Terra Invicta Alien threat level

This guide is meant to give a quick overview on the alien threat level, its meant to be used as early game tips and help those struggling with the aliens when they unintentionally aggro them too early.

The Intel Page

Your friend, your best friend when it comes to the aliens, is the Intel page. The button for it can be found right next to the Research page.

When you click on it you will be greeted with the factions page and several buttons. I’ll only cover the Aliens tab of the Intel page here, the very first button on the Intel page.

Alien Threat

The Alien threat is marked by 5 colored dots on the top left of the Alien tab in the Intel page and is named “Estimated Alien Threat Level”

In the picture 4 of the 5 are colored, originally these dots are not colored but when you attract their attention each dot will color up to signify the threat level.

There are 6 ways in which the threat level increases:

• Station building
• Outpost building
• Fleet building
• Constant attacks against the Servants
• Direct attacks against the Alien ships
• Certain story missions / councilor missions

The first 3 are self explanatory. Whenever you build a station, outpost or ship you will increase the threat level. Its not by much, as in my game I was able to build 5 stations, 13 outposts and 1 ship and the threat level increased only by 1 point. Early game this where you want to keep your threat level as much as possible, I would not jump to 2 points of threat level due to the last point on the list which I will cover shortly.

In theory you should be able to fully colonize Mars without attracting alien attention, but if you do that its best to not expand towards asteroid mining until you’ve unlocked a tech that allows you to expand more without attracting alien attention. A full Mars colonization will give you enough income to sustain you and be able to stockpile – though I prefer to just take the 3 best spots on Mars and find a few really good asteroids to exploit.

Now on to Constant attacks against the Servants

Actions against the Servants will piss off the aliens. This, to my experience, does not include Councilor missions such as Detaining, Assassination, Tech stealing, Tech Sabotage and Org stealing; rather, it pertains to direct (military) actions against CPs they control. The more you declare war on territories they hold and flip them over to your control through military actions the more you will attract the Aliens attention.

The game will notify you about this through a councilor in a short message in the left side of the screen but its very easy to miss. Just know that the more military action you take against their CPs the closer you get to increasing the threat level and bringing the aliens on you.

Direct attacks against the Alien ships is again self explanatory. Early to mid game you do not want to fight them, this means not sending fleets directly to engage theirs nor building your ships in Earth orbit where the aliens might “accidentally” fly into yours and start combat. In fact, from what I recently learned, all they need to do is start and engagement, evade or leave combat after that, and your threat level increased by 2 or more points.

From what others have said on the forums and what I found as well, the best solution is to build your Shipyard station in a Lagrange point.

Not only do you not run the risk of other Factions trying to flip over your station to their side but you won’t have any “accidental” encounters with the alien fleets there.

And finally, Certain story missions / councilor missions

This is a spoiler regarding the story, I will not go into the specifics just what the missions themselves want you to do
The final way (so far that I know) that will increase threat level is when you complete 2 story missions (1 which can be repeated how much you like).

The first mission will require you assassinate an alien agent, they usually spawn next to alien encounters and you need to use the “Investigate Councilor” task to uncover the agent.

By itself, this mission does not increase the threat level too much, in fact, when I did it the threat did not go past 1 level, however, from this point on you will be able to kill alien agents over and over again and the more you kill the more you will tick them off and your threat level will increase.

So far I’ve not found a reason to kill more than one (as the mission required) not only because they spawn with a massive Security level, meaning that you need a councilor with a high Espionage level, but there are just too many downsides in messing with them early game.

The second mission will require you to detain an alien agent. This one will jump your threat level to 4 points, whether its a fixed jump or not I do know know, but I do not recommend having a threat level over 1 when you do this mission. I’ve had games where after detaining the alien agent they went ham on me and games where nothing happened as it was only recently that I understood I need to keep an eye on the threat level.

Alien aggro

If you’ve aggroed the aliens too soon the only thing you can do is nothing.

Just wait it out, let them destroy your stuff, let the threat level drop and then rebuild. It sucks, but that’s your best solution. They out-tech you too much to fight them, its a losing battle to try so early game.

Conclusion

Always keep an eye on the threat level. Do not go crazy and expand without regard in the solar system, build outposts only in locations that give you the best income, do not go ham on station building and keep your ship production as far away as possible from Earths orbit. And finally, do not attack the alien fleet early game, that’s just a death sentence.