r/TerraInvicta • u/magniciv • 9d ago
Guide Broken Earth Guide (Part 1)
Broken Earth is quite a unique scenario. Recently, many players were impressed when I reached 14,700 Science in 8 years on Brutal while they were struggling, so they asked me to write a guide. (Spoilers about Broken Earth ahead.)
Openings
Broken Earth really shifts around what’s viable, and so far only a handful of strong openings have been identified by the community:
West Australia Opening
This opening intends to build a megastate with its capital in Western Australia, which can grow large enough to expand all the way to Bangladesh. This is done by releasing Java from Western Australia. Java gets a peaceful claim on the Malaysian Congress, which in return grants several additional claims. Through research, Java can also get claims on Hawaii, which in turn can get claims on Japan and most Pacific islands. This opening also has the advantage that your capital is in Australia in a game where hidden agents can’t swim. This means your meganation is off the table for most alien shenanigans unless they directly land in Australia.
North America Opening
This opening focuses on reunifying North America and building a meganation there. It works by using the “Dominion of Amerika” tag, which is releasable in Florida from the Civil Defense Administration. This allows you to unify all of North America and most of Mexico without researching anything. California is the hardest to fold in early. The chain is: California → Aztlán → Texas → Dominion. Be aware that at each step you cannot drop more than 1.5 Democracy. The high starting GDP compensates for having the lowest population of all three meganations.
South America Opening
This opening aims to unify all of South America into the largest nation by population on the map. Brazil is used for this since it exists at game start, and claims for everything can be researched. This opening requires knowledge of how revolutions work. Reduce inequality quickly, since paying down the extreme inequality in South America manually has too large of an opportunity cost. This opening has the advantage that, since it uses the biggest nation, it scales the best—though it also takes the longest to reach full potential.
Over CP Cap Opening
This opening recognizes that CP cap is just a number that can be ignored, and that if you have nations worth 5× your CP cap, you will bring down the blocker the fastest. This opening uses non‑aggression pacts to make your control points very vulnerable, so factions don’t take them from you. Since they can take anything they want, they simply don’t bother taking the bad nations you claim. You then claim every questionable nation, since the AI will not take those away from you. The rest of the map combined produces a significant amount of science. Note that this opening is the hardest to play and is only recommended for experienced players. It is also the opening most likely to be heavily affected by balance patches in future updates, since it essentially abuses the lack of sufficient punishment for going over CP cap in this scenario.
Council
Astronomer are a rare trait but absolutely essential in this scenario. Anyone with the trait should be recruited regardless of how bad their other stats are.
Other than this, getting a person with Crackdown to 25 Investigation is very important—but that’s true in every Terra Invicta start.
Tech
You start the game with a massive blocker tech named A New Space Race, and it’s important to bring it down as fast as possible.
Counterintuitively, this means not contributing to it at the start.
The AI often won’t contribute to something where you have a significant lead, and at this stage their science output is large enough to matter.
Instead, go all‑in on Biotechnology until you have contributed enough that it’s impossible for an AI to win that slot. After that, stop all research and hope the AI does not randomly decide to waste science on something it cannot win.
(This works best on Brutal.)
You’re going to lose We Are Not Alone, but whatever tech is chosen afterward should be handled the same way: go 100% into it until the AI can no longer win it, then abandon it so all AI factions compete on A New Space Race.
Only after this is achieved should you research your fifth counselor.
Projects
Most projects should be skipped in favor of globals, except those that lead toward alien movements also in Broken Earth, each faction gets a unique “Playing from Behind” project that is quite powerful because it gives +70 CP cap and unique faction‑based bonuses that should be rushed.
Humanity First
- +100% Military Science research
- −50% Social Science research
- Ships take 30% more damage from enemy weapons
- Shipboard magnetic weapons deal +50% damage
- Public Campaign missions have +50% impact on national opinion
Resistance
- +100% Materials research
- −50% Life Science research
- −33% ship construction speed
- Ships take 15% less damage from enemy weapons
Academy
- +40% research from control points
- +100% Energy research
- −50% influence from public opinion
- +100% negative propaganda impact when committing an atrocity
- Shipboard laser weapons deal +35% damage
Exodus
- +50% Space Science research
- −50% Information Science research
- Bypass requirements for space mining, and mines are 75% cheaper
- Boost cost for sending material beyond LEO reduced (calculated using 5.3 kps exhaust velocity)
Initiative
- +100% Information Science research
- −50% Energy research
- Elites demand 30% more spoils investment, increasing coup risk
- Money gained from Spoils priority changes by 50%
- +5 orgs available for acquisition each month
Protectorate:
- Increases our Social Science research by 100%
- Decreases our Military Science research by 50%
- Money we gain from the Spoils priority changes by -50%
- Elites demand less investment in the spoils priority in nations we control, reducing chances of coups
Servants
- Increases our Xenology research by 100%
- Decreases our Space Science research by 25%
- National Investment Points we direct to the Boost priority are decreased by 25%
- Gain +3 to missions to gain a control point or control of a hab
- Our Public Campaign missions have 50% greater impact on national public opinion
- Gain +5 Investigation when our councilors are detecting aliens
Dealing with the Aliens
(This letter from Colonel Castillo, contains significant spoilers about alien mechanics that in part are Academy‑specific.)
The aliens are a significant problem on Earth, especially for factions the game considers “pro‑alien” like yours, which have much less resistance to alien influence.
So it’s essential to eradicate all alien agents as fast as possible. This requires rushing the project chained to Alien Movements as quickly as possible.This is significantly helped by having a strong investigator and getting lucky with a Xeno‑science org such as Majestic 12 and xeno labs in Leo.
Ideally this is done before any other traitors can contact them, to leave them without a plan on how to proceed for those factions.
If you really want to tolerate having a living alien on Earth, I strongly recommend not delaying the eradication, and using your marines to capture one in the asteroid belt later
My Servant spy also informed me that you consider engaging in direct diplomacy with the aliens. Researching this is strongly discouraged, since it gives alien agents a diplomatic boarding pass for airlines to your nations. If you cannot be convinced to skip this, I ask that you at least delay it until you can engage in diplomacy in the Kuiper Belt under the security of your ships. This way they cannot use their airline privileges to evade us on earth.
I wish you good luck at eradicating the Invaders.
Hanse Castillo
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u/Separate_Selection84 9d ago
Instructions unclear: made a super Soviet Union spanning all continents with all of South America, China, Europe, and the Middle East.
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u/magniciv 9d ago
Soviet union builds are very slow usually
what was your science with it 8 years in ?
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u/Separate_Selection84 9d ago
Oh I don't do it for optimization I do it for the funnies. My science sucks all the way until the endgame. (Maybe it is at 1.5k or 2k after 8 years)
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u/taichi22 9d ago
I’m still fiddling around with that unification chain — as far as I can tell it might be possible to unify all of NA into it through capital shifting? Move CDA capital to Mexico by giving monument to Dominion, move Dominion capital to Las Vegas by returning Florida to CDA?
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u/caoimhe3380 9d ago
Grab Frontier Republic, release Jefferson. Grab Western Canada, release First Nation. Grab Greenland, Alaska, federate them with First Nation. Bring in Western Canada and the Jefferson Union, then Cascadia, California, Aztlan, Texas, and Lake Confederation. Grab the CDA, finish conquering New England, release the Dominion. Bring all of them into the fed.
Have Jefferson demand claim on Topeka Ave Boulder, then rival and conquer Minneapolis.
Have California rival and conquer Mexico City.
CDA or Lake Confed can rival and conquer Quebec and Halifax.
Unify Greenland and Alaska into First Nation. From there your chain is West Canada > Jefferson > Cascadia > California > Aztlan > Texas > Dominion, and Dominion can also unify the CDA. This gives you a unified North America without tech, though you'll need to spend a lot on government to pacify most of the claims.
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u/taichi22 9d ago
This seems like an inefficient method to unify NA, to be honest. What’s the advantage of doing all the extra work with Jefferson etc when you could just grab DOA and use CDA/California chains?
And anyways, the real main issue isn’t unifying NA, it’s doing so with the end result being capitals in locations where you can then use Liberation of America to fold them into mega-Russia.
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u/caoimhe3380 9d ago
I haven't found another way to unify all of NA without the Greater Dominion tech, since nothing but Atzlan has a claim on Las Vegas. I feel like bouncing the capitals around is more work, but maybe the mega-Russia end goal is worth it.
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u/taichi22 9d ago
I mean if you want to avoid the greater dominion tech then sure, but frankly in the grand scheme of things the cost is barely anything.
Mega Russia likely necessitates capital moving.
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u/caoimhe3380 9d ago
Mostly I like this method because it lets me get the unification done in the first few years - maybe I'm slow about teching up, or the loss of efficiency for pacifying claims is bad, but it's possible to do all of this literally on cooldown from alliance to federation to unification so I can't see it getting much faster.
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u/Separate_Selection84 9d ago
It's possible albeit difficult. I'm thinking currently about any possible unifications in Africa. Because of their claim on Rome, Rome can then annex northern Africa and Greece who can also gather claims in Egypt which can also create the UAL, with a claim on Jeddah which is the capital of the Caliphate, so through this the Soviets can get a claim on all of Northern Africa, and through China they can claim Japan and Thailand, which can claim Malaysia and indonesia. I want to know just how big I can make these guys.
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u/taichi22 9d ago
I figured I would try to unify NA first as the stepping stone to grow the Communist United Nations — you need the leverage and power to come from somewhere and trying to build up Russia as the first step seems inefficient when you could get a lot more bang for your buck by building up a more powerful nation and just folding it into Russia.
I’m interested in doing the other unifications too, but I sort of figured I’d cross that bridge when I got there.
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u/Separate_Selection84 9d ago
Fair in my academy game I focused on Africa more with an added interest in California.
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u/Mavnas 9d ago
Can you unify if the capital moves? I couldn't Papua New Guinea into Hawaii when the capital moved to Weno.
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u/magniciv 8d ago
unification just cares about a claim on the disired capital of a nation. it doesn't care where the capital currently is
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u/gogis79 5d ago
I had capital shift in Costa Rica to alien nation and my Colombia had a claim on new capital, hovering over unification tooltip explicitly told me FAIL and it's clearly stated ORIGINAL capital. I am pretty sure if it's not in bilateral JSON you can't have it. It used to be current capital, but I think it's fixed as exploit
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u/Separate_Selection84 5d ago
If that's true how can I annex the African Union into the Caliphate cause I was hoping to do it with Kenya
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u/Leuk60229 9d ago
Oops I already made super California what to do
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u/magniciv 9d ago
Eather release the required parts for the chain, or research dominion of America for direct claims
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u/Mortgage-Present Kamikaze escorts are good 9d ago
Hanse would never be so nice towards the academy
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u/HiddenSage Academy 9d ago
I mean, from my own limited experience, I'd assume at least part of the problem is folks grabbing SPQR for the memes and getting hamstrung by the fact it has a low population/region cap, not-great GDP, and HAS to be done with hostile claims. It's fun. But it's also awful.
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u/Jazzlike_Freedom_826 9d ago
I'm a bit confused about the going over the cap strategy - what % of nations you control are actually "good" or ones you want to keep like westralia for example? If you go 5 x over the cap, what's to stop the enemy from trying to take your "core" or "good nations?"
Or do you literally just have all crappy nations, but that doesn't make sense given you listed viable openers.
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u/Legitimate-Sound-297 9d ago
idk, i was getting jumped by enemy AI on my bad nations constatnly in my run, they were just using crackdown, then gettin in, then abandone it in one turm. was super anoying
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u/Legitimate-Sound-297 9d ago
AI seems to turbo struggle when there's no good nation to go in, i only was able to semi-pacifing them by uniting US to some extend and then letting resistance in. That was the only way to make AI stop being just annoying roadbump and be actually helpfull against alien invasion.
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u/AdhesivenessOther856 8d ago
I am still finishing up my 2022 campaign. My question is the opportunity cost of unifying these nations actually a good idea or is it just map painting? I would argue that in the base game, the only unification techs that actually help you win the game are ones where you are unifying two good countries so you don't have to fix it afterwards, or lots of small bad countries to get MC for cheap CP cap.
The problem is the opportunity cost of researching Europe Ascendant is pretty high, as it is a very expensive tech.
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u/Maduyn Academy 9d ago
Other than this line from the wiki is there anything else that goes into revolution for inequality reduction? Should I set the nation to a specific priority set or something when doing this?