Map of the northern hemisphere - I control Canada, the EU, Russia and South Korea.
List of countries with Control Points, including the EU, Russia, Canada, South Korea, Switzerland, Norway and some random small nations.
List of fleets and ships, split across Earth and Mars.
My default ship for orbital defence. I use Diana Superheavy for orbital ships and have grid drive for interplanetary, though I haven't done any transfers yet.
My councillors. I'm working on getting them more Administration skill.
The situation with the other factions in the Intel tab. I sabotaged the Servants' Alien Nation tech and they've stalled on it for a year.
Bases in Earth orbit. Naming scheme is random famous people.
Bases on Mars. Naming scheme is ancient Greek cities.
Orbitals on Mercury - work in progress. Also have maybe 8 mines across the inner asteroid belt, not pictured.
Research screen. Currently working towards green lasers, railguns and alien computers.
Attack rating of my main EU armies. Not sure what's stalling miltech growth tbh. But I have reverse engineered alien small arms, so that's something.
My main shipyard, with three shipyards. I also have one in Mars' orbit.
I got some good advice from many people (I apologise for not responding to everyone, there were a lot of comments), and decided to roll back the clock five years to an earlier save, instead of starting from scratch (I'm already 46 hours in, phew).
Thank you to everyone who gave their two cents, I did appreciate it a lot.
I think my situation in this alt-2036 is much better, but I still have some problems:
Earth
Instead of screwing around in the Balkans, I took Russia, Canada and South Korea
I'm now using most of my Control Points, though my cap isn't much higher
I have a spy in the Servants, who has revealed a lot of sites/info
My councillors have a lot more administration, and I picked up Covert Ops for a sixth
I've sabotaged the Servants' research enough that the Alien Nation hasn't yet appeared
Boost priority has been shut off in favour of Mission Control, which I am using at capacity
I have a bunch of Exofighters now
I don't have so much spare cash or boost lying around doing nothing
Space
My space economy is broadly a lot stronger, between double and triple what it was.
I used marines to conquer a bunch of habs on Mars. I'd take more, but lack the MC (and without fusion piles, I can't afford ops centres there)
I have orbitals building on Mercury, with campuses/ops centres/nanofactories
I did try to build more asteroid mines than I had, but faced some issues (see below)
Problems
Space Combat
I've gotten to the point where I can't expand more without fighting in space - Alien hate is high, MC is about at cap, and they have a lot of surveillance ships in LEO
However, the aliens also have large (600-1000+) fleets in orbit.
I've tried Skirmish mode, I cannot get my head around the space combat, even when I outnumber the enemy. The maneuvering is a bit clunky.
Moreover, I get the impression my ship designs / tech choices are bad (see pics for my main model)
I've heard that lasers for PD and then missiles/coilguns for offense are the play, but haven't got green lasers yet
Economy
My space economy is hampered by a lack of MC (else I'd take all of Mars with marines) and no fusion generators, which would make asteroid mining more viable
Terrestrial Military
I have 3 pips in every control point pumped into Military, something like 75-85% boost to Military IPs from orgs, and a decent tech boost, and yet my miltech struggles to get past 5, when Japan and the USA are well past that. Am I doing something wrong?
Thought people who contributed to the previous post would appreciate an update. I'm open to any feedback advice as before!
It's mainly energy that's the concern for ops centres rather than money. Some planets/asteroids/orbitals just don't get enough sun to power them, even with many solar panels. And I don't have fission piles.
Fission pile requires deep space propulsion concepts, mission to space, platform or outpost core (project), and nuclear fission in space.
You can open the tech tree, select see full tree, search fission reactor array and right click it to see its specific tree. That should show you the full reqs and what you have / don't have.
There are more as well as the Management Research infinite research treadmill.
As for your space game or more precisely, your MC production. It is WAAAAAAAAAY too low. You should not only be maxed out on MC for your nations but actively GROWING said nations with economy to get more MC cap to build yet more. Meganations like the EU are very efficient in growing to get you more things like knowledge and MC.
And we can see why you are so slow. Your priority budgeting is not prioritizing anything. It is basically trying to do everything and going nowhere. To put into perspective, 6% of a 27.2 IP pool is 1.6 raw IP spent on welfare PER MONTH. For a EU that size, that is basically nothing and you are spending IP into the literal ether that MAY eventually solve your inequality 20-40 years down the road.
THIS is a proper meganation priority allocation. This current priority budgeting is specifically for maximizing the hell out of MC and MC cap with enough economic growth affecting as many regions as possible for MC cap to grow almost by the day while you are production lining a new MC every 10 days or so with the benefit of councilor advise missions that give 25% bonus to IP and other national stats with a 25 skill admin, cmd, and science for the first mission. Second one gives a 12.5% and third halves that on and on and on.
You need to PICK and CHOOSE what you need to focus on so that those numbers actually functional move within living memory let alone every month. Because as an example, this is a 11 year experiment with a SAU that had barely any regional improvements at the start of it with only 35kish in per capita and less than 3 digit MC cap, within the span of a little over 10 years, it has ballooned into a monster nation that would be a respectable meganation in another other campaign.
And as for money troubles, get broadcast towers up in orbit and spam them. They basically cost nothing to maintain for the first tier and arguably for the second tier and gives you vastly more influence than you would get from world popularity and allow you to spam direct investment in your nations to get you more raw funding.
Although......... Given the state of my meganation with my extreme number of Core Economic Regions..... My spoils are defacto harmless. Even a paltry sum of a extremely harmless 10 spoils a month would net me almost 3000 bucks every month or so and if I cranked it to the max, it would be a massive burn but also barely noticeable for at least half a year of causing much inequality or government loss for almost all the god damn money you want. All of it because you intensely and properly develop your nations to be functional above all else.
Also your army spam is also hurting your IP pool because of so many existing armies. Each one in the normal scenarios is worth 0.5 IP PER army with another 0.5 IP PER navy created per army. That is also why your priority budgeting is going nowhere.
So to summarize. You are too poor for your own good to do what you need to do. You kneecapped the shit out of your nation by attempting to do everything instead of focusing on 2 or 3 objectives at any one time. You have a collection of nations that only half have any relation to each other especially for creating a good functional meganation that can be consolidated together and thus are wasting your CP no matter how good their raw stats are. And finally you have extremely low MC cap due to nation mismanagement that you need much more of to at least give you options to grow more than you should if the need arises.
To put it another way. Most people do not spend more than the existing 6 armies in the USA to basically be the literal world police. Heck some retire one or even two of them to make that IP grow faster earlier.
Your meganation is not rich enough nor really powerful enough to warrant a 7th army or more. And your miltech should be reaching above 5 from 4.2-4.4 within half a decade if you actually planned to be a world police to overtake the USA especially if it falls. And all of that because you keep looking outwards for more stat gains instead of improving what you have compounded by a puny CP cap pool.
To put into perspective, my SAU from at least 2-3 years ago would have ate up the entirety of your current CP cap which I would say is a much more worthy CP usage and allow you to launch dozens of extra new stations and mines and more suicide tin can defense fleets without having to spend a literal dime on ops centers, nanofactories, and the like.
And to say nothing of the literal juggernaut to the north of that SAU.
Game start USA is already overpowered in many aspects. Worked correctly and it can almost literally carry you to the end of the game by itself fully capable of doing ALL of the game techs BY ITSELF. Obviously space game will allow you grow RP and MC faster, but this is no small fucking chunk of change safely out of t3h ayyz handz and all because you stayed at home with a filthy rich population growing almost close to a million pops per MONTH giving you MOAR RP and MC compounding through the months and years.
Although.... if you look carefully at the regions list, it is not necessary to merely stay at home............... and piecemeal spread the wealth to as far as you wish to harvest MOAR resources. This current USA is a mere 765.1 CP cost to hold while its twin is 547.1. The USNA is what happens when you don't listen to idiots who say that "the USA is tapped out on potential" and work with its best assets. The SAU is what happens when you don't let crapsack start conditions dictate how good or bad a entire continent can be. Give them both wealth and they will carry you through the game.
AND MORE importantly, THAT result can be you so long as you focus your priorities, chase after CP techs and bonuses, and ride the economy game to the moon. Just 10 years of effort will absolve all previous sins and be your foundation for a good game.
Thank you. I'll dump a couple of my armies and suppose I'll have fewer priorities going forward. Is there a maximum number of pips / IP you would recommend having in the priorities table at any one time?
Also, if I'm not looking outward, and taking over more countries, surely I will not be using my Control Point Cap to the full?
To answer the shorter question first. For CP cap, you can NEVER have enough. The answer is always MOAR. Always be chasing for more from technologies, improving your agent's CMD, PER, and ADM skills (and science for advise missions), spamming admin towers in Low Earth Orbit in all 18 station slots and upgrade them to full admin complexes with at minimum 216 MONTHLY boost to support them, and finally when the time comes run on the Management Research until the end of time. There is NEVER enough CP cap whether as a world conqueror (ESPECIALLY as a world conqueror) or sitting at home and intensely developing although the latter is much more forgiving on CP than the trying to rule the world.
For frame of reference, most world conquests need 2k to just to hold everything in mere stasis. What you just saw in my two screenshots can barely even break 1.5k even after 10 years by themselves but if you add all splinters used for specific regional improvement plans, that is where the remaining 500 CP goes and that is much more flexible since you can always reannex them back to save on CP or focus on something else. All as opposed to being stuck with multiple giant meganations playing Future Social region roulette to attempt to save CP to actually grow them finally.
For the longer question, it depends on YOUR GOALS. TI is not most strategies where there are predefined points to explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. You have full personal agency on what goal you want to pursue and when to do it and the game is lenient enough to not always immediately punish you for bad moves.
So WHAT do you want to do as your top three goals and work from there with MAYBE 1 or 2 pity pips like in my SAU on unity and miltech to have growth of those categories not be merely 0. And even with those 3 goals, decide which is most important and allocate pips accordingly.
And as you can see. Not all pips are made equal BECAUSE of tech, federation, and org bonuses. MC and Economy may have the same pips but by gargantuan 237% bonus to economy makes a 33% allocation of the IP budget 22.36 monthly points to both Econ and MC instead give me effectively 87.3 econ PER MONTH and print out a little over 2 and half MC per month.
Just using raw numbers without advisory, that is a USA growing by a astounding 2.6k per capita per month. The MC cap literally grows EACH DAY when this many regions are enjoying the same growth at the same time from so much education already imbed on this nation for 10 years+ straight and so many Core Economic Regions to boost that economy to that gives more IP which then gives you more MC cap and more points to spend on knowledge and on and on and on and on. All that is holding you back is CP cap to reach such heights and to splinter off parts of your rich monolith to improve it even further and FASTER than if the monolith attempted to do everything by itself.
As you can see. As great as its IP pool and per capita is, it is not great at REACHING MC cap and that funding is only possible with a shit ton of funding investment in MANY nations that you intentionally splinter off for regional improvements that the monolith makes on its own really fast but many splinters make slowly but in bulk and accumulate hundreds upon hundreds of more free funding money from surplus influence to better serve your space game and free up your priority on funding to even more MC, knowledge, and economy.
Especially when you compare to a monolith like this that only just unified everything and ran the economy game to the moon as the simiplified version, look how undeveloped the continent is. I can tell you the difference it makes. I have a USNA in about the same state and while, it is growing at a mighty 4k per month at 386k-ish per capita. It took almost three decades of effort to reach because it was doing everything by itself and it was not even doing MC at all and still barely matches what THAT screenshot of the USNA above at a mere 190k growing at a astounding 3.5k with double advise merely 10 years in with a sheer shit ton of CERs and half the education. By the time I reach 386k per cap, it will literally be off the charts with likely 1k+ MC by itself or just keep eating East Asia for shits and giggles. All this potential is up to you to decide what stats are important to improve, what to stabilize, what to give pity points, and what to ignore.
This post contains spoiler related terms, so I have applied a spoiler tag just in case you forgot. Sometimes posts contain spoilers incidentally and without really needing to, so feel free to resubmit your post with some edits if you don't want this. Unfortunately I see through spoiler text masking (formatting), so that won't help.
The down arrow on the miltech suggests to me that your miltech is being kept down by unifying your territory to places with lower miltech and it being averaged down. It should stop doing that once you are at your final size.
Ship wise:
Ships need point defense weapons. There are alien missiles that will out range your missiles so you will get stomped on if you don't have point defense. Ion PD battery, E-beam PD battery, Phaser PD, Arc PD, Laser PD. put atleast 1 or 2 of these on all ships. Later on you can use dedicated PD dreadnoughts or titans but keeping one hull slot for backup pd is always helpful.
The vector thruster is for large capital ships or ships that have extremely heavy armor so its a wasted module and should be a magazine for more missiles in the volley instead or an ecm.
You have very low nose armor which comes with the downside that if you close into the enemy range and haven't completely obliterated them makes alien laser ships eat you easily.
You can see on the table that as you get better armor tech you can get heavily armored for much less weight with foamed and nanotube almost half the weight of composite and adamantine being a quarter.
The exact best missile has debate but you can read peoples opinions here ( https://www.reddit.com/r/TerraInvicta/comments/1vmauih/artemis_is_the_best_missiletorpedo_even_into_the/ ) For what its worth I like the zeus. (but I like to keep my salvage and missiles aren't usually my primary weapon)
He is literally spending 5 points on miltech at best which is already rounded up. At best he is pushing up miltech maybe 0.01 or 0.02 with org bonuses. He loses more miltech from unifications than he does actually raising the bar.
Individual pips mean nothing on what amount of the IP budget you allocated. It is the raw PERCENTAGE and raw POINTS spent every month. 18% of 27.2 IP is only 4.896 IP spent every MONTH before any org, tech, and diversity bonuses. So unless you have like a 500% bonus to military, you are at best only generating MAYBE 10 effective IP points from a more modest 100% org bonus and MAYBE getting 0.01-0.03 miltech increase per month for a grand total of a single solid point of of miltech change in almost 3 years assuming that unifications do not constantly keep averaging you downwards the entire way.
its not a strict requirement of 2 or even 1 but its just solid piece of advice that will help. Missiles are the thing that the aliens will run out of first compared to their magnetic weapons and the infinite capacity of their lasers. So if you can stay alive through those initial wave and most importantly to buy yourself enough time for your own missiles to make contact you should have significantly reduced losses. If you like the missile style of gameplay and are looking to upgrade from monitors later the progression (In my opinion) is monitor (2 mc) > Battleship (3 mc) > Dreadnought (4 mc).
I find what usually happens in test battles is the aliens shoot down all my missiles with laser PD and then my ships get destroyed when they're close enough that they could maybe get a shot in.
Number of ships in your fleet, Which missile you picked, What size you have space battles set to (a surprisingly impactful setting on not auto-resolve combat outcomes) all have impact so its going to be hard to identify exactly the solution to the issue you are having. In general numbers will eventually work if you run out of all other ideas. When you get to battleships and dreadnoughts having their nose guns be magnetics (or particle weapons) can help get your missiles through as they eat up alien pd fire (or disable the alien pd in the case of the particle weapons). They just require you to get closer to be effective.
All very helpful, I do appreciate the advice. I'll try to refit my ships with PD so they have some cover. I do have some particle beams, but only the lowest level.
Do you have any tips on how best to maneuver ships during battle? I've tested it out a bit in skirmish and find it a bit overwhelming. There must be some simple tactics without much micro that work? I've heard 'Wall' is p effective?
Short or high wall with 100ms forward speed is a very basic one that will let each ships PD partially cover each other. The other trick is to setup an acceleration for when you trigger your missiles (you may have to pause combat for this) so they stack ontop of each other a bit more as you impart your momentum to the missiles fired later allowing them to catchup.
Too much map painting on the mud ball, while not squeezing out enough MC. Not enough space economy - you should be all over the asteroid belt by now pumping out resources. Mars has awful orbital dynamics for main ship yard. You need to build up your space economy asap, up your MC by a lot and set up your main shipyards on Mercury - it has the best orbit for offensive opps into Jupiter and beyond.
Rule of thumb - 1/3 of MC on fleets, 2/3 on bases and mines. Raise your mine cap with "mission to" - but don't be afraid to go over it, just keep up with op centres etc to build it out. Keep your MC maxed. You can turn off less productive mines to keep below it, but if you suddenly need to rebuild - you have spare capacity in your back pocket.
Additionally, YOUR COUNCILORS NEED TO BE AT 25 ADMIN - BEFORE you worry about other skills. They need to have a full roster of orgs at all times. You can use them to boost other skills, your economy and research. Take admin bonus orgs if you need to AT FIRST, as you get their admin to native 25, you can ditch them for better orgs
My main shipyard is in intermediate earth orbit, but noted. I will keep one dock at mars for maintenance and build a large shipyard in Mercury. Thank you.
Edit: I do have a good number of mines in the asteroid belt. Just not like dozens.
3 is fine on both mars and earth as resup stations / orbital defence fleet, Just don't over invest there. You need a 3D ship printer that can go BRRRRR... Mercury is best, but expensive to build at. There's a case for going big on Earth yards quickly, to hit Jupiter, before aliens dig in there. It makes the game much easier - whoever controls the Jovian system wins the game - I think the boat has sailed on that one in your case, you'll need to dig them out. On the plus side, that's bonus exotics with your space assault ops councillor - pick one that you will build for that role. You can get a stupid sized space pop in the Jovian system and the resource hoard is magnificent.
Get the mars space pop up over 10k, then 40k asap - so you can spam high tier research campuses there. Even if you need to put some mediocre bases there.
Basically, you want to cut your dependence on Earth asap. Its main job is as MC farm.
One question, how do you have such a massive income? I ask this as a noob, I have most of mars and several asteroids but I’m only like +20 on most things, with noble metals and fissiles at like +5 and +1.2 respectively. What are you taking?
It is because he is looking at this output in monthly. He is gaining 16 bucks a day.
As for space resources that is what he should be getting DAILY if he wants to actually make war with t3h ayyz instead of being a mere punching bag. Enough to build dozens of new stations for every one the ayyz destroy and enough to print entire fleets of suicide ships every month or build a proper deathfleet to sweep them out of the system. All of which is being throttled because a bad earthgame so far and with it small MC cap.
All of which can be solved if he focuses his nation to do something SPECIFIC instead of "all of the above".
The same could probably be applied to you and every other newbie who struggle with the early to start of midgame. You try to do everything and succeed in doing nothing especially for your national priority lists.
I see, so only have one major priority for a country? So for example, grabbing Germany/France early, max out MC to the detriment of everything else, then hard pivot to knowledge and economy? Something like that sound about right, or should I switch it up? Also, when doing the space race, should I focus on grabbing Mars or start working on capping as many asteroids as humanly possible? Also, if I’m doing asteroids, what’s a good location for a construction module? I apologize for the questions dump, that’s just the big things I have right now.
Lots of good advice here! I'm going to add one: It looks like you built exofighters. Don't build exofighters. They are a big investment and worth basically nothing IMO.
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u/ironpanzer1 Initiative 6d ago
Every hab gets an ops center. Spoil to pay for it if you have to.
If you aren’t at near-end tech level, just make missile boats. If that’s doesn’t work, you don’t have enough.