Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
SubstantialFrivolity I'm not even supposed to be here today
2yr ago
(text post)
2533 thread views
Friday Fun Thread for October 14, 2022
- 70
- 9
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Terra Invicta Review
This was initially going to be a shorter post but it turned into an unedited, error filled rant about all the things that annoy me about a game that the vast majority of you haven’t and won’t play. But maybe you’ll enjoy it away.
Overview
Terra Invicta is a 4X grand strategy game that was recently released into early access recently, and I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time playing recently. The game is the first original release from Pavonis Interactive, the team who made the Long War mods for the modern XCOM games. The premise of the game is that you take control of one of seven factions/organisations/ideologies following the discovery of a crashed UFO, the beginning of an arrival/invasion of aliens in the Sol System. Each of the factions responds to the aliens in their own way and have their own win condition, with some factions even being ‘pro-alien’. The gameplay of Terra Invicta is hard to explain. It’s kind of two game separate games stitched together, the first being a escape/grand strategy (Paradox) like game where you fight with other factions (and aliens) for control of Earth’s nations, which provide you resources, and the second being control of space that plays like more a traditional space 4X, where you have to build space stations (‘habs’), mine resources and build ships, and fight in real time space battles.
Thematically, Terra Invicta is most directly inspired by XCOM (duh!) in the setting of the game (but not that much in gameplay). Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (and Civilization) is also a heavy influence, particularly in the writing. There are also similarities to Paradox-style grand strategy and the Total War franchises. Yes, I’m aware that sounds confusing! Terra Invictia is a very ambitious strategy game that attempts to really capture the grand scope of how humans might respond to an alien invasion. In this ambition, it mostly succeeds, however, it is quite rough around the edges, and not just a way that can be fixed in early access. The writing in the game is pretty mediocre, some of the Earth grand strategy elements are shallow, and the space combat is pretty horrible that a significant rework looks likely. Despite all this, I strongly recommend Terra Invicta if you enjoy the above games, and it a great first release for a development studio. Even though it is early access, the game is feature complete and mostly bug free.
Gameplay
I won’t spend too long describing gameplay, it’s easy enough to search for footage online, it’s time better spent on specific critique but a brief summary: You take the role of one seven factions with their own goals. You play as the omnipotent disembodied leader of one of seven factions each with their own ideologies. The seven factions are:
The Resistance – default ‘XCOM’ defend the Earth from aliens faction
Humanity First – a violent militaristic xenophobic faction willing to use extreme methods to kill the aliens
The Academy – a idealistic faction that wishes to prove humanity the alien’s equal and enter peaceful relations
Project Exodus – a faction that wants to GTFO and abandon Earth and escape to a new star system
The Initiative – a kleptocratic faction only concerned with using chaos to increase their own wealth and power
The Protectorate – a faction who wishes to appease the aliens to avoid bloodshed and preserve some degree human autonomy
The Servants – a religious cult faction that sees the aliens as humanity’s saviours and will outright support the aliens (and the aliens them)
I will discuss the factions, their leaders, and how they are written later on (it’s not good).
Each faction has up to 6 ‘councillors’ which is your primary way of interacting with Earth and the nations of the world. These councillors all have a range of different missions which interact with the nations of Earth and other factions in different ways, ranging from taking control of a nation and its armies, raising or reducing civil unrest in those nations, assassinating enemy councillors, or steal enemy research. This all takes place on a Paradox-style globe. Each nation has stats like population, GDP, education level, unrest etc. Control over a nation is dictated by control of a nation’s ‘control points’, which allow you to control how it invests its ‘economy’ (investment points), and its foreign policy and armies. The primary reason to control nations is that they are the primary source of money, research (to unlock new technologies like any 4X), and ‘boost’ (abstracted resource representing ability to send thing into space). All these are needed to launch build space stations to mine resources (metal, gases) to design and build spaceships which constitutes the second ‘half’ of the game. Space combat is a 3D real time with pause – think Homeworld without the base management or spaceship Total War (there’s probably better comparisons). It also uses Newtonian mechanics for movement, and pretty fleshed out orbital mechanics to move around the Solar system. To win the game you need to complete a specific victory condition for your chosen faction that will be discovered as you play, which often but not always involves blowing up a lot of the alien’s shit.
Now to the more interesting ‘critique’ (read: rant filled criticism about stuff that annoys me about the game):
The spaceship combat is quite bad in its current state. There are two primary issues – first, the waypoint system. You control all your ships in combat via ‘waypoints’, a line that shows your ship’s current trajectory (Newtonian mechanics), which has several points on it which represents points on which your ship can adjust its course (orientation and thrust). This sounds good on paper, but quickly becomes micromanagement hell. It’s actually pretty fun for like 2v2 skirmishes, but when you’re trying to manage 20+ ships it’s just tedious. The alternative is almost as bad though - setting the ships to AI control. The AI control is both hilariously bad and lacking in options. You have no control how the AI ship actually acts. You can’t for example, assign your smaller corvettes only defend and screen for your capital ships. It’s either AI or it isn’t. And the preferred strategy of the AI seems to be rushing full speed ahead into the enemy and getting itself killed. So your choice in ship combat is either tedious micromanagement, or braindead AI. Fortunately, the developers are aware of this problem and there’s probably going to be a substantial overhaul of space combat at some point.
Bad AI also extends to the enemy factions too. The humanity faction AI mismanages the nations it controls really badly, and this results in them stagnating in the midgame, causing the player the surpass them very quickly and leave only the aliens as the real opposition.
The game is incredibly long. Some people might think this is a positive, but even as a veteran of Paradox grand strategy who is used to hundred-hour campaigns, Terra Invicta is just too long. I’ve got over a hundred hours in the game and have not come close to actually finishing a campaign. A big culprit of this is the bloated and overly engineered and complicated technology system (much of the early ship technology is useless anyway), which has hundreds of technologies and engineering projects. There are significant stretches of time where you’ll be nothing but waiting for tech to complete. But can’t just completely zone out and go full speed, because the requires you to micro your councillors constantly. There’s also a significant bottleneck for research in the midgame and if you don’t go down certain paths before than others you can waste a lot of time, despite the apparent gameplay freedom that is the design intent of the developers.
The grand strategy/geoscape parts are surprisingly shallow and feel very boardgamey. A major reason for this is that there is nothing really unique about any given country. They are all just the same pile of numbers that happen to start at different points of a scale. There’s actually no mechanical difference between China and the USA, China just happens to have lower education and democracy score but more population than the USA. If you democratize and education China using the same relatively shallow mechanics available to all countries, then you just end up with bigger USA. Things like migration, religion, sectarian or ethnic divides in a country aren’t modelled at all. And things that are modelled like democracy/government score or education are just simply points on a scale. You can pretty easily make Israel and Iran allies for example. It’s all just completely abstracted game mechanics that are the almost exactly same for all countries. It’s a board game where there’s a square that happens to be called India, but there’s nothing uniquely Indian about it, only abstracted gamified statistics of India. This is part of both the strength and weakness of Terra Invicta – it is an ambitious game with enormous scope, but any given specific mechanics is poorly developed.
I think a major problem with the game design as it stands, is despite the freedom in how you approach the game’s many mechanics, you’re ultimately pigeonholed into a rough playstyle and a predetermined victory condition. Many of the games I mentioned in the summary either are sandbox oriented and don’t have true win conditions (Paradox), or have multiple win conditions (Alpha Centauri/Civilization). In Terra Invicta, this means you can’t adjust adapt your plan to win based on the circumstances of the game or what you find the most enjoyable. In Civilization, sure you might be incentivised to go for a certain win condition based on which civilization you pick, but you always have the freedom to change. This I think really hurts the enjoyment of the game through limiting player options.
Continued below....
I wrote maybe half a post about TI last week and never sent it because it seemed kind of unfair to criticize a game I've played and (mostly!) enjoyed for a hundred hours. It's deeply flawed and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone unless you're already so deep down the GSG rabbit hole you know what you're getting into. Yet it does so many truly novel, interesting things, in a setting that may be poorly written and poorly explored (although, as far as video games go, I don't think it's that bad, it's just not even close to the greats) but still compelling -- I think it's worth playing.
More options
Context Copy link
I think you're pretty on point. See my earlier comment that mostly agrees with you: https://www.themotte.org/post/21/just-playin/11879?context=8#context
I also wrote a review for detailing every thing wrong with the game that I encountered. It ended up being not just too long for steam but too long for me to bother proofreading it, so I scrapped it.
The game is full of problems, the writing is abysmal, but in the end I'm still happy that it's been made. It's ambitious, it's challenging, it's innovative. If only it were also rewarding.
More options
Context Copy link
I have always wanted to have a Newtonian spaceship combat game but figured it would be too hard to manage. Are there better candidates here?
The old elite games had newtonian flight sim space combat, there was a lot of swooping past each other, but it was amazing in a high thrust ship.
Specifically Frontier (Elite 2) and Frontier: First Encounters (effectively an expansion to Frontier but sold as a separate game to try and wriggle out of a contract). The original Elite didn't have Newtonian flight.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Children of a Dead Earth if you want a sim.
Star Ruler if you want a 4X.
Did CoaDE ever get any updates? I was really hoping he'd keep going with more scenarios.
AFAIK not, no.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's amazing how all the criticisms of long war seem to have anticipated this game, except with the potential for failure unbound by the limits of hex-editing XCOM.exe.
Thanks for the review. Sounds like a game that can't be fixed by fleshing out mechanics, but only stripping out all the pointless ones the Good Idea Fairy mailed in.
Come to think of it, xcom:lw was what made me realize how pointless games are. I can't boot one up any more without hearing Shen go "This is what the aliens do for fun? At least they're not playing... computer games".
More options
Context Copy link
Continued
I’ve been very critical and to say something positive because I actually do enjoy the game, one of the things the game does very well is dynamic difficulty. While there are actual difficulty settings, the game has mechanics to dynamically adjust the difficulty as the aliens’ activity is in part driven by your own activity. The more aggressive you are, the more aggressive the aliens will be in response. It’s also hard to outright lose the game, and there’s almost always an opportunity to recover and claw back victory, even if it might be slow and tedious. XCOM’s Long War indeed!
Factions and Writing
In Terra Invicta, you a playing as one of seven competing factions. However, it’s never exactly made quite clear what the factions/organisations even are. The presentation really lacks the context to make it clear, it’s all completely abstracted to the point where it diminishes the experience. The game aesthetically presents the factions as Illuminati like clandestine organisations pulling the strings of government from the behind the curtain. But much of the gameplay doesn’t reflect that at all, and in practice it seems like you’re more like a inter or pseudo governmental body that unites a bunch of nations under a geopolitical bloc. But this is also undermined by the fact it’s relatively easy to oust a faction from a country and seize control yourself. Some of the mechanics of the game imply you’re not exactly secret to the public. But it’s never quite clear what you are. The game is this weird halfway position between the two positions. This is made worse by the fact the origins of the factions are just handwaved way. Apparently, there were seven secret organisations who all just happened waiting around for aliens to appear so they start taking over countries. The predetermined victory condition/ideology of the factions is also adding to this issue because the factions, even the non-fanatical ones, already have their set-in-stone attitude to the aliens before even knowing anything about them, that doesn’t change after learning anything about them. It all feels a bit artificial and ‘teleological’ I guess. Also, all the factions are mechanically identical despite their organisations presumably differing significantly, like the Servants being a weird religious cult and the Initiative being some dog-eat-dog corporate Illuminati.
Terra Invicta is most directly influenced by Alpha Centauri by its writing and faction leaders. Like AC, each faction is represented by a leader, who is explored whose perspective, background and ideology is slowly explored through a voiced acted quote that appear after researching each technology from one of the leaders. However, unlike Alpha Centauri which has some fantastic writing, touches on complex ideas and provides believable ideological justifications for each of the factions, the writing in Terra Invicta is mediocre and shallow. The vast majority of quotes from the factions leaders are just bad, mostly in the asinine ‘I’m a teenager and think this is a deep observation about humanity’ kind. They never really say anything that meaningful. All the leaders are ultimately boring caricatures. Unfortunately, I can’t find any list of quotes from the game at this stage. I’m going to list the faction leaders from roughly most annoying to least annoying and describe them and their issues.
The Resistance – Commander Fiona Ayouade, a black Bri’ish woman with an extremely annoying (north?) London accent. She is apparently an experienced counterterrorist expert, although you wouldn’t know it because she has the most asinine comments imaginable mostly about ‘why can’t humans just work together’. Sounds more like a young arts school undergraduate student.
The Protectorate – Commissioner Kiran Banerjee, an Indian human rights lawyer/politician who is like an unintentional caricature of what a conservative imagines a bleeding-heart liberal to be. All his quotes are asinine quotes about people being selfish or shallow environmentalism and everything is dangerous and could be used to abuse people. He’s also gay, which I guess the game doesn’t make a big deal out of, but he also happens to be the only character in the game whose relationship is ever mentioned in quotes.
The Servants – Superior Judith Howell, an American who is an odd amalgamation of new age mystic and cultish Evangalical Christian. Seems woefully underqualified for leading whatever the faction organisation is meant to be. Her quotes are mostly boring attempts for the writer to sound religious or spiritual. A lot of meaningless and repetitive quotes about cleansing and purification that don’t say anything.
The Initiative – Chairman Soren Van Wyk, an extremely unethical Afrikaner businessman (arms, diamonds), who is almost comically evil (very original). Literally every quote from him is some variation of “Fuck [ethical thing], just make me more money or give me more power”. No depth, completely one note and boring.
The Academy – Chancellor Li Qingzhao, female Chinese extremely influential scientist. Her quotes are relatively inoffensive, mostly just quotes about science and how technology is awesome and great but not saying anything substantial. Sometimes comments on society but it’s all bland liberal technocrat stuff about we can overcome division through knowledge and understanding.
Humanity First - Colonel Hanse Castille, an Argentinian military officer turned commando after alleged war crimes. Mostly just waxes about how there’s danger everywhere, some military strategy themed quotes that’s probably not even true (‘sometimes it’s not about who has the bigger gun but can shoot faster’ or some bs like that), and sometimes comments about how humans must be hard asses. Cliché and uninspired but not offensively bad.
Project Exodus – Director Khalid Al-Ashgar. Oxford educated Emirati space tech mogul. Idealist who wants to leave Earth and explore space. Has the most inoffensive quotes of the lot mostly about how we must dream big and leave the cradle of Earth, and a few quotes about sciencey stuff.
Just to give a taste here’s a couple of quotes from my least favourite leader Fiona Ayouade (imagine an annoying female northern London accent):
“Together, we’re stronger. Apart, we’re weaker, yeah? Sounds great on paper, love, but the trouble is there’s always some bloke with a loud voice who wants to keep as apart – and a whole lot of someone elses bankrolling him”
“When I was a kid, the threat of nuclear Armageddon was on every front page, every day. So forgive me if I get just a tiny bit anxious when you tell me that our best hope of sailing the stars is staging nuclear explosions inside our spacecraft!” - (She's a professional logical mature counterterrrorist operative btw)
By comparison, here’s some quotes from the game Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Sure, there are some duds there (the expansion factions suck ass) but the quality of the writing is just so much higher. With all respect to the Terra Invicta writer(s), it seems like they just didn’t have the philosophical chops to emulate what Alpha Centauri did. Alpha Centauri was also smart enough to use some real world quotes too (like all Civilization games do), rather than trying to come up with some witty original insight to say about everything.
Even the names of the factions suck and are so generic. They're literally just called the Resistance or the Academy or whatever. They could have at least called them like 'United Earth Defense Organisation' or something, and have Resistance be a nickname.
Also a quick note on the Aliens, who I haven’t commented much on. I want to avoid spoiling their motivations for invading Earth and who they are because discovering it is a major part of the experience. My opinion is that the answer to that question is meh, and like a lot of the other writing it’s superficially deep.
Real World Politics
To go on a tangent and to veer briefly into the culture war a bit in the end, what I always find interesting about games like Terra Invicta that have a grand, contemporary, and somewhat realistic setting is how the mechanics and initial game state of the game reflects the ideological biases of the developers and perhaps maybe wider society in general. The previous section on the factions and how they’re written might provide some insights. The game starts on 1 October, 2022. It includes contemporary geopolitical events, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Taiwan has a special relationship with China (which is also used as a generic mechanic for breakaway states. You can look at things like how democratic the devs rate a given country at game start (perhaps they used some democracy index). But more interesting things might be what they chose to affect population growth (i.e. fertility) – low GDP per capita and education have high birth rates, but in developed countries increasing GDP per capita increases population growth.
Migration is completely absent from the game, something you might think there would be a lot of if there were alien invasions of Earth, or even just extreme ideologies taking over nations. I don’t know if this was a conscious social decision not to include it or just because the developers thought it would be too complex to introduce.
Interestingly, Palestine is completely absent from the game. They don’t even have a claim to the region that Israel has. Civil wars and sectarian conflict in general are modelled extremely poorly. Because Israel has high democracy score and relatively high GDP per capita and education, most of the unrest Israel starts the game with that presumably represents Palestinian conflict disappears by itself pretty quickly because of how the game mechanics work. In fairness to the developers, I suspect that there might be a legitimate mechanical issue in having two countries have exact sam
Addendum - The Static Nature of the World
Something I kind of touched on in the gameplay section but didn't really expand on is how static the world feels. The nations in the games don't actually do anything of their own accord, things only happen when the factions make things happen. There's not really any true dynamic systems. It doesn't feel like a lived in world.
Additionally, the game doesn't really illustrate how what human society looks likes in the aftermath of alien contact, invasion, and rapid technological advancement. At best, you're given of couple of snippets of text explaining what the technology does and how it might affect society when you unlock it. But you never feel it or have it materially impact the world. As far as we are concerned, the world and society at large remains mostly the same as it is now ~40 years into the future. We don't really get any changing game mechanics about how nations work or anything. This is despite the introduction of technologies like self-programming AI, quantum computing, virtually unlimited clean energy in the form of cheap mass fusion technology and so on. Game terms these things mostly just translate into like 5% bonuses to investment in economy and welfare. The lack of vision in how society might materially change due to the events of the game is pretty disappointing.
Climate Change
One of the biggest political issues I forgot to mention is climate change is modelled in the game, with is providing an ongoing drain on world GDP supposedly representing the costs of adapting to a changing climate. It is possible to invest points into 'Welfare' which includes removing a minor amount of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. However, and this is where the game becomes expressly political/ideological, is that the game doesn't want you (and doesn't let you) actually solve climate change, you can only slow it down. Even techs expressly designed to address climate change like designer organisms and carbon capture technology do very little to address the problem. This is a deliberate choice from the developers as I've seen it been discussed, because despite being set in an timeline where mass advanced AI, nuclear fusion and plasma weaponry are quickly invented and adopted, apparently we can't develop a similar solution for climate change. The developers, and many of the fans who have argued about it in the forums and discord, believe in some green radical social change is the only way to deal with climate change and have inserted that view into their advanced sci-fi setting.
It's a general trend I notice that those who have some extremely strong ideological convictions about a topic, especially those who have almost no nuance in their worldview and can't steelman and inhabit alternative points of view, are almost never able to craft realistic worlds and narratives when it comes to their topic of interest. This is not necessarily a stock "politics in entertainment is bad" position, rather it's more that worldbuilding and the politics in it have to be handled carefully and can't feel like you are being aggressively force-fed a position or point of view. It's especially bad when the writers are tackling very different settings with very different material and technological conditions from ours and yet still feel the need to shoehorn Current Year politics into things.
It's for that reason that I think it's a good rule of thumb to politically disengage as much as possible when one tackles fiction, and if they do have politics one should make sure they organically arise from the groundwork they've set instead of trying to create allegories and messages that pertain to our current environment. The latter approach to things simply does not work, in my opinion, and ends up feeling ridiculously out of place and quite preachy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It'd makes sense looking at the potential markets. These games are usually played by smarter people, inbreeding lowers IQ in a major way, so mid East just isn't really a potential market.
Sure, some leftists may get mad at you, but you know what they say about free publicity..
More options
Context Copy link
Comparing it to Alpha Centauri seems almost unfair; considering it's probably the game with the most philosophical depth of all games, ever. It's not a coincidence that Scott frequently inserts references to it in his posts (click the colon characters in his review of Albion's Seed, or read Unsong, where I noticed at least one chapter deal with and directly reference concepts introduced in SMAC e.g. the quote from a "wise woman" here, a reference to this).
The chief difference I think is that the writers clearly had a whole bunch of genuinely interesting ideas stewing in their heads that they wanted to express, and chose the computer game medium to do so. Other games have a plot and then attempt to come up with "deep" ideas after the fact, something which almost always fail.
(Tangentially, If you've played it and enjoyed it as much as I did, I can recommend this blog containing in-depth analysis of basically every quote in the game.)
Yeah, AC is a beast when it comes to writing in video games. Or, hell, writing in sci-fi in general.
And it seems to have cast a shadow on every 4X set on a planet's surface to come. Pax Nova, Beyond Earth, Planetfall, Terra Invicta. They all attempt the AC thing without having any of the necessary skills, and it cheapens the experience to a very noticeable degree. If they cannot even tell that they are out of their depth in writing, then why should I trust them on game design? Why play a game that will probably just waste my time, just as it wasted my attention with those crappy quotes?
More options
Context Copy link
I agree, and I would be more forgiving if it wasn't for the fact the game seems to be heavily drawing from Alpha Centauri in their faction design and presentation. It's pretty obvious. They set themselves up for unfavourable comparisons.
Yeah if your writing chops aren't impeccable, it's a bad idea to make a 4X sci fi game with ideological factions. I didn't even like SMAC, and I know that much. I'm color blind and the colors on the early map made exploration quite difficult the alien life that killed most early units was indistinguishable from the predominant map color. A few months later they released a color blind patch to change them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oh, that blog series is excellent, I've read it before. One of the things I loved about the original seven factions is that every one has a point to make, somewhere, and even though all of them are easily summarized in a few words, there's depth to the characterization that often comes as a surprise. It's easy to dismiss Sister Miriam as a religious zealot (and she is), but the common accusation that she's a Luddite is misaimed--she thinks technological development often has moral implications that should be understood before adoption (cough looking at you, Zakharov). Similarly, Chairman Yang, the Communist/Hive organizer, has some interesting philosophical thoughts about the nature of humanity and consciousness in a post-Singularity context. Each of the faction heads may be wrong--and you can usually point to pretty clear cases where they are--but none of them are trivial. (Sadly, the expansion writing is much less good.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oh, dynamic difficulty is a good choice. I suggested that to the original team way back in LW1, to avoid the "steamroll or die" problem that rewarded gamey strategies and trivialized the extremely drawn-out endgame. But they just tried to nerf all the good strats while balancing around people using them, turning the meta into exploiting the few things they couldn't control: breaking the AI with tedious LOS manipulation, pack activation mechanics, etc.
The sad part is that XCOM had a great lore justification for dynamic difficulty. Since the whole campaign is a test or experiment by the aliens for their new slave race, showing more promise should make them ramp up the pressure, and vice versa.
Didn't LW1 actually have elements of dynamic difficulty? It's been a while so I don't recall the datails, but I'm sure there was something.
Dynamic difficulty is something that I wish more games would attempt. Steamrolling and getting steamrolled after having invested hours into a campaign is always a very disappointing ending.
That said, IMO TI gets some things about it right and some horribly wrong.
The good: You can almost always come back from losses. You can always hire new councilors, take over small countries and work your way up, start a new space program.
The bad: And sometimes you can't, or the AI can't, and then there's still a very, very long game ahead of you. Sometimes the factions just run the Earth's economy into the ground and there's nothing to be done about the alien invasion. Sometimes you manage to unite all the Earth's nations into a few superblobs and retain control of all of them and all the other factions are now unable to do a damn thing. Sometimes you accidentally annoy the aliens prematurely and they lock down space forever, GG.
I stopped playing after the .12 nerfs, and didn't follow 1.0 at all, so they might have added it. But the mid-dev versions had a fixed difficulty curve timetable you could get ahead of: cheese an early supply ship and the Zhang missions, get early mecs & laser intis, and the rest of the game was just smashing endless UFO crash sites and milking exalt missions for meld.
Edit: I only just remembered that there was a reverse difficulty scaling mechanic in Alien Research, which made the aliens harder the poorer you were doing, and vice versa. If you were smashing it the aliens would fall behind on their tech curve and get even easier (even losing the ability to do terror missions). If you lost soldiers or failed to stop UFOs they would start showing up with 60 HP mechtoids against your basic rifles.
It was retarded and a big reason I burned out on the game.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Terra Invicta also kinda has an explanation but it's not great. Just to do spoilers for the alien motivation, which you won't discover the entirety off in every faction's playthough. Spoiler:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link