I’ve seen people suggest to stay at a certain MC Capacity or usage. Do or Don’t kill the servants like the scum they are. To do the barest minimum in the story, or kill every alien on earth.
Contents
Alien Threat Levels Guide
All credit goes to Logion567!
When Do the Aliens Attack?
It is paramount to understand the aliens are binary in their hatred towards you. They have a hidden “Hate level” (Remember, what we see in the intel screen is imperfect!) and at 50 “Hate” they will start blowing up your stuff.
Things that increase this are obvious stuff like blowing up ships, killing/detaining aliens, and even beating up the Servants and Protectorate.
But What About MC?
The answer is Using MC increases the “floor” for how low it can go. This is modified by difficulty, Cinematic is .05x. Normal is .4x (or .3x on 0.3.21.) Veteran is .6x. and Brutal is 1x. This means (absent hostile actions against the Aliens) you can use 1,000 MC on cinematic, but only 50 on Brutal before angering the aliens and they bring the hammer on you.
Keep in mind this is a minimum hate, so going full hog and building to the limit difficulty limit Before you have completed story objectives is ill advised.
So What Does Piss Them Off?
The obvious stuff does at least, killing and capturing the Alien Xenoforms bring 10 hate while blowing up their ships brings more hate per ship type (1-for-1 with the “structural Integrity” line in the “Terra Invicta\TerraInvicta_Data\StreamingAssets\Templates\ShipHullTemplate.json” file).
As for the Servants and Protectorate? At game start actions against them “mirror” onto the aliens. This is multiplied if they manage to make contact with the aliens. Assassinating them increases hate with a faction by 10 directly and other actions also increase this but not as drastic. Actions against the Servants will “Mirror” .25x of gained hate to the aliens, this is increased to .5x if they have established contact with the aliens. The protectorate at game start won’t do the same, but after they make contact will begin mirroring .3x of hate towards the aliens.
Can It Go Down?
It can! All human factions Except the top dog has hate tick down automatically every month. Not the most elegant solution but this way they don’t send a Dreadnought to blow up the sole Mars base of Project Exodus while a Humanity First death fleet is rampaging through the Jovian system.
The other way is also fairly obvious, when they destroy stations and habs the aliens go “Take that!” and their hate level against you is reduced by 5. They appear to collate all the stations/habs you have, sort by defenses then go for whichever is the highest research cost “Mission to X”.
So they will take down undefended Mars Bases before Luna, and if all you have is undefended stations in LEO and defenses everywhere else they’ll contribute to Kessler Syndrome (the A-holes).
So What Should I Do?
This is where we enter into subjective terms, however one can always use the above information to keep your head down long enough to be ready in your own games.
From what I see, there are 2 distinct ways of doing thing. Barest minimum Until you get Tier 2 Defense modules for Habs and Stations then going all out. Or waiting until you get “construction platforms” and making sure every important base/station has one and then just role play as the Amish from that one Family Guy skit while beating up the servants/aliens on earth.
Of the two I prefer the Latter, losing a few habs from keeping the Servants down is worth it.
As for starting nations? I have to say the EU is ultimately the strongest start. USA is big and imposing, but you are spending CP capacity on armies you don’t really need right now.
China and India show promise, but you spend the better part of a decade or more fixing them up, and when you do get them up and running they’re so bloated you can’t hold much of anything else.
EU may take time getting off the ground over USA, but you can spend the more efficient IP gain of smaller nations into precious, precious MC. “but can’t you just build MC in space?” you ask, however you need to spend MC to make MC that way. And operations centers are expensive upkeep wise, which need Nanofactories, which need even more MC and it snowballs out of control very fast.
The kill and capture Alien objectives + destroying an Alien Destroyer (ignore corvettes at first) will net you 32 hate. then as long as you didn’t kill too many servants before getting Construction Platforms on all your mars bases you should be good.
From here get Railguns and visible Arc lasers for Tier 2 station defenses and voila! You have successfully navigated the early game and can now consolidate control in the inner planets, begin exploiting the asteroid belt, and tech up for the offensive.
It’s my first game, I play the resistance, I just reached year 2031 and I’m currently in a “none shall pass” situation. I have control over a Science/Eco focused EU and a Science/Military America. For now, I did apply a constant servant/protectorate/alien genocide of everything I could see, thanks to the turned councillors. They are currently stuck and I can keep then stunlocked with the sabotage project / assassinations as they can only do around 300 science and 20 influence per turn. I keep getting attacked by the aliens, but I have enough mines everywhere to rebuild and wait for next bi-annual retaliation.
To win, should I continue focusing on stunlocking the pro-aliens humans, while the academy and human first continue developing their space races, our should I stop this strategy asap ? Am I in the hate loop, or am I in the constant 50 border ?
One more thing, looks like HF and resistant always have 20 hate at any point and when Alien Administration has formed there is +30 hate to all non-alien related factions, so basically when this happens it trigger aliens to crush and destroy for some time?
How those +25% stacks exactly? it’s 90+25% and then 112+25% or it’s just +25% to 90 both times? Hard to tell exactly how much I can afford when there is no direct numbers in game.
Its a multiplicative effect, also, it’s value is 0.8 per tech/stack of the reduction research.
So, with the normal difficulty modifier of 0.4 and assuming all stacks are multiplicative the floor breakpoints for 50 hate would be:
50/0.4 = 50 * 2.5 = 125 MC for 0 reduction research
50/(0.4*0.8) = 50 * 2.5 * 1.25 = 156.25 MC for 1 reduction research
50/(0.4*0.8^2) = 50 * 2.5 * 1.25^2 = 195.3125 MC for 2 reduction research
source: Effect_MCUsageMasking in steamapps\common\Terra Invicta\TerraInvicta_Data\StreamingAssets\Templates\TIEffectTemplate.json
I wish I’d read this before I started building as many mining colonies as possible and attempted to monopolise low earth orbit! I am currently getting obliterated by the aliens in response!
I am confused though by how Construction Modules on my stations and colonies would help?
Welp, I started slaughtering the Servants the moment I got the special Resistance Quest Organization and stuck it on a very lucky Fixer.
I have also recently murdered two aliens.
I only just finished Construction Modules, and don’t even have basic hab defenses.
It was a good game while it lasted, I doubt my one corvette is going to be able to do much
Would placing a bunch of undefended T1 stations in far Earth orbit be a valid hate reduction tactic, I wonder?
Bait stations are one of those “gigabrained” strats for multiple kinda spoilery reasons but YMMV
Use the high radiation orbit if at all.
Thanks. You might want to consider explaining that the MC mitigation tech increases at 5% per (cycle) to show up, which increases MC w/o wage form 90 to … 115, is unlocked with the following two techs: Arrival Security and Hydra Interrogation, and costs 10K project points.
USA is by far the strongest start possible, and then you coup kazakhstan to monopolize all the early-game boosts so you can take all of mars for yourself before anybody else even has a moon base up and running. It’s so strong that it basically renders all the human AIs irrelevant for the entire rest of the game.
EU is only really amazing if you don’t unify it for a long time and let all the small, high-GDP nations accumulate Mission Control all game before unifying them. If you’re “consolidating the EU” *after* “maxed out MC in every region” you’re well into the 30s and would already be at functional MC cap with Mercury up-and-running for years if you’d started US&Kaz. MC ultimately is an irrelevant resource until you go total war with the aliens, since you’re limited not by how much MC you have but how much of it they will tolerate. So that 130 MC you may have from the EU in 2026 or whatever is almost all completely pointless.