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[Cthulhu]

China is hard to break into when it's neutral and you have high popularity. If someone else takes it, you're not taking it from them with spies under normal circumstances. I assume that research is so you can take the much easier Taiwan, ally them to superpowers who can beat China, and then declare a war from Taiwan and pull the superpowers in to win the war.

The problem is -- and maybe this should change -- you can just declare war on any rival. So if you can win a war against China there's not much of a point in bothering with Taiwan, who doesn't even start with an army. Probably the way to do it is take South and North Korea for the land border, ally them to each other, then send their armies into China to soak 2/3 of China's nukes. Then you can invade with America's armies and trade one US army for the final Chinese nuke and then occupy Beijing with the remaining 4 armies and take complete control of China. Alternatively, the UK and France both start with 1 amphibious army each, so you can use them to tank a couple nukes, if you can't get NK & SK allied fast enough. One thing that's interesting to note is that if you have control of Taiwan, you can declare independence (you don't need claims or anything for this), which forces China to declare war on you -- which counts as a defensive war for you -- and automatically calls your allies into war. So depending on how braindead/not-braindead the AI is you might be able to win vs. China without personally controlling the USA, just by forcing them to defend you. The problem is the AI seems to be pretty trigger-happy on the nukes and nuclear war is not fun. I ran a quick test game and China ended up nuking London, which brought the UK's GDP per capita down to $14,000 and they permanently lost a control node.

I bet you can abuse the Taiwan independence war thing to steal China out from under another faction's nose (depending on who's in control, maybe some factions are less keen on using nukes than regular, uncontrolled China) without letting them automatically call their allies in. I think the AI plays by the same rules so to join an offensive war they need to complete the "Set Policy" mission and then manually declare, so if they're a big bloc like China/Russia/India you might be able to buy an extra couple of months to snag Beijing quickly. All of this seems strictly worse than the diplomatic option though -- if a nuke hits a province with high boost, it'll take years to recover. And the GDP and population will probably never come close to what it was beforehand.

I didn't build any ships, thinking a 60 power ship useless against the 7k alien power.

I have no idea how those calculations work, because my ships were around 60 strength in the designer but when I built them, they showed up as 800. I built a fleet of 3 missile boats and engaged the 7k alien ship and just ran away while pelting them with missiles. Lost one ship but eventually my missiles won, and then the victory procced like four story events at once (I think you're supposed to assault a landed alien ship on the ground before you destroy one in space, but I never got the opportunity to do so in 7 years of gameplay; I don't think it's in the demo) and I got some interesting projects to research, but the time limit was pretty much over by then.

Hmm, what you could do, if you had your own boost source but no path or desire to capturing America or China, you could be a spoiler and use Taiwan to provoke a nuclear war between America and China, ruining them both for your rivals.

[Il Palazzo]

Can they not just say no when called to war as allies?

[Cthulhu]

I would hope not without serious consequences, otherwise what's the point of having an alliance in the first place?

I asked about it on the discord, one of the admins reacted with the Institute logo, which seems promising.  You might have to be careful about how you do it, I would not expect the US to be beholden to help Taiwan invade China unprovoked, but assuming the US never ends its alliance it sounds like you should be able to provoke China into invading and then forcing the US into it. 

[EuchreJack]

I've seen many games have an Alliance Check upon the Alliance conditions triggering.  Essentially, the AI & player have a choice to either honor the Alliance or break it, usually for some penalty.

Example: Peru & Columbia are Allied due to mutual fears of Brazil.  United States invades Columbia.  Peru says "Not my problem" and breaks the Alliance, rather than getting bombed, blockaded, and blitzed by the United States.  Peru has difficulty getting a new Alliance due to being an Alliance Breaker, but still exists relatively intact.

[Vivalas]

This looks interesting. Is it basically you just playing a longer version of X-COM where you play through the backstory a little bit before the aliens arrive? Seems interesting from a roleplay standpoint, at least.

[Cthulhu]

It's XCOM but you play as the faceless general dude from the video feeds

[Chiefwaffles]

That’s… actually a good explanation. You’re the shadowy organization manipulating things behind the scenes.

In the demo it’s just the shadowy good guys but in the full game you’ll have 6(?) total factions to choose from with varying goals I believe. All the factions exist in one game and you just play as one of them. I don’t know if every faction will eventually be playable.

I do wonder how they’d handle the pro-alien factions since those seem kind of antithetical to half the gameplay.

[Jopax]

You will be able to most definitely, as there's a number of events that offer decisions specific to certain factions, the servants included. With them it seems the goal will be to do as much damage and cause as many setbacks to the other factions as possible. One part of it seems to be trying to help the spread of xenoforming as much as possible. My longest game to date had them dominating china which started developing a bunch of alien life hotspots which were slowly starting to spread out into rest of asia.

Also something I've noticed that's kinda neat, it seems that every game you start, one of your operatives will always be from your country. Not sure how much gameplay impact this has on your starting strategy but I'd like to see an option for a completely random start maybe.

[Cthulhu]

Yeah, I think the agent thing is based on your time zone. 

Yes, all the factions are playable and have different goals, though they're very tight-lipped as to how those relate to the alien invasion, if the aliens' goals will vary at all.  Nobody knows except the alpha testers and they're under a strict NDA that hasn't been violated so far.

The Resistance is closest to XCOM, trying to form a coalition of governments to figure out what the aliens want and resist if they're hostile.
Humanity First is hardline anti-alien and wants to kill them all and any humans who disagree
The Institute just wants to profit off the situation, not clear how they'll eventually relate to the invasion, obviously can't spend the money if the earth gets destroyed. I'd guess this means playing parasite, you want to siphon as much as you can without making the more active factions lose.
The Protectorate wants to negotiate the most favorable surrender they can, which I'd presume means putting up some sort of fight, even if you expect to lose you have to make negotiating preferable to just crushing us
The Servants worship the aliens, and yeah that's interesting if they have projects to progress the invasion faster. Goal to be a spoiler and help the aliens win
The Academy wants to be friends with the aliens, which means proving we're worth it. I assume that'll entail technological/economical/ecological advancement on Earth while trying to prevent the aggressive factions from destroying/provoking the aliens too much
The Exodus wants to build a colony ship and just fuck off before they aliens get us.  That one has the most obvious alternate victory condition

[Il Palazzo]

I kinda love the exodus guys. They heard 'aliens' and decided to nope outta here. True to their agenda, they put all their pips into unification and space stuff. Zero in economy, welfare, military and all the rest. Because we gotta stick together and build those ships, dude!

[Nelia Hawk]

it would be cool if the aliens also have multiple factions similar to the humans and are on different planets... but as human player they all just grouped together as "aliens" till you find out there are also actual factions.

and they fight eachother over solarsystemplanet controls like the humans fight over planet areas.

and some factions want to help the humans and another wants to murder them... well like 6 alien factions all doing similar stuff as the human factions XD
so maybe one game oyu play the "murder everyone" alien faction is the dominant one... another game the "help the humans" one.

[Vivalas]

it would be cool if the aliens also have multiple factions similar to the humans and are on different planets... but as human player they all just grouped together as "aliens" till you find out there are also actual factions.

and they fight eachother over solarsystemplanet controls like the humans fight over planet areas.

and some factions want to help the humans and another wants to murder them... well like 6 alien factions all doing similar stuff as the human factions XD
so maybe one game oyu play the "murder everyone" alien faction is the dominant one... another game the "help the humans" one.

That sounds like a really cool DLC idea, or maybe even a multiplayer thing, like 12v12 pvp with one player playing a faction on each side.

Honestly the Institute sounds the most interesting. I can't think of a lot of games with a balancing act win condition like that

EDIT: I mean 6v6,12 players total.

[NikkTheTrick]

This looks interesting. Is it basically you just playing a longer version of X-COM where you play through the backstory a little bit before the aliens arrive? Seems interesting from a roleplay standpoint, at least.

I jut spent a couple days with the demo.

The actual gameplay is nothing like X-Com. There is no squad-based combat: such things are far beneath you.

It is more like a mix between Hearts of Iron and Kerbal Space Program. Both Earth and Space are critical to success. Earth is where money, research and influence are coming from. You will be fighting a political, and often even regular, war there. Space is where you will confront aliens... and other human factions.

On Earth, beginning of the game is a mad scramble to take control of nations. Aliens won't actually be doing much in the beginning and instead you will be struggling against other human factions, where wage combat using whole national armies. In fact, so far I've seen far more humans murdered by humans. Humans are not united, are complete jerks towards each other, committed to their nationalistic prejudices, willing to commit outright genocide in name of their ideologies and, unlike most strategy games set up in modern time, nukes are there, can fall into hands of extremists (usually, player is the worst) and are horrifyingly destructive. In demo, it is not uncommon to have billions dead before aliens even fire a shot.

Now on to space:

The solar system is insanely well modelled. There are 350 objects: planets, dwarf planets, satellites, asteroids, etc. All of them have proper orbits: none of the orbits are circles, but are actual elliptical orbits. Planets are not much inclined against plane of ecliptic, so, as in real solar system, are mostly in 2 dimensions, but Kuiper Belt objects and many asteroids are inclined. Of course, all the objects are in motion with their respective orbital periods, so your strategic map drastically changes all the time. I literally spent an hour with my 5 year old simply looking at the solar system. He told me that one of Saturn satellites was a pancake. I zoomed in and indeed it was a pancake, which is bizarre. Turns out it is really a pancake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(moon). Seriously, I cannot recall anything even close to this. It is far easier to show to a kid than the system on the freaking NASA website! I would literally buy the game just for that!

Actual travel in space is also realistically modelled. Stuff needs to be transferred from Earth to Low Earth Orbit. From there, it needs sufficient escape velocity to continue journey. All planets and major satellites have their 5 Lagrange Points where you park stuff and do re-supply. To get from Earth to Mars, you don't just fly there, you do a Hohmann Transfer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit) instead. Which means that to have a reasonable travel, you must launch within the launch window when orbits align for easier transfer. Earth orbital period is a year, Mars is 1.88 years, Jupiter is 11.86 years, so good luck timing!

Now, on to factions. While devs did not talk much about them, I did some digging in game files (much like Paradox games, a lot of parameters are in plain text and are easily editable) and what I saw matched behavior that other players observed. I will talk about 2 parameters here: "protect human life" and "Protect Alien Life", which range from 0 to 1. There are 7 human factions + aliens. Keep in mind that all 7 human factions will be playable.

1. Resistance: basically your standard X-com guys. Protect Human Life is 1, Protect Alien Life is 0. Moving on.
2. Protectorate: believe that humans are doomed in war against inter-stellar civilization and thus seek to negotiate a peace/surrender on terms where humanity can survive. They are quite pacifist with Protect Human Life at 1, Protect Alien Life at 0.9. During demo, they were mostly just sitting there. Useless in fight, but at least wont do crap that # 6 and 7 in this list will do.
3. Academy: they believe that humanity needs to convince aliens that we are equals and ally to them. Protect Human Life is 0.85, Protect Alien Life is 0.85.
4. Exodus: believe that humans have no hope in fight and also that aliens will not spare us. So, they want to escape from the Solar System. Protect Human Life is 0.85, Protect Alien Life is 0
5. Initiative: ruthless capitalists/Illuminati who seek to use chaos for personal benefit and become the dominant power after the whole thing is over. Protect Human Life is 0.5, Protect Alien Life is 0.5. In other words, they are perfectly OK with murder for sake of profit.
6. Servants: now, this is where things get interesting. They worship aliens and will actively help aliens conquer the Earth. Protect Human Life is 0.5, Protect Alien Life is 1. In other words, they will willingly kill humans if that saves alien lives. Now, remember what I mentioned about nukes being nukes? Russia and USA got a LOT of nukes. If said nukes fly, humans will be far less capable of resisting, won't they? And aliens are not here yet, so they don't get hurt... And this is a faction you will be able to play!
7. Humanity First. Just like Resistance, they want to fight the aliens. In fact, more so since they really want to kill all aliens. Also, kill all traitors. They are a really violent X-Com. Of course, Protect Alien Life is 0. Protect Human Life is... 0.5. Yep, they place no more value on human life than a faction actively supporting aliens. If they get hold of USA or Russia... they got a GREAT set of tools to teach traitors a lesson. Lesson that will wipe out half of Earth GDP and third of population.

Finally aliens have Protect Alien Life at 1 and Protect Human Life at 0.25. Quite curiously, they seem to be more OK with humans than resistance is with aliens.

[Mkok]

I am quite excited for this game. The demo seems fun, tho it does get boring quite fast... probably mainly due to no save feature so you repeat the same stuff over and over, and bunch of stuff being left out. From certain point on it feels like there is just nothing going on anymore. But that should not be the case in the full game. There seem to be some fundamental issues, as for example the country control limits, where the more countries you have the more influence they cost you, but main source of influence are countries you own thus the more you own the more influence you get... There are few more weird quirks, such as the way funding or boost works, or how easy it seems to be to hoard infinite cash and grab all the space in space once you get your first mine out. Hopefully at least some will be solved by the time of full release, but I think having a fully well balance grand-strategy game is near impossible, so Im ok with how it is even now.

I think this ought to be a decent game at launch, but I am mostly excited for what will come afterwards with mods and dlcs. With a bit of luck pavonis just might become the next paradox, making great grand-strategy games. And we all know paradox really needs some serious competition. Plus the game already has plenty of innovative ideas which will hopefully get copied by some other games. I am especially fond of the innovation to research...

[Il Palazzo]

but main source of influence are countries you own

It isn't. It's the amount of population agreeing with your agenda. You can run public campaigns on uncontrolled nations to gain influence And conversely, losing popular support will lose you influence income even if you retain control.
One reason why China and India are attractive targets for permanent placement public campaigns.