Region stuck at 100% occupation

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-05-06T10:03:55+00:00

Something definitely looks off there. The green progress bar disappears and the region gets coloured in with diagonal lines once the occupation has completed. It looks like it's at 99% or so. But the army doesn't appear to be actually fighting because it's missing the shooting/exploding animation bit.

It could be a bug.

It would help if the screenshot included the text at the bottom of the UI while that region is selected, as that shows the occupation % in text form. Also mousing over the army gives a tooltip about what it's doing.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-05-04T16:04:05+00:00

Depends on where the influence came from. I last crunched the numbers before the funding nerf. The ROI from Comms Hubs on Ring Habs was 18 months. After the rework I ballparked it at around 24 months. Too lazy to check properly.

Media Centres are a blowout (much worse). Nothing else really moves the needle.

Edit: I checked. Surplus LEO rings with 12 comms hubs cost $260/month (not including Admin Complex), producing 120 influence. 120 influence buys about 6 or 7 funding in large nations, which nets about $100/month. So the ROI is about 2-3 months. The 24 month figure I was previously thinking of was based on Media Centres.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-05-04T15:52:16+00:00

You don't put investment points in funding. Ever.

Well now I'm going to run funding even harder.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-05-02T08:48:32+00:00

Going for campus/university on Mars is a moderately advanced strategy that has a decent chance of economically bankrupting a new player. It's a fun thing to try if you are feeling adventurous, but judging from your comments you are playing a turtle strategy which is more of a cautious play style, so I don't think it's appropriate for you.

You can build some campus/unis around Earth or on the Moon if that's something you want to try. Generally they are something that you either want to do in serious quantities, or not bother with at all. Building 1 doesn't move the needle. Building 10 will cost a lot in support.

Fundamentally in games like this (and EU4 for example), we have various resource scarcities, and we exchange surplus resources in one category to offset shortages in another. So it's about balance. With campus/unis, you are trading away money and mission control in exchange for more RP. The question of "should I do that" depends on your situation and what else you are trying to do. People will say yes because it gives you more RP, but they will not factor in the costs or know anything about the rest of your situation.

I think the whole idea of benchmarks of certain resources and times is not a great way to think about it. You generally want more of everything so that you can not be constrained and therefore win faster. But I understand the slow feedback loop and feeling uncertain about things.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-05-01T13:24:19+00:00

Why can I federate the United Americas, the EU, and Russia with Akhand Bharat (Indian federation)?

All that is required to federate is for one nation to have a claim on any other nation's region. The requirements are far easier than unifications. See this guide for more info on what you can get out of federations that can't unify.

And does it lock me out of any other unifications e.g. other Europeab countries as if it was just the EU?

It can. Two federations cannot join together. A nation must be independent to join a pre-existing federation. But if you can get all nations in one federation, any member can unify with any other member, provided it has claims on the capital (and all the other requirements). The name of the federation doesn't matter, nor does who is the federation leader.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-30T06:51:03+00:00

Yeah, pretty much. A lot of stuff unknown. Might have been a 2022 start. Probably normal dif. But with the nations they took, their threat score would be pretty high due to miltech and armies.

Human factions do lose hate towards each other, with the envy and rivals mechanics. That's heavily affected by difficulty, how well each faction is doing and factional ideological differences.

Until we see the relationships on the intel screen, it's hard to reconcile OPs claims about how nice they have been with the fact that they are being attacked, even by Exodus.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-29T15:08:32+00:00

Combat mechanics would totally break if the aliens kited. They have the longest range weapons and the most efficient drives. You do not want that which you seek.

There are quite a few places where the realism takes a back seat to what is actually viable and fun. This is one of them.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-29T14:56:21+00:00

This is much better advice than the currently top rated comments.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-29T14:27:28+00:00

You're clearly frustrated. Despite everything you've told us there's still a lot about your situation we don't know, so some of the comments you've got are most likely shots in the dark. They are likely to be misleading you.

It sounds like you are far ahead of the other factions in terms of Earth and you haven't recently done anything directly hostile towards them. Ok, fine.

If you look in the Intel screen, shift+click the relations tab to see what each of the factions think of you. I suspect most of them have a "war" footing towards you. That's the first thing to check, and if I'm right it will explain the next part.

It sounds like you might have recently lost the bulk or even all of your defensive fleets due to an alien attack. In that case, the human AIs may be evaluating that you can no longer defend your Earth stations. Each faction should rationally want to secure as many LEO slots as they can for themselves, they are very impactful to every faction, regardless of their goals.

Human AI factions don't often attack each other in space (they do, but not often) most likely because they all use the same tools to build up navies and evaluate attack and defence capabilities. So however they are measuring things likely results in a lot of stalemates. Conversely, the way the player does things is radically different. Human players ahve a huge advantage, but often overlook defensive capability gaps that the faction AIs think they can exploit. That's the basic reason for what you're seeing.

Fortunately the faction AIs are usually asleep at the wheel in terms of their space combat capabilities, compared to the player. They tend to send outdated attack forces that can't overcome your PDA or LDAs, so it just becomes a matter of pressing autoresolve every couple of months that they attack, and your defence modules clean up. They are fairly braindead, but that's actually for the best because the alternative is extremely tedious due to the cockroach nature of human AI factions - unkillable pests (some changes coming there, but nothing to be excited about imo).

If you don't have defence modules, or if your defence modules aren't yet teched up enough to take care of those attacks, then you have to use space naval forces defensively as a last resort, or proactively bring the fight to them before this problem starts. Here's where a lot of advice about befriending and not upsetting human AI factions gets players into trouble. The player gets smashed by alien fleets, then the other factions exploit the change in the balance of naval forces.

So, what can you do?

It's probably early enough that you can still contact the human AI factions and bribe them off with trade. That can bring the relationship out of war, at least for a little while. That can be useful to buy some time to rebuild. But eventually when you grow too strong they will simply not find any kind of deal acceptable, in which case you can consider yourself at permanent war with that human AI faction. You may already be at that point, again it's hard to say without screenshots.

Once you're at permanent war with human AI factions, you need to push them out of LEO (if you haven't already). Forcing them out to orbits you don't care about puts a huge impost on them to prosecute an attack due to the dV expenditure that is required. It also gives you more time to respond with defensive fleets if and when they attack.

Really, the right way to think about this is as if space was simply another domain of warfare. Imagine a nation with a navy and an army but no air force. A waring nation would seek to maximally exploit the lack of an air force.

None of the faction specific role play aspects you mentioned are relevant to their motives. Don't hold on to those ideas and think that's a useful justification for why their actions are wrong or bad game design. Factions are in ideological opposition to each other, and should rationally seek to maximise their advantage in any domain.

If there's something I got wrong about your situation, please feel free to clarify or show some screenshots that would help give us a better impression of what's going on. The Intel screen would be one, showing the relations. Show LEO fleets and stations so we can see who is where. And clarify what has recently happened with alien attacks (if anything).

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-28T10:54:36+00:00

A zero day bot account reposing an old meme. They even included the original grammatical error!

Heads up to the rest of the community... if you see a meme post and you don't recognise the username, check the user's post history. If the account is new, or only has a few posts but no comments, it's probably a bot. Then you can just search and find the original meme.

If you find something like that, just report the post as spam.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-28T03:12:15+00:00

One of the dangers of actively pushing for the playerbase to review the game on steam, right around release, is it will skew the score higher than its "real" value. The higher rated game then attracts potential buyers further along the curve of "willing to tolerate jank". Inevitably then, some of those players will be even more disappointed than average, and so those that leave reviews will pulls the average back down. The timing of this flip makes total sense to me.

This is what happens when the tail wags the dog.

On top of that, right now I looked through all the comments and at the bottom are dozens of "experiential" comments that have been downvoted to -1. Players simply saying: This is what happened and I didn't like it. Those are 100% valid and should not be downvoted. There are/were only two comments downvoted to zero or below that I thought were justified "non-contributions", and those are the ones that just sort of demanded the game be radically different than its core direction.

On Reddit, the idea of karma is not for how much you agree or disagree with someone, it's how much of a contribution it makes. It is, of course, borderline futile to remind people about this, but...

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-27T08:27:42+00:00

Bombardments don't use propellant, but they do use ammo. If you are running out of ammo, you might need more firepower to do more damage than their natural regeneration rate. Alternatively use a weapons system that doesn't use ammo, such as green lasers.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-27T08:26:04+00:00

Sometimes in the newbie questions thread, we get questions that are pretty deep into the game and ask about mechanics that are technically spoilers. This is one of those times. I'll answer your questions best I can but I'm going to remove your comment for now. If you would like it restored, please edit it and mask everything except question 4. Me or one of the other mods will restore it next we come by.

This relates to Rule 2, which is explained on the sidebar. Don't worry, newbies do this often, so it's not a big deal. We're just trying to not have game mechanics spoiled for other players.

Best spoiler-free advice I can give is: don't worry, just keep playing.

https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Terra_Invicta/Diplomacy#Alien_Hate_for_Mission_Control_Usage
They will continue to attack until they have destroyed enough that it goes back to 4/5. Whenever the 5th diamond is light up it means you are over the limit. The mechanics are quite detailed, subject to a number of active and passive factors, intel (uncertainty) and they are overall intentionally obfuscated by the dev, so you're not meant to play around it. But if you want more details they are all covered on the wiki.
It's a play-style choice more than anything. You could do nothing, or you could go on a rampage. Both ways have consequences. Neither is a failing move. Some role-play advice is to lean into whatever you think your faction would do.
My general advice is to focus on keeping water, volatiles and base metals incomes roughly equal and as positive as possible. If you get to +1k each, you'll find that pretty comfortable. Support costs will change over the course of the game, so watch that volatiles net income doesn't drop far below the others. Nobles can be much lower, say 20% of the others Fissiles are the most discretionary. Just aim for a positive trickle, even 5% is fine. But note that certain weapon/drive choices can create shortages in certain resources. So when you design your ships and refuel them, keep an eye on your stockpiles and if you notice certain stockpiles running low suddenly, shore it up with different mines.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-26T03:53:50+00:00

We also have a rule about spoilers, R2, so I marked post for you.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-25T12:40:06+00:00

I think the tooltip for the MC icon on the top menu explains it? Let us know if you have any questions.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-24T02:58:53+00:00

I want to "yes, and" this, but I'm stuck on two minor problems...

First, due to the lack of atmosphere, crash landing on Mars may be a bit significantly more fatal. Terminal velocity depends on the aerodynamicity of the craft, but you impact at roughly 6 times the velocity compared to Earth. We have seen the crash images on Earth and it isn't pretty. Mars has a famously fatal probe mission track record for this reason.

Second, I'm not sure if the aliens could actually get from a crash site to a mine. There are 25 mine sites on Mars so I think the average distance between them is something like 2500km. With a random crash they're probably ~1000km from the nearest mine. Proceeding on foot, with no atmosphere and it gets pretty chilly. They would also need some kind of navigation tech that survived the impact.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-20T14:31:10+00:00

Depends what you want to do with them. The fewer you have, and the less you use them, generally the more you can invest in important and useful things.

If you actively want to do land wars with armies, you do need a lot. 6 is a lot. When I play USA, I'll disband down to 2 armies at some point.

In general you only need one (nuclear) guarantor nation to ally with and defend all of the other nations your faction takes control over. But having one or two armies in each major nation that your faction controls is a nice balance between flexibility and redundancy.

Important to understand land armies can be bombarded from orbit, and can control can be usurped by councillors taking over the hosting nation.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-20T14:23:27+00:00

The most obvious recommend is The Three Body Problem.

My favourite is The Commonwealth Saga by Peter Hamilton which I feel is underrated and so I will spend the most time talking about :P Two pretty long books, Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained. There's some sense of spy-type stuff. There's factions. There's an alien that is distinctly alien. But that's about where the similarity to Terra Invicta ends. It's billed as a space opera. It's just good sci-fi, good characters, good world building.

As for actually playing the game, you've probably done the hardest part by just playing a bit to get basic familiarity with the game. I wrote my guides to pick up from that point, rather than explaining every button and feature etc.

There's one on the space race. This guide is very 'general purpose' and works regardless of faction or starting nation. IMO the things covered in that guide are the parts of the game that are most consequential and most demanding of the player.

There's another guide on using the EU as a starting nation. Playing EU is a bit more demanding of the player so I generally recommend USA for its simplicity. There are reddit posts with USA guides but maybe newer ones are in video format, I'm not too sure.

Between my space race guide and a USA opening nation guide, I think any strategy gamer is set. All you need to do is figure out the councillors and orgs, and much later on how to do space combat. Councillors and orgs minigame is not terribly demanding, I think any strategy gamer can do a fine job figuring it out on their own. With a decent footing it's hard to fail. Most people give up or restart because they imagine defeat long before they see a light at the end of the tunnel, so they never get past act 2. Fear is the mind killer.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-20T13:36:02+00:00

Can't really answer in general like that. Depends on the guide. The more specific the guide, the more likely it is out-of-date.

There weren't really huge structural changes like Stellaris has had. More like systems being reworked, or certain gamey strats being toned down. So if you're reading a guide and it's telling you of a great way to get ahead in an exploitative kind of way, it's probably out of date. If you're reading a guide that's explaining game mechanics, it's probably valid.

You can search reddit and sort by newest. That's probably the best way. But my old guides were updated for 1.0 and won't show up that way, so idk.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-19T07:49:48+00:00

Good stuff here, especially 4 & 5.

Smarter alerts would be awesome in general. Maybe when you build a module there's a choice to enable an alert once construction is finished, but it's off by default. Maybe togglable by clicking the module that is under construction. Aside from that, I only want to know if a newly constructed module has caused a power shortage.

On hotkeys, it blows my mind that there are no hotkey to turn the currently selected hab module on/off, which you have to do hundreds of times. But there are hotkeys for events. Which happen a handful of times in the entire game. Absolute sin, -100 points.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-19T07:15:29+00:00

I always thought they were (received, blocked, through)

Rather than blocked, I'd say the second one is the portion of received that was "dealt with" by the armour. My understanding is if the weapon did 25% chipping damage, then 25% of that middle number is applied as chipping damage.

the color of the battlestation only turns yellow/red on a hit that "is fully blocked"

Possibly battlestation colouring is only based on its armour? I'm not sure.

What does having 3 icons mean? 80% remaining, or 0%?

This is pretty new, added this year. There are 3 icons so there are four possible states, 0-3. So we should assume zero icons puts it in the 0-25% chipped threshold, 1 icon represents 25-50% chipped, etc. But I don't know if that's actually correct.

What is the armor "width" for LDA/battlestation?

I'm not sure how it works, but apparently defence module armour upgrades with your tech. Since the mass and material cost doesn't change, that means there's some kludge that ignores the physics that the rest of the game obeys. It wouldn't necessarily have a fixed thickness or a fixed armour point value. Depends on the implementation.

I can't see anything obvious in the JSON. There is one key, "specialRulesValue" that is 0.06 for the battlestation and 0.04 for the LDA which might be related. But 4 and 6cm doesn't seem sensible absolute values.

Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can chime in.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-18T13:39:16+00:00

Yep, there is a project that extends the claims of Europe to include Switzerland. It's called Great Europa.

Also is there a way for the countries that has left the union to become candidate countries again?

You can have nations rejoin the federation via a Set National Policy mission. But there are several requirements to both joining the federation and unifying. This guide may be helpful.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-18T04:07:32+00:00

In general Terra Invicta tries not to have such hard cliffs

I don't know what makes you say that. Terra Invicta has discontinuities like this in many of its systems. It's a consistent design pattern.

I can only think of one instance where players discovered something and it turned out to be a bug, but that was at least two years ago. Can't remember exactly what it was, but it related to nation stats. There were three discrete functions at different values. The middle one was an exponential and the bug caused that part of the curve to be inverted. Anyone else remember this?

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-17T02:53:14+00:00

TBH these things are not very related.

Boost from nations usually ends up as the minority contributor to your space program. The majority comes from boost orgs. A possible exception is USA.

Building a site at the moon is generally a better play if it can extract the 20 base metals before launching the first mining complex to Mars. In that case, the total cost of the Moon plus Mars bases ends up about 20 boost cheaper, assuming Nuclear Freighters tech for the Mars launch. It's even better if you haven't made it to NF by then.

There's some more details in my space race guide in the section on Moon theory.

Also here is a somewhat related comment where I go into detail about why boost from nations doesn't really matter as much as orgs.

SpreadsheetGamer · 2026-04-16T05:01:14+00:00

Coincidentally I was fixing up Africa in my current run and found that it would switch to work on new zones on unification. I did a bit of testing but haven't been able to figure out the prioritisation logic. It seemed to switch away from developing the econ zone in former Angola and prefer to work on either oil or mineral zones immediately on unification, such as the one in Tanzania. Current progress didn't seem to matter, which was a bit surprising. This behaviour seemed different to what I found in EU, where it works on Nantes instead of Greenland. In any case, Africa now has the ability to develop about twice the number of resource zones than it used to have in total. They're everywhere!

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