Terra Invicta Dev Diary #6: Councilors

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johnnylump
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Terra Invicta Dev Diary #6: Councilors

Post by johnnylump »

Councilors are your primary proxies on Earth and may also go to space to advance your interests there. Your faction may have up to six at a time.
An early campaign Resistance council
An early campaign Resistance council
faction council.png (325.37 KiB) Viewed 40681 times
Their primary role is to perform Missions on behalf of your faction. Periodically, the game will enter the mission phase, during which all factions will assign their councilors to missions. These missions will be resolved in a sequence over the next few weeks. (We’re currently testing having mission phases twice a month.) While some missions are automatically successful, most are contested and require a success roll. Missions can target nations, control points, space facilities, and other councilors.

Right now we have about 40 or so missions, although each councilor can perform only a subset of those.

An example of a mission would be the “Control Nation” mission, in which a councilor attempts to gain a control point in a nation, which grants access to some of its resources. More on missions in the next post.

You recruit councilors to your faction by spending influence. You’ll have a group of possible recruits to choose from each month. You can also turn councilors from other factions to work for you.

Councilors also have professions, attributes, traits, incomes and orgs.

Professions are akin to a character class in RPGs and other games, though in Terra Invicta they are geared toward navigating the modern global political and economic environment. The councilor’s profession determines the range of councilor attribute scores, what missions the councilor can do, and what range of traits the councilor may have.

The current design has 24 professions, including the Celebrity, the Judge, the Politician, the Investigator, and the Operative.

Many of their attributes determine how good they are at missions. The eight attributes councilors have are:

1) Persuasion
2) Investigation
3) Espionage
4) Command
5) Administration
6) Science
7) Security
8) Loyalty

The first four are typically used in missions – Control Nation, for example, uses Persuasion, while Assassinate Councilor uses Espionage and Assault Alien Asset uses Command.

Persuasion, Command, Administration and Science grant bonuses to your councilor’s influence, ops, money, and research incomes.
Administration also sets how many orgs you can control. Security and Loyalty are defensive stats.

Traits are characteristics of the councilor that provide conditional bonuses to missions, incomes, and occasionally penalties and restrictions to the councilor’s missions and movements. The Demagogue trait, for example, grants an influence income, plus bonus persuasion in nations with low education, but penalizes persuasion in high-education nations.

Organizations, or Orgs, are essentially your councilors’ gear. These are government agencies, NGOs, criminal organizations, and private companies under a given councilor’s control. These are acquired with money, influence and rarely ops (typically for criminal cartels). They provide stat bonuses, incomes, missions, bonuses to research, and bonuses to certain priorities for nations under your control. The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, for example, grants a bonus to faction research, a bonus to the science stat for the individual councilor, and helps your nations develop their military and spaceflight programs more quickly.

Orgs can be transferred between councilors and sometimes stolen by other factions via the Hostile Takeover mission.

Councilors gain experience from successful missions, which can be spent on improving the councilor by improving their attributes, adding missions, or adding or removing certain traits.

Coming Up: Councilor Missions.
Varicen
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #6: Councilors

Post by Varicen »

Have you considered using a more art style of portrait? Similar to Hearts of Iron 4? Also loving the idea of organisations as being RPG like weapons and gear.
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johnnylump
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #6: Councilors

Post by johnnylump »

The portraits are animated; we're going for something that looks like a videoconference when you open up your council UI.
gimrah
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #6: Councilors

Post by gimrah »

"The Demagogue trait, for example, grants an influence income, plus bonus persuasion in nations with low education, but penalizes persuasion in high-education nations"

Love it! I was just thinking as I started reading that I now really want to try a run-through based on the strategy of "what would Trump do?". Then I got to that part and felt happy. I'm assuming, based on that mechanic, that the US does not count as a high education nation?

More generally thanks for the update. It had a been a little while, so good to hear it's still happening.
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johnnylump
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #6: Councilors

Post by johnnylump »

I used a years-of-schooling dataset for education that academic researchers use to fill out the education data, and the U.S. scores among the highest in the world.

Probably a better fit for the situation in the United States is the "Agitator" trait, which grants persuasion bonuses in nations with low cohesion. Probably should add one that confers bonuses on the basis of inequality as well.
gimrah
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #6: Councilors

Post by gimrah »

Heh. Sounds about right. Whereas presumably the agitator dies 10 minutes after getting off the plane in Russia or China.
tarkalak
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #6: Councilors

Post by tarkalak »

You should add that a Demagogue in an impoverished country have higher persuasion. Or in a country that has some sort of crisis.

The real life use case is Hitler. He wasn't very popular until the Great Depression.
thegrey1
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #6: Councilors

Post by thegrey1 »

You should be able to pick your own starting councilors... I tend to find the random ones suck or allow us to Generate our own with the knowledge that you need one able to investigate alien crash sites at the beginning and one that allows you to control nations.
neilwilkes
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #6: Councilors

Post by neilwilkes »

thegrey1 wrote: Fri Oct 07, 2022 3:25 pm You should be able to pick your own starting councilors... I tend to find the random ones suck or allow us to Generate our own with the knowledge that you need one able to investigate alien crash sites at the beginning and one that allows you to control nations.
I'm not at all sure about this idea - yes, it would be great to have the option to state preferences/likelihood of councillor skill sets - think in terms of asking to see CV's - but not to be able to detail specifics as this would work against you as the AI would have the same options....and that could be well dodgy.
You can always dismiss the early ones at first opportunity too.....
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