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[Cthulhu]

You won't be able to get Russia and the US together.  US alone is 100% of your management cap for most of the early game (but is strong enough to be worth that)  Though it is apparently a viable strategy to take Russia purely to dismantle its nukes and then abandon it.

[Il Palazzo]

US+Russia should be just about enough to keep you in the green influence-wise. It's about as taxing as Mexico or Canada. Having high admin agents helps as each admin point adds to management cap.

[The_Explorer]

Yes. My friend actually had a game as academy having both russia+US. He went for russia first. Such a terrible faction to have both with though, because he lost both during the event crisis. He started over with someone else, but dunno how its going. That is, he did say he was over for a little bit but ended up breaking even on cap points and it was still worth it for the boost.

[Chiefwaffles]

I have no idea the timeline the game intends for you, yeah. Very much been flying in the dark, having no idea whether I'm doing well or not. I... think I'm doing well? Got control of all of North America and an EU that unified most of western Europe other than Germany. The Servants have all of China and a chunk of Russia though, so.
No nukes, at least. Just constant notifications about the AI-controlled nations invading other ones while I admire my armies sitting at home, taking up valuable upkeep.

No idea how I'm doing against the aliens though. I decided to give space combat a try. Figured I'd have an advantage since you can look at the designs of the alien ships chilling in low Earth orbit. Slapped some armor, point defense, and lasers on a monitor hull and sent it into orbit, expecting to at least get a decent fight in.
It shot down a few missiles, got hit by one (1) missile making it past point defense, and promptly blew up into smithereens without making even a dent on the alien ship. Maybe I at least got some debris dust messing up their paint. Take that.

I noticed boost rapidly drops in utility after the early game, with off-world mining. Boost income goes way up thanks to not spending it on hab upkeep anymore; expenditure goes way down as you'll only need it to send probes and establish new habs in places without a local construction yard. Mission Control on the other hand, seems to replace it as the #1 most important currency.
On that note, boy are colonization/exploration ships worth it. Slap a space lab and fission outpost module on a ship, give it some fuel-efficient thrusters, and bam. I managed to get a base running on a moon of jupiter in a fraction of the time it would have taken for a probe to reach there and report back.

EDIT: I take it all back an alien ship just intercepted my returning colony ship then proceeded to orbitally bombard the hab, wiping it off the face of Callisto. Pain.

[Malus]

So, something I think may be viable is maintaining good relations with other factions (well, "tolerance", which is as high as it seems to go). I started an Academy game, took USA, and have been playing a sort of laid-back research-focused run. I bribed everyone up to tolerance (a few boost early on is all it takes) and signed non-aggression pacts with everyone, and it's now 2032 and I don't think I've ever been targeted by a hostile mission. I don't even think they're running public relations campaigns in my territory (if they are, they're ninjas). None of my stations have been taken over either and my research income is triple the next faction so, things are going alright. This is in stark contrast to my previous Initiative run where I almost completely monopolized LEO, the moon, and Mars, and then constantly antagonized everyone by taking over what few habs and stations they managed to get up and running. The result was a nonstop flurry of attacks, assassinations, sabotaged space facilities, etc. It was awful.

You can even coup nations (I haven't tried straight-up purging yet) without breaking the non-aggression pact, though it does lower relations from "tolerance" down to "in conflict" (edit: actually, I'm not sure if it was a fluke or what, but the next time I coup'd someone it did break the pact, so maybe it's only fine if you're undetected?). It's possible that by maintaining good relations, the AI figures it has bigger fish to fry and prioritizes targeting their actual enemies. I mean, it sounds kind of obvious, so it's probably some kind of GSG/4X brainrot that made me take 40 hours of gameplay to realize cooperation/diplomacy might be a reasonable strategy.

[Chiefwaffles]

Jesus christ, I just hit some kind of extreme difficulty bump out of nowhere. All of a sudden, the fucking Protectorate starts purging every control point I have everywhere. I have no idea how? I'm struggling with my popular support, neighbor, federation, and more bonuses to get 10% chances on purge/crackdowns on the same control point they just took. Meanwhile, they're taking another control point in another heavily fortified region.

It's seriously out of nowhere. I haven't done anything to the Protectorate thus far.

EDIT: And the Academy. And Humanity First. Not only is every faction suddenly targeting me, but it feels like they're auto-succeeding all their attacks. Before this point the most I had to deal with was Humanity First purging one control point from Mexico that I promptly reclaimed every 2 years or so. But now I'm getting multiple successful purges on fortified points a turn by multiple different factions.
And naturally,

Spoiler: Genuine but mild spoiler I guess?? (click to show/hide)

The aliens decide to land a battleship on Earth (and are also suddenly conducting terror missions in my regions despite never touching them with any operations at all before)

I'm wondering if the game suddenly registered me as the #1 faction in the game and decided I needed to be brought down several thousand notches, or if this was some hidden timer. It's nonsensical.

EDIT 2: Something's up. My 21 espionage/20 investigation agent is getting 0% chances to purge *or* crackdown the control points that were just taken by me. That I still have the greatest public support in. This is some AI bullshit.

EDIT 3: Yeah this save is done. Cruised to early 2033 before the game decided it was time for literally every single AI faction to gang up on me.

[Jopax]

The Aliens actually have a threat meter, tho it's kinda hidden in the intel screen and the game never tells you it exists. Basically tracks most shit you do to piss the aliens off and they start escalating accordingly. I'm guessing there's something similar with the human factions, tho from what I've heard it heavily depends on your alignment. So if you're playing Humanity First you'll have a much easier time of pissing off the Servants than you would if you played the Protectorate.

And in regards to everything going to shit, could your agents have been compromised? Seems unlikely that all of them would be, but the AI can definitely turn them and mess with you. Someone mentioned earlier how the AI dismissed an agent the moment he tried turning them, that happens only when the AI has turned one of yours and they have intel on what you're actually doing.

[Cthulhu]

It does tell you it exists but it's buried in the walls of text, I think it comes up after you get Alien Operations?  One of the big xenology research projects makes it show up, and the research screen tells you you have it.

Overall I dunno.  The game is fun when it gets going, but the start is a boring slog and the complexity of the game and its systems makes me think there'll be a lot of fucking up badly and needing to restart, which means spending another five or six hours just doing this early game shit.  Made worse by the sheer number of things you can do, some of which are very important, and can bite you in the ass if you weren't aware of them from the start.  Like priorities, which are so small and incremental it's easy to fly under the radar but will pay huge dividends if done right (and how do you do them right? fuck if I know).

I know one trick is to take Iraq and give it 100% spoils which'll give you roughly 300 funds a month.  If you're willing to invest a bit more time and management cap Saudi Arabia will give you over a thousand a month.  But things like economy and knowledge scale with population so India which isn't anything special early game can turn into a monster with the right investments.

Also a cheesy strat, but if you get a guy with high admin and hostile takeover, along with one or two with good investigation you can aggressively steal +ADM orgs from other factions and use that to pump all your councilors' admin.  Since ADM lets your councilors carry more orgs, and orgs can give any stat, this can give you insanely strong councilors with huge stats in everything and giant resource income.  In general, while you may not have the leeway to raise it early on when you're desperate for one or two points in something to get off the ground, admin is the strongest stat because orgs can do everything else you'd spend XP on.

[Chiefwaffles]

I actually just checked my alien threat level — 2 pips. Didn’t seem that high. Was already annoying though because the aliens were deleting anything I sent to Jupiter and its moons’ delicious mineral deposits.

The main problem by far was the other AI factions though. Every single one of them. Protectorate, Academy, Exodus, Humanity First… Ironically, the servants pitched in on the dead horse beating but by the smallest amount.
And my agents being turned doesn’t explain that. As far as I can tell, a turned agent gives the owning faction a lot of Intel on what you’re doing and the ability to auto fail missions below a configurable % success chance for that agent.

But every AI faction was targeting and seemingly auto-succeeding in purging my fortified control points. Control points which gave me, with a home field advantage, literal 0% chance to take them back even when the AI didn’t immediately fortify the points themselves. It was insane.

Anyways, I think my biggest problem with the game is the weird difficulty curve. It seems like the optimal gameplay is just being as passive as possible.
From what I can tell, actually attacking the aliens any time before endgame is a noob trap. And since the other factions can’t be eliminated and can make your life a living hell if they desire, attacking them seems like one too.
So your best strategy is just ignoring and appeasing everyone else and not touching combat/aggressive portions of the game until you’re almost done. Just ignore the aliens so they don’t immediately blow up your ships and nuke your habs. Keep to yourself until you can build superships and take out the aliens, but nothing beforehand.
And there’s just no real way to know if you’re doing this right. You just keep going at it until the game decides you’ve taken too long and need to lose now?

Still fun, but christ. I’ll probably try reloading an earlier save and see if signing NAPs with everyone helps. Having to spend agent actions for diplomacy (and nation actions) is… incredibly clunky.

[Mkok]

dunno about factions grabbing your stuff, it sounds like you somehow got a big penalty for defending, so everyone is taking a piece of the easy target. You want your councilors to have high ADM and going above cap limit gives you penalty for defending as well apparently.

for aliens, dunno how it works, but I have been at 4 threat level for a while due to having colonized mercury, and they started sending ships blowing up my stuff. I would always just rebuild it immidietly, so it just repeated itself for a while, until I made some ships and started doing suicide runs at the aliens. lasers seem to be completely useless (green arc size 3 frontal laser didnt fire even a single shot before being torn to pieces), but rocket ships are king. a ship with 2 viper missiles can easily take out a single alien ship, just note that it is not a win but mutual annihilation. I blew up like 15 alien ships and still at threat 4. my biggest problem is how tedious it is to hunt the alien fleets around mercury to stop them from bombarding my colonies.

Land wise I had what I would consider a bug where aliens conquered usa faster then it would nuke the invading armies, and now the aliens have 25 nukes, so there is no hope of kicking them out of earth, but fortunately I still have 30 nukes in russia to defend my nations for quite a while. I have all of india, china, korea, russia, and all the nations in euroasian union and doing quite nice. I could unify the euroasian union and grab more nations, but that would probably piss someone so I dont feel like doing that. Not like any nation outside of my india/china and russia matters at this point.

[Chiefwaffles]

I was 4 points over the cap at first but after the first (of many) control point was taken I was under my cap for the rest of the points being taken. Bizarre.

[Cthulhu]

I'm worried about that shit, but hoping I can kneecap the servants.  I'm starting to snowball pretty hard.  Have a 25 admin diplomat with hostile takeover and a spy in the servants, I'm eating their guys alive for their +admin orgs and using it to pump all my councilors up super hard.  I cannot overstate how strong admin is, and how strong hostile takeover is.  Orgs are kind of a crapshoot when you're just buying them cause you've only got like ten and can only obtain maybe 1 or 2 if you're lucky, but being able to steal them at will gives you a massive range of orgs to choose from, and they do so much that you can get extremely OP on them.

I'm playing humanity first, just got their goal research done

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Your goal is to kill all alien freaks, as you might expect, and you get a huge management cap boost and a new paramilitary org called the executioners that gives +5 admin and like +10 to violent stats like command and espionage, it's crazy good.

[Rolan7]

I keep getting really paralyzed by this game's options, but I got some good advice from a close friend.

I'm going to finish the tutorial and then go full Gue'Vesa.  I'll do my best for humanity and our wonderful owners, and I'll probably fail, but at least I'll have a powerful ally.

Edit: Okay I meant that as "I'll restart as the Servitors or Protectorate" but in retrospect I might learn a lot from running the Resistance into the ground once.  Sounds like it's basically impossible to grok the game on one's first playthrough, so might as well take the intended loss and learn the mechanics on the way.

[Cthulhu]

Yeah, the game's very fucking complicated and you'll probably fuck things up.  Some lessons I learned:

1. Science labs on orbital habs give additional bonuses if they're in an interface orbit, which is low or high LEO.  Put your habs there early on, the other options are kind of traps.  They can be useful later on but if you put your first hab on GEO then you're getting less benefits for higher boost cost.

2. You can build space stuff on earth, which costs funds and boost, or in space, which costs space resources you can only get by mining.  Get on the moon as fast as you can (requires mission to the moon global tech, outpost hab faction project, and probing the moon, which you do by zooming out and selecting the moon to get the button) and take the best mining spots, don't be afraid to put a hab on multiple locations just to stake your claim.  If you miss the moon rush then I think you'll be stuck trying to steal enemy habs or using boost to build a presence on mars, which will suck immensely. Looks like boosting to Mars is inevitable, but moon mining will still help a lot.

3.  Priority investment is important but the way it's situated gives a bit of information overload, my eyes glazed over it many times before I started actually working with it.  Every nation generates a number of investment points per month, raised by GDP and reduced by unrest and armies not resting in their home province.  The points are distributed among the priorities according to the percentage points listed. Every time you get the number of points required (1 or 2 for most, 50 for big projects like building a new army or beginning a space program) grants an incremental boost to something.  Things like economy, welfare, and knowledge also scale with population, so while China and India aren't insanely good at the start they can become powerhouses with smart investment.

4. See the stuff I've been saying about orgs.

[Malus]

One piece of advice that I simply cannot stress enough: have at least one nation (USA is probably the easiest) with maxed miltech and a few armies. Every time there's a tech unlock that raises the maximum, focus 100% on bringing your country up to max again. Otherwise you're going to have a very bad time.

On a completely unrelated note, nukes go from "this GDP debuff is kind of annoying" to "holy shit, why is USA's per capita GDP $15,000??" very quickly. You don't need to worry about 3 or 4 nukes, but 10+ and things start to get really, irrecoverably bad.