YMMV / Terra Invicta

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Is Kiran Banerjee (the leader of the Protectorate) a Tragic Villain who's desperately trying to save humanity from the aliens and itself in the only way he thinks is realistic? A paranoid, misanthropic Knight Templar who's come to believe that only a firm hand can keep the world stable and peaceful? Or just plain mind controlled early on, and serving the Hydras' interests the entire time? There's plenty of room for any interpretation, or a mixture thereof, in the story.
  • Does Khalid Al-Ashgar really believe that Project Exodus is the best way to save humanity, or is he just using the alien crisis as an excuse to gather the resources to finally make his passion project a reality? By extension, is Project Exodus an earnest attempt to preserve human civilization, or an extravagant case of The Elites Jump Ship?
  • At a certain point in the Servants campaign, Judith Howell meets with the aliens and proves to be extremely resistant to their pherocytes. The question is, why? Is it, as she believes, because her existing loyalty to the Hydra means there's no conflict between the pherocyte effects and her own desires? Or is it either a side effect of all the mind-altering drugs she's done over her life and/or the sheer cunning willpower she developed as a cult leader protecting her?
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Each and every single game, with maybe the exception of the Servants, is going to start the exact same way - take over Kazakhstan for the Baikonur Cosmodrome and then make Kazakhs leave the Eurasian Union ASAP for the maximum Boost benefit. It borders on a Self-Imposed Challenge to not do this.
  • Similarly, installing yourself in any given oil-rich country early on, particularly in the Arabian Peninsula and setting local policies entirely to Spoils and nothing else. Sure, it will drive the local economy to ruin eventually, but before that happens, it will provide a steady source of early game funding with minimal effort to get there.
  • While there's several different ways to take power on Earth, and how much to focus on Earth versus space is a point of disagreement among players, players' space development plan is largely identical: Luna^note some players skip this, Mars, Earth orbit, a few asteroids (or just Ceres), and Mercury in that order, and then it's time to build fighting ships and take the battle to the aliens in the outer system. The alternative is to rush Jupiter as quickly as possible, which is a somewhat advanced technique.
  • Building at least a single Mission Control in any given country that can afford it. Nothing else really matters in the long run, since MC is the only resource that's useful or important past Mars colonisation. This also means consolidation of countries will be postponed until all members of potential bigger entities build at least a single MC, and the resulting super-state will inherit them all, rather than building one at a time just slightly faster (EU being the prime example of this in action).
  • By mid-game, once your own faction is firmly entrenched in the most important countries of your choice, it becomes far, far easier and more profitable to not as much force AI controlled factions out of their own strongholds, but just carpet-bomb them with Unrest missions to the brink of a civil war within 2-3 months. As a result, the whole place will turn into a war zone with Revolving Door Revolution, and all the AI factions will try to fight for the scraps, as the place will constantly keep purging established CPs. Bonus points if that's something big and thus hard to take over, like the US or federalised European Union, since most councillors will be hard-pressed to succeed there in the first place.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Fans of Hanse Castillo tend to regard him as a Well-Intentioned Extremist fighting for the greater good of humanity, while downplaying or ignoring his war crimes during Operation Condor and his generally abusive behavior towards his own soldiers. Fittingly, Castillo himself is, in universe, part of Magneto's Misaimed Fandom.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • Humanity First, the Absolute Xenophobe faction, has quite a following among players for their no-nonsense approach to dealing with the aliens and the Servants, as well as their red and black aesthetic.
  • The Servants are generally enjoyed by their fans for being an easier campaign to play, their ability to work alongside the aliens (which is a big part of why said campaign is easier) and successfully arguing for humanity to get a better deal out of service to the Hydra than what the Protectorate agrees to.
  • The Initiative gets this too, being The Illuminati in all but name. They may be evil and self-interested, but they don't pretend otherwise, they are clever about it, they refuse to surrender Earth to the aliens, and in their ending, they manage to become overlords of both Earth and the Hydras' empire through modified pherocytes.
• Fan Nickname: The aliens are frequently referred to by the fandom as "Ayys" or "Ayyliens". This is hardly surprising for anyone familiar with the XCOM: Enemy Unknown fandom that Pavonis' creators previously made a mod for, who did the same.
• Game-Breaker:
  • While Mercury is resource-rich and thus a great place to mine for metals, its real advantage is its proximity to the Sun, which makes solar power ludicrously efficient there. Build a bunch of space stations in orbit with two Solar Arrays (or one Solar Farm) and a buttload of Nanofactories — the so-called "Dyson Mercury" strategy — and you won't have to worry about money for the rest of the game. This received a nerf later; the radiation levels on Mercury make the metal cost of shielding bases enough that Venus looks like a better alternative for the highest level stations.
  • Lasers and phasers are decent damage dealers in their own right, but where they really excel is point defense. Park a bunch of laser-armed ships in a Wall formation, and their collective Beam Spam will annihilate any incoming missiles or projectiles, leaving the enemy ships with empty launch tubes and a bunch of pissed-off humans swooping in for the Coup de Grâce.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Regions close the equator produce more of the Boost resource, which represents mass being launched into Earth orbit. This is because, due to Coriolis force, rockets launching from the equator gain a slight speed boost from the Earth's rotation, reducing the fuel needed to attain orbit.
  • Solar power is very inefficient in a planet's L-2 Lagrangian point, because it's located in said planet's shadow.
• Goddamned Bats: Individual alien corvettes, frigates, and destroyers can be very annoying when they're deployed to attack your colonies via Orbital Bombardment. While a Layered Defense Array on your base will usually shoot them down in short order, they're likely to take out at least one module before expiring, which forces the player to pause what they're doing to rebuild it. There was also a nasty bug in Patch 6 where the defenses don't work at all under high timewarp, so the player would have to slow the game down and wait until the ship is destroyed before returning to what they were doing.
• Jerkass Woobie: Kiran Banerjee is widely despised in the playerbase for being a Knight Templar Quisling, but even his detractors generally agree that his Protagonist Journey to Villain is well-written and even somewhat sympathetic, given his backstory as a UN peacekeeper who gradually lost his faith in humanity.
• Memetic Loser: The Protectorate is generally the least popular of the pro-alien factions among the playerbase due to their complete knuckling under to the alien's demands. The Academy gets a decent amount of support for their "speak softly and carry a big stick" approach, and the Servants generally get credit for at least negotiating a better deal for humanity than the one that The Protectorate accepts.
• Misaimed Fandom: A number of players unironically think that Hanse Castillo and Humanity First have the right idea, rather than seeing them as the fascist, bigoted Sociopathic Soldiers they were largely intended to be.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: A "No Superpowers" run involves deliberately avoiding taking control of the US, China, India or the nascent EU to exclusively focus on the developing world: Africa, the Middle East, South America and Southeast Asia, and building these regions up to compete with the world superpowers.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • Of the X-COM series, but mostly of the Geoescape section of the game rather than the tactical combat. Makes sense considering the creators are responsible for the famous XCOM: Long War mod.
  • The game shares its premise with that of Remembrance of Earth's Past, both depicting a divided humanity struggling to prepare for a looming Alien Invasion in a fairly realistic sci-fi setting. Several of the game's factions also echo those of the novels, with the Servants standing in for the Earth-Trisolaris Organization, Project Exodus representing Starship Earth and the Escapist movement, etc.
  • There's a lot of overlap with The Expanse as well, with the mid- and late-game being set amid a Colonized Solar System contested by fleets of (relatively) grounded space warships. Many of the ship designs resemble those used by the UN or Martian navies, and their weaponry, movements, and order of battle would fit quite nicely into that universe.
  • Gameplay-wise, there are also parallels with games such as Metal Gear and Deus Ex, given how the various factions all start out as covert groups seeing to influence humanity, only this time, they're the protagonists. This is especially the case when playing the Initiative, with its emphasis on working through various intermediaries and becoming a shadowy conspiracy running Earth in the shadows being reminiscent of both the Illuminati and Majestic-12.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Nobody likes the Initiative in-universe, but they're something of an Ensemble Dark Horse in the fanbase.