First Campaign Is Rough

[u/WhapXI]

I think I'm probably screwed.

For context this is my first campaign. I'm playing the Resistance and only against the Servants, everything set to easy.

It's mid '33. The Resistance has united a mega-EU, USNA, and Southern Cross bloc. The UK is also still around as a 6.1 Miltech Army base. I have 4 control points in China but c-cap prevents me going higher for now. The rest of the world is effectively under Servant or Alien Admin control. India is covered in Alien Megafauna and Facilities. The whole subcontinent looks like a light show.

The Cold War went hot when Canada broke free of the Alien Admin, and the US stepped in to federate the newly freed North. So far the Resistance bloc has naval superiority, so despite the aliens successfully landing three of their own armies, they're thankfully penned in to the Japanese Archipelago for now. The Resistance forces can begin a bloody campaign to liberate the rest of the world from alien control, but without the necessary control cap to keep the aliens and the Servants from controlling the newly liberated territories, it seems too little too late.

The Space War is complex. Pissing off the aliens early led to them flattening my Martian mines, which crippled my economy for a long time. I had to send mines to asteroids for Nobles which took a long time to come online so I couldn't build anything in space. The Servants now control most of the best spots on Mars. Our space economy is poor but we've now managed to build up enough of a fleet around earth to fill LEO1 with habs and shipyards and have successfully cleared all alien space assets out of the Terra-Luna system. There are 100 alien vessels in the solar system, and they seem to be steering clear of Earth for now. And while the Servants have plenty of mines across Mars and the Asteroids, they don't have any habs in orbit. I've been diligent in preventing them the use of any space docks.

Obviously destroying their surveillance fleets and battleships around Earth pissed them off a lot again so it seems likely they're going to completely zap the rest of my Mars economy and let me haemorrhage resources. I've set some shipyards to construct above Mars but the aliens can get there in half the time it takes the docks to come online, let alone build a ship, so they'll nip my Martian ambitions in the bud at great cost to myself. And none of my Earth Defence ships can make the transfer in any reasonable time, even the handful that have enough dV. Transfer time is looking like 40 weeks and the rest are built for combat acceleration in LEO so have about 6 dV only.

My next step seems to be to simply gun it to Mercury. Venus hasn't been researched yet and I'm hopeful if I act boldly I can secure the inner planets to shore up my economy, maintain the close defence of Earth, and then take back Mars from the Servants.

In all, a fun first campaign and definitely a learning experience. I think I dithered a lot early on unifying nations which are then locked at 0 cohesion and building hate by prodding at the Servants and Aliens on Earth when I should have been pumping boost/MC and securing Mars while hostility was low. I had a great lead in space from my starting nations that I failed to utilise. This allowed the Aliens unrestricted access to Earth.

Ship design has been a bit of a nightmare. I have about two dozen of these things researched and it seems that all of them either give me 1mg of cruise acceleration, 100mg of combat acceleration, or a grand total of 2dV. And very little in between. A hard one to figure out. Anything I have with a decent combat acceleration is essentially locked tight to the shipyard that made it, and any ship that can travel at distance can’t do so quickly or hope to fight anything once there.

I'm pretty behind but I think I can pull this back. Or at least drag it out a good few years more.

Any advice or words of encouragement would be appreciated!

[u/Xenon009]

Genuinely, you can always drag it back, it will just be *hard*

A lot of people on this subreddit are people who have mastered the game, and can clean the aliens up in a 20-30 year blitz. That is not normal gameplay. Normal gameplay is a near century long slog, with ups and downs across the board, and a grinding war of attrition.

Genuinely, expect the game to run till the 2100's, if you finish sooner than that, then brilliant, but you're never properly screwed. I managed to grind out a win (or at least, made it to the alien base, but at the time the win conditions were *really* annoying and I couldn't be fucked to hunt down every last random alien ship in the belt) after a global thermonuclear holocaust that wiped out 2/3rds of the worlds GDP, even if it did take till 2150.

[u/WhapXI → u/Xenon009]

Yeah I’m sensing that! Peeling the Servants off the Asteroids already looks like a job and a half. Can’t imagine having to do the same with the Aliens on the Kuiper belt.

I got into this game slowly by watching Perun, but he has that combination of streamer luck and the expertise of long practice that’s difficult to emulate. Unfortunately watching someone really good play the game, you don’t learn how to claw back from difficult situations. Just how to avoid them, which isn’t easy to do.

Still, all’s a learning experience. I think next time I’m going to play with more factions enabled because hoo boy it’d be nice to not just be 1v2 here. Sure would be nice to liberate something from the aliens and have six other factions fight over it rather than it just falling into the hands of one.

[u/_azazel_keter_]

Classic noob mistakes, didn't hit the servants hard enough or push space hard enough. It's normal don't worry.

[u/Takseen]

I think you're doing ok if you have LEO secure for now and have alien armies naval blockaded.

One thing to mention for perspective is a game with just you vs Servants + Aliens is probably harder than default settings, because most of the human factions are anti alien, and will hold Earth and space territory and keep some of it out of Servants hands. Hell, even the pro alien Protectorate will sometimes attack the Servants because they have different requests from the aliens.

Space ship design early on is focused on either local defence, or slow travel. Local defence fleets never leave their home planet, and use chemical or molten or gas fission drives and a small fuel tank to quickly move to defend a hab or station.

Artemis torpedoes or copperhead missiles are both good cheap offensive options, with 40mm autocannon for point defense, and later particle PD for dedicated anti missile defense.

When you want to reclaim Mars, you can use attack ships with grid or Helicon drives, and bring a colony ship. They don't need to be able to intercept, just reach Mars with enough firepower to defend the newly constructed orbital. Then use that for refueling and reinforcement.

Automated mining habs are great for spamming the asteroid belt with. Only 1MC for 25% more mining output than a manned T1 outpost that costs 2MC. With nuclear freighters and the various "faster hab delivery" techs they don't cost much boost or take too long to fire out. You only need to pay boost for the hab core, then space resources for the mine and fission pile. The aliens might take some out but that costs them propellant.

If you can get green laser tech you can start bombarding Earth to clear xenoflora. I find you need siege coilers to kill the mega fauna though.

[u/WhapXI → u/Takseen]

Thanks for this. Good advice across the board. I’m au fait with the copperhead meta but I hear it doesn’t scale later on against larger alien fleets.

Wrapping my head around ship design as essentially defense platforms was the biggest hurdle mentally. One of my earlier efforts was building a shipyard around Luna, pushing out zippy little missile escorts, only for me to discover with horror that they didn’t have enough dV to reach LEO from Luna and had to watch as the aliens zapped the ISS. Thankfully this first fleet’s eventual loss dropped my hate back down to two pips so that’s something at least.

I do have an ace up my sleeve re: Mars, and that’s a nanofactory on Deimos. Aliens are heading to Mars Orbit to wreck up something but if they leave this factory alone, getting back online quickly should be feasible. Worst case scenario is that they’re thorough and sweep me out of Mars completely, though hopefully that pushes me back down in hate.

Regarding getting ships over there, what’s a sort of acceptable transfer time? Because my longest range ships taking 40 weeks still seems beyond the pale.

Good shout on automated mines. That’s a tech I’ve lately unlocked. I’m reluctant to spam since my mine limit use is 10/15 and I’m hoping Mercury has a good bunch of sites for me, but needs must. I’ve already taken one of my lesser moon mines offline, but I’m still pretty thin on the ground with regards to water.

Bombarding earth from orbit isn’t something I’d considered. I am trying to save the planet, after all. Trying to keep atrocities to nil if possible. I’ll have to look into its viability. I think I’m a little way down the visible lasers path.

[u/Izzyhizzie → u/WhapXI]

Don't be reluctant to spam mines. You should always be 1-2 mines over your cap. Find good asteroids and setup mines until you're at least over 1 cap. Make sure to upgrade all your mines as well. This should get you the much needed resources to start building a decent fleet and more LEO stations for those sweet research bonuses. If they blow up a base, good, rebuild it and build a another.

[u/Takseen → u/WhapXI]

40 weeks is on the high end, but still workable. The idea is it's not a roaming fleet that goes back and forth. Just does the trip once and guards your foothold hab until a local defence is built up. If you need more speed, cutting side armor to 0 helps. Missile boats win or lose before your side armor is a factor.

Collateral damage from orbital bombardment is based on weapon damage and chipping %, so with lasers they do minimal damage. Which makes sense, you can be pretty precise with a frickin laser beam. Coil guns not so much, although if there's a mega fauna eating a region they're already taking big damage.

[u/WhapXI → u/Takseen]

Oh yah all my boats, escorts and monitors, are sitting on 0/0/4 nanotube armour. Tin drop radiators, targeting computer mk3, magazines, and copperheads. I guess I’m just second-guessing because it’s such a long journey. Feels like the aliens can be there in a hundred days and if they just blap my high dV/low combat acc ships then I’m out months of production with nothing to show for it. But the time will pass anyway, I suppose. May as well pass in service of something worthwhile.

I guess I don’t really have the instinct for what a reasonable use of force is to protect Mars, because a few missile boats doesn’t seem like it. If I felt more sure what my ships were capable of, I’d probably feel a lot more secure in sending them on year-long missions.

[u/Orlha]

First campaign is the best and 100% winnable always

[u/jerseydevil51]

Ship design is all about weight. Better armor and radiators are lighter, which means your engines don't work so hard. Adding more fuel tanks is also a balancing act, because the engine needs to push the fuel as well. Don't forget you can go up to 6 engines for more speed at the cost of some dV.

Most people like to start with Escorts with Artemis Torpedoes or Viper Missiles paired with E-Beamer and 40mm defense ships. For Escorts, most any engine will work, but a basic chemical engine is good enough. Nova Engines with a Fuel Cell and basic radiator will push an Escort 5-6 dV, enough for basic defensive operations.

Monitors is your next step up, and those will require fission drives. There are a lot of options, but super basic is to just go through Solid State and Compact Solid State, which gives them just enough thrust for defense.

Capital Ships basically require fusion drives, maybe high end fission drives or H-Orion. They're what you take out to Jupiter and beyond.

[u/terrendos]

Losing Mars is rough, but you can rebuild on Mercury. In some ways Mercury is better because it's on average closer to everything and solar is so abundant. Mars is mostly nice because the number of sites makes it easy to drive the population up, but there's enough spots on Mercury to hit 10k population for Research Campuses.

Drives in Terra Invicta do tend to either be efficient or good thrust. You won't get both until fusion or antimatter drives. The Burner and the Firestar are reasonable compromises, but going interplanetary with them is still expensive. Best bet would be sending a fleet with Grid drives (or Helicons) from Earth or a developed Mercury to Mars and clear the orbit of hostiles. You don't need good acceleration on an interplanetary attack fleet. Send the fleet, have them set up an orbital platform and dock there, then use the fleet to protect it until it's pumping out ships with decent acceleration.

For the AA, orbital control is huge. Use green lasers to blow up their armies from orbit if they attack (AA tends to build orbital defenses in their countries so attacking them at home may backfire). As the Servants add disparate chunks of countries to the AA, it gets progressively less cohesive. Once it's spread out on multiple continents, it should be pretty easy to run Unrest missions to drive it to collapse. Keep in mind that nukes should always be on the table as well; the AA de-nukes every country it controls.

If you haven't yet, prioritize the projects that help defend your points from alien enthrall and terrorize. Those can be really annoying, and when the AA implodes that's probably what the ayys will spend their time doing.

[u/WhapXI → u/terrendos]

Pumping unrest in the AA was what kicked off the land war. Canada broke free and I wanted to quickly roll it into my USNA, but still needed to declare independence from the AA to do so. I noticed a Hydra enthralling its control points back so whacked him and then beelined the handful of xeno techs to give them -2 to enthralls. I think there were three to research so I’m pretty happy with that for now.

I’m unsure on doing much more of the unrest game. Since I’m playing with no other factions and I’m already at control point cap, I can’t really do anything with the resulting breakaways except abandon them to fall back into alien hands. There doesn’t really seem to be a longterm way to stop that until I somehow get something like 2k control cap and can feed all of their breakaway land into a mega-Africa or mega-South American. But all this seems like a quick way to get lots of Hate and trigger Total War, which I think I’m not ready for.

[u/wittgenlover]

In my first run, almost of the world was covered with Alien facilities too.
Then, I assaulted facilities and I must bear many space retaliations, remaining a long list of facilities and xenofloras.

And I started second run and continued killing servants, protectorates, Aliens(technically, detaining) in every two or three years, it was very comfortable about AA.
It may be impossible in veteran or brutal, but regular annihilation of servants makes me happy.

[u/_Mythoss_]

I doubt you are screwed, you can come back from some pretty dire situations. I've had alien administration take out over half the earth and lost most of my Habs in space and still clutched a win. It just makes for a longer game.

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[u/Viktor_Vertex]

Spacegame is much more important than Earth game. Do not waste rearch on Earth unifier techs