The modders behind brilliant XCOM mods Long War and Long War 2—which Tom called "a must-play reinvention of XCOM 2"—formed their own studio in 2015 and announced their first full game: Terra Invicta. Now, four years later, they've released the game's first trailer, which runs you through what to expect from the grand strategy space game.
In Terra Invicta, a hostile alien force has arrived on the outer solar system, and is preparing for all-out war. Humanity is split about how to respond, and fractures into various groups with their own agendas. You control one of these factions, The Resistance, and your goal is to jostle and negotiate with the other factions as you build a fleet that can push back the alien invasion.
As The Resistance's commander, it's your job to recruit a council of leaders from the world's best scientists, business tycoons and military leaders, all the while responding to the shifting geopolitical climate on Earth.
You're not just constrained to our planet, either: Terra Invicta takes place across an expansive map of the entire solar system, and a lot of your time will be spent striking out to various planets and moons to gather resources and create mining colonies. Building space stations looks satisfying and detailed: you'll snap modules onto a shell until you've got the exact structure you want (skip to 2:05 in the trailer above to take a look).
The devs promise you'll also command interplanetary warships in battle against both human and alien forces, although it hasn't said how detailed that battle system is. I'm looking forward to hearing more about it in the coming months.
The game doesn't have a release date but the dev team, called Pavonis Interactive, says a Kickstarter fundraising launch is "imminent".
