What do the alien fleets look like in your game?

[delor]

Inspired by the mega-bombardment thread describing some interesting alien behavior plus my latest game, to be described later in this thread...

What year is it in your current Terra Invicta game at what difficulty, and what does the disposition of the alien fleets look like? More broadly, if you have memories of how you'd characterize the alien fleet behavior in recent games you remember, what was it like?

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In my game, Veteran 2032 right now, there's roughly 110 alien fleets with 23 of them flagged red by the UI. I see at least one carrier, and one carrier has already landed on earth and taken a nation. The quantity of alien fleets has felt huge for a year or two now, both visually in the solar system view and due to amount of attacks that have occurred- I was honestly surprised it was closer to 100 than 200 when I reviewed the Fleets tab.

Human habs and stations have been under constant, numerous bombardment raids for a while now. The earth is surrounded by the debris of the various human factions that aren't me; they built a ton of stations and habs that drove up their MC count but built precious few fleets to defend them. Three or four of the human factions don't even have ANY ships now, although I wasn't watching and couldn't swear that they never had any versus having a tiny few and lost them to the aliens. Kessler syndrome has not only come, but come so long ago that the debuff has even had time to go away.

Versus my previous games, so many fleets committing so many raids so early feels exceptional, but OTOH I haven't played a ton of games and haven't ever done such a comprehensive survey of the Fleets tab. The first carrier arrived in mid-2031, which was about six months earlier than I saw in my previous Veteran game*. The focus on the AI humans is also surprising, but I think just speaks to how successful those human factions were at settling space than they have been in my previous games. Pity they didn't build any ships to defend them.

*Which itself was a shock! The first time I saw carriers, on Normal maybe half a year ago, they didn't show up until 2035 IIRC and arrived in a simultaneous three ship wave! Much different than the two recent Veteran games where a single one showed up early with another distantly on the way...

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Anyway, just curious what other people have been experiencing to get a better idea of what "normal" feels like in the game at different difficulties and how similar or different from game-to-game that normal is.

[DarthVicious]

I played two campaigns in recent weeks, before the latest patch, both on veteran.

I was surprised by the number of alien ships and their fleet sizes, with at least one fleet way over 100 ships by the time I got into Space.

I make no attempt to control Earth orbit though, other than getting the salvage objective, until much later in the game. I usually see off the first few invasion attempts in land battles. I even prefer the Aays knocking over some countries, so its easier to take them over militarily. They can have Africa or South America, but its a pain if they take a nuclear power with nukes intact.

However, on my last campaign, i felt that i left the space combat a fraction late, and had my land armies wiped out in a matter of days by 100 ship bombardments that pretty much ignored ground-space defenses. My plan for my next campaign is to try and get into space sooner, to counter their orbital bombardments.

[neilwilkes]

Is that sig from 'Alpha Centauri' by any chance, DarthVicious?
A superb game...

[DarthVicious]

Is that sig from 'Alpha Centauri' by any chance, DarthVicious?
A superb game...

Most definitely. I played it for years, and every couple years drag it out of retirement for a quick campaign.
I was hard pressed to figure out which quote to use in my sig. And constrained by the 255 char limit,

I am sure its no accident, but TI reminds me a lot of SMAC the way the factions are characterised. No offense to the TI writers, but I think SMAC did a slightly better job of making every tech/event/quote ambiguous. Virtually every faction or tech or event had a surface level positivity, and also an underlying darkness that was just creepy, and made the universe feel dark and dangerous and full of unanswerable questions. The matter transporter tech for e.g., ".. but what happens to the immortal soul in this transaction?", and Prokor Zhakarov's mouse gave me nightmares for years LMAO, and Miriam's quote about "Evil lurked in the datalinks, just like the streets of old, but it was never the streets that were evil." So apt today.

The leader/faction characterization is a massive contributor to immersion.

[neilwilkes]

I must have a look & see if I can still find my original installers for this game.
High time it was made available again on Steam or something similar - I loved that game so much, and it's great to see others felt the same.

I agree with you whole heartedly about the ambviguity of each of the factions too. That's a large part of what made it so good - I am reminded every time I launch TI when it gets to the 'we each saw what we wanted to see'.
Additionallyk, I (yet again) agree totally with the comment that leader/faction characterization adds immensely to the immersion overall.

What did you think of 'Beyond Earth' & the 'Rising Tide' expansion?
Personally, it felt like a missed opportunity to me as the differing factions were not nearly different enough and nowhere near as dark and/or ambiguous in their intent & politics - BE had almost no political side at all.

[DarthVicious]

Agreed.

I played BE a bit and it was fun but not nearly the character of SMAC.

My friends occasionally force me to play Civ6 with them but ive probably had too much of it lol.

I obviously played a lot of Stellaris until i realised it had evolved into too much of a politocal micro nightmare and not much of a starship game. Too much politics not enough starships, and no actual aliens (just political factions with superfiicial skins).

Been trying my hand at Distant Worlds and while it is a tech marvel of a living universe its way too buggy for me and just not quite enough immersive story elements to keep me focussed.

Currently i am keeping an eye on Starfield, and hoping it lives up to the hype. Single player RPG is not my favorite genre but occasionally games like Witcher or Morrowind or Skyrim come along. Burnt my fingers too often to pre order though.

[neilwilkes]

I don't know 'Starfield' - will check it out.
Civ 6 is boring, as since the original civs all newly added ones have been more & more overpowered and the whole game is simply too easy, with the 'difficult' levels relying completely on massive bonus yields to the AI. It's still just too easy though, which is why I like this so much - it's bloody difficult.

EDIT.
Just found Starfield - my gods it is expensive!
£60 for the standard edition and £86 for the 'digital premium edition'.