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
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Friday Fun Thread for October 14, 2022
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Notes -
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.
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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..
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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?
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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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:
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