I haven't played in a while, then saw that there were a bunch of negative reviews AND a bunch of patches since I last played... so I figured I'd see if there's been any negative developments that would explain it.

Not really. It seems there were a bunch of new players who appear to not have understood what they were buying and, unfortunately for them, put too much time into it to get a refund. Well I'm here to save you from that fate - by telling you exactly what Terra Invicta is!

The game is an acquired taste. Like scotch. And, just like scotch, it will burn going down at first... until it gets sweet when you really get into it... until eventually it just poisons you altogether and you swear you'll never touch the stuff again.... and then, a week or month or year later, you start it up again.

Terra Invicta is an extremely nerdy game. Not nerdy like "I like to play videogames" nerdy. Terra Invicta is the best attempt ever made to create a scientifically-accurate alien invasion simulator.

And, if that wasn't ambitious enough, it's basically three different games in one: a space combat sim, a space war 4x and a deep-state-conspiracy strategy game.

Surprisingly - these three games actually interact pretty well most of the time... especially after some recent QOL improvements.

The most annoying thing is - when you've got one or two of the three down pat - they become tedious chores while you try to focus on the other one. So the conspiracy on Earth game gets boring once you've already conquered most/all of the world... and space combat can get tedious when you've got an unbeatable fleet... which just leaves the 4x logistics of getting your little metal airpockets of death several Astronomical Units away from Earth to the endgame.

What's going on
They're an unimaginably-advanced civilization that can break laws of physics we don't even know exist. You're a naked monkey who just split the atom and can't stop arguing over bananas with all the other monkeys. Oh yeah and they can do mind control.

Even on normal difficulty, you are near-hopelessly outmatched. Your one saving grace is the aliens have a limited throughput with their invasion pipeline and a limited population, so you can use home ground advantage to hopefully survive long enough to do enough research you need so you can fight back with tech they'll take seriously.

Space Combat
And that tech will (mostly) follow the laws of physics. Meaning that, like actual theoretical space drives proposed IRL, most of them will suck and be of little-to-no use in combat. And combat will also follow the laws of physics, so be prepared to watch in horror as your basic-fission-drive monkey ships get rekt because the enemy can literally dodge bullets with fusion drives, acrobatically flying circles around your fleet. If you want to survive the initial invasion, you need to outnumber the hell out of the enemy and overwhelm their point-defense with clouds of missiles.

Once you get dreadnoughts with (EDIT: BETTER ADVICE) good fusion drives, 66 units of armor at the front, a spinal coilgun, 2x large coils and medium UV phaser batteries... the aliens are basically toast. I just fought outnumbered 10 to one and the only thing that killed me was the game crashing (probably because RAM and crappy laptop).

The 4x strategy
As Sseth once said, 4x stands for: eXplore, eXpand and eXterminate all Xenos.

If the aliens could bring whole ships to the Sol system, you'd be screwed. But, as it stands, they have to build their invasion fleet using local materials... which gives you an opportunity to learn from them and respond in kind.

But that requires a LOT of raw materials. Colonizing Mars is just the start... in order to succeed, you'll need to grab valuable real estate in Sol's asteroid belt (Ceres is always popular).

Like I said, the drives (mostly) follow the laws of physics, so they WILL SUCK. The best drives in the early game require way too much Volatiles (jet fuel) or fissiles (nuke sauce) to be practical.

Several of the negative reviews mentioned this facet of the game... but, if you're a giant nerd like me, this is a positive. Think less Star Trek and more The Expanse. Most of the best drives are fusion-based and run on hydrogen.

The best drive in the game runs on antimatter, which comes with a breathtakingly-obscene logistics profile... as in, in order to make the stuff, you have to dedicate the resource equivalent of the total production of several colonies to produce anything more than - I ♥♥♥♥ you not - "femtograms" of antimatter. But, if you got it, then you've pretty much won the logistics war and it's all over but the alien crying.

The worst part about the 4x game is that the human-faction AI is totally incompetent at it. You can expect to suffer the brunt of the invasion yourself because, despite improvements since I last played, the AI is still totally hopeless at it.

The world conspiracy sim
So there are 8 different factions in-game and all of them, with one exception, have pretty solid backstories + raisons d'etre. You don't play as a country. You play as a secret conspiracy of unelected Deep State bureaucrats who wear countries like skinsuits and play politicians like sock puppets.

It does get a little boring once you've beaten it, but the ground game is easily the best part of Terra Invicta AND recent QOL features include an "automatic mission" button so you don't have to babysit your conspiracy council when the time comes. And this part of the game is, unfortunately, the most realistic part of Terra Invicta.

To give you the best idea of what that part of the game is like, here's what my recent Academy playthrough was like:

Academy wants to make peace with the aliens, which involves first studying them, then communicating with them and then threatening them with xenocide so they come to the negotiating table. But, in order for that to work, you need to get the vast majority of the human race under your thumb so you can credibly claim to speak for the whole species.

So I set about creating a world government by first starting in France, then making the EU into a super-state that totally crushed Brexit and dominated the UK... then I crushed Russia and dragged them in too... then allying with China, who proceeded to conquer everything east of India into the Pan-Asian Combine (democracy score= ZERO)... I then took India and Pakistan over and made them go to war with each other, so I could make an Indian super-state without the risk of starting a nuclear war (because I CONTROLLED BOTH SIDES).

I grabbed the US, then used it to conquer Canada and Mexico... then with my 4 massive super-states proceeded to crush every independent nation in Latin America and Africa into the South American Union and the African Union, respectively. Everything else ended up in the Sunni Calphate... (oof! Sorry, Israel! Hope they're treating you OK!). In the end, every nation on the planet was part of the European Union's federation.

But I still couldn't hold on to enough of these states to get the win condition because my management capacity wasn't high enough.

And then I realized what my problem was: the population was too high and GDP was too high - so the people were too free and prosperous to be controlled. I needed to sabotage the global economy to crush the will of recalcitrant western capitalists and destroy the nuclear family, or I'd never be able to exert enough control to dominate the world. So I intentionally tanked every Western economy, while turning the Welfare dial up to max everywhere. The standard of living cratered and so did the population, as the wilting flower of liberty took more lives from suicide, drug abuse and hopelessness than the aliens ever would have.

And, with that, I was finally able to bring Earth under the benevolent rule of a conspiracy of 6 billionaire socialists in order to make peace and end the alien threat.

10/10 would George Soros again