their schemes is selling snake oil cures to an alleged alien disease. And while other factions seek to convert people to their own ideologies, the Initiative's "followers" are described as having "various exploitable beliefs". Later on, this is taken to its logical conclusion, with the Initiative seizing the opportunity to not only control humanity from the shadows, but also enslave the Hydras.
Lethal Joke Character:
- The European Union starts as a federation of 20 states, ranging from middle powers like France to backward weaklings in the style of Bulgaria. However, they are all already within a single federation, have a shared space program right at the equator, and taken together, they represent one of the strongest economies on the planet, where you don't really need to care about the smaller, eastern states in it other than filling up their MC counter. The EU can start turning into a unified country as soon as six months into the game, while also having the option to swallow the UK, Norway, expand into Turkey and eventually even all of Russia. The resulting country is among the strongest players in the game, and even sticking to the starting members offers an incredibly powerful country with a high GDP, high living standards, and massive research output.
- The exact same applies to the Caliphate, which starts from one city and can have the entirety of Africa plus Muslim parts of Asia and Europe under its banner. To add to the joke character aspect, Caliphate's "larva" form is the Arab League, which is a weakling that has nothing going for itself other than Egypt's population, the nascent space program of Israel, and UAE and Saudi wealth^note (that turn into peanuts when divided between the predominately impoverished MENA's population).
- Weapons-wise: The humble 40mm chaingun. Available from the start, and eclipsed only by the late game. It can, however, be useful even in endgame. A fusillade of unblockable rounds in a driveby across the alien ships' vulnerable sides can land many critical hits, crippling the precious components.
Lightworlder: The Griffins evolved in a low-gravity environment and can't function well on large planets like Earth.
Lizard Folk: The aliens' Elite Mooks are reptilian humanoids referred to as "Salamanders".
Macross Missile Massacre: Since point defenses can be quite effective (especially since energy weapons that aren't dedicated point defense can still shoot down missiles too), missiles are best employed en masse to overwhelm an enemy's suite of energy weapons; the minimum salvo from a launcher is 6 missiles, and you can mount up to six of them on a single ship.
Magikarp Power:
- India starts off relatively insignificant compared to the established superpowers of the United States and China, but a properly-managed and invested India can eclipse the US in GDP and science output within ten years of game start. It can be territorally expanded in two stages; the first to encompass the subcontinent, and the second into the entire Indosphere. India and Japan as two nations will fill up most of your Admin cap and be a fantastic start for your faction of choice, as Japan can feed India vital cash, research and Boost in the first decade while India gradually builds its muscle.
- Corrupt, fractured and in almost-perpetual turmoil, Africa might seem like an odd continent to consider as the cornerstone of your strategy, but the place is brimming with potential if you can (metaphorically and literally) get it together. Picking Nigeria is a strong starting point, and has one of the easier unifications through conquest once you unlock the African Union or one of the other super-nations in the region (alternatively you could grab a mid-sized external power like Israel or the UK to do the heavy lifting for you). Great Bantu and East African Federation can be united in mid-game to fit a huge portion of the continent into a superstate with four resource regions and an impressive GDP for the late 2020's. And if the African Union holds the entire continent then it will probably control at least one-fifth of the Earth's total population with a GDP comparable to (or possibly even greater than) India or the EU, though admittedly it will take a while to get there. You can even unify African Union and the Caliphate, which makes it even more powerful. And as a bonus to all of this, the African Union straddles the equator, making it a great place for building up Boost.
- "Advise" mission allows to pull this with any country, since by parking a councillor in it, it gains a hefty bonus to its development score and can re-invest it in any way deemed fit. Done long enough, it can go as far as turning some post-colonial African hellhole into a Pint-Sized Powerhouse.
- Hab defenses are hilariously inadequate at actual defense against a dedicated attack force...at first. Point Defenses are really only good at shooting down missiles, which means they're all but worthless against aliens. Layered Defense Arrays are actually quite good, but still easily out-ranged by anything the aliens have, and a single array will struggle against even a small fleet. But Battlestations are monsters: a single Battlestation can easily destroy a small fleet single-handedly, and two Battlestations will savage a massive alien attack force through sheer attrition; despite being rated at "only" 300 attack power, a Battlestation can take on a 1000-power alien fleet and emerge victorious. They require a lot of resources to build and power to maintain, but they are worth investing in just for the peace of mind they give you.
Make It Look Like an Accident: Towards its ending, the Protectorate resorts to framing the destruction of the UN Headquarters by its orbital weapons platforms, taking out New York City in the process, as an accidental misfire. This not only eliminates the remaining organized opposition to Earth's new benefactors, but also conveniently wipes out anyone who could know the truth about humanity's surrender.
Make the Bear Angry Again: The modern Eurasian Economic Union can turn into a single country just as easily as the European Union can, and the entire former Soviet Union can be invited - or "invited". And while Russia isn't necessarily any more aggressive than any other country, they begin as an authoritarian dictatorship invading Ukraine, it's a lot easier for Russia to expand militarily than just about any other country, and God help the Earth if a nuke-happy faction gets control of them.
The Man Behind the Man: At least initially, all the factions serve as this, working through operatives, intermediaries, and eventually, entire countries under their control/influence. The Initiative in particular stays committed to this path towards the end, preferring to rule humanity from the shadows while treating the Aliens as slaves.
Mexico Called; They Want Texas Back: One of the later mega-nations you can create is a revanchist Mexico with claims on a significant part of the USA.^note It's named "Aztlán", which was originally the mythical homeland of the Aztecs, but here appears to refer to the term's use by the Chicano movement among 20th-century Mexican-Americans.
Middle Eastern Coalition: There's a couple of options for this. The Arab League is a secular version that allows a pan-Arab unification, while the Caliphate allows the unification of the Middle East (and later, the rest of the Muslim world) under an Islamic banner.
Mind Control:
- The Hydras are revealed to possess pherocytes that allow them to mind-control any opponent in close proximity to them. They also eventually resort to using brainwashed human captives to serve as spies with no one suspecting them until it's too late.
- The Initiative not only uses modified pheromones to enslave the Hydras in the ending, but it's strongly suggested that said pheromones are also used to brainwash the rest of humanity, allowing it to rule Earth from the shadows.
- The Servants in their ending arrange a large public event with which to spread mind-controlling pheromones around Earth, leaving mankind completely at the mercy of the Hydras.
Morality Kitchen Sink: The human factions run the gamut.
- The Resistance and Academy are both idealistic factions who seek not just to defend Earth, but to protect what makes it worth defending and avoid committing atrocities or unnecessarily wasting human life. That said, they can employ criminals, exploit countries for profit, and commit war crimes as easily as any other faction. Project Exodus just want to get off the planet, hoping to find a better home for humanity among the stars. They believe that humanity can't win against the aliens, and are doing their best to protect human life regardless.
- The Initiative actively seek to exploit the crisis, and only fight the invasion to defend their interest. Among one another, they don't even pretend to be anything but ruthless, self-interested bastards who want to be the "top dog", the rest of the world be damned. The Servants are an alien-serving cult and naturally opposed to almost every other faction, and to anyone who doesn't want to be the slave of alien invaders.
- The remaining factions are more complicated, with varying shades of grey. The Protectorate truly believe their attempts to arrange a conditional surrender is the best way to resolve the crisis with minimal loss of life, but they are manipulative and Genre Blind. Humanity First are absolute xenophobes willing to go much further than the Resistance against both the aliens and their human sympathizers, but their initial theories about the aliens are proven painfully accurate.
Multiple Government Polity: The seven factions consist of various nations that have united under their banner, voluntarily or otherwise.
Nebulous Criminal Conspiracy: The Initiative is a cabal of corporations and industrialists who want to exploit the ongoing crisis to amass wealth and power. At first. They gradually coalesce into The Illuminati in all but name. Strictly speaking, of course, their goal never actually changes, it just grows to encompass the Aliens as well.
Never Be Hurt Again: It's eventually revealed that the Hydras are the survivors of a genocide enacted by the Salamanders, and that their belligerence toward humanity and other sapient species is their way of ensuring that they are never threatened by invasion again.
Next Sunday A.D.: The game begins on October 1st, 2022, and global politics are fairly accurate to the present day (up to and including the Russian invasion of Ukraine).
No Man Should Have This Power: A powerful country with more or less entrenched AI control? Or simply outside your own capacity to control it? Start working on splitting it into smaller pieces, even researching related techs. This not only potentially weakens the nation itself (making it far less dangerous in AI hands), but, and that's even more useful, creates more countries for the AI factions to spread their control points capacity on. This technique is particularly useful for countries like the US or China, but can also be handy for dealing with India and Russia (and its nuclear stockpile), if none of those are on players' priority list to control themselves. The end result is a bunch of mid-tier countries that the AI will then start fighting over, solving both the issue of having a powerful entity outside your own control and AI's general capability of taking chunks of the world for itself.
No Place for Me There: The Servants' leader expects to be assassinated for turning the Earth over to the aliens. In contrast even Project Exodus' leader hitches a ride on the colony ship with supposedly ultra-strict selection.
Not Completely Useless:
- Nuclear missiles for your ships are underwhelming weapons for ship-to-ship combat due to the combination of their price to build and resupply, but also the way how combat resolution works, where most of the missiles will be destroyed by defence systems before hitting anything. However, they make excellent bombardment ships, as they simply send a nuclear warhead towards the target, obliterating it instantly rather than slowly chipping it down.
- All the various European unifications outside the EU, while clearly inferior to the EU itself, have a niche use. Since AI is unlikely to unify the EU if left on its own, unification techs allow working with what's left of the region for human player if not focusing on Europe from the start. And some of them can cover pretty large areas for chump change, effectively being a discount EU in case the EU is not turned into a unified state. Also, since there is a fixed amount of time between each next country added to the unified EU, it can speed the process by integrating lesser parties in the meanwhile, while also decreasing the point costs of having so many countries under your faction's control.
Not in This for Your Revolution:
- In contrast to the other factions, the Initiative couldn't care less about the Aliens, unless they directly threaten its interests. So long as its members get a hefty piece of the action amidst the turmoil and become the shadowy puppet masters of mankind, it's all fair game.
- Project Exodus' sole concern is simply to get humanity to a new homeworld, and couldn't care less about the Aliens' plans or fighting against them, unless they directly intervene in said Homeworld Evacuation. However, they do end up fighting a large number of aliens in order to get the rare metals used in their ships, and after launching the ark, Project Exodus pledges to continue fighting the alien invaders till victory or defeat.
"Not So Different" Remark: When the Resistance captures an alien for interrogation, it laughs at the notion that Earth could unite to defeat the aliens... because the aliens themselves did this to defeat their own invaders.
Not the Intended Use: Nuclear weapons are great for glassing invading aliens. They can also be used... as an effective measurement to curb Global Warming, by causing nuclear winter or at least cooldown, until the technology to deal with climate are finally researched. It may even end up being a net positive for economy (both to the climate improving and not having to maintain the stockpile) if all weapons are dropped in a single, underdeveloped region while curbing temperature rise globally. Just keep in mind your faction is going to be hated for doing this, but the temporal tanking of popularity is well-worth it. Turns out, recreational nukes are the answer to climate catastrophes!
Older Than They Look: The faction leaders at large can remain in charge even after several decades, with none looking any worse for wear. Could be Justified, since multiple techs increase the lifespan of councilors (and therefore can make them look youthful), and faction leaders would likely get access to them first.
One Stat to Rule Them All: While all stats are important^noteScience increases the chances of unlocking faction projects and provides protection against alien mind control; Security makes it harder for councilors to be targeted by other factions for a variety of negative missions; Espionage makes it far more difficult for other councilors to detect them (and thus target them); and Investigation makes it far easier to detect not only human agents, but those of the aliens, three are more important than the others: Persuasion, Command and Administration. All three will increase your control point cap, and all three are vital for overall progression in the game.
- Persuasion is vital in the early game, as it allows you to raise public opinion and capture control points. In the mid-game, where consolidating your control is not quite as vital, it's still important as it allows you to convince enemy councilors to turn traitor while also ensuring the loyalty of your current councilors. Late game, you can use it to convince enemy habs and ships to join your faction outright.
- Command is the stat that determines how effective your councilor is at direct action. Combating alien xenoforming, assaulting enemy habs and ships with marines, and leading armies all fall under Command.
- Administration is arguably one of the most important stats: it determines how many orgs a councilor can have equipped. Orgs are essentially force multipliers: they can provide cash, influence, ops, boost and mission control income, bonuses to research and national funding priorities, bonuses to stats, and even actions to which the councilors normally don't have access to. A councilor with 25 org slots is frighteningly effective. The fact that it increases your control point cap is really just a bonus at that point.
One World Order: Played With. The revelation that man isn't alone in the universe triggers a shift in the way humanity sees one another, but how this manifests varies considerably between individual countries and especially among the various factions. Depending on what projects and policies are enacted, it's possible either for Earth to be unified under a group of super-nations (if not a singular world government), a general status-quo to persist as various national powers preserve their way of life, or for countries to fracture even more into more easily-controllable puppets for the dominant faction.
Oppressive States of America: It is entirely possible for the United States to become a totalitarian dictatorship if its Government score falls low enough.
Orbital Bombardment: Can be used to attack or destroy enemy surface bases, as well as army units on Earth. How effective it is depends on what kind of weapons your ships have, and how thick the planetary body's atmosphere is.
Orion Drive: A mid-game technology unlocks it for your ships. It is squarely into Cool, but Inefficient territory: shows up late, has terrible manoeuvrability and is both expensive to build and refuel, as it consumes a god-damn nuke every time it has to move the ship. Even over such short distances as moving from orbit to a space station to refuel.

Tropes P-S

Piñata Enemy: Some countries can provide high Spoils for relatively little expenditure of Control Points, particularly rich and authoritarian countries with Oil and/or Mining regions (such as Saudi Arabia). Taking over one of these and looting it into the ground is a popular early-game move.
Plasma Cannon: The cross between kinetic weapons and energy weapons, plasma weapons require investing in both magnetic weaponry and laser weaponry, but have advantages over both. Plasma weapons are relatively fast-firing^note, do hefty amounts of damage at long range^note, and most importantly, can't be shot down or intercepted: once a plasma shot is fired, the only thing to do is get out of the way. Even alien battleships will struggle to withstand a barrage of plasma fire. The drawbacks are that plasma weapons generate a lot of heat and require a lot of power, meaning you'll need to build heavier heat radiators and larger power plants to support them, making them costly.
Point of Divergence: The Earth of Terra Invicta is the same as ours up until 2022, when the first sightings of the Hydra result in the formation of the player factions and the ensuing struggle to war for influence over Earth and (eventually) the rest of the Solar System.
Post-End Game Content: In certain cases, even after one faction achieves its ending, it's possible for another to achieve its own objectives, if not turn the tables on the erstwhile victor. However, you cannot continue a game after achieving victory with your own faction.
- Even if the Servants or the Protectorate succeed in their respective schemes to control humanity, there's still enough organized opposition and pockets of non-brainwashed people for the Resistance to rebuild. There's even an achievement for doing so: "Phoenix".
- Just because Project Exodus achieves its goal of escaping the solar system doesn't mean its mission is accomplished just yet, when its members can buy more time by taking out as many Alien forces as they can or even contribute to repelling the invasion altogether. While other factions can still gain their victory conditions.
The Pollyanna: Councilors with the "Pollyanna" trait are described as having a perpetually optimistic attitude, even in the face of strife or defeat. The practical effect of this is that their apparent loyalty is set to 25, giving the appearance of perfect loyalty to their faction even if that's not really the case.
Power at a Price:
- To create the United States of Northern America, a super-state covering all of Northern America, first a tech unlocking American separatism has to be researched. This creates a situation where, should the country be unstable, it will absolutely implode into small states, balancing the continental union's immense potential.
- To create the Pacific Defense League, aka Greater Japan, you must first research either the aforementioned American separatism tech, or one that gives China claims on a number of countries, including Japan. In other words, before you can expand Japan, you must either put its greatest ally at risk, or give its greatest threat an excuse to invade.
- An unusual case with a trait: the Criminal trait allows a councilor to have access to various powerful organizations, such as the American Mafia, the Hong Kong Triads, and others. These organizations are far better than the standard organizations, usually increasing several stats (include the rare increase to Administration) and providing money and influence besides. However, being a Criminal means that the councilor could be called on at any time to do a job for their criminal associates. Declining will destroy up to three orgs, while going forward with it could result in a massive payday, access to Exotic Materials, imprisonment or death. And there's no way to control the outcomes, so you just have to roll the dice and hope your councilor makes it through.^note
Pragmatic Villainy: No matter how bad a faction is, they need Earth to remain intact and the countries they rule to be in good condition if they want to achieve their goals.
- Humanity First, for all its members' rabid xenophobia, isn't picky about race, gender or political ideology, and will generally allow others to pursue their own path. At least so long as said path is anti-Alien.
- The Protectorate, meanwhile, tries to encourage and maintain some semblance of normalcy if it means making Earth's conditional surrender more palatable.
- Even the rapacious Initiative will put some effort into stopping Global Warming and generally maintaining order. Though this is more to mitigate potential opposition and to consolidate power than anything else.
- Only Project Exodus doesn't particularly care about the state of the Earth as their goal is to leave Earth and make a new home elsewhere.
Puny Earthlings: It soon becomes clear that the aliens are tough. Early in the game, you find out that a typical member of the dominant alien species is two meters, or about six and half feet, tall on average. They have multiple redundant organs, a majority of which must be taken out rapidly to put them down with anything other than heavy machine gun fire. And their pherocytes allow them to effectively Mind Control other creatures just by proximity. However, there is one weakness that comes up later, and is especially important to Humanity First's win condition: though long-lived, they have a low population and very low reproductive rate, leaving them extremely vulnerable to plague. Humanity First therefore develops a bio-weapon to target the aliens.
Puppet King: Over the course of the game, the factions can seize control over entire countries through either proxies or subtle influence.
Quantity vs. Quality: Played both ways. A sufficiently well-armed and well-armoured fleet can take down a fleet few times bigger when it consists of weaker ships. But at the same time, a sufficiently large swarm of crappy ships build for a dime each can completely overwhelm enemy defences, no matter how advanced they were. The trick is always about being either strong enough or numerous enough to win, while punishing fleets that consist of average ships in non-swarm numbers.
Ramming Always Works: Ordering a ship to ram an enemy craft will cause spectacular damage and can take down even alien motherships if it hits, which can be a highly useful tactic for tin-can missile boats. However, it costs Influence to order your crew to do this, as it's a Heroic Sacrifice that calls for intense loyalty from the crew.
Recycled with a Gimmick: Terra Invicta is basically Hearts of Iron but with ALIENS!
Repressive, but Efficient: Nations with low government scores (Totalitarian or Authoritarian) are much more effective at stomping out unrest with armies. Their military priorities focus less on tech upgrades and more on curbing unrest (which is useful if one is aiming for the latter). And they raise cohesion to the highest possible resting point, lowering unrest and chance of coups as well as revolutions, being more resistant to invasions, and decrease the need for corruption at the highest levels. Additionally, they censor any other propaganda from factions that don't have a control point in their nation, which can be good for controlling public opinion, as well as being able to cover up any scandal that politicians may have.
Realpolitik:
- Firmly believing in the idea that mankind wouldn't realistically just put aside their differences, the Resistance has to rely on realist geopolitics in order to get various national powers to cooperate.
- The Initiative doesn't really care much about culture or political leanings in its dealings with various nations. So long as the government is malleable enough, and the right people are bribed off or put in place, it's more than happy to work with anyone, and to toss them aside as quickly if they're seen as useless.
- This is why Project Exodus is forced to fight other factions. Uniquely, their goals don't interfere with any other faction's. However, to launch their project, they need resources, and everyone else knows that, which leads to the same military buildups and conflict that the other six factions engage in. And if they become the strongest faction, the other factions will fear them and try to cut them down to size just as badly as if the Servants and Resistance were in the lead.
Red Is Violent:
- Humanity First has a blood-red handprint as their sigil, and their ships are painted the same color. Not a subtle bunch, those guys.
- The Alien Threat meter turns completely red when they decide that you are a threat that cannot be allowed to survive, and begin attacking all your assets indiscriminately. The game outright calls this "total war"..
Reptiles Are Abhorrent: It turns out that, prior to being enslaved, the Salamanders destroyed the Hydras' homeworld and exterminated the population out of rabid xenophobia. The trauma of losing all but the dregs of their people and culture is what drove the surviving Hydras to become the militaristic slavers they are now.
Research, Inc.: The bread and butter of orgs. Quarter of their possible types are various research institutions, foundations and engineering companies that do contracted job to whoever is paying them.
Restrained Resistance, Reckless Rebellion: The Academy, Resistance and Humanity First are at different points on this scale, though they all oppose the Alien Invasion. The Academy are the most restrained; they'll fight back to defend Earth but really want to establish a cooperative relationship with the aliens. The Resistance are in the middle; they want to protect the Earth, period, and don't really have much in the way of political goals for what Earth should look like afterward. And Humanity First are the Reckless ones, who want to exterminate anything not from Earth.
Ring World Planet: A ring-shaped space station is the final level of orbital hab technology.
Russia Called; They Want Alaska Back: The "Forward Russia" social tech gives the Eurasian Union (led by Russia) claims on the entirety of continental Europe and Alaska.
Russia Is Western: With the "Europe Ascendant" project, Russia is a potential member of the European Union. This can be inverted by the "Forward Russia" project, which allows Europe to join Russia instead.
Save Scumming: The game is generally protected against this (including a script that automatically gives the worst possible roll if trying to reload auto-resolve space battle), but there are two exceptions: checks for events and technologies are re-rolled every time after a reload. You can't influence what happens, but you can, at the very least, prevent really nasty bad events in most cases or simply force the game to unlock access to a faction project you have below 100% chance of unlocking.
Servant Race: What happens to humanity if the Aliens succeed in their conquest of Earth (or if the Servants/Protectorate prevail over the other Human factions).
Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
- Project Exodus wants humanity to deal with the alien invasion by evacuating as many humans as they can from Earth to another planet outside of the Solar System, where the aliens won’t be able to reach them.
- Fleets controlled by the AI will generally run away from enemy fleets that they don't think they can overpower, and individual ships will sometimes cut and run if the tide of a battle starts to turn against them.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Hydras invaded Earth to prevent another race from having the power to wipe out their race. Turns out, this heavy-handed approach is exactly what shattered the legitimacy of the peaceful Academy, and sprung the genocidal Humanity First into popularity who are now all the more fanatical to wipe out the aliens. Even if a more reasonable human faction like the Resistance or the Academy ends up achieving victory, the Hydra's actions still incentivized humanity to rapidly develop into a strong, unified and technologically advanced interplanetary civilization that is capable of going toe-to-toe with them, making humanity a greater security risk to the Hydras than they were prior to the invasion.
Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: Downplayed in the game as a whole, but this is the core of the Protectorate plotline. Their combination of disdain for human society, and refusal to believe that humans have a chance of convincing the Hydras to be allowed a longer leash (as the Servants do) or that invasion is not worth it (as the Academy does), ends up turning them into a bunch of despots who let the aliens keep on talking them into worse and worse deals simply because they won't stand up for themselves. Humanity First and the Initiative, while deeply cynical in certain ways, get much better outcomes because they at least trust their own species to accomplish things.
Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Going from most idealistic to most cynical: the Academy and the Servants (most idealistic), then Project Exodus and the Resistance (somewhat idealistic), then the Protectorate (somewhat cynical), then finally Humanity First and the Initiative (most cynical).
Space Fighter: Two versions of them:
- Your early game ships and hulls are effectively those - small, lightly armed vessels that are intended to be just gunboats in space. It's more of a stop-gap measure than an actual goal, and eventually small hulls become obsolete except as colony ships or councillor transportation.
- Mid-game, it is possible to develop exofighters. Rather than being actual ships, they are built and stationed per nation and are used when fighting in LEO. While they can't hope to achieve much on their own, the goal is to have an entire swarm of those, and they neatly divert firepower and attention from alien ships. Their main selling point is how cheap they are to make and costing no MC to maintain - they use Boost instead, giving the resource a niche after the early space race.
Space-Filling Empire: All over the place, though to a much lesser extent than in early versions of the game. Sometimes with new names (e.g. various small Caribbean islands are lumped together as the "Lesser Antilles States") and sometimes through simple annexation (e.g. Cyprus is just represented as Greek-owned and Turkish-owned sections). This is mainly part of the Acceptable Breaks from Reality / Anti-Frustration Features, since taking over governments is a major part of gameplay, it would be a real pain to monitor over 200 countries.
- The player can also enforce this further with the unification polities that become available later in the game, such as creating an Expanded States of America, United Africa or Arabian Union.
Space Station: Platforms, orbitals and rings are progressively-larger space habitats, orbiting around planets, moons and Lagrange points. Low Earth Orbit in particular gets very crowded, very fast.
Standard Human Spaceship: Zigzagged depending on the type of ship and the components used. The smaller ones, or those sporting wide radiator panels, generally look NASA-inspired, while the larger ones with smaller or retracted panels fit the trope more accurately. The trope is lampshaded in the Orbital Shipbuilding tech description:
The old rules of aerospace cease to be when there is less "aero" and more "space". Craft built for the purpose of traveling, transporting, and fighting in space have greater allowance for design versatility when friction and drag are no longer an issue; materials can be more dense and designs can be more utilitarian.
Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: Ship classes range from Gunship to Titan, and differ in the number of available nose hardpoints (dedicated to a Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon), hull hardpoints (for turrets, point defense, and missiles), and utility modules (for a variety of purposes). These classes are also divided into Small, Medium, Large, Ship of the Line, and Titan sizes, which mostly affect how much Mission Control a ship's logistical operations consume.
Stealing from the Till: The Spoils priority allows you to use your control of a country to divert part of its wealth. It includes, but is not limited to, direct corruption; it also includes tax evasion, ignoring pollution regulations, exploiting labor, and other rent-seeking behaviors.
Stealth in Space: Fully averted.
- Once you research Deep System Skywatch, a very early global tech, you can monitor every ship and station in the Solar System in real time, down to the specific weapons and modules present (or under construction) on each. This is entirely justified: it would be possible for current technology to monitor and keep tabs on everything in our solar system, we just don't, because there's not much point and we'd rather study beyond our system as well.
- Similarly, the aliens know what you're building and where, the same way you do, and they're keeping watch on your activity. If you build enough habs/ships beyond what's considered acceptable, they'll send fleets to knock you below that threshold, and eventually engage total war against. If you even attempt to send a ship toward Jupiter or further outward, an alien ship will work to intercept yours ASAP. ^note
Storming the Castle: For several factions, the final step to victory is attacking "Alien Station Able" and "Alien Surface Base Alpha" all the way out in the Kuiper Belt, guarded by a powerful alien fleet and home to the aliens' wormhole portal. Furthermore, if you overcome Able and just leave a fleet in orbit, the aliens will scramble as many of their fleets as possible to come try and dislodge you. This is useful for certain factions who have a goal to destroy all large alien fleets.
Suicidal Overconfidence: The aliens are well-aware of the technology level of humanity and it doesn't concern them, such that if you engage them with a fleet of equal or lesser power, they will happily respond with combat. But they don't take into consideration what your fleets might be armed with, and generally don't use advanced tactics unless they think there's a challenge, and it will take them a while to determine what a challenge might be. As a result, it's entirely possible to take on an alien fleet that, in theory is much stronger than your own fleet, and still defeat them by using tactics and weapons they're not expecting. In particular, the aliens are slow to adapt to laser and plasma weapons, but even before that, they struggle really hard with handling massive torpedoe barrages.
Summon Bigger Fish: If a country starts allied with a strong nation with pre-existing armies, then any war declared means summoning the pre-existing allies, especially if those countries are still under AI control. This is especially useful when exploiting the vast number of alliances the USA starts with, since you have six top-quality armies backing your own invasion.
Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
- Just because aliens are real doesn't mean that terrestrial geopolitics have abated, or will anytime soon. At the beginning of the game in the 2022 start, Russia is at war with the Ukraine, and absolutely will not stop unless a faction forces them to, or they win. Likewise, Ukraine has a good chance of starting with a high public opinion for the Resistance faction because they really don't like being forcibly oppressed.
- The Academy enjoys a strong early support base and public opinion, as everyone is caught up in the wonder of not being alone in the universe. As soon as the aliens are revealed to be unequivocally hostile^note, the Academy's support will absolutely crater. At that point, the Academy's goal changes from "Work with the aliens" to "Convince the aliens that we can work together".
- Using nuclear weapons on Earth results in a massive loss of support for your faction across the world, as does creating a fresh nuclear weapons program; each instance is considered an atrocity, which is a permanent black mark against your faction for the rest of the game. This is further highlighted with the fact there is no Nuclear Weapons Taboo when dashing those against aliens.
- Speaking of atrocities, a faction receives this penalty when they destroy a "civilian" module^note... but the faction which built that module will also lose some public support. After all, you chose to send civilians to space during this dangerous time, then you failed to protect them.
- Destroying an orbital space station will make that orbit significantly more dangerous for any other stations, due to the space debris that was just created and is now orbiting around at a significant speed.
- Building your first ships and taking the war to space will take about 1-3 years (depending on the normal or accelerated game). Actually being able to confront and defeat an alien ship will take much longer: your technological level is several orders of magnitude lower than a true interstellar species. To put it in perspective, your first ship will have a combat rating of about 10. The basic "observer" alien ship has a combat rating of 215.
- For the Resistance (as well as other factions that have similar goals), interrogating an alien is their starting goal, but they initially can't do that at all. The first step is to figure out that aliens are real, and then to determine what they're trying to do, by investigating alien activity sites and inferring possible objectives for the invaders, as well as possible trace signatures. Then they have to figure out how to use those objectives to figure out where aliens are going to be, and the trace signatures to figure out how to follow them. All of that just allows you to find an alien. And despite the possibly-friendly interaction that can come from talking to this alien that you've uncovered, the next step is to kill the shit out of it, so that you can study it and figure out how to contain a live one safely. Only then can you actually try to capture a (different) alien infiltrator, and once you've done that, you have to invest significant resources into figuring out how to even communicate with a creature that talks in both auditory and pheremonal signatures. After all of that is done... the alien shuts you down, refusing to talk about their race or culture beyond vague platitudes. The final research project is to find the best way to interrogate them and get information about their goals without offending them. And all of that effort eventually reveals that the aliens view humanity as a nascent threat best killed early, and they will show absolutely no mercy if they think humans might become an actual threat. You're on the short list for extermination and all of your efforts to get to this point have only hastened it.
- Once you've figured out your victory condition, other factions will not be friendly anymore. Up to that point, you can have non-aggression pacts, intelligence and resource-sharing, and even have cordial relations with factions that have similar aims (for example, the Resistance and Humanity First are relatively friendly, as they both want the aliens off Earth). Getting your victory condition will immediately break all trust, as your victory is not their victory: In the case of the Resistance, who want to shut the wormhole and leave it at that, Humanity First will never sign a non-aggression pact with them again, as the Resistance victory will prevent the Humanity First victory (as they want to use the wormhole to kill all the aliens). The one faction that doesn't immediately break relations is Project Exodus, as they just want to leave, and that's not counter to anyone else's goals (though the Protectorate and the Servants will immediately declare war on them, as humans colonizing other planets will prevent those factions from securing peace with the aliens).

Tropes T-Z

Take Over the World: Multiple factions' endgoals require this.
- The aliens, of course, since they're pulling an Alien Invasion.
- The Servants don't want to do this themselves, but rather help the aliens take over.
- The Protectorate wants to take control of Earth's orbitals and forcibly pacify the Earth, preventing a space development that would threaten the aliens.
- The Initiative begin by just wanting to profit from the chaos, but their end goal is to take over both the Earth and the Aliens. Running Earth from the shadows, while making the Aliens glorified slaves.
- In theory, this isn't necessarily the Academy's goal. But if they want to make an alliance with the aliens, then they need to beat everyone else into the ground and take even more thorough control over the Earth and the Solar System than the other factions do.
- One line from Khalid al-Ashgar mocks this, since he sees taking over the Earth as a distraction that the other factions pursue, while he's busy claiming space resources.
  "Remember, while they're building empires down there, we're building an empire up here."
Terraform: Climate change is doing the bad version of this at the beginning of the game, and it will only take a few years before you get a notice that global temperatures have increased by 1.5 degress Celcius. Climate change is detrimental to global income, and can result in disasters in countries you control^note. However, the aliens will drop "xenoforming" into various countries, resulting in the growth of extraterrestrial plants and lifeforms. Left unchecked, xenoforming will result in the creation of "alien megafauna", a rampaging Kaiju that will cause damage to any country it passes through, and can only be beaten with military force. However, xenoforming does reduce carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere; if you're willing to let it go unchecked and deal with all the GDP damage, it can help undo climate change.
There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Initial assassinations of alien operatives requires this. It takes far, far more firepower to kill an alien than it does a human, and leads to the first corpses available for study being heavily damaged. Once xenobiologists figure out where all the redundant organs are, you unlock easier methods of attack.
Throw-Away Country: North Korea is a tiny one-CP minor nation with bugger-all for an economy and one working nuclear weapon. Functionally, the country is of little use to anyone. But if the Servants are invading your core territories or maybe the Aliens have begun to land their own armies and you need a quickie "panic button nuke" from a country you don't mind seeing glassed in a retaliatory strike...
Token Good Teammate: The Academy is this to the pro-Alien factions. The Academy wants to cooperate with the aliens but, unlike the Protectorate or the Servants, they consider humanity's independence to be non-negotiable.
20 Minutes into the Past: The start date of the normal campaign is fixed to October 1st, 2022; when the first build of the game was released, it was a week into the future. Similar also applies to the 2026 and DLC 2003 campaigns.
- 20 Minutes into the Future: The "future campaign" instead starts in October of 2070.
The Unfettered:
- Though Humanity First shares the Resistance's desire to protect Earth from the Alien menace, it's not only much more xenophobic and zealous about it, but is also excessively vindictive against anyone deemed to be serving extraterrestrial interests. They're thus much less squeamish about unethical and immoral measures in the name of saving mankind: where other factions might discourage alien worship, or try to rescue a town that's been mass mind-controlled, Humanity First will instead declare them a "lost cause" and burn everything to the ground. Notably, Humanity First believe that The Resistance's heart is in the right place; the factional disagreement is that HF believes the Resistance's methods are simply not enough to "meet the threat". They are still perfectly willing to ally with the Resistance, however. This actually makes them very similar to the Hydras, who are themselves willing to absolutely exterminate anything they see as a threat to their existence.
- Played With in the case of the Servants. On top of all but worshipping the extraterrestrials and seeking to have all mankind submit to them with open arms, they'll go above and beyond to see their vision realized. In contrast to the nominally more measured Protectorate, however, they negotiate for more preferable terms with the Aliens as the initial ones come off as too insulting for them.
- The Academy is gradually pushed into accepting no limits in its aim of proving humanity's worth as an equal to the Aliens. Whether it's bringing the entire planet under its influence, whether people like it or not, or doing whatever is deemed necessary to convince the Hydras of mankind's good intentions, just about anything goes. Though unlike certain other factions, its members are genuinely well-meaning.
United Europe:
- The European Union begins as a union of separate countries, but can unite into a single country with just a little push from a faction. It can also include the UK, Norway, Serbia and Ukraine, and expand even further into Belarus, Russia, the Caucasus countries, Turkey, and Switzerland with the right research projects.
- Can be subverted if the "Restored Warsaw Pact" and "Forward Russia" techs are researched, allowing Russia to unify former Soviet-controlled states and continental Europe under the banner of the Eurasian Union.
Useless Useful Spell:
- About two thirds of ship components turn out to be either minor variations or technological dead-ends. While a general reflection of real life, since not everything invented will be useful/an upgrade, this serves little purpose for the average player. Various guides for the game have explicit lists of technologies to never bother researching, since they're mainly a waste of both research points and time.
- Numerous political unions leading to larger states are underwhelming due to their price, the target countries, how late they show up or that there are better alternatives - this includes things like Maghreb, Central Asia, former Indochina or Central America. The cream of this crop though is the various European unifications. Most of Europe already starts the game within the European Union (still as a federation, but the unification process can be engaged on the 180th day of this decades-spanning game) and a few more countries can be easily added within the first year, without any research. As such, mid-game techs that allow you to unite Eastern Europe, Nordics or expand Germany to its smaller neighbours are - unless you want to make mega nations led by said countries - utterly superfluous, as by the time those techs are unlocked, anyone playing within Europe can have the EU as a united state with far less time and effort.
- The ability to reunify Korea, while it sounds awesome in theory, is completely useless in practice due to the way national stats are averaged during unification: a North Korea-led peaceful reunification would rapidly increase unrest (even more) due to South Korea's democracy being forced into a totalitarian regime, while a South Korea-led peaceful reunification would tank South Korea's excellent military score. The latter could maintain such if it absorbs North Korea by force instead of using diplomacy, but it still inherits North Korea's terrible social inequality and unrest, which will cause stability issues for the reunited Korea that require lots of resources to fix^note. Therefore, the only reasons to pursue unification of Korea are sentimental ones as it is much more efficient to let Korea remain divided. In addition, there are multiple larger super-states that include the peninsula, making the unification not just meaningless in gameplay terms but actually better postponed so that both countries cease to exist/their issues become much more minor.
- Eventually the game added option to develop regions if they meet the requirements: oil, mining, or core ones, though which region is developed first is out of the player's/AI's hands. The latter two are quite helpful when developed, bolstering the nation's economy stats in various different ways, yet while oil is easier and cheaper... it's increased effects are much weaker compared to the investment poured in (often years using the economy priority), and they contribute to increasing global warming. Also, a late-game tech removes oil resources from the game.
Vichy Earth: The Servants and the Protectorate both want to bring humanity under alien control. In the case of the Servants it's because they believe that joining the aliens really is the best option, while the Protectorate think that resistance is futile and want to negotiate a conditional surrender, with itself in charge.
Video Game Caring Potential: You can use your faction's influence to end wars and rivalries, improve living standards, stamp out ethnic violence and xenophobia, dismantle nuclear weapons, and combat Global Warming.
Video Game Cruelty Potential: ...Or you can do the exact opposite by waging wars, increasing strife to make a country more vulnerable to conquest or even break apart into separate regions, raining nuclear hell on enemy-controlled nations, and letting Global Warming get increasingly out of hand (though you will suffer for this as well via worldwide GDP damage). Several of these have achievements for them, as well.
- "Waterworld" in particular takes the cake, where you have to let Global Warming get high enough to make giant masses of ice — including parts of Greenland and Antarctica — melt, greatly raising the Earth's sea levels, ensuring every nation's population and economy will enter a death spiral. Playing with events turned on is advised if trying for this achievement, as otherwise it'll take in-game centuries to achieve.
Violation of Common Sense:
- Setting countries to a single goal with their pips and development, rather than tackling two or more issues. Even if there is a multitude of problems, it is simply more efficient to tackle them one at a time and let everything else fester for the time being, than try to prevent all of them from growing any further, as there is simply never enough resources.
- If you plan to build a union of two or more nations, the only thing that matters is to max-out the Mission Control (if there is a space program in existence) or run Spoils (if there is no space program in place) for lesser members. Once there is a union, the sub-states get absorbed and sure, their problems get inherited by the union leader, but you now have combined resources of both countries to deal with them, making it significantly easier and faster, while the problem itself gets diluted between union members (so it can even go out on its own). This also means getting maximum benefits when a specific region is still considered a capital one vs. it being just a sub-region of a bigger country.
- If you're playing as one of the anti-alien factions, you will have access to the alien threat monitor after a certain point. If it reaches maximum level (which is 5), then you can bet that the aliens are sending a fleet to blow up something you own to teach you a lesson about your power versus theirs. This is generally considered a bad thing, as it will cost you resources and time to rebuild whatever the aliens destroy. In the first few years of the game (generally up to 2031), however, the aliens will only send a token fleet to punish you, because it's all they have available. If you manage to destroy that fleet, the aliens will back off and let you run rampant on Earth while they build up a properly powerful force to punish you. That powerful force will take at least three years to build and reach Earth, giving you time to punish the hell out of the Servants and the Protectorate, while killing or capturing any alien agents on Earth with impunity. Or you can just build up an even bigger fleet to meet that punishment fleet when it arrives^note.
- When you research your endgame, you will inevitably and irrevocably piss off the other factions; they will immediately break any non-aggression and intel-sharing pact, and set their attitude to "In Conflict". They don't want you (or anyone else) to win, after all. Therefore, it can be advantageous to delay researching your endgame until you're significantly advanced towards accomplishing it, just so that you can avoid interference from some of your current allies; they won't know that you're working against them until you finish the research project, and will happily let you, for example, destroy alien habs, since that works for them. This doesn't work for all factions^note, but it's always worthwhile to delay your endgame project until you're ready to deal with the consequences.
- As a general rule, you don't want to go over your control point capacity: if you try to control too many countries at once, you'll have to use influence to maintain your control, and all of your control points become much more vulnerable to crackdown and purge missions. However, you can certainly take control of a country just to frustrate other factions. One prime example is to rush the Independence Movements global technology so that you can break up China, India, the United States, Russia or the European Union. You don't have to control those massive countries, you just need to get someone in the executive chair long enough to grant independence to the breakaway states, and then abandon control. This is dangerous, as it generally takes at least 6-8 months to properly break up a large country, but if you manage to do it, the other factions will happily fight over the new, smaller pieces, leaving you to consolidate your control elsewhere. A unified India is an easily controlled economic powerhouse with a lot of influence, but an India divided into 8-12 individual nations is a nightmare to control and stabilize.
Voluntary Vassal: The Servants are not just willing, but eager to submit to the alien invasion. Unlike the Protectorate, they genuinely want to be a part of the aliens' dominion, and require no coercion. Their leader, Judith Howell, believes that this is the destiny of humanity, but not her destiny: she expects to be killed by the aliens after delivering humanity into their hands.
Wave-Motion Gun: Spinal Mount lasers and particle beams. They can only be mounted on Lancers (ships of the line designed around the use of spinal mounts) and Titans (just plain big spaceships), can penetrate armor at long distance, and will utterly annihilate weaker targets. There's also a BFG kinetic version in spinal-mount Magnetic Weapons.
We ARE Struggling Together: Just because Earth is under the threat of an alien invasion does not mean that all human nations are immediately willing to cooperate with each other. Therefore, preventing or ending conflicts is essential as they can escalate even further into a global war. The aliens are themselves equally politically divided, which is why it takes some time for the invasion project to get rolling in earnest.
- Also, councillors of the same faction can sometimes come into conflict with each other. Just because you all share an ideology doesn't erase the fact that you have extremely different personalities and walks of life.
We Can Rule Together: Inverted. The Academy wishes for humanity and aliens to become allies as they believe that cooperation with aliens will benefit humanity. However, unlike the Protectorate and the Servants, the Academy wants to have an equal relationship with the aliens.
We Come in Peace — Shoot to Kill: When Earth realizes that the aliens do not, in fact, come in peace, the diplomatic Academy faction gets kicked in the metaphorical junk and loses a good chunk of their support to the other factions. The Academy almost immediately changes their goals from "welcome the aliens as friends" to "convince the aliens we can be equal allies".
World War III: It's unlikely to happen at the beginning of the game, simply because the large countries (USA, Russia, China and, to an extent, the European Union) are not under the control of any of the factions and are unlikely to start a War for Fun and Profit as a result. As the game progresses and the factions start manipulating countries, borders and alliances, however, it becomes more likely. If a faction gets control of China or the US, with their strong military power, they will likely use that power to force regime change on smaller countries to expand their influence. If this comes into conflict with other factions, expect war to break out on a large scale.
You Have Researched Breathing: Generally averted: existing technology might work just fine on Earth, but there's either a problem of transferring the concepts to space, or developing the proper scale that wasn't available before.
- As an example of scale: while it might seem redundant to spend time researching "Mission to the Moon", given that humanity has already been to the moon in the 1960's, the research result makes it clear that this mission is much more large scale than the Apollo missions: you're going to the moon regularly, and establishing permanent outposts and mining compared to brief touchdowns. The technology to go to the moon for scientific endeavors is not nearly the same as what's required for regular travel and resource exploitation.
- As an example of non-transference: nuclear fission has been around since the 1940's, with nuclear power being a known, and widespread source of energy. But fission on Earth relies on gravity, and developing a nuclear power source that will work in zero-g is neither straightforward nor easily adapted, requiring a whole new set of research to make it work. Once that's achieved, however, researchers realize they can do things in space they can't do on Earth, enabling the development of molten core and gas core nuclear reactors.
Zerg Rush:
- In the early game, this is your best counter to the aliens. Cheap, quickly-built missile escorts are a solid means of countering the aliens' initial ships: even a fast cycling, long range laser system will struggle to take out the missiles from a half dozen ships working together. This works far less effectively as the game goes on, however: larger ships have many laser weapons, and larger fleets have many ships, making missile weapons almost completely ineffective (though they are a good distraction).
- It's also best to invoke a different flavor of such regarding the aliens around the mid-to-late game. If you engage a fleet with your own, but they have sufficient/high Delta-V to escape pursuit^note, you'll often use most/all your fuel reserves trying to engage, because all ships in a fleet use the same amount of fuel per action taken. However, if you engage said fleet with one small fleet, then engage them with another small fleet - repeated ad nauseam - your ships will individually use less fuel than they would've as a single unified fleet; with enough reserves used in this strategic manner, the alien fleets will eventually run out trying to escape conflict and become stranded, and thus easy targets compared to a head-on confrontation.

Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

Terra Invicta

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Terra Invicta

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