Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

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johnnylump
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Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

Post by johnnylump »

This is a rough roadmap for what we’ve got planned for Terra Invicta in EA and beyond. This is hugely subject to change based on player feedback and our own judgment, so don’t regard any of this as a promise, just a plan as it exists. We hope that during EA you’ll watch the game get better and better as we work toward a 1.0 release.

• Scenario
- We’re planning to work on what we’re calling a “2070” scenario during EA. This is essentially a start for players who want to play with a (smallish) space program up-and-running from the get-go. This will show up in a regular update of the game at some point. (See below for the status of the Cold War and Foothold scenarios.) BEN IS WORKING ON THIS BUT WE NEED TO UPDATE THE WORLD MAP BEFORE HE CAN FINISH

• General UI
- Camera operation will get a look. Right now the UI tries to helpfully focus/zoom/pop an information panel when you click something. Sometimes that’s not desired. We’ll look at making mouse-camera interactions consistent so you can, say, get the information panel without moving your camera. DONE, but open to additional suggestions.
-Notification controls. There are a few of these already, but the game generally is coded for notifications pop an alert, add info to the top-center horizontal feed, or just add something to the left-side vertical newsfeed. We remain hopeful we can reach player consensus on what specific events belong where but we’ll look at adding specific controls for alert priority if we can’t. DONE.
- We will look at scaling UIs for greater accessibility and better Deck support. This may not be trivial to pull off; there’s a lot of information to present. FIRST PASS DONE.

• Nations
- Numeric breakdowns of what’s changing certain nation values. Along the lines of “In the last month, GDP in Mexico went up due to the Economy priority by $20M, went down due to environmental damage by $3M, and down by $5M due to warfare.”
- Longer term, if we can keep it performant, we’ll record interesting national data for long term performance reviews.
- Also this kind of feedback for climate change values.

• Nation Policies
- Add new major policies for nations:
- Close Borders. Massive hit to economy. Defense bonus. Severely limits which councilors can visit. Essentially how North Korea is now.
- Mobilization. Significant hit to economy, faster build army and military priority fulfillment.
- Military Doctrine

• Army Warfare
- Army manual pathing and/or destination selection that allows for multiple steps. DONE
- A UI breakdown for army combat about all the modifiers going to a battle. DONE.
- We’ll test an “annex region” option during warfare. This will be a long-duration operation by an army to transfer a claimed and occupied region to its home nation. Right now armies capture a capital and claimed territory transfers as a part of a regime change. This is an alternative mechanism to slowly transfer territory in what is otherwise a stalemate. DONE, considering additional mechanic that lets you free regions you don't have a claim on into new nations.
- AI needs to mass multiple armies before an offensive if possible

• Space Combat
- AI that works better towards flanks and protects its own flanks better. AI that uses standoff tactics on stations. Greater preference for self-preservation. IN PROGRESS.
- Controls for ships to stay in formation with other ships. DONE
- Group commands. DONE
- A “Pincer” pre-combat option (or some other name like that). Right now, the way to engage fleets that have more Delta-V than you do, and don’t want to fight, is to send two fleets at once so they are forced to engage the second one. We’ll simplify that by letting you split your fleet as the combat starts; the enemy will be forced to fight the weaker of your two fleets. Alternately, an envelop function that splits yours into multiple fleets to achieve the same goal (a bit more realistic). DONE.

• Habs
- A “duplicate hab design” button. This will be limited in some ways because habs in different locations have different power production and requirements. DONE.
- Shipyards need some work; the higher-tier shipyards aren’t helpful enough. DONE.
- Need to review antimatter mining. It will never be that much – there is very very little natural antimatter created in the Solar System. DONE.
- De-decommission button if no time has passed.
- Little base models with some info when you zoom in enough. DONE.
- Under consideration: T3 and possibly T2 administration modules. Basically offices that improve output of a hab, increase population, and increase control point cap if orbiting Earth. Also possibly a T3 residential module. DONE.
- Hab loyalty mechanic.
- A sortable spreadsheet of your habs

• Modding
- Our current modding setup doesn’t allow you to add or substitute new text in easily. We’re planning to fix this. DONE.
- Down the road we’ll start conversing with modders about how we can open up aspects of TI better for modding – like exposing a constant in code to config.

• Research UI
- Manual filters to turn off projects you don't want. DONE

• Ship designer and Fleets UI
- Manual filters to turn off ship parts you don't want. DONE
- Better organization, filtering and sorting in the Fleets UI

• Intel UI
- faction -> tech -> add marker whether we know it or not for steal targets.
- list of all your various "effects"

• Startup options
- Some control of your initial councilors' professions. 0.3.101
- Difficulty fine tuning. FIRST PASS DONE 0.3.106
- Global research speed multiplier 0.3.101
- Initial CP Cap settings. 0.3.101

• Space Exploration / Navigation
- Aerocapture. STARTED.
- Gravity-assist trajectories
- Allow fleets to abort planned trajectories while waiting for their launch window. DONE.
- Ship propellant-sharing, so they can refuel each other. This should enable tanker-type ship designs. DONE.
- Large comets. Need VFX. STARTED.
- Allow fleets to decide not to complete intercepted fleet's trajectory if possible. STARTED.
- Allow creation of warnings that an enemy fleet is getting close. IN 0.3.77.
- 2 Hab Site space bodies, like Vesta and a few others. IN 0.3.77.
- Supermax solar system with a buncha more bodies.

• Councilors
- We’re going to explore hard stat caps for various councilor classes (below 25) as a balancing mechanism and to make you think a little harder about who you recruit.
- Invest in your orgs to upgrade them
- ORGanizer table UI where you can compare all your orgs.
- Traits or other mechanisms that can lower loyalty of councilors. TRAITS IN 0.3.77.

• AI
- The late-game human AI needs to get better at building and utilizing fleets and pursuing its victory conditions.
- AI peacemaking will get a look. Interstate wars tend to persist longer than they need to.
- Human hab AI building still needs some work, particularly with regard to non-required modules. We’ve also seen successful players fill low earth orbits with stations to gain the Earth bonuses. The AI doesn’t do this nearly as much as we’d like. IN PROGRESS.
- AI challenging for Mercury, Jovian moons, and using assault more in general.
- Late game alien threat needs improvements.

• Late-Game Councilor Management
- Considering some options here, like granting some councilors autonomy to perform some limited range of defensive and support missions, or reducing the turn frequency a second time. IN 0.3.77.

• Translations
- The game has a few novels worth of text, and our localization is rough in places. This is an iterative process, and it will get better.

• Performance
- The main remaining problem is that the late-game AI has a lot to do and sometimes the game can get pretty choppy while it is considering its options. This includes designing and building ships, organizing fleets and managing orgs.
- We made a lot of progress with combat and Earth-UI-related performance issues shortly before release. There might be some UI improvements we can still manage.
- There are some large summary UIs (research and nations in particular) that are slow to load.

• Content
- More event/mission/objective illustrations are on the way
- More strategy layer music tracks are in production. DONE.
- Additional faction leader voice files. DONE

• Probably post-EA: the Cold War and Foothold (far-future) scenarios
- These may not be available during the EA period. We’d like to add some additional features to Terra Invicta to better support these, like wet-naval warfare and nation-like polities in space. These are quite a bit more complex to add than some of the things we’ve listed above, so we’ll need to assess what it will take to develop these. Stay tuned.

This is all in addition to the bugfixing and balancing we’ll be doing.
neilwilkes
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Re: Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

Post by neilwilkes »

It's going to be one heck of a ride, and I for one am really happy to be even a small little part of it.
Apollo
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Re: Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

Post by Apollo »

These are a lot of changes and will require a lot of work
I am enjoying the game now as it is, have not run into any problems yet
Just one small step for the tutorial: I thought I need to surveil the region in France where the alien ship crash landed but instead I needed to investigate the alien presence there
neilwilkes
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Re: Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

Post by neilwilkes »

Apollo wrote: Wed Nov 09, 2022 8:17 pm These are a lot of changes and will require a lot of work
I am enjoying the game now as it is, have not run into any problems yet
Just one small step for the tutorial: I thought I need to surveil the region in France where the alien ship crash landed but instead I needed to investigate the alien presence there
I find it best to do both if there are Councillors available to do this.
I usually (at this point, anyway - everything is subject to reassessment) send in one to survey the crash site and another to surveil for stuff.
Then I can usually guarantee at least one 'Attack Alien Asset' mission, whereas if I only investigate the site there is often nothing detected to attack, so that wastes another mission cycle looking.
neilwilkes
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Re: Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

Post by neilwilkes »

The biggest thing for me right now is to get starting councillors who are at least actually useful characters, capable of doing some basic stuff (Control Nation / Public Campaign etc) and not about to drop dead on me through the slow creep of Eld.
Seriously, trying to start a new campaign because 0.43 is so different in crucial ways I find myself now well & truly hobbled in my previous campaign with no way back because things were done that would simply not get done now.
But I digress.

5 starts so far, each time I get a scientist type in their late 40's and a rather feeble 'campaigner' type in their 50's with stats at 6 at the best so far on anything. I am not asking for Einstein, Kissinger & Arnie out of the gate - but there really needs to be a way to at least ask for CV's to be submitted rather than these blind hires.
It may even be interesting/better to have NO startup councillors and have to hire from the Pool at Turn 1.

EDIT.
Can I ask why some keep turning up? As 'Humanity First' I can pretty much guarantee that one starting councillor will be a British Scientist in their mid to late 40's, and the second will be a far eastern Publicist/Campaigner/Persuader type in their 50's. Almost every time.
Why?
DarthVicious
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Re: Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

Post by DarthVicious »

Some general stuff that would make the game less tedious would be ...

- open ended councilor missions, such as economic improvement, welfare programs, education drives where you dont have to re assign missions every two weeks. Some automation around public campaigns, unrest, defend interests would be nice.

- As for fleet tactical micro, it would be nice to get prompts for your fleet as to whether it should intercept an enemy fleet, defend a local station or orbit. Not necessarily full automation, but something more in the way of a reminder that you can approve or deny. (Battlegroup Earth would like to relocate to Orbital Ring 3 to intercept Victor-33 which will arrive in 3 days. Do you approve?).
- Or the ability to put a fleet on a 'standby' or 'patrol' mode to autorespond to events in a hub. Something akin to distant universe.

It would be nice (probably too big an ask) to implement actual ground combat on other planets. Like Mars. So you could raise armies and fight for territories to expand your bases. Maybe even have an alien presence on those planets to compete with.

Probably have corporations establish independent mining operations that you would influence to your cause much like you do with earth nations. So instead of directly establishing your own bases, you would co-opt bases belonging to national or corporate actors.

Lastly, one of the things that makes the game rather dead or lifeless is that there are no people in the game other than your councillors and some population numbers. If the game included generic pops or independent actors (base commanders, ships captains, scientists, politicians, administrators, etc) then it might feel a little more like a living world/universe.
Richard Baxton held off four waves of mind worms. We immediately purchased his identity manifests and repackaged him into the Recon Rover Rick character. People need heroes. They don't need to know he died clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy.
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johnnylump
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Re: Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

Post by johnnylump »

- As for fleet tactical micro, it would be nice to get prompts for your fleet as to whether it should intercept an enemy fleet, defend a local station or orbit. Not necessarily full automation, but something more in the way of a reminder that you can approve or deny. (Battlegroup Earth would like to relocate to Orbital Ring 3 to intercept Victor-33 which will arrive in 3 days. Do you approve?).
- Or the ability to put a fleet on a 'standby' or 'patrol' mode to autorespond to events in a hub. Something akin to distant universe.
There's a reason that we didn't do this.

If you're trying to simulate real propulsion characteristics like we are, interceptions of one possibly accelerating object by another accelerating object are hard. As in, lots and lots of math hard and your framerate goes to something around 0 if you want the game to figure it out while you are passively running time. All trajectory calculations in TI are carefully on-demand; either you or the AI have to specifically ask for them for a specific origin and specific destination. These calculations can't be offloaded while the game runs because they are dependent on a very specific set of numbers of a given moment in time; those numbers change and are updated every single frame in the game. Launch windows open and close. You'd probably want some control of how much DV you burn before an interception so you are able to maneuver in combat. You'll also want the game to leave you enough DV to get back home.

If we've got a fleet on patrol to automatically intercept any bad guys, the computer would have to check every incoming bad guy periodically to see if you are capable of intercepting it. If we set "periodically" to too wide a step so your framerate is merely choppy, the incoming bad guy will skip right through your intercept window. Too short a step and we've got 80 fleets checking 80 fleets every few frames and you're treated to the sound of your CPU fans spinning up but no action on your screen.

So, no, your computer can't handle it the way you are envisioning. But, yes, it would help both the player and AI if something like this existed. We've talked about other ways to try to help with this, like letting you set an pause-alarm when a fleet is a certain distance/time away, and you can try an intercept then. The problem there is that your ability to intercept is highly dependent on your propulsion system and DV; 200,000 km may be the exactly correct for one setup but it's 10,000 km for another.
DarthVicious
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Re: Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

Post by DarthVicious »

Thank you for the detailed response.

The point would not be to do a mid transit intercept as such, but to remind the player to reposition ships to the intended target (and defend it). Sorry for explaining it badly. Regardless I am happy that you are considering ways to address this.

Even an enhancement of the fleet page to allow for filtering and sorting would be helpful. I know those things are coming though. :)
Richard Baxton held off four waves of mind worms. We immediately purchased his identity manifests and repackaged him into the Recon Rover Rick character. People need heroes. They don't need to know he died clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy.
Maty83
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Re: Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

Post by Maty83 »

All of these look great. Just a note about the councillor hard-caps: These could pair well with traits too. Your councillor has a base stat line, where some stats can't go above 'x' naturally through level-ups, but with traits and orgs can go up to 'y' value (Maybe say a Judge can get PER of 20 as the natural cap, but orgs can get it to 25). If you then have more traits for councillors, it would make sense to invest in some which increase the natural cap rather than a similar trait which increases the stat itself (Where you can only gain one of the two).
frostyplanet
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Re: Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

Post by frostyplanet »

It's there linux native build on the road map ?

Using proton to run on linux is slow, and have memory management issue.
Zanotirn
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Re: Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

Post by Zanotirn »

On the councillor hard caps I hope they are not as strict as the starting stats are. What I mean is that skills a person currently has are determined by what they have been doing over the last years. So the current ranges work fine. But a tech tycoon might actually had been a terrific journalist if they hadn't chosen a more exciting job, or a politician may have been a great hacker in their teens till circumstances threw them into politics - so basically people's potential shouldn't be determined solely by their current occupation. Or to put it differently, not many professors will have relevant experience in military operations, but it doesn't mean that being a professor automatically means that a person won't be able to fully develop their military command skills if circumstances demanded.

At the very least the game should e.g. randomly roll for 0-2 other professions the person has good potential in, and use the highest stat caps from all. Or randomly increase the caps in 1-2 skills beyond profession caps.
Arrowline
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Re: Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

Post by Arrowline »

Regarding skill hard caps - definitely they can somewhat break the game for unexperienced players, and frustrate some of them.

Probably there is a softer solution, like:
1. Make each other point invested in a certain skill progressively more expensive. It is easy to become an amateur, hard to become a high-skilled professional.
2. Make each other consecutive point invested into a councilor more expensive. A player can decide this way, should they build a jack-of-all-trades character or a specialized professional.
3. Let a player select one or two skills as a character 'specialization' and make them less expensive to advance, others - more expensive to advance. That guy who was born strong can become the Hulk or Arnold Schwarzenegger a bit easier than a guy who was born frail but smart as Steven Hawking.
Last edited by Arrowline on Fri Jan 27, 2023 8:27 am, edited 2 times in total.
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johnnylump
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Re: Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

Post by johnnylump »

frostyplanet wrote: Sat Jan 14, 2023 1:55 am It's there linux native build on the road map ?

Using proton to run on linux is slow, and have memory management issue.

We are not planning a separate Linux release. We experimented with one versus Proton and found Proton was much more stable.
Beanstalk
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Re: Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

Post by Beanstalk »

After over a year of EA, perhaps an update for the roadmap is in order? As in, mark those that have been completed, update those that have changed or decided against, add any new ones that are now being planned?
PAwleus
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Re: Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

Post by PAwleus »

Don't you see that it is being updated? Eg. there are clearly changes marked from 0.3.106, aren't they? I agree that it would be nice if at least all DONE from now on had game versions indicated with them.
Beanstalk
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Re: Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

Post by Beanstalk »

Either this was added after I made my post, or I need new glasses. :?

I do suggest adding a "last updated on xxx" line.
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johnnylump
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Re: Terra Invicta Roadmap for EA and beyond

Post by johnnylump »

We're working on what we're calling our 0.4 builds with some significant feature adds. Updating with things as they go in over in this thread
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=29923
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