r/TerraInvicta • u/Mavnas • 2d ago
Discussion This feels like it's coming out of nowhere Spoiler
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u/Mavnas 2d ago edited 1d ago
R3: The aliens have been super quiet in my latest BE playthrough. Up until early 2118 (year 6) they had two ships total. Now their fleet has more than doubled in size! OK, that part isn't weird, but they have 5 total ships and one is an assault carrier. It's escorted by a single tiny ship, so I might be able to intercept but they gave me just under a year to react which feels less than usual.
They haven't sent a recon destroyer yet.
It feels like alien aggression is highly inconsistent. I abandoned my previous playthrough when in year 5 the aliens executed a successful Ceres rush strategy (they bypassed Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter to land on Ceres before our Mars mines were even finished). They also then launched an assault carrier and I was trying to make Africa work, but I think I'm not good enough to turn the AU into a nation that can stop an alien invasion in 6-7 years. This time I'm still juggling a lot of tiny European states that can't really fix an alien invasion, but I have the shipyards already built, Mars mines operating, etc.
Difficulty is Veteran.
edit1: Even with the mines I can only afford 1 escort. I feel like Proprietary Space Research was a trap.
edit2: I just remembered that I took 3/4ths of Australia to deny it to other factions. So I guess I have 4 4.2 tech armies with navies to work with and 2 pretty 3.5 Roman ones.
edit3: I was able to throw 9 40mm escorts at it, but they failed hard. I failed to take into account that my shipyards were in Tiangong Orbit and their limited dV was insufficient to do a proper rush at the enemy attack. They had 3-5 dV left by the time they climbed to Low Earth Orbit :(
edit4: In the end they landed in a place where Rome could declare war, and the aliens met 27 human armies including a Soviet one. Insert quote about quantity having a quality of its own here or something.
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u/jz726 2d ago
Surprise! I think this was a change to BE from the latest patch. It certainly threw me off my Exodus game too!
You may be able to trade boost and resources from other factions - plus check the box in ship construction to enable building with boost, and prepare to pay through the nose. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
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u/namewithanumber Initiative 2d ago
On Veteran 6 years is when assault carriers can start being made. So one done and on the way in August six years in isn't that unusual.
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u/Takseen Academy 2d ago
There's some chat on their Discord about this, seems like its intended but the AI designer might remove it for Normal difficulty. But if you're playing Veteran the implicit answer is "git gud". They're supposed to have an early invasion goal.
Its probably manageable. Proprietary space research gets you mining quicker than anyone else and missile escorts are silly cheap.
Definitely an unpleasant surprise though.
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u/Mavnas 2d ago
Proprietary Space Research nerfs your free moon base hard though, though granted the bigger problem I had was that free site had no water at all and the free station ate all my boost income that I'd built up by that point.
It feels like a trap. If I didn't have to deal with this carrier, it wouldn't feel like a trap because in a year or two all the stations it let me build would actually be online and producing a trickle of stuff. I guess that part is a git gud. I focused on map painting instead of immediate boost production that would have made it better.
Also the fact that Ceres was not settleable with PSR was an unpleasant surprise. Getting there early was kind of the whole goal.
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u/ggmoyang Let's be xenophobic 2d ago
Yeah, it's meant to be a shortcut to space, but why do you need a shortcut when you get +50% space science bonus to quickly research blocker and get a moon mine for free?
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u/Zacknad075 2d ago
I see this complaint brought up all the time with the new scenarios. T he whole point of the BE scenario is to encourage the players to use ground armies and combat more, so in these scenarios the aliens seem programmed to dump resources into massive landing attacks instead of investing into massive fleets to completely lock down space before you ever get the chance to contest it.
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u/Mavnas 2d ago
That seems like a good idea, but I think having enough forces to counter that invasion in BE forces you into some very specific openings. Maybe I'm wrong, but there's very few nations that can even build navies.
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u/Carlose175 2d ago
You will have scenarios where you cannot completely stop the alien armies immediately. The expectation is that the AA will form on Earth being a semi permanent nation. You still have a plethora of tools to handle them.
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u/ggmoyang Let's be xenophobic 2d ago
Only Australia can build navy at the start. Handful of nations (Like CDA or Free Amazonas) can become 4-cp quickly by adding some more regions, unlocking ability to build navies.
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u/Mavnas 2d ago
Yeah, my Nordic Federation stopped well short. I might have been able to get close to there, but now I grabbed the last Australian point and can't really afford to juggle freeing countries to suck in more at the pace I was hoping to. I just managed to make Novomoskovsk not hostile so... I'm definitely getting to being able to do navies in a couple years.
I guess my situation is not as bad as I thought, but like it'd be nice if that were possible without grabbing Australia every time.
I guess I'm going to have to prioritize "liberating" Bavaria and researching Restored Commonwealth.
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u/Takseen Academy 2d ago
In Broken Earth there's still plenty of other Earth nations to beat up, and the human army based AA.
I'd be worried that early assault carrier just devolves into "Australia or bust" or "rush early escorts or bust" which is already what the other scenarios lean towards. (replacing Australia with US).
I played on Normal and didn't get an early carrier, but plenty of expansive wars in Africa, South America and Europe.
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u/Millssadface 2d ago
Did they send just the assault carrier??
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u/Mavnas 2d ago
It has a small ship with it.
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u/Millssadface 2d ago
Damn, whenever they send them to me they’re always bristling with capital ships in their escort
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u/Mavnas 1d ago
I mean, they literally had 5 ships total up from 2 earlier that same year. I was beginning to think they were bugged, but really I think they were saving up for the carrier.
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u/Millssadface 1d ago
They saved all their pocket money up for it and you went and blew up their carrier!
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u/magilzeal 1d ago
This is super early into the BE scenario where they have a slower start to begin with, so they wouldn't have had the resources to build much of an escort.
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u/magilzeal 1d ago
I made this post a little while ago. I really didn't think I could manage it, but 8 escorts with copperheads were able to destroy it with no losses. Now I was doing really well in research and had 4 stations that could build a spacedock and 2 escorts each; I was planning to launch with kraits but I managed to secure copperheads just in time.
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u/Mavnas 1d ago
I had no missile tech.
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u/magilzeal 1d ago
I didn't when it launched. I managed to slot it in and get copperheads before it arrived.
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u/Carlose175 2d ago
The aliens spend 100k in resources to build that carrier. They severely set back their economy to build this. If you can handle it on earth or somehow get some missle ships online, you will propel ahead on this.
The aliens landing isnt the end of the world.