Hi everyone! Terra Invicta version 0.4.18, our biggest update in some time, is now available for all players on Steam.

VERY IMPORTANT: The 0.4 builds break 0.3 saves. This was unavoidable in development so we could bring you these new features. But not to worry! You are free to continue playing 0.3 saves by rolling back to version 0.3.138, which you can find in the PROPERTIES -> Betas menu inside Steam. It will be available indefinitely.

Thanks to all our players who spent time trying out the build and helping us hunt down bugs and giving us feedback -- with an extra shout-out to the researchers, veterans, and generally well-read folk, as well as a particular nuclear engineer, for lending us their expertise and keeping many aspects of the game in the realm of plausibility. We’re ultimately a small team making a big game, and the support of our players during EA makes this a better game for everyone. We encourage everyone to join our Discord to take part in the feedback process.

And there’s more to do. No doubt there will be bugs to fix and things to balance in future 0.4 patches. We’re also working hard on new gameplay features and also the UI and AI improvements we know the game needs before we can take it out of EA. (We do shout ‘git gud’ at the AI every single day, but we think it’s ignoring us.)

Here’s some of the new features you’ll be able to explore:
• More than 80 regions added to the Earth map, with changes to meganations and new breakaways. Switzerland, the Netherlands, Serbia, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, North Macedonia, Albania, Lebanon, the Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Malawi, Cabo Verde, Uganda, Djibouti, the United Arab Emirates, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Palestine and Somaliland are now in the game as separate nations. Many larger nations also gained multiple regions.

• Large comets now roam the Solar System, growing tails as they dive toward the sun. They may serve as good sources of water and volatiles in the relatively arid inner Solar System if you can colonize them. We also added new moons astronomers announced around Uranus and Neptune (and gave them more imaginative names than their current catalog numbers), and updated the Kuiper Belt with the latest information about that distant region.

• Your ships will now gain named officers as a form of experience. You can promote 15 officer classes, including admirals, captains, and weapon officers, who all grant different bonuses as your fleets take on the alien (and human) threat. Most officers will spawn and improve during battle.

• Significant rework of climate change mechanics so they better reflect how economies and greenhouse gases relate. Nations now all have a “sustainability” rating that marks how much more or less GHGs the nation generates than one would expect for its population and economy. The Welfare priority improves this rating until it hits a maximum (which will require numerous technological developments and a great deal of effort), at which point it will begin to remove GHGs from the atmosphere. Refined natural uptake mechanics for various GHGs. It gets harder and harder to improve the rating as you get close to zero emissions.

• Overhauls of the fusion propulsion tree with more clear lines of progression, along with condensing weapon and electrical propulsion development. Dropped a few drives in favor of more interesting fusion systems.

• Complete rework of particle weapons. In rough order of progression, there are now e-beamers, ion cannon, neutral particle cannon, antimatter cannon, and the deadly neutron cannon. Some of these can do a measure of normal thermal damage, but they all also can penetrate normal armor to do radiation damage to "soft" systems -- computers and crew. While particle beams are unlikely to kill a ship, but can disable critical systems. And eliminate those poor officers.

• You’ll see three new alien ship classes – their versions of the escort, monitor and cruiser.

• Updated targeting mechanics in combat. ECM modules now have a chance to add a forced cooldown on any weapon newly targeting the ship with the ECM. (ECM still has a chance to disable missiles immediately before they strike a target, although this functionality no longer affects nuclear and antimatter missiles; they just explode.) Added targeting computer module for ships to overcome enemy ECM. The duration of the cooldown depends on the internal success-failure roll.

• Rework of internal ship damage mechanics so damage can exit a ship under certain circumstances and not be applied internally. This is typically for kinetic/penetrator/beam weapons with a small point of contact; explosive warheads, nukes, and antimatter weapons are immune to this. This should make ships somewhat more survivable and give explodey weapons a larger niche.

• Rebalancing of terrestrial warfare mechanics to better simulate long grindy wars of attrition alongside rapid invasions against a significantly weaker foe. Invasions of near-peer nations will be more difficult and take longer. Occupations of large and highly populated regions will take longer.

• Rework of priority mechanics so many priority benefits that affect national stats now scale with the population of the country, so working on GDP or inequality in China will go slower than working on it in Botswana. This gives meganations more trade-offs as you form them and smaller nations more agility in improving conditions there. The Advise councilor mission has been significantly buffed in how it improves a nation’s economy while active, so pointing your high admin councilor at your meganation capitals will help offset the new challenges big empires are facing.

• A host of new weapons and modules for your ships, including the 40mm autocannon, siege coilguns, the flag bridge, the salvage bay, and several new high-performance missile systems. The aliens also got some dangerous new toys to play with in the late game.

• Adjusted the relationship between the mission control resource and mining. Small hab cores cost more MC and huge habs cost less. Mine modules cost none, but the cap on how many mines you can have without paying mission control has changed from a per-planet to a per-mine basis. That cap now increases with technological advances. Mars also increased to 25 hab sites.

There are plenty more adjustments to various mechanics and tools, but this is already really long so we’ll let you discover the rest, or you can review our running patch notes here: https://www.pavonisinteractive.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=29923&p=58150#p58150

If you have any crashes or other bugs to report, please post on our Discord (https://discord.gg/XBVqMZU) or send us an email at support@pavonisinteractive.com with your save, the files Player.log and Player-prev.log from the directory %HOMEPATH%\AppData\LocalLow\Pavonis Interactive\TerraInvicta, and a list of steps to cause the crash.

A few known issues we’re still working on:
• You may hit a prompt that notes the AI has screwed itself up and asking you to send us a save. This may happen at the campaign’s start. There’s a couple of rare bugs in there we’re trying to run down and fix.
• We’re still getting the UI that reports damage from ionizing radiation to enemy ships in combat up and running.