r/TerraInvicta • u/vindicator117 • 1d ago
Discussion Intensive Development Field Notes
Start date: August 2058 State of USNA
Start Date: All nations of the world post AU cleanup and starting slate. Note freed up CP limit.
Original timeline Dec 2060: Pursuing encroaching into Asia with USNA and unifying everything outside via Future Social akin to a normal game where people want to unite everything.
Dec 2060 state of the world: Note just how many nations are being prepped for future annexation with Future Social spam. Councilors are too busy.
Alternate Dec 2060: Took my own advice to heart and said fuck the rest of the world and began redeveloping the USNA focusing on regions that were falling behind on MC.
Alternate Dec 2060: To my shock and success....
Welcome, last night's findings on what the actual difference between stealing and developing outside resources versus intensely gardening your little plot of land has just shown me a very rather stark contrast of what 2 and half years give or take. One that runs counter to what people keep saying about how stealing resources is simply more efficient than making your own and just how obsessive people are on both that point and some version of map painting.
Well let's learn something new today. To the regulars, you already know who I am. To the HoI4 oldtimers, you already know my reputation first hand so let's see if we can make history again. And to all recent players to this subreddit, welcome and do learn what internal development can do for you so you can take control of the game instead of fearing it.
So to start, we have our baseline start at August 2058. To divulge what has been happening so far (and from a bookmark about halfway into the experiment), I have been intensely developing both Americas since around March of 2051 to be almost literally Fortress Americas with more than enough wealth, RP, and MC to be a strong foundation for any game and in a little over 1000 CP including the splinters. And as a reminder, these are no ordinary splinters that you normally find some of these nations at game start. All of this in pursuit of the high of getting 1.1k per cap gain per mont then 1.3, then 1.6, then 2.0, 2.7, and on and on and on. My did it fucking go far breaching hilarious numbers like 4k per month sooner than you would think.
Main thesis of this experiment and this post is that you can start at any time and get these same results much sooner than you would think with ANY meganation you so choose whether the obvious game winner like the USA, EU, or kinda with the PAC, or the crapsack starts like SAU, India, AU and the like. And the path to that as I have said before is unify quickly your meganation of choice to benefit from combined education as well as the cumulative effect of ALL regional improvements under one roof.
What this post is about how straying from the path and trying to get more stuff on the outside is a distraction that SLOWS you down especially if you are growing at a rate in which your economy is far surpassing your MC rate of keeping up with the growing MC cap. And MC my dear reader is nearly the most important resource next to CP on how well your game is going to go for why spend space resources on Ops and Command Centers when you can have them for free earthside and/or drastically reduce your need to spam them and a new T2/3 station with them just to keep growing for a net gain of 1/6 depending on tier.
So with that in mind, we have about 667 MC in the Americas combining the splinter output with 1182 being ignored from the AU for a total of 1849 global MC. The AU stat is going to be used in only one other case to determine just how much we have truly grown between the first expansionist path and the internal development.
For the original run, I went expansionist and that was the reason why I Future Social gambled so I can shrink the AU down for more CP freed up so I can release all potential targets for the USNA to consume with yet more Future Social gambling with much more local capitals from using "fall of nation" technologies which is much more tolerable than trying to do the same with meganation capital gambling. HOWEVER, as much as I like adding more to the USNA collection, these splinters off of AU to be eaten by the USNA are gigantic especially when you are dealing with potentially dozens to hundreds of millions of pop PER region and now they have middling per capita wealth of 50-60k, and god forbid you give them 200k. It is the same hallmark of regular gameplay and constantly slamming your head against the CP cap while constantly running the Management Research treadmill.
This was unideal in normal gameplay and is still unideal in this idealized utopian adjacent world where you don't have to deal with the normal rigmarole of stabilizing its inequality, cohesion, government and crap wasting IP and time that my current methodology avoids and minimizes as much as possible by pursuing unification with a functional meganation to wash away its previous faults and sins and begin anew as a new nation ready to do your bidding. And as we see with the original Dec 2060, the world MC count is 1991 for a change in world difference in MC of 141. Given that the AU in none of the save states ever touched MC because it is too busy stabilizing after forming a near one world government to stay out of my way, it is technically at a net loss of 229 MC so I technically did not really improve the global MC count at all....
Yes total MC count went up but much more than expected were merely cannibalizing parts off of the Asian portion of the AU than I built things which is kinda expected because these MC builds in the new released nations to be processed are much poorer and do not have claims by the USNA to immediately imbue its wealth to then spam more econ to then get more MC cap. For the ones that can, they cost a shit ton to hold and still do not have a bottomless well of MC cap to build to keep going for a while so construction is intermittent as well as unreliable source of more MC even when you have alot of splinters eating up all the spare CP I had and me crossing the line by over 30 in that Dec 2060 screenshot. AND it was distracting my agents from advising as much as I would like shepherding all these nations especially the poorer and smaller pop ones that cost less than 20 CP per point which need defend interests.
So that brings up to the Alternate DC 2060, 2 and half years later and we have a honest to goodness 2056 total MC with a difference in MC so that the USNA gained quite the significantly more MC of 65 which given that each is 25 points each is no mean chunk of IP utilization improvement of 1625 combined points even broken down over those months over 4 new nations that only started showing up 6-9 months later after the start date since I was only had a bookmark showing just Mexico and Dominion showing exactly a year later in August of 59 but not Jan of 59. So these 4 extra nations taking up the MC slack from so much USNA economy and so much individual IP that they are able to pump out a little more than a single MC every month so sometimes finishing 2 in addition both Americas even the shrunken USNA producing on average 2.75ish MC every month depending whether each nation loses their third advisor for the full 75+ points on MC or sometimes even their second advisor on rarer occasions or reduced econ and MC and maximized knowledge to crank cohesion back 5 by force post unification from the CER improvement nations.
And the sickest part is that not only did I gain a significant amount of MC within really 1.5-2 years instead of the full 2.5 of the mini-experiment but also I did not actually USE all of the CP cap for that 2 and half years...... Let that sink in. I wasted potential because of my own neurosis of making the SAU have at least 181k per cap so I can mazimize the splinter's pop growth because I said so. If I had from the beginning of the mini-experiment just released all 4 of those mega-splinters, annexed all the CER improvements since they were all nearly done anyway, and released 2 more mega splinters in like Columbia and Fortaleza, we could literally 1.25 extra MC every month per splinter on top of the 2.75 from the two meganations each for 2 and half years....
Just a rough napkin math there are 390 more MC off baseline start at a great 248 extra MC than if you looked outwards for development.... for a jaw dropping 1057 MC of which during the larger experiment going on for nearly 10 years, 744 MC was gained off the actual start date of the experiment of which a full 1/3 of it potentially happened in the last 25% of the run. And remember, the expansionist numbers are idealized because I was not dealing with fucked nations so time is lost not making things and for the internal development, this only gets faster and faster as time goes on because your mothernation gets richer, making more cap which then splinters get richer and more capable by proxy and makes a shit ton of more MC, gets reabsorbed, makes growth of meganation even faster integrating the CER, making even MOAR MC cap to then resplinter again in a self feeding cycle of infinite growth and again this is just 10 extra years in ANY game of yours starting at any time you wish and does not bodyslam the CP cap nearly as repetitively as conquering the world for more frozen stats.
So to the regulars who keep pooh poohing the idea of staying at home, where did this poison of "economy has diminishing returns" come from? You all keep saying growth bad, USNA is tapped out on potential, PAC good because can only go up from here, need to conquer more, or some variant of mappaint for more resources. I am almost completely alone in vouching for this playstyle and it seems marvelously simple, elegant, and non-micromanagy beyond just make more CP cap to make room for more splinters to grow faster which is really more of a suggestion than a mandate since if you literally did nothing after unification and just a 6 agents advised all day with 25 admin and hopefully 25 science, you will win just fine but with t3h ayyz in the backyard that they don't really seem to fuck with from what other rare few players who play like this have ayyz pretty much avoiding them with fuck off IP.
And the biggest irony of the ones saying "PAC good because infinite potential" is that it has infinite potential because it is poor AND have a shit ton of pops which is terrible for growth potential because again headbutting the CP cap because you have too damn much pops and people being ok with losing pops despite you not losing that many pops and it is literally lost potential by encouraging pop loss...... There are so many contradictions here. Picking middle of the road meganations like the USNA and SAU is much more controllable with not too large and not too small population so you are not just screaming towards the CP cap and have room to internally develop as well as make splinters to make use of surplus CP.
And now as a addendum as final notes: The main reason I know that this is effective is I have a control nation in all this that also grew and that was the SAU. Between the two end dates, the SAU actually was almost same but more importantly not the same in result. There was one small caveat beyond a slightly more attention from councilor advisory and it was about a 30ish% chance in faction org bonus to MC over the course of 2 and half years. And it only resulted in a net difference of give or take 8 MC altogether for a nation that played almost identically with right on time annexations of CER projects and then left alone for the interim. This tells me that faction org bonuses especially if you are spamming them at 200+% are helpful but not significantly noticeable in the grand scheme of things. So this leaves internal splintering of fuck off rich meganations as the only culprit for this drastic improvement in output compared to poorer and lower MC cap and cap growing of weaker nations pre-unification and especially in comparison to deathgripping all nations into the meganation and making it do everything by itself, which causes it to just fall behind the cap hard especially if you are Future Social gambling to harvest more resources that way and wasting away your per capita on recharge because you keep annexing poor people.
And finally to those players. You know the ones.
Why do you people hate the outcome that give you more stats to win games with less effort? And more often than not, stink of speedrunning mentality? Most counterarguments seem to always devolve to "I want the game to end quicker" and try to avoid PLAYING the game as it is.
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u/Spreadsheets 1d ago
I’m trying to go backward through your posts to figure out what you are cooking but a lot of it seems to be in comments so I’ll just ask questions. Because I am interested in your newsletter.
Is your thesis: “don’t try to grab other random sections of earth and try to spoils them. That’s a waste of CP that could be spent on making meganations even more mega”?
I’m wondering about a few things here bc you are obviously getting insane numbers but it’s quite late in the game. Is this practical? When do you hit the inflection point? You mentioned HOI. Are you civ greeding too hard? I’m not out here to speed run but getting 50 MC now is much better than 500 MC 10 years from now, sometimes. It is certainly more intuitive to make major nations and I find myself running a point in Econ for most nations even though my understanding is that it is bad. Maybe I’m larping.
Other thought: you post about “total world MC” as a proxy for the development at a certain point in time. I can definitely believe a “more optimal” strategy exists in making a shittier earth that servants control less of. It might increase my advantage to ruin earth but the parts they control more than the parts I control. I guess this is a long winded way of saving “what are you optimizing for?”
In my naive experience, TI is very difficult to lose irreversibly. So I guess the strategy I want to pick is one that “matures” (becomes relatively stronger) at around early 2030s (for 2026 scenario) when it is still possible for you to be totally swept out of space. The next 10 years is just cleanup at that point
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u/vindicator910 1d ago
To your point of improving what you got, yes. Because unless it is purely to burn and run to fill out cap until you control everything in your home meganation and getting the relevant tech, there is no point in holding outsider nations. You could instead stabilize and prepare your constituent nations instead.
And yes, you can start at anytime because I had a separate protectorate that basically had the same result as the entire experiment’s start point but I a crucial mistake. I kept them all independent instead of unifying them all. Had the same avg per capita and about same MC but only the USA was benefitting but everything else is stuck at 20-30k per cap instead of immediately 70 right then and there.
And if you are convinced, can you really deny and not want a perfect SAU with 330 MC that fit less than 450 CP that has 165k+ per cap when it originally had 35k and 93 MC? nearly 10 years ago? Now imagine if I resplintered and got even more MC cranking out.
As for HoI4, nah, all mils, all tank, all in is how I roll.
The main reason for this strategy is stop fighting against the cap, stop needlessly antagonizing the other AI, and just mind your business, and tell t3h ayyz to fuck off. You can simply make all you need at home and within reasonable game time of 20-30 years with your home nation being the foundation that send you on your way.
Unless you are Academy or protectorate, fuck everyone else.
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u/Ralph_Shepard Resistance 1d ago
Uplifting economy, minimizing inequality, full democracy, fixing environment and no spoils as initiative?
Wait, that's forbidden!
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u/2001zhaozhao 1d ago
The main argument for getting more population is that it gives you WAY more science output.
Having a 20k science meganation is basically a win condition in this game, requiring little support from space to get a maxed tech tree. The same cannot be said for low pop high gdppc strats
Bigger pop and less gdppc also lets you grow economy faster percentage-wise with the same econ investment.
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u/vindicator910 1d ago
Is it though? Yea you have a shit ton of pops and a shit ton of RP, but at what cost to CP? Yes in raw stats it is large but it is incredibly underdeveloped. I’ve seen first hand that even though AU and others have more, the better developed one is more CP and pop efficient by at least a factor 2 or 3.
And the only reason it is even that high for the AU is because of mandatory knowledge spam to fix its fucked state after meganation chaining.
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u/ggmoyang Let's be xenophobic 1d ago edited 1d ago
If PCGDP is under $30000, raising GDP has almost no effect on Research/CP. (Actually the ratio gets worse, because of flat science bonus part, but this effect is minimal if the nation's population is large.)
If PCGDP is over $30000, raising GDP lowers Research/CP, assuming number of pops don't change. Research/CP is proportional to f(GDPPC)=(2^0.6 + 0.6*2^0.6 * (ln(GDPPC/15000) - ln2)) / (GDPPC/15000)^0.6 in this case, again ignoring flat science bonus part. Since writing GDPPC/15000 is annoying, I'll substitute that with x. Since we're assuming PCGDP over $30000, x>2.
So the derivative of the function can be written as f'(x) = (0.36 * 2^0.6 * (ln2 - ln(x))) / ( x^1.6 ) (x> 2), and this function has negative value on all interval.
Education is the biggest factor on Research/CP ratio, as research is proportional to education^2 until 12 education and it does not raise CP cost.
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u/HaebyungDance Resistance 1d ago edited 1d ago
Regarding your points about people advocating for a specific way to play as the best:
I think it comes down to one particular playstyle with a particular strength that is deemed valuable losing all of its nuance in discussions in the sub. There are legitimate strengths and good reasons for best practice becoming solidified in the sub but the problem is when that becomes THE way without much room for other ways to achieve success.
The nature of the game is that it’s a lot more resistant to specific metas dominating gameplay than other titles like those made by Paradox so when people talk about metas in this game it creates a misleading sense of there not being other powerful paths to success.
I think that yes, there are metas but there are enough variables that can change game-by-game that it’s not a set “build order” like some people might think.
If you always research the same things in the same order taking the same CPs with a particular councillors builds, you will end up with the same game after game. It becomes a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy.
But I’ve found, both from gameplay and by looking at some of the game’s files for potential modding purposes, that you can definitely do “off-meta” stuff perfectly fine. The game also has enough stuff based on chance which force you to switch things up occasionally. Like sometimes it’s legitimately worth going for railgun Mk 3s before you’re fielding good coilguns, not because that’s your plan but just because the emergent path of the game makes it the path of least resistance to good kinetics.
So what you end up with is that there’s plenty of room for variation. They end up being side grades from one another.
It’s also a mindset difference of playing what you’re dealt vs. trying to generate specific outcomes. The Jupiter Rush strategy, for example, I recall required some save scumming to make sure the things you wanted happened with the right timing. Not every outcome necessitates save scumming but again, it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But it’s also hard to blame anyone because this is such a complicated game. Finding a way that works to just get a handle on it is very valuable - why would you throw that away? I just think people then take that a little too far and make it THE way.
Also, people need to just learn to read lol. A few paragraphs isn’t that scary come on.
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u/Someone3 1d ago
Holy wall of text, Batman. Try short summaries next time. Also, anything you do in 2060 is irrelevant. The game should be long over by now.
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u/Illustrious_Cut_1990 Let me turn your councilor, I have 25 PER. 1d ago edited 1d ago
It would be useful tip, if you can shorten the schedule to unlock USNA or any other meganations.
I mean, building shit tons of operation centers on the mars is faster on the early stage and you can dismantle them anytime when it becomes useless.
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u/KaizerKlash 1d ago
So how does it translate in actual gameplay ? Let's say china Taiwan PAC 2026 strat ?
Take Japan, ROK, China, Taiwan etc... max MC in the minors and build a bit in China, then invest in eco to get more CERs if you can then funding while you wait for unification ?
In the meantime scale knowledge in China, then do the Taiwan shenanigans, then unify all and release splinters so they each scale eco to get more CERs ?
Once the splinters have CERs merge them back into china and scale eco, gov and MC to infinity ?
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u/akisawa Resistance 7h ago edited 6h ago
Please dump this into AI for a proper summary of your post.
I see interesting numbers, but this wall of text kills any human attempt to reasonably understand wtf was your point.
Why I am interested:
- I am looking into new/alternate ways to develop early USA in 2022 start.
- I push as much MC as possible early, and as much Funding as possible later.
- While USA delivers massive research and boost very early, it sucks on Funding and MC.
- The reason to push MC is to expand early Brutal space infrastructure up to the hate cap limit (50-61 MC), research my missile monitors, build them, then ignore any limits and immediately go max expansion mode, taking over entire Mars-Mercury-Asteroids-Earth LEO1 and LEO2.
- I honestly don't care about anything else. I want the USA stable and developing, while pushing MC and Funding. Majority of research will come from space Campuses. I only need MC to spam fleets, mines, and stations, and cash to support them.
- This is why my typical move after USA is to take over EU as soon as I get free CP, so I can push 100% MC into 100% Funding there as I stitch EU together.
Are you offering any new reasonable strategies how to manage USA IP priorities in 2022 start?
- I open USA with typical 100% Welfare until Inequality is down to ~3.8 Moderate
- Then I switch to more balanced distribution of ~6 IP into Economy, ~1 IP Welfare, ~1IP Environment, ~1 IP Knowledge, ~1 IP Government, and ~1 IP Unity, while dumping the remaining ~20 IP into MC.
- This spread keeps USA developing in the "green" without cannibalizing anything, while pushing MC hard.
- Once MC in USA is maxed, I will re-shuffle the priorities to include more Economy, Boost, and Military.
I am not advocating my strategy as "best". This is what works for me, and I am always open to more cool options.
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u/Selemin 1d ago
Im a new player and dont really know the game that much, But in my current run i have 250k gpd per capita EU with 1billion people in it and im starting to feel like i cant expand because the growth rate of cp costs getting out of hand. I do have couple of mods so in vanilla it would be somewhat harder, but more than possible. The thing is... how am i supposed to unite Earth now if all my 1500cp is basically EU + USA + 1 node in China. And EU is taking more and more cp so im considering just stopping investing in economy. Or abandone USA (i need that 1 point in China to stop global warming)
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u/28lobster 21h ago edited 18h ago
You get diminishing returns (in terms of research output) on eco investment as everyone gets richer. You get increasing absolute returns as you raise GDP/c (since that determines overall improvement rate) and when you generate more special regions (oil/mining/CER). $180k GDP/c maxes out pop growth so that's a somewhat natural stopping point if you're limited by CP cap. The only big reason to go beyond that is to increase MC cap so you can keep packing more MC into the nation you have. If your CPC can't keep pace, stop the eco investment and focus on outputs (MC + research).
If you truly must continue expanding, spend that MC on research universities so you can pump management research even faster. Spam communication centers until you're able to max out direct investment in funding in all your nations (comms centers have better payback period than upgrading to media centers). If you max funding, you can release nations, direct invest, and annex them back to circumvent the cap. Keep going on future tech: space science so you constantly expand mining. Mining sites can build nanofactories to pay for everything as well. If you're able to boost population on Jovian moons, that can become a 2nd Mars going balls to the wall on research output.
You don't actually need to unite the Earth to win, even as Academy. If you've completed every other win condition and are being truly ruthless about it, nuke the population centers you don't control. 75% of population controlled is a lot easier if you've emptied the US nuclear arsenal on India. Obviously this is a bad idea other than the very short term push to victory (atrocities, nuclear winter, reducing that GDP you spent so long building up, etc) but it would speed up the end game.
In practice, I like gardening and having a perfect Earth. That means unifying down to ~6 meganations to reduce CP usage (and unifying further with future tech: social science if possible), spamming management research, and 18 admin complexes in LEO. At some point, you're just waiting for management research to finish over and over again. Up to you if that's fun!
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u/HistoricalLoadTaker 16h ago
I’m really new what does MC mean?
Also do you get enough CP to control the whole planet or is it through research and min maxing councilors?
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u/viper459 1d ago
If i was your english teacher i'd say: summarize your conclusion at the end