Terra Invicta: Complete Guide To Ship Design

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For the first few hours of any new campaign in Terra Invicta, you’ll be spending your time squarely on Terra Firma, expanding your influence across the globe as you research the technologies that let you reach for the stars.

Once you get to space, sending about probes is the easy part. If you want to actually move between planets and get materials around more easily, then you’re going to need ships. And wow, that really is more complex than literally any other system in the game.

Do You Have To Design Ships?

Here’s the most exciting part. If you love the nitty-gritty aspects of a grand strategy games, you’ll love the ship building. There aren’t pre-built ships or already defined functions. Before you make build any ship, you have to design it first. No exceptions.

Now, you can have the game auto-design a ship based on the hull and role you choose, and it will be perfectly sufficient, though it’s worth taking the time to actually build it yourself so you can learn exactly how it all works, and make sure it’s an efficient as it can be.

That said, Autodesign is a great tool to give you an idea of what’s expected of each hull and role so you can build your own even better.

After you’ve designed a ship, it’s saved as a template so you can then create that exact ship as many times as you want, or make slight adjustments to it. If you want to make an entirely new type of ship though, then you’re starting over again.

Ships are an essential part of the game as you advance into space, and building ships is honestly one of the most complex elements of it all. You can genuinely lose hours fine-tuning the stats of a ship.

How To Build And Design Ships

To design and build ships, you need two core elements — a place to actually build the ship, and the modules you build it with. For the former, you’ll need a Space Dock module or better, which can be built on any space station or on-plant hab.

Once you’ve built a Space Dock, you can start designing a ship at that location. However, what you can build ships from is limited by the modules that you’ve researched.

There are certain modules that are required for any ship to be built, so you’ll need to have them researched. And there is a lot. So, so much. As such, it’s a good idea to invest in ship module research early to give you a head start when it comes to creating a ship.

Once you’ve put together your ship, you do a Test Transfer, which gives you an idea of where it can reach in the Solar System and how long it would take to travel from one destination to another. After that, you’re free to save the design.

The building part then is easy. But also probably very, very expensive in terms of Space Resources. Realistically, it will be hard to build ships until you’ve set up a few mines, and that means reaching Mars and the asteroid belt to give you a much wider variety of more plentiful resources.

Choosing A Hull And Role

Now let’s get into the real meat of ships. While you do have to build the ship almost entirely yourself, there’s a small degree of guidance you need to , and that’s by choosing a hull. Plenty more hull types can be unlocked through research, though you’ll be given a decent selection to start you off.

The hull determines the number of modules you can equip to the ship, and the shape of them. The shape of components is important as it determines what can be equipped. For example, not every hull will have the space for certain weapons, while they will always have the components for Drives, Power Plants, and Radiators.

After you’ve chosen your hull, you need to choose a role. This is somewhat less important as it does not actually define what the ship you build can do when you’re in control of it. However, you can also set ships to auto, letting the AI take over their responsibilities. The rol determines how they act, and is necessary to build a ship.

Every Ship Module And What It Does

Once you’ve chosen your hull, you can start putting together your ship. This happens across eight major categories, though there are some extra bis and pieces to many of them.

Drives

Drives are, well, what drive your ship. They allow it to move, and are the core determining factor behind Delta-Vs, thrust, and acceleration. There are a good few to choose from, especially as you unlock more advanced ones. Ideally, you want a Drive that’s low in mass so that it can accelerate faster.

After placing a drive, you must choose how many thrusters it has, and how much propellant is available to it. Thrusters max out at six, each giving you more acceleration but adding mass, which can lower Delta-Vs. Meanwhile, propellant increases Delta-Vs directly. A more efficient thrust will let you move faster and lighter, meaning less propellant is proportionately required.

Power Plants

After choosing your Drive, you need a Power Plant. Power Plants and Drives need to be compatible in terms of energy, so make your choice with that in mind. Power Plants are also the main source of power for the whole ship, so think about what you want your ship to be and how much power it might need before committing to a Power Plant.

Radiators

Next up are Radiators. Ships generate a lot of heat, and they need a way to take that heat away from critical components. These are constantly in use and can only handle a certain amount of heat, so make sure they’re capacity exceeds what’s actually being used so your ship doesn’t overheat.

If the ship overheats, it can cause fires onboard, eventually killing the crew inside.

Radiators are fragile however, and ideally will be retracted during combat. To this end, you can equip heat sinks in a utility module, though these can handle much less heat.

Utility Modules

These are where you really get to determine what role your ship will play. Utility modules can cover so many roles, from construction modules that let you quickly and affordably built new habs and modules on other planets, mobile labs that can probe planets as they move, to military barracks that allow you to have a defensive crew to defend against boardings.

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Different hulls will offer up different numbers and types of utility modules in varying shapes. So check the shape the modules you want to build before you commit to a hull.

Hull Weapons

Hull weapons are the weapons that are placed along the hull of the ship. These weapons tend to be weaker than those placed at the nose of a ship, though have a much wider area in which they can hit targets.

Nose Weapons

Nose weapons are significantly more powerful than hull weapons, though can only hit in a cone directly ahead of them, requiring more precise positioning to hit.

Armor

On every ship, armor can be placed in three slots — tail, hull, and nose. The tail and nose both cost the same to place armor on, while the hull, having a variable length on different hulls, will always cost more.

Once armor is placed, you can also determine how many layers it has. This will add significantly to the mass of the ship, though will also make it much harder to destroy.

Understanding Ship Performance Data

As you’re putting together your ship, its performance data will update in real time, giving you an idea as to how it will perform. There are a lot of stats involved, so let’s take a look at them.

You’ll never have a ship that is the singular best at everything, so don’t worry too heavily about so lacking stats. As long as it does its job, you can always build better ones later.