I'm playing Terra Invicta right now. Played a quick campaign as The Capitalists (the initiative), but I feel like I fell into the classic You Made A Mistake 5 Hours Ago And Now It's All Fucked trap. So I started a new one with The Academy.

So something people will generally tell you about TI – it's long, it's increasingly complex, it has a massive scope of play, you can get into all the weeds with ship design, transfer windows and ΔV.

But what I hadn't seen before playing is how good the writing often is. I mean, it's a strategy game, so you're not getting like intense character moments, although the lore blurbs on new techs pull a little in the direction Alpha Centauri style. But really cool thing is the stuff that comes up in your objectives. There's a bunch of them that overlap between factions, but every faction talks about them differently. Like the initiative is at all times "we bought up the surplus, we paid some loser to take the fall, this thing was costly but necessary", while the academy gets to be "people left us for more extreme orgs, but we still talk and they hooked us up with some leads". Basically there's a lot of faction identity that comes through not only in what objectives they set, but also how they talk about them in briefing and on completion.

It's a delight. Annnd 100 hours long.

Also, my initial non-strategic goal was to stop the war in Ukraine. Which I did and even gave Crimea back. But then I also integrated Belarus and Kazakhstan into Russia. Because they're easier to manage that way. Also, I think I'll go for Big Sweden and/or Big Poland when those become available.