Thoughts on miltech/nation investment

[bearmans]

Obligatory, but I've really been enjoying the game so far, thanks so much for all your hard work. <3

I've played about 80 hours of the game so far; one thing that feels off to me has been nation investment in miltech and some other maybe-related details on how nation investment works. The basic problem is that miltech requires massive, massive investment by a nation in order to meaningfully increase, on the order of years of doing almost nothing but military investment to make meaningful gains, even for massive GDP nations. This kind of "feels" wrong to me, since military sophistication at least in the context of Terra Invicta seems to be mostly based on the technological side (after all, global techs are what increase the cap).

The individual status of the nation's miltech at the open also ends up being very significant. The US starts at 4.7 and smaller, weaker nations start as low as 3.0, which is a gap that's functionally impossible to close. Small nations military is essentially pointless, and while I think on some level that's "the point" it feels bad that those nations won't ever be even slightly competitive or have any role to even possibly play in fighting off alien ground units. The level of sophistication of humanity's space forces goes up astronomically over the course of ~10 years in this game, but the ground forces probably won't. The AI as well, even when it plays a strong ground war game, doesn't optimize for military development nearly enough to end up being competitive with a min-maxing player, and military tech level matters quite a lot for ground war outcome.

Bit of a tangent, but another very weird behavior is how miltech level merges when nations unify. A good example of this that I played was when I had the US at 6.1 and merged it with Canada (which was somewhere in the 4s). Canada had 0 armies and the US had 6, and yet upon merging the two nations suddenly the US's 6 invasion era armies all instantly fell to mid-robotics era. I think that pretty clearly doesn't make much sense...

I think it might be better to change the military nation-investment part into something like "military effectiveness" which would be some kind of multiplier for how the forces perform and have a threshold based on other nation stats like the knowledge/corruption/GDP per capita and number of armies they're fielding. Then have a separate military tech score that's just based on a combination of global techs with "threshold" investments the same way as build army/nuke/orbital defense that only need to be cleared once to increase the nation's "military era". In my mind that ends up both making more sense and would probably feel better to play!

That's my thoughts for now, I'll probably have more feedback as I keep playing, thanks for reading.

[KinSeth2]

I've played about 80 hours of the game so far; one thing that feels off to me has been nation investment in miltech and some other maybe-related details on how nation investment works. The basic problem is that miltech requires massive, massive investment by a nation in order to meaningfully increase, on the order of years of doing almost nothing but military investment to make meaningful gains, even for massive GDP nations. This kind of "feels" wrong to me, since military sophistication at least in the context of Terra Invicta seems to be mostly based on the technological side (after all, global techs are what increase the cap).

I could see militech increase with tech possibly, however just because you have the tech to be strong, doesn't mean you have the infrastructure. The US military is'nt powerful because it's technologically ahead of everyone. It is, but the reason it's strong is because it's HUGE and has a century of literally building up to expand the globe to the point the pentagon itself hasn't even remotely passed an audit of even a simple question like "how many bases do you have?". (Look it up)

Our stuff is advanced, but we have more aircraft carriers and naval vessels than the rest of the world combined, and we are not that much more advanced than the EU countries and NATO itself. That said, this is also represented in Build Army/ Build Navy. =I think a middle ground is likely best, possibly capping militech progression with "Advancement" of the country, as well as giving a small militech boost from knowledge. Of course, that will just make knowledge even better of a stat, so then you have balance issues.

Overall, I think from a gameplay standpoint it's fine, standing as a representation of applying technology to military matters. Though perhaps someone smarter than I can find a better solution.

Bit of a tangent, but another very weird behavior is how miltech level merges when nations unify. A good example of this that I played was when I had the US at 6.1 and merged it with Canada (which was somewhere in the 4s). Canada had 0 armies and the US had 6, and yet upon merging the two nations suddenly the US's 6 invasion era armies all instantly fell to mid-robotics era. I think that pretty clearly doesn't make much sense...

Military merging only happens when peacefully merging. To avoid it, step on canada instead.

I think it might be better to change the military nation-investment part into something like "military effectiveness" which would be some kind of multiplier for how the forces perform and have a threshold based on other nation stats like the knowledge/corruption/GDP per capita and number of armies they're fielding. Then have a separate military tech score that's just based on a combination of global techs with "threshold" investments the same way as build army/nuke/orbital defense that only need to be cleared once to increase the nation's "military era". In my mind that ends up both making more sense and would probably feel better to play!

Yeah, again though, knowledge is already a great stat to invest into. At that point you are just making it a max out in all circumstances. Personally, I thiink that would get stale and kill a level of the geopolitical layer of the game.

[bane]

Two thoughts:

Miltech is obviously an abstraction of logistic, organization, but also technology. The US military logistics is the most advanced in the world -- by far. Did you know that the US employs 3M people in military logistics alone?

However, the bigger issue is probably that Terra Invicta allows you to research Phase Array Lasers (end game laser tech), while your "miltech" can remain at 3.0. Gameplay-wise having a miltech of 3.0 is not advisable but technically, it is possible, since the "tech tree" is not connected to "miltech".

Therefore, the "miltech" probably needs to go away -- and in turn, we need a "land, air and naval warfare tech tree".

[ecpgieicg]

The US starts at 4.7 and smaller, weaker nations start as low as 3.0, which is a gap that's functionally impossible to close.

That's not quite true. The high population countries -- once stablized -- will quite readily outpace the developed but small population countries. With 80hr, you should really have already seen that in your game with neutral China's miltech past 4 and overall power progressing well before AI factions can go near it or alien invasion arrives. With other regions, well, you have to stablize them first.

So, trust the game design for now. Miltech is only one piece of the nation development logic. Keep exploring. There is more to see.

Or, don't explore it. As you have done, set aside the whole nation building aspect and focus on other parts of the game until later. Other parts of the game can be fun too. The same applies to miltech though -- you may come back thinking differently.

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I think it might be better to change the military nation-investment part into something like "military effectiveness"

Miltech just abstractly represents the military's ability to fight -- the tooltip already says that right? Or does it say something else?

I would prefer not calling it mil "tech". Military Effectiveness would be great.

That said, it'd be debatable whether the "tech" word is bad. Gamers -- perhaps naively -- perceive strengthening military as "teching up". There is value in being compatible with our existing gaming culture -- so that players will know what to do with this minor mechanic in the game without thinking about it. You always want players to be able to guess at what a game mechanic does -- fake it, then ignore it, before eventually perhaps coming back to it. Failing that, the mechanic will be just a nuisance standing in the way of enjoying the remaining content. So I see some rationale in calling it "tech". Still, Military Effectiveness does the same thing. It's probably not going to be changed now so far into the game's development.

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Bit of a tangent, but another very weird behavior is how miltech level merges when nations unify. A good example of this that I played was when I had the US at 6.1 and merged it with Canada (which was somewhere in the 4s). Canada had 0 armies and the US had 6, and yet upon merging the two nations suddenly the US's 6 invasion era armies all instantly fell to mid-robotics era. I think that pretty clearly doesn't make much sense...

Miltech level upon merging is by a weighted average of miltech and weights based on number of regions. That should probably be scaled with more factors from the nations, e.g. population, GDP, etc.

As is, the player has to at least keep in mind that merging nations can significantly reduce miltech at the end and avoid merging their main army provider.

US-Canada happens to be the main example that is most sudden and likely to cause regret or reload save. So hopefully there is an update on miltech upon merge.

With other countries, the experience is more intuitive even right now. EU nations have similar miltech. Similarly with many other regions. Japan is relatively small and if you use it to provide high "tech" military, you know you should leave it alone -- not to mention the lack of claims on it or by it. Similarly with other developed small nations in heterogenous regions.

[bearmans]

Thanks for the replies all!

To kind of address my take on a central theme of the replies (sorry for not quoting anyone directly):

I do generally agree that large scale military investment is a thing and that a nation's military investment is definitely more complex than its technological capabilities. That said to my mind the need for exponential investments in training/specialization/support & logistics is largely dictated by the size of a military- the more parts you need to coordinate the better structured/supported you need to be. That was kind of my thinking behind having more armies require more ongoing nation investment to maintain a "military effectiveness" score. I also think having a higher degree of social unrest in your country/kleptocratic elements in your chain of command have been, ahem, recently demonstrated to decrease your military effectiveness and could maybe play into that score.

Balance perspective-wise I think it's a good point to note that knowledge is already pretty valuable, maybe "unity" investment could play a secondary role raising military effectiveness instead? I think the main stats that would "sensibly" impact it are probably unrest and social inequality.

But I do think that it taking multiple years of economy-hampering investment to modernize your military is neither realistic nor good-feeling gameplay wise. It definitely takes massive investment to "push the envelope" technologically, which is (part) of why the US spends so much on its military, but once those innovations are made it doesn't really take that long to put them into practice. Moreover, most nations that aren't the US/China/Russia mostly take their military innovations from one or more of those three and definitely don't themselves have to invest to the same degree to modernize.

Maybe that's another, simpler possibility for making miltech feel better? Instead of having to substantially change the current system system, could simply make it so that miltech increase is multiplied proportionally to the difference between the highest miltech nation and the nation's current miltech score. This is still a better system gameplay-wise than the current one where only very high population/productivity nations will ever have decent miltech scores by the midgame, and it also seems to make more logical sense.

[DrGentech]

Thanks for the replies all!

To kind of address my take on a central theme of the replies (sorry for not quoting anyone directly):

I do generally agree that large scale military investment is a thing and that a nation's military investment is definitely more complex than its technological capabilities. That said to my mind the need for exponential investments in training/specialization/support & logistics is largely dictated by the size of a military- the more parts you need to coordinate the better structured/supported you need to be. That was kind of my thinking behind having more armies require more ongoing nation investment to maintain a "military effectiveness" score. I also think having a higher degree of social unrest in your country/kleptocratic elements in your chain of command have been, ahem, recently demonstrated to decrease your military effectiveness and could maybe play into that score.

Balance perspective-wise I think it's a good point to note that knowledge is already pretty valuable, maybe "unity" investment could play a secondary role raising military effectiveness instead? I think the main stats that would "sensibly" impact it are probably unrest and social inequality.

But I do think that it taking multiple years of economy-hampering investment to modernize your military is neither realistic nor good-feeling gameplay wise. It definitely takes massive investment to "push the envelope" technologically, which is (part) of why the US spends so much on its military, but once those innovations are made it doesn't really take that long to put them into practice. Moreover, most nations that aren't the US/China/Russia mostly take their military innovations from one or more of those three and definitely don't themselves have to invest to the same degree to modernize.

Maybe that's another, simpler possibility for making miltech feel better? Instead of having to substantially change the current system system, could simply make it so that miltech increase is multiplied proportionally to the difference between the highest miltech nation and the nation's current miltech score. This is still a better system gameplay-wise than the current one where only very high population/productivity nations will ever have decent miltech scores by the midgame, and it also seems to make more logical sense.

I like this idea the most, because it reflects reality and how scientific/military advancement actually works. When any nation reaches a new miltech ceiling, every nation should get a multiplier towards progress up to, say, one "era" behind the highest tech nation. If those nations are allied, that bonus should be significantly higher or go all the way up to the highest miltech cap. Combine that with miltech not "averaging out" during peaceful unifications, armies being able to have queued orders to move across land, and armies being most effective on home soil/breakaway provinces with lower but still bonus effectiveness in neighbouring provinces, and I'd be basically happy with the ground military system, aside from minor balance changes around which nations have which miltech value.

[Ian_W]

But I do think that it taking multiple years of economy-hampering investment to modernize your military is neither realistic nor good-feeling gameplay wise. It definitely takes massive investment to "push the envelope" technologically, which is (part) of why the US spends so much on its military, but once those innovations are made it doesn't really take that long to put them into practice.

I think you're wrong on the realism of it taking multiple years of economy-hampering investment to modernise your military.

From a realism perspective, that's actually too fast.

It's not just the kit. It's figuring out the new doctrine, and then doing the really hard updating of how the Army does things. Which you can get wrong.

Then you need to figure out if the people who run things are still the right people. Or if the new way of doing things is the best way.

Now, this isn't feelgood gameplay - players expect to get the guaranteed results when they hit the button, and get cranky when (from their perspective) the under-documented game didn't do what was on the tooltip, or the RNG didn't like them, or whatever.

But modernising a military is hard.

[Barleyman]

There's no unification like unification by conquest. Makes the miltech woes go away just like that. Ideally if you control executive you could just order the territorial defence guys to give up but presuming you already had much better miltech, it isn't too hard to occupy the capital region.

[neilwilkes]

I'm with Ian (previous post) in the main - Mil Tech is also often done in so-called SAP's (Special Access Programmes) as well as openly.
This is quite different to the funding for the 'regular' armed forces of a nation too.

[DarthVicious]

I think the way its implemented is quite good actually. Just because you invented lasers doesn't make your army instantly better. It just raises the potential (max) of what you can achieve. To actually implement it takes years of invest, training, doctrinal changes, etc.

So, various techs in the game raise your 'Miltech cap' or your potential, but to actually get there, you have to grind through months/years of IP, or throw money at the problem.

What I would agree with is that armies which are 'behind' should have a catch up mechanism, as they can just copy their global peers, their neighbors, or their alliance/federation members. This would also help with unifications, as by the time you incorporate your federation members, they would in theory have had some time to raise their Miltech, and so integrating wouldn't be a huge hit to your own Miltech.

[neilwilkes]

I think the way its implemented is quite good actually. Just because you invented lasers doesn't make your army instantly better. It just raises the potential (max) of what you can achieve. To actually implement it takes years of invest, training, doctrinal changes, etc.

So, various techs in the game raise your 'Miltech cap' or your potential, but to actually get there, you have to grind through months/years of IP, or throw money at the problem.

Absolutely spot on.

What I would agree with is that armies which are 'behind' should have a catch up mechanism, as they can just copy their global peers, their neighbors, or their alliance/federation members. This would also help with unifications, as by the time you incorporate your federation members, they would in theory have had some time to raise their Miltech, and so integrating wouldn't be a huge hit to your own Miltech.

This one I am not so sure about however. Military tech is closely guarded by those who have it against those who do not (in the real world, I mean) and just because you swallow up (aka 'federate') with another nation will not necessarily give their military tech a boost at all. As an example, the modern EU is an aggressively expanding wannabe empire (just ask Guy Verhofstadt, who is on the record as stating the EU needs to become the European Empire) and all the ex-Soviet states they have swallowed up have not automatically strengthened their military at all - hell, the EU cannot even help it's member state economies, never mind boosting Military tech.

The only way I have so far found to boost efficiency in the game's military is to do the hard yards, and steal projects you have not researched for yourself. Set your knowledge levels of investment to Max - ignore economy, Welfare, Funding, etc - boost the knowledge first & foremost. Get that done and then fix the economy & the rest will take care of itself. In theory, anyway.