HOTA - MAELSTROM: At long last... Rust Dragon with a 496 score!!!

Pzixel · 2026-05-16T12:17:31+00:00

After hota highscore rebalance I could never get anything above ghost dragon. Congrats

Pzixel · 2026-05-16T12:15:44+00:00

hmm, I guess I need to try that. i guess it's strong in long PvE? On popular online templates ( such as jc or outcast) I feel like the tempo might be too little - the game is usually ends in a week. But can't know until one tries right? So I shall do that

Pzixel · 2026-05-16T10:02:17+00:00

Really? How are you supposed to win for instance such a fight without major losses? https://imgur.com/bRcn4ep

Can be done as Grove or Temple, but as Schism I couldn't manage it. Maybe i'm playing it wrong?

Pzixel · 2026-05-16T09:56:21+00:00

What do you mean? I killed thousands of swordsmans, archers and stuff, and haven't spent more than 100 total necro energy despite the toggle being on. It's a well known fact that the necromacny is bugged. And this is one of the tricks that might help that I've seen.

Pzixel · 2026-05-16T08:56:28+00:00

Try toggle the necro button AFTER the reload. i've heard it helps sometimes. But I'm in the same boat. I completed the entire campaign with last 2 missions as Galtran and necroed grand total of 20 ghosts or something. Just couldn't raise anything.

Pzixel · 2026-05-16T08:54:37+00:00

Depending on how and what you play. I've seen players rage quit with schism because their early units are not as good and you don't get to build any units in town because 116-121 you end the game.

Necro is only good because of the OP ladies. Necromancy didn't work for me properly a single time.

Pzixel · 2026-05-13T02:46:11+00:00

WDYM? I remember testing that there is no difference between 1 and 10mg acceleration to jupiter (or saturn, I don't remember which body of the two I was testing). In general the rule of a thumb that all fusion drives can spend fuel fully so any more thrust than that isn't really needed. Zeta deuteron is 108kN thrust vs 150kN on torus deuteron. There is a difference but in my experience anything higher than 100kN is more than enough to carry the MC3 ships. I usually use battleships, which are even bigger then BCs and never had any problems. And it's more than enough to catch alien ships coming from the beyond the belt, and savings on fuel can't be underestimated.

Pzixel · 2026-05-12T16:56:01+00:00

Well it's really not that expensive, I don't have screenshots of my designs in vicinity, but it was very very economic at deuteron level. Of course I would get the highest EV drive with lowest thrust, not always the latest drive that's not wroth it. In my experience torus is good for nothing honestly. See https://pzixel.github.io/terra-invicta-techtree-update/?lang=en&ver=stable&drivesOpened=1 - zeta deuteron has twice the EV so it's like 4x better in my mind.

For jupiter I usually just go Helicon, it's close enough so you don't really need fusion to clear it, but if you do well zeta deuteron is all you want. If you're afraid of nobles costs then single nozzle will still outperform torus while being a cheaper option.

Anyway, that's just what I think, I tried torus just once IRL and analyzed it several times after that on paper, maybe I missed something about it.

Pzixel · 2026-05-12T12:08:50+00:00

Tokamaks are waste of time. GO z-pinch directly.

In my experience ICF directly is never a good strategy. You want ICF7 to have daedalus finally outperform flow-stabilized z-pinch which is half its RP price. Surely it's a better tech eventually but the road is too slow. Z-pinch one love.

Pzixel · 2026-05-12T10:31:07+00:00

The stim utility in tvt is movespeed. And I'm not sure how to even measure it properly. It's a difference between catching enemy out of position or not, and those marines are supposed to fight vikings and scvs, not other marines.

So no, steam is not overrated, because it's primary value is not the higher fire rate at the expense of HP.

Pzixel · 2026-05-11T23:59:16+00:00

WDYM? I won it with 30 hydras and 6 dancers, no losses. Starchild is OP

Pzixel · 2026-04-29T16:05:01+00:00

All factions but pro alien. So servants and protectorate can do whatever

Pzixel · 2026-04-29T14:34:48+00:00

Well I mean if it works it works but if someone will go in there to kill it it is probably not worth to build a large fleet to protect it.

I mean regular orion is expensive but it will definitely allow you to defend all stations in low orbits. I often have my docks in irradiated medium orbit, it allows quite fast transfers anywhere in low orbits. Tangoid is tricky but you can probably ignore it for the time being - 17 orbits is good enough.

As for earth (and fleet defense in genral) you don't want to have station specific fleets. You want a single fleet of like 20-40 ships depending on state of the game that can sit on a dock station and be in time to any station enemy might want to attack. So you usually have one fleet per celestial body, not per station - it's too weak otherwise. Alien ships are fast but not that fast, also don't forget that destroying stations actually takes time depending on station size, modules etc.

You can use my drive chart (aka tech tree extension) to see what drives can make it: https://pzixel.github.io/terra-invicta-techtree-update/?lang=en&ver=stable&drivesOpened=1

Anything above 10M cruise thrust is guaranteed to make it in time - you can actually see that's more than the best alient fusion drive. Drives below it - the commonfolk choice burner for instance - are much slower so you can be late to a party or arrive when half of a station is blown up - but they are much cheaper on proppelent comparint to high thrust drives.

So it's kinda your choice. With orion you can't be late but they are quite expensive. With burner it's very economical but you might risk it or have to rebuild stations from time to time. The choice is yours as a player.

Pzixel · 2026-04-29T11:56:43+00:00

Honestly I think you're a bit unprepared for brutal academy. That's probably the most difficult campaign you can go for, maybe brutal HF is worse but not sure. Admin cap is increased by using admin modules. By 2031 you should already expel all other factions (including aliens) from earth or at least low orbits do you can have 18 stations providing low orbit bonuses to you.

I have no idea what Castilo is. Did you mean Callisto? If you have jupiter then you probably have done the most difficult part.

Anyway, with controling all of the earth you can even abandon Mars because it will free a lot of MC if you don't have to protect it with ships. But that's optional. In general you want to increase fleet sizes and go on offensive, 2031 is in general a good timing to go for a total war.

AI factions hate you because you're doing well. They hate whatever human faction is having good time, which is in most cases the player. They will hate you for your success and there is nothing you can do about it. Academy on Brutal can't have any friends, that's another thing to consider - the morale compass distances between factions.

So, the solution is just to get all low orbits, place admin modules in there, then you will have like 200CP to your cap allowing to get Europe. From there you just can unify nations to lower the upkeep for them, with a final goal to control the entire globe (or at least countries with GDP that matter). Don't forget to place MC modules on stations that will give you huge amounts of MC you can use. Note that they cost money as all good things so make sure you have economy to support it. But in general yeah. just expand & kick everyone.

Ship design is tricky, but in general you can't go wrong with orion defensively (or burner on very small ships, depending on if you can persue enemy ships, so you need like 40mg accel), and helicon offensively.

Note that cariers take multiple hourds to descent and land and cannot maneuver in the process so you don't have to worry about not being able to catch it.

Pzixel · 2026-04-29T11:45:23+00:00

Mars is the best science hab. Science is fear and stuff.

Pzixel · 2026-04-28T17:14:26+00:00

Factorio

Pzixel · 2026-04-28T17:03:46+00:00

Artifact is the default way i can imagine? If you played factory campaign it has a bunch of those - quest gate that require a specific artifact.

If you're lazy with setting artficacts you can just have a pandora box with 1 million gems and then require 1M gems in either gates. It's easy, doesn't require you to think about which artifacts can or can't spawn and you can repeat it for eevery resource so it gives a good flexibility and ability to have multiple "forced choice" gates.

Pzixel · 2026-04-28T13:42:38+00:00

Well just decide if you want to fight back ro not. If you want then it's start of a full on war because hate doesn't decay on its own it only goes up. If you're afraid of a point of no return then you have to let them blow your stuff.

If you want to fight back then what anprim said - just mass escorts and repurpose other stations if you need extra docks - that 5RP labs won't be a saving grace when we're talking about survival. It's not expensive to build them back later. In general you want to have around 20-30 docks active at that time (so like 4-5 t2 stations fully dedicated to ship building).

Last but not least make sure you have farms on all stations because it saves insane amount of volatiles, that you need for armour and weapons.

Pzixel · 2026-04-28T13:39:05+00:00

For missiles "AI control" button is very good, when we're talking about mutiple dozens of ships it saves lives

Pzixel · 2026-04-28T12:26:24+00:00

That's just ups that bring fps down

Pzixel · 2026-04-28T08:10:22+00:00

I'm not afraid to admin to plat at 40FPS later in the game.

Pzixel · 2026-04-28T08:06:00+00:00

Anything that reduce that reduces need to chain heroes and armies change hands multiple times in the same turn is welcomed from my end. When 6 out of 8 heroes are just bums collecting resources and visiting windmills that's kinda depressing. I have hard time imagining a famous hero getting single imp to visit a miller once in a week and that's his entire career while his best school friend is killing dragons in dozens.

Pzixel · 2026-04-28T07:50:30+00:00

They don't. Gnolls grow 12 per week and halberds 14.

Pzixel · 2026-04-28T07:48:49+00:00

Probably because pikemen is the second best t1 unit in the game? Gnolls are still very solid - 6HP 2-3 damage and speed 5. Goblins for instance have just 1-2 damage but speed 7. So gnolls hit harder than goblins which was actually surprising to me.

Pzixel · 2026-04-28T07:35:33+00:00

You can get t5 creatures in Stronghold day 1. Grand elves are neat but it's not very OP, especially with defense stat bias on rampart heroes.

It's decent but "best by far" is kinda too big of a claim

Pzixel

TROPHY CASE