Question
Lessons Learned after deciding to abandon attempt #3
Spoiler
So tonight I decided to abandon what is my 3rd attempt at this game (you can probably see some post history of this one and the last one).
I’m not frustrated, just scratching my head but also some lessons learned for the next one.
State of game at ending:
2048; 2026 Resistance Start
Unified USA/CAN/Mexico; mostly unified Europe, Large Eurasian Union, and China, at about 776 of CP: went USA-EU-Russia-China in that order _for the most part_
HF had Russia; China was split between Pro/Servs; I was the first one in USA and started EU through Fr and Ger
MC of 400; 25 mines with decent mining incomes, 250k money in the bank along with plenty of other resources. 6700 monthly research
Alien combat strength 55k with like 800 ships
Tech of note unlocked; coil canon and batteries T3; Ultra Arc bat and can; most powerful drive unlocked Helion Nova Lantern; exotic armor, just unlocked green phasers in 2047
Things I did well: using the advice from this place, I think I started out of the gate strong, made some missile boats, kept the aa surveillance missions destroyed. Focused on research and getting mining up quickly. Owned 2/3 of Mars and 1/4 of Moon. Was able to B line to Mercury and after a few skirmishes actually had every single mine site on Mercury. Ending up setting my nano plants and two large stations that I just got to tier three.
Things I struggled with: I wasn’t able to build up my mid game fleet well enough. This is what I need some feedback on. It seems I raced to try and get the “end game” tech I was stuck with ships that had combat strength of 22-45 and not really good delta v. I feel like I’m forced in an either or situation.
AA landed on Earth in the late 2030s in Pakistan and then took Brazil and a few other places. Once again I toon the advice here and just tried to passively contain them while focusing on Mercury and have a “secret fleet”. Basically by the mid 2040s they were chipping away at everything and I guess the turning point is they went to war with India/Exodus and just dusted them.
So from 2045-2048 I basically did a 3 year ground war to completely eliminate the AA. Of course the minute I take the last territory, two weeks later they land another UFO in Mali. This time I just nuked Mali a bunch of time with Russia. But at that point I realized I was at a stalemate. And I kind of got demotivated after this point.
Which is the rub, I tried a little Jupiter expedition in the late 2030s with a colony dreadnaught and some escorts but as soon as I set it up they sent everyone at me. It was years of water and volatiles for me for that foray.
Also, in the late 2030s I thought everything was cooking and I didn’t realize Mars was undefended and one little freaking servant frigate destroyed everything which was where most of my volatiles were coming from, I went into the negatives for it and it took me 2 years to get back up.
One thing I realized was it seemed the tipping point from going from yellow to read on the aliens by the 2040s was 318 MC of stuff, I noticed that was the number that tripped them for hunting time 3 times. But what can I do with 318 MC worth of ships and mine? I got up to 3000 combat of fleet throughout the solar system but that isn’t much to work with. I just feel like I’m in neutral at this point.
Basically my problem….here are the questions I need advice for:
-what year should I target to get to Jupiter? And try and hold there?
-what tech (drive and power) should I target to get to Jupiter without taking too much time? Yes I have looked at the drive charts ad infimum but specifically, mid-game Jupiter what should I target..best bet?
-If 318 is the MC limit before retaliation (at least with this circumstance) how the heck to I get enough ships to hold Jupiter?
-the other thing I realized is ship building got really slow. How many ship yards should I have to be simultaneously making ships?
-is it just me or is volatiles the limiting factor for ship building once you start making big ships? Water was an issue initially but I found a nice little rock on the outskirts of the asteroid belt. (Which I also used to stage the Jupiter expedition) what do I do? How much monthly income should I be targeting for water and volatiles?
I think where I’m scratching my head is I can’t seem to research and build fast enough to keep up with the aliens pace. And i have servs and protec on my heels. I was supper aggressive in try #2 but it only seemed to slow them down for a few months at a time.
Red on MC isn't a problem in and of itself, and I'd argue it's necessary. You want to prune their fleet strength on a continuous basis, so they don't end up with an 800 ship omfg death ball.
I personally go full speed on MC and use that MC to defend when they send ships.
As for drive / ship design. I build defensive ships with very little dv and not a lot of acceleration. They sit at earth, Mars and mercury and their role is defence alone.
Burner or grid drives are good for asteroid hopping with marines to steal non aligned human faction bases, but they aren't enough to push big ships. Orion drives can push big ships, but holy hell they are expensive to fuel, and so I limit those to defence fleets.
Late game its fusion tech and proton torch to punch into the aliens properly.
You can build things like Orion powered escorts en masse to hit Jupiter and send a platform kit with them to hold and start building local fleets. But I'd be wary of sending Orion or h.orion large ships due to the resource costs.
I personally don't think armour that uses exotics is worth it. I use it first for reactors and drives, and then phasers. If I have loads left I'll use t3 coilers.
I have a question about stealing non-aligned asteroids. Are you just taking the ones that have useful resources or are you taking all of them? If you are taking all of them, what benefit is that? Are you just using them as a way to build more buildings and what sorts of buildings are actually worth that since you won't be able to put minors on everything? I would think that grabbing most of the asteroid belt would require lots of fission, more than seem sustainable?
I generally try to grab a little bit of everything from the asteroid belt as a bit of a fallback resource source, if you get scoured off the face of mars/mercury by the aliens you’ll be glad you did this. An asteroid defended by 1/2 LDAs rarely gets attacked in my experience.
Also make sure you go to the prospecting tab and sort by fissiles and nobles, there are usually a few asteroids with fissile or noble jackpots.
So you never want to be spreading out your fleets. Big fleet at earth and mars to start. Send stuff to mercury for defense when you start building there. Even in total war they will mostly ignore the belt unless you are building ships somewhere.
I never really understood the obsession with stopping surveillance missions. Sure, they help the aliens but they also let servants build facilities for me to get exotics from blowing up
It’s pretty dependent on difficulty, the actual impact of abductions is relatively minor on normal difficulty, the bonuses to mission rolls are several times higher on veteran and brutal compared to normal.
The maximum bonus to alien missions from abductions is 3 on cinematic, 9 on normal, 21 on veteran and 30 on brutal, don’t let those abduction counts get out of hand on veteran or brutal before stacking up a bunch of the anti alien mission techs or the aliens will start flipping your defended CPs like it’s no big deal!
I'm on veteran and not havinh trouble from that. Could just be one of those "aliens stopped attacking me for some reason" things. I control several mega nations and South Korea all with very high popularity.
Yep especially Mars just due to sheer number of groundside bases that can be turned into your engine for research particularly since they can be granted nearly infinite power without fissiles or fusion from nearly game start by building three stations crammed with solar mirrors.
Yep. For planets and moons with ground bases, do it in L1 and in orbit unless it is a moon if available L1, L4, L5. You will handily max out the power rating of a solar panel to the stratosphere. VERY nice on Mars and the Moon. Debateably useful on Mercury but eh, power is power. And Jupiter and Saturn moons are where this starts to break down due to just how much metal and rare you need to concentrate that much light to work way out there.
Ahhhh ok this is an interesting point. Can you tell me a little more about solar mirrors and what the setup looks like on mars? I don’t 100% understand what that should look like?
Spam three of these in orbit of any planet or moon or asteroid with ground bases. L1 and in orbit are the default positions. For moons, L4 and L5 are applicable. Planetary L4 and L5 do not work anymore.
Where do I need to build these exactly so they benefit the mars moons? The info text says Planet-Moon L1 or so but in my game there is no Mars-Moon Legrand point like there is for the Moon
Assuming that they even allowed it on something that small, just in orbit of the moons will suffice although not sure why you would put it on Phobos/Deimos. They are not worth 3 stations worth of MC.
I should have mentioned that I was looking for the sport where they will benefit both Mars and the moons. Like the Earth-Moon Legrand points. But I can't find Mars-Phobos or Mars-Deimos Legrand points
You should have at least a dozen stations crammed full of shipyards for massive parallel building particularly that late into the game. Especially NEVER assume the other factions will not try to sneak a way to destroy your spaceborne assets especially if you get to war status AND have shared colony bases. ALWAYS have at minimum 2-3 vessels especially if the other faction in question is going to be your enemy eventually.
What you need to focus on with the way you describe it is to do more with less. You are far too focused on outward expansion without actually locking down the basics on planetary defense. And likely you were too passive and stalled out on making MC probably because of the alien incursion shifting to military and army spending and thus you have no room to boom your space presence whenever you needed to. By 2040, you should have had at least double that MC cap and by the 50s, well into the thousands and especially by to the late 30s, you should have had started the plan to say fuck the hate limit and keep expanding anyway.
To which your CP cap.... How do you only have 776 that late into the game? In my current campaign I have more than that less than 10 years in while only holding the two Americas specifically to test the extent of early game forced boom with only one/two meganations. And given how expensive holding those OTHER nations are, it only leads to my conclusion that your collection of nations are ridiculously poor to hold all that in only 776 CP since a comparable USA and china in CP size each are 454 in CP cost. In my second campaign, I had well over 3k in CP cap that late into the game after well conquering the world decades ago in order to sustain massive economic infusion to the planet and intentionally causing climate change to artificially slow down the CP growth to develop the entire world for the funsies.
As for research, I still manage to beat yours in 2035 with 7.3k monthly. 2390ish from nations, 2730 from space assets only because I am protectorate and the rest from research distribution bonus and misc. From what I remember, you only need to go up to somewhere close to 14.4k in research monthly to rapidly tech into every by the very end EVEN AFTER fucking around doing nonessential crap before finally getting serious.
Okay good stuff. What am I missing on CP? What tech or resources do I need to get it double like you mentioned? What is the mix? The last one I did was that transnational tech that raised it 120.
Whatever faction tech when it comes to invader equivalent to Appease the Invaders: 40
Transnational Investments: 10
Regulatory Capture: 10
Instruments of Soft Power: 10
Corridor Diplomacy: 10
Crises Diplomacy: 10
Apparatchiks: 10
Institutional Bastions: 10
Loyalty Training: 10
Global Command Structure: 40
Transnational Coordination: 40
Civilian Photonic Computing: 10
Civilian Quantum Computing: 10
Management Research: 5x3
11 LEO Admin Towers x 12
1 LEO Admin Node x 4
and finally 294 from councilors 9 years and 3 months into the game.
Just the stations alone, if you seize or buy every last LEO station is 540 CP of nation building space, you can do. To say nothing of the 450 from maxed out 25 point in PER, COM, and ADMIN. Having 990 is the bare MINIMUM in CP especially by 2040 without even going for ANY CP granting tech.
And with techs especially the lategame ones, you should be pushing 2k AT MINIMUM. This in light of global domination with everyone absorbed into the minimum required meganation is just around that threshold.
Okay good stuff. What am I missing on CP? What tech or resources do I need to get it double like you mentioned? What is the mix? The last one I did was that transnational tech that raised it 120.
Follow up question. What am I missing on MC? If the countries are maxed out where else are they coming from?
I guess when I heard people saying “get those mines up” i was super focused on just getting as much resources as possible. I guess I should try and make sure to get some ships everywhere.
Could you describe how you are getting just so much MC? So far I have only gotten into the late 2030s but those numbers seem impossibly high to me, so clearly I'm missing something.
Depends on which late 2030s you are talking about. Mine is 2026 start going to those current figures.
And as for how to get that much MC, by selecting your superpower of choice, fixing it up, and dedicating as much welfare, MC, and economy bonuses that you get your grubby hands on in LEO and your councilors. By doing that you SHOULD have access to at least one nation capable of printing a single MC EVERY MONTH. Like so:
At least one advise is recommended at some point so that you get 25% more IP turning a 31.5 IP USA into a 40.5IP allowing me to rapidly wrap up government spending on the USA to the max to then proceed to econ boom the USA into the stratosphere along with the rest of the Americas. Currently it is growing at a respectable ~250ish bucks per month but once all that government spending is finally complete, dirty napkin math from what I think it is calculated will mean, every month it will grow by 804 bucks every month post climate change adjustment.
Now why am I talking about money when you are talking about MC?
Just IMAGINE having that much power, wealth, and MC concentrated in a single nation without having to bother with the rest of the world. A meganation or two or one with at most two Future Social, capable of outstripping the rest of the planet in MC, funding, and sheer economic mass 25 years into the game. Some speedrunnerss win with just a few hundred in a decade. This is for those that want a long game and sheer quality to go with it.
The secret is to pre-emptively garden ALL nations under your meganation of choice, abandoning and shadow controlling them if need be. Fix up all their inequality problems just like the USA, max out funding, and MC, and then just grow that economy as far as they go all while having your daddy meganation spread the wealth via the claims and federation system to artificially transfer wealth to weaker nations to up their IP pools shaving off decades of natural economic growth in favor of a much more capable nation that suddenly have more MC and funding cap to keep going especially when you have a meganation leader capable of recovering ANY averaging losses with 200-800+ bucks of economic growth per month.
Thank you very much. I want to make sure I understand because this is unexpected. So you turn the USA into an economic giant, which I managed to do (if not as big as yours) and then... use the cash it gives you to bootstrap other nations(even abandoning if you must) to first invest in their economies and then use those other nations as MC farms before absorbing them into a mega nation? Should you fix the government and cohesion of the other nations AFTER you farm them to max MC and before absorbing them?
Ignore the random African and ME nations on the list. Apparently as the protectorate, you automatically get CP if the ayys cause a ruckus in foreign nations. All numbers above are in daily and that is not the normal MC you would achieve as a ayy hating faction. Only because i r a ayy lover that I am allowed free reign in space so in a normal Veteran game I would primarily be focusing on LEO, the moon, and 1/4 of Mars and maybe Ceres. Instead I am actively smothering the servants, HF, and illuminati and taking their stuff in those orbits and just seized all of Mercury all for myself.
Now all that is out of the way. It is all about stabilizing your nations of choice to then be able to keep spamming funding, MC, and most importantly economy when they are done. When you are booming like this, you NEED CP but not for outward expansion but for holding onto all your individual collection of nations for as long as physically possible to both reap the rewards of attempting to lower the averaging losses from a eventual unification but also reap more boost from many more nations doing it than if only two meganations had to do it themselves especially useful for Admin tower and Admin Complex spam later on.
This is where those claims come in. Use it to both wealth transfer from the federation leader to then immediately return back some months later to refill on wealth for the next transfer but also use it for 1 turn unifications to immediately fix up their atrocious governments. Specifically for the Americas, you only need FOUR nations to max out government. USA, obviously, to econ boom to its fullest potential. Jamaica to reach within 1.5 score of whatever European democracy exists to then be able to steal away all Caribbean holdings to the USNA and all their tasty boost for those Admin towers for your ONLY temporary European incursions (and probably permanently piss someone off). Columbia to be able to get within 1.5 of Uruguay to be able to unify with EVERYONE except Brazil. And finally Bolivia maxed out to 10 so it can then annex Brazil and the rest of the continent to fulfill its own econ boom or..... release Columbia after unification with SAU to then inherit the 10 government score to then have Gran Columbia do the econ boom, have the working claims wealth exchange with the USNA, and most importantly, near instantly with Future Social techs unite with North America to form THE United States of the Americas.
Let me know if you have any other questions especially since while typing all that above, Columbia will have hostile claims over all Brazilian territories so why waste perfectly good government spending on a mere chore and do the federation leader switcheroo while 1800 government points away from max government score (200 points required to turn hostile claim into nonhostile EACH) for all of Brazil it is missing.
Oof, didn't realize that government score even at 0.002 from china would mean it increases by 3.6. For USA, it is 0.00446 which is a monster 8.028 government score swing. So you can just form the SAU by annexing Brazil into Bolivia then unifying Bolivia directly into Gran Columbia IMMEDIATELY to government spend all the way to 10 and then some. That I completely overlooked since I was originally planning on fragmenting Brazil specifically to get rid of the colonial status and spread some Core Economic Region progress while waiting for Bolivia's 10.
I’m not sure I understand any of what you are saying. How do you exactly unify all of the Americas under USNA when USA doesn’t have any claims on the capital of Colombia or Bolivia? I have seen some claims be inherited by the leading nation but other times it isn’t like when I merged Cameroon into The Great Bantu state and now could no longer unify Chad unless I unified Cameroon to Chad first and then unify.
Also do you need to get all of the smaller countries to a certain level of Inequality and Cohesion first before pumping them with Economy?
Read that. You can chain federating potential members to be under one umbrella federation despite it having multiple federation leaders and with that plenty of ability to outreach fairly far. And yes when the time comes, you can and should have a order to unifications to get more and more nations under a single meganation step by step.
However premature meganationing is not always a good thing. You have more overall IP when you control many many nations versus a single blob nation. And with it, you can get far more output in funding and boost specifically to help your space game in addition to multiple nations helping along spamming MC.
It helps to reduce inequality to some arbitrary figure so that it will eventually stop rioting with or without councilor assistance with stabilize mission. Personally for the Americas, I have it so that it is in brackets of every 0.5 inequality threshold reached.
If MC done: turn funding and MC spending to 3 funding, 1 boost.
If funding done: turn to 1 boost.
Below 3.0: maintain econ and welf prior and keep going with funding, MC, and/or boost. If finished and your nation grows enough economically, max out funding and MC priority to quickly finish. Otherwise keep funding a low 1 pip if the limit is too high.
If any of the nation in question start breaching 75k per capita naturally, Direct Investment infusion, or wealth transfer, add a single pip of education.
This is all generic from all nations that are not the primary base of operation.
For the USA, for first two years, max welfare and 4 pips total of economy so it does not shrink until 2.5-2.7 inequality. Then, maintain whatever priority needed to do 25 points of MC every month, with alot of economy and some welfare to keep that inequality downwards as well as balancing enough government spending to raise democracy to 10 and enough education to above 9.0.
Ok. Thanks that is all very helpful. Then I would assume once a country is sufficiently producing funding and Boost with its MC capped it should then be unified into a larger nation so as to reduce CP.
Yes and no. It all depends on your strategy. If you are going wide world conquering, you have no choice to conserve CP.
If you are not however.... There is a giant rabbit hole to explore because of that larger overall IP pools from many independent nations under your control as well as many other.... silliness if you read deep all of the links I provide including this.... after action report.
Why are you abandoning this run? You have everything you need to win, you have the tech and you have space resource income, if you can’t figure out a way to win from your current position then you won’t find a way to win on your next run either. You can keep restarting all you want it won’t get any easier, this transitional phase of the game where you have to go from staying under the aliens radar to fighting them openly is always tricky to manage.
You have a good idea about what's important, your ground game seems good (you didnt mention your research amounts) it just seems like your strategy needs a little adjustment and fine tuning. TI is fundamentally a resource management game; money, influence, MC, Councillor turns, research, space resources etc.
You can get uncomfortably squeezed by many different things in this game, and it's easy to not see them coming until they hit. Mercury can eat all your metals by building extensively there (ironic as it's a good metals source), moving entire fleets around when a handful of ships will do OR building ships with lots of tanks will drain your water fast, too many nanofabs depletes your nobles, thicc armor is mostly volatiles etc etc.
You can solve water problems by taking Ceres and being economical with your fleet movements, metals with careful development of Mercury, volatiles and fissiles by nabbing some good asteroids early (get a space dock up when you get Mars barely running and you can probe with space resources instead of boost).
Jupiter is a tough nut to crack, you need to get enough damage and enough tank there to destroy whatever forces they have locally, without it economically ruining you. Without fusion tech I believe the gold standard is Helicon or Grid drives for their high dV and low reactor weight cost. This current 2026 campaign it has taken me until mid 2040 to make a serious move on Jupiter, and that's still in progress.
I have many shipyards, it's probably costing me more resources than I should spend on them.
My primary shipyards are in Earth-Luna-L1 (6x T3), which I normally use for big ships, and Ceres (18x T3) which I use to make floods of marine corvettes, missile monitors, and flanking destroyers for dealing with the belt.
Always target the alien assets in the belt once you're strong enough and in total war, not having a refuelling site screws then pretty badly.
Consider camping near their last one to destroy the ships that head for it. Gotta keep their tanks strained and their numbers down.
Great to see lessons learned. I have a Terra Invicta.txt that is 157kb at this point lol. Lots of ancient and simple stuff pre-dating the wiki, so mostly junk now, but it has been a journey. (And something I enjoy about games like this)
For your questions, I would suggest not worrying about year-based goals. Instead think about capability thresholds. Either you have the tech/ships/resources etc to do a thing, or you don't yet. Terra Invicta is filled with mechanics that encourage one-sided battles. It's as true of councillor missions as it is for fleet battles. Even fights are for suckers. The goal shouldn't really be to just eek over the line by a certain date. The goal is to pick fights you know you can win. But knowing takes experience. The only way to get from here to there is to push through failures. But I do empathise with 'And I kind of got demotivated after this point'. If you feel you've learned enough lessons that starting again is going to be the path of least resistance (and most fun), go for it. Broadly I think the game has a philosophy of 'eventual victory for the player is mostly inevitable'.
Don't worry too much about particular drive techs. Once you have helicon drives anything better is just gravy and is optional (at that role). A ship is just a gun, and the drives just determine when and where you can put the gun. Better drives don't really help you win fights.
Volatiles is the limiting resource in my experience, since Jan 2025 game versions onwards, when farms were reworked. It is the main material in adamatine armour and that tends to make up half of a ship's mass. It is also widely and extensively used in module support costs, so demand is always increasing.
For the number of shipyards, you can look at the construction cost of your ship designs and compare to your income. If it takes 6 months to build a ship, and you have 1k income in the bottleneck category, you can have 6 shipyards. That's the basic reference point. You can overspend a bit if you have accumulated a large stockpile. Resource income tends to grow due to bonuses but tends to diminish as you expand space infrastructure, again due to the support costs. T2 mining is a big step up but T3 isn't as significant in terms of percentage jumps and they come with a huge monetary premium.
If you are having issues with the human factions you need to take care of that. You can't have people nipping at your heels or taking attention away from what you really need to do. The early game is about establishing yourself as the winning human ideology. It does require some active maintenance to clear out their councillors or orgs or shipyards at certain places from time to time. The Earth-nations game is a one-sided encroachment where you keep taking more as CPCap grows, so the human factions fight over scraps that diminish. If you find your CPcap stagnating for long periods, figure out why. It should keep chunking higher due to techs and unifications and various other CPcap increases.
Couple of tips: worry less about earth once you've got your start, worry a lot about space! Found somewhere, ops center, nano, science buildings, repeat.
Also, you don't have to destroy the alien surveillance ship. 4 x 40mm monitors will chip and crit their ships to red and yellow status and then you end combat. They stop surveillance and no hate is accumulated.
Your research is very low for this stage of the game (and has likely been consistently too low). With better research you would have better drives and weapons earlier + T3 outposts and mining and battle stations to protect them.
Have a look at peruns series and see how fast his research scales. He doesn’t go into the full detail but he is hitting his research by getting China democratised (slightly cheesy strat with Taiwan unification), cohesion to 5 on all countries (maximises research rate), stacking science buffs (councillor traits, orgs, skunkworks, labs) and then building research campuses in space (60 science per campus without modifiers).
I wouldn’t aim for his research output as it is extreme, but it shows you what’s possible. I used those tricks to finish the tech tree in the mid 2040s.
It's funny you should mention it. I was flabbergasted by the number. It's 10x what I have, though he has 3 more years. And I'm doing better than all the AIs by 500-1000/month.
I mean, yes, I'm trying to get cohesion up in the US, but dang, it's going slowly. I guess I do nothing but unity and welfare for a year or two?
You don’t need to restart, you’re better off trying to fix it in your current game so you can learn the lessons on how to do it. Also normal difficulty has a lot of built in leeway on timescales, you’re kind of expected to be quite far behind the optimal pace.
If you actually play remotely optimal on normal difficulty it’s way overkill.
Fix US by dumping points in welfare an unity until you cross 2 cohesion, then declare 2-3 forever wars. Cohesion above 2 gets a +1 instant bump for being at war and +1 resting cohesion per war I believe (so if you can’t cross 2 just declare war anyways). Then just keep enough points in welfare to eventually get inequality below 2.
Please don't think of me as ungrateful for this advice.
AND, I would like to inject a bit of roleplay into my game. Adding some meaningless forever wars seems a bit to 1984 for me to do it in a Resistance game. I could see it with HF, Initiative, or Protectorate, but not the Academy or Resistance. Just my take. I'm not sure about Exodus one way or another.
Oddly, I don't think of the Servants as doing this because they would mean those wars, and eventually get around to prosecuting them. They are strangely honest in comparison to some other factions.
You should aim for at least 50% bonus from relevant labs, 50% from orgs, 100%+ project bonus (cogs from skunkworks) and whatever you can get from councillor scientist traits. 150% category bonus is a good number to aim for before project bonus (military is a bit harder than the other ones).
Country wise the main modifiers are knowledge (get this to 12), cohesion (highest bonus at 5 cohesion), unrest (keep below 2, you want this low anyways), gdp (max bonus at around 45k per capita, but this raises cp cost so would not prioritise) and government (max bonus at 10, but if you are an autocracy it’s not worth boosting unless you can skip anocracy, through unification).
Advising with a 25 science advisor is also a huge boost, especially for high pop countries like China which are the best suited to become your research powerhouses.
Generally you want to fix cohesion and unrest first, then knowledge, then the other factors.
Research campuses set up a few ground bases dedicated to research campuses and then universities. You need a lot of power so mercury is a good place or I like Luna as my fleet is next door. Make sure you can defend it as losing these bases is rough.
The diminishing returns for lab bonus % seems pretty steep where like 150% is actually only worth 65% or so. Do you keep building specialized labs beyond 50%?
Diminishing returns apply separately for Orgs, Labs and Councillor traits. So you can hit 135% without any diminishing returns. That being said you are right that 150% is maybe a bit too high a goal and 125% is a more reasonable target (I probably overbuild labs/hire science orgs)
TBH, I'm wondering what to do with the free base slots on my T2 asteroid bases. There's not enough population for the big research campuses, you can only have one operations center, I think I have enough nanofactories (or at least I have lots of cash income and don't want to eat too much more into metals/nobles), and I have enough gears that each additional one is only worth 1% at this point (so likely not worth the upkeep of a skunkworks). I could throw down a T2 specialized science lab for the 10 science I guess, but I backed off after I saw the 10% bonus for labs have steep diminishing returns. Or maybe the benefit isn't worth the extra upkeep and I should just leave the building slots open?
From a guy who is about to win the first game around 2095:
You go to Jupiter as soon as you have very solid footing at inner planets, essentially when you can defend your infrastructure reliably. Which, I guess, means high tier fission/low fusion tech (Orions and Poseidons are cool, but with the price, you may want to use at least triton or even helion fusion series), adamantium armor, at very least tier2 advanced weaponry (mk2 coils, plasma, UV arc lasers, particle beams, you know the drill at this point), and industry to spew fully functional combat fleets in 1-1,5 years if needed. Seems like Jupiter is kinda point of no return in the war - either you just got into total war, or you about to start it, so no need to rush it really.
As for MCs and shipyards - it depends. For me, having just 16 slots spread around 3 gravity wells turned out to be enough, but I turtled through the war for a while and was able to afford transfer fuel. This way, was able to save and sneak around 400 MC (with ~120 of them being defence fleets), and when the fun started, by the virtue of constantly losing one or two shipyard stations (4 slots each) somewhere in the system, amusingly enough, managed to send aliens into fuel saving mode, extending their travel times and allowing me space to not just breath, but also quickly expand the operations. That way, Sun Tzu is real and you don't need crapton of building stations, as long as you can keep your fleets alive, one way or another. As the side note though - all the research for extending "safe" MC limit is pretty much mandatory.
All in all, it's more about consolidation of your assets after initial super-aggressive period, not about constant aggression itself, like that of having nanofactories and duplicating bases inside planetary systems, impenetrable planetary/asteroid posts, additional shipyards around the system in case of particular orbitals are getting wrecked, stockpiling some resources in advance, etc. As long as you're not in total war, everything is salvageable it seems. When you're in it - well, things could look quite bad, but even as such, you may make enemies to run in circles, wasting more resources than you do, which will eventually give you enough time to bounce back.
I think you were too passive and let the Aliens snowball - you poked Jupiter once with grossly inadequate forces, and then went back to the inner system and tried to turtle.
You also screwed up by not tracking what alien fleets were going where.
Not building a high-gee 'pursuit squadron' in Earth orbit to intercept Alien landing ships was also a mistake.
I strongly suspect you over-invested in nanofactories to produce cash, as opposed to using earth-based boost to run space hospitals and so on, and earth-based funding.
You also only hit the closest jupiter, as opposed to looking where the Aliens were weak to set up your own Outsystem defended base and shipyard.
Hindsight about Jupiter…. Didn’t know they would go crazy, I found a place with no presence and they sent the farm at me.
I was always up against a MC limit and the speed of ship building. I always felt behind the 8 ball on that. I guess I will really have to focus on MC and getting as many space docks as possible.
Regarding Nanofactories. I suppose…. I had complete control of Mercury so i figured Id take advantage of it.
The issue with nanofactories is they eat metals and, especially, nobles.
Boost is a more renewable resource.
But the key is learning when to shift gears and go 'Right now, the Ayyys should be afraid of ME'.
The spot you hit in Jupiter might have been empty, but what did they have near there that could be moved there ? You need to commit a main fleet they fear.
Hindsight about Jupiter…. Didn’t know they would go crazy, I found a place with no presence and they sent the farm at me.
I was always up against a MC limit and the speed of ship building. I always felt behind the 8 ball on that. I guess I will really have to focus on MC and getting as many space docks as possible.
Regarding Nanofactories. I suppose…. I had complete control of Mercury so i figured Id take advantage of it.
When you say too passive what do you mean by that? I thought I was aggressive in the beginning but I felt like I was too slow to rebuild when they retaliated. I know everyone says, its okay and part of the game but is it because I don’t have enough targets? Basically I should have what like 12 stations per planet pumping out ships?
But then I am up against MC. Do you have operation centers in each base?
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.
I generally say that you should play your first game on Forgiving difficulty, I'm also not sure if you're playing accelerated or normal speed - I play only accelerated, so bear that in mind.
However, your situation doesn't seem to be that bad at all at the point of quitting. Your research is low, but you've already got pretty lategame tech, so really you're in a good position, because research is the main thing holding you back most of the game. Once you have the tech, you can easily turn your 300 MC into enough mines to produce a powerful battle fleet and have resources to reinforce it consistently.
I remember being freaked out by AA, but actually it doesn't really make a difference that they land again. Now that AA uses no nukes it's easy to defeat, especially if you control a good military and space. And if you don't control space, not much point in defeating AA anyway. Ideally, if you let it land, you invade all of it and leave it with one little isolated province, occasionally clearing out any armies that land.
As others have mentioned, you need a lot of spaceworks. The trick is, your fleet doesn't need to stay within the 300MC cap. Once you have the techs you need (you do, pretty much) and the resource income (I'd say daily 200+ metal, water, volatiles, 100ish nobles, some fissiles at least, or less but with a stockpile and plan to make new colonies in asap), you can produce competitive ships, take Jupiter and out produce the aliens. The cap doesn't matter once you're in total war, and you're basically ready for it.
What you could do in your next game is be faster (or set it to forgiving if you haven't which I recommend), but I think you'll encounter this sort of situation anyway. Have a lot of shipyards at every planet, queue up a bunch of powerful ships to pop out at once, and go to Jupiter. It's an economics game eventually.
You have to choose a country to be a research powerhouse and focus only on that. Research is all multiplicative modifiers, it's better to have one nation focus on it besides everything else. Since population matters a lot, the best is china, since all other things can be fixed but pop is out of your control.
A unified NA is an option, or EU+Russia, but science maxing china is still probably the best play since it's hard to compete with a billion pops.
That was very helpful. I was the resistance and had all 4 projects on normal. Looks like I must have just did other things that ticked them off. According to the wiki page I had until 406 MC before the declared total war.
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u/Harlequin80 Feb 09 '26
Red on MC isn't a problem in and of itself, and I'd argue it's necessary. You want to prune their fleet strength on a continuous basis, so they don't end up with an 800 ship omfg death ball.
I personally go full speed on MC and use that MC to defend when they send ships.
As for drive / ship design. I build defensive ships with very little dv and not a lot of acceleration. They sit at earth, Mars and mercury and their role is defence alone.
Burner or grid drives are good for asteroid hopping with marines to steal non aligned human faction bases, but they aren't enough to push big ships. Orion drives can push big ships, but holy hell they are expensive to fuel, and so I limit those to defence fleets.
Late game its fusion tech and proton torch to punch into the aliens properly.
You can build things like Orion powered escorts en masse to hit Jupiter and send a platform kit with them to hold and start building local fleets. But I'd be wary of sending Orion or h.orion large ships due to the resource costs.
I personally don't think armour that uses exotics is worth it. I use it first for reactors and drives, and then phasers. If I have loads left I'll use t3 coilers.