Terra Invicta Dev Diary #19: Early Access State of Things

For updates and discussion of Terra Invicta, a grand-strategy alien invasion simulator
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johnnylump
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Terra Invicta Dev Diary #19: Early Access State of Things

Post by johnnylump »

Why Early Access?
Because we think game is playable and a lot of fun, and our fans in general and our Kickstarter backers in particular have waited long enough to start playing it, but it isn't done yet.

EA Release Price
$39.99/€39.99/£34.99/¥4980

Product Notes:
This is the full game. You can play any of the seven human factions from start to finish of the base campaign. No cut content or features we're holding back. You'll get new stuff as we get it in a working state.

Initial EA release will be PC only.
Will be Available on Steam and GOG.

We continue to hope to do a Mac release. We've made Mac builds but they aren't sufficiently tested for us to feel comfortable making them available yet. We only have so many team members and hours in the day, and it's also a lot of extra time dealing with Apple's requirements to post even private test builds, so we've made the decision to focus on getting our PC build where we want it first and then rather than constantly re-verify we didn't break our Mac build with one fix or another.

We are not planning a separate Linux release at this time. In testing, we found Proton users had a better experience than on native Linux builds, so we're encouraging Linux players to use Proton to play TI.

The EA build will have our draft translations into the six languages we've announced: Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Traditional and Simplified Chinese. These are undergoing a separate QA process with professionals who know the game and those languages. The game has a couple novels worth of text, and we know there will be some grammar issues that will be in this release because we need to have the code handle string substitution better in some cases -- this is due to things like gendered nouns than aren't really an issue in English. This is on us, not the translators.

The Cold War and Foothold scenarios aren't going to be in the EA release. We're still determining how big a feature set we want to add to support those.

Modding and Steam Workshop support is coming along nicely and we expect it to be ready sooner rather than later, but it may not be there in initial release. It's currently functional but needs some manual workarounds until we get some issues fixed. Stay tuned.

Beyond all that, there will be bugs. There are probably CTDs out there we don't know about. We hate them too. The game has periodic autosaves you can roll back to, but occasionally a bug can't be avoided until we post a patch. Let us know about them with saves and logs and we'll get after them. No doubt we'll make all new and frustrating bugs as we add features and content after release.

There are balance issues. We've provided gameplay tools that are too effective for their cost, or not effective enough. Let us know about them and we'll work on them. We're aware of a few ship designs that bust some systems we don't want busted. We try not to design puzzles with a dominant strategy to solve, so if something is just too darn strong we'll nerf it.

There are simulation-related things to keep an eye on. China and India's military strength. The war in Ukraine. Ireland's per-capita GDP. It takes some finesse to fit those things into our game's various abstractions.

We'll be adding small features here and there if we can get them working satisfactory. Like tankers to refuel your ships.

There is still content coming in -- event illustrations and music tracks, in particular. We'd like to add more events and projects, too.

There are places we need to improve the AI. It can be a bit suicidal in combat, exposing its flanks when it shouldn't be. Maneuver needs to be more important at certain stages of the game. AI factions other than the Servants aren't great at pursuing their final win objectives. The AI humans don't build fleets as quickly as we'd like, but this has been a major focus and they are getting better at it.

We're also working on performance -- in the late game, when the AI has a lot to manage, the game can get choppy on high time compression as its list of decisions to make gets longer. This obviously depends on the system you're playing on, but the CPU needs to do some rocket science for dozens of fleets while managing Earth and its colonies: It's a lot, and coding it is a balancing act between smooth gameplay and a challenging AI. There are some big summary UIs with tons of data that take a noticeable amount of time to load. Also on the list.

Finally, there's more QOL stuff to do. We've definitely focused on this based on demo feedback. But we still need to reduce clicks to move your armies, build habs, and handle your fleets. We need to provide better feedback on the nations you are managing and why a particular value is changing. We want to add formation-keeping to combat. We want to see what we can do with text scaling and notification controls.

If this stuff is going to drive you nuts and get in the way of your enjoyment of the game, please wait to purchase it! Different people have different tolerances, and that's fine. We're acknowledging all these issues so you're informed. We'll get there.

We'll keep multiple builds available. A stable default one. Ones with newer stuff that we're less sure about. And a rollback to an older stable build in case something goes wrong or we have to break saves to fix the game at some point and you don't want to lose your progress.

We encourage lively discussion; we read it and learn from it. We'll have dedicated Discord channels for feedback that we'll monitor. We'll also watch our forums here for longer-form feedback. We'll set up a mechanism to report bugs and balance issues directly -- probably keep using our issues Github from the Beta test.

We'll post patch notes. We'll do our best to communicate our plans as they evolve. We can't communicate constantly because that does take time away from making the game.

A more specific roadmap will be along soon.
ranik_sandaris
Terra Invicta Beta Tester
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Joined: Sun Apr 18, 2021 2:35 pm

Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #19: Early Access State of Things

Post by ranik_sandaris »

Its been a hard slog, but you have all done an incredible job. I cannot wait to see what the future holds for TI.
Oh also, please bring to geforce now ;) my computer died yesterday.
Love you <3
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Tanalbi
Long War EU Crew
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Joined: Mon Dec 28, 2015 8:54 pm

Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #19: Early Access State of Things

Post by Tanalbi »

johnnylump wrote: Mon Sep 12, 2022 9:18 pm The EA build will have our draft translations into the six languages we've announced: Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Traditional and Simplified Chinese. These are undergoing a separate QA process with professionals who know the game and those languages. The game has a couple novels worth of text, and we know there will be some grammar issues that will be in this release because we need to have the code handle string substitution better in some cases -- this is due to things like gendered nouns than aren't really an issue in English. This is on us, not the translators.
Interesting, might want to add me as a QA tester for Spanish, since i wanted to take part on the game since it's development's beginning, but couldn't.
"The prefect true curves of a woman are her smile"
grampipon
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Sep 25, 2022 7:11 am

Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #19: Early Access State of Things

Post by grampipon »

Hey, when the Mac build comes, will it be ARM based? Is there also any ETA whatsoever? Weeks, months, year? I want to know if I should buy a computer :lol:
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