Frequently Asked Questions

This page should contain no spoilers.

Space Warfare

What drives should I get first?

TI has many drive options. Some are generally good, some are generally useless, and some are situational. But for your first game when you don't know what's going on, here's a few default early choices:

• You can shoot down a surveillance destroyer with the Nova chemical rocket and 1-2 kps.
• For defending a planet, you want 6-10 kps and as much cruise acceleration as you can manage. Target early options are Orion, Pegasus, or Burner. Helicon will serve, but is a bit slow.
• For getting a ship to Mercury or the asteroid belt, you want 30+ kps and cruise acceleration of at least 1-2 milli-g. Decent early options are Helicon, Advanced VASIMR, or Grid.

Helpful charts showing drive performance (cruise acceleration vs ∆V) can be found here: Help:Gameplay Guides/Drive Guide.

Managing Nations

Why can't I Federate/Unify/Declare War?

Mouseover flags on the relations tab

• These are actions performed via the Set Policy mission, which always requires active (not-cracked-down) control of the executive in the nation where you want to act.
• If you have control, view the nation detail window. Go to the Relations tab and mouseover the flag of the target nation. It will show all the possible Policy actions and the complete list of requirements for each; the ones marked FAIL are preventing you from taking action.

How do I take a control point in China from a rival?

• You're going to need councilors with maxed 25 INV and 25 ESP, and a war chest of Ops.
• You also need a maxed 25 PER councilor, or at least the willingness to spend a lot of cash on Public Campaign.
• Get Sanctioned Investigations (+3 Crackdown), if it's available.
• Get a spy in their faction and investigate a few additional councilors.
• Campaign your popularity up as high as it will go -- ideally, over 70%.
  • If this is difficult because they are spending a ton on Unity, have a nation declare war on China. This should shift their priorities.
• Ideally, take control of as many non-rival neighbor nations as you can.
• Ideally, wait until shortly before their Defend protection expires. They cannot refresh Defend if they have no councilors. (But it can be a crapshoot to get the timing right, here. Defend will be one of their highest priorities if they have any councilors left.)
• Ideally, target the Security Apparatus control point first. Its bonuses will be helpful for future purges.
• When it's go time, go to the Councilors tab and tell your spy to resign. Turn a new spy and simultaneously Assassinate or Detain as many additional councilors as you can. The idea is to push them as far over their control cap as possible, while also reducing their total council Adminstration score as much as possible. These both either help you or hurt them when you attempt Crack Down.
• Be prepared to have to try more than once before the dice roll in your favor. Good luck.

How do I democratize an authoritarian nation?

Most efficiently:

• Stay authoritarian while you work Education up to 12 and GDP per capital up to $50-60k
  • Work on these at the same time, 3 pips in Knowledge and 1 pip in Economy, to take advantage of the diverstity bonus.
  • Increases in Education feed back into improved effectiveness of the Economy priority. Increases in GDP feed back into more IP to spend on fixing the nation.
  • GDPpc is important to prevent unrest once you take away the stability effects of authoritarianism. It's more important in large nations, which are harder to keep stable.
• After Education 12, switch to working on Government.
  • Focus hard to do this quickly, because the Anocracy range (Govt 4-6) is generally bad.

How do I fix China's Government?

• If Taiwan hasn't been reunified yet: Research Liberating Mainland China. Unify the People's Republic into Taiwan, creating the Republic of China. The meganation keeps Taiwan's government score, instantly democratizing a billion people.
  • One thing to be aware of: this creates Republic of China with a capital at Shanghai. The Pan-Asian Combine only applies to the People's Republic with capital at Beijing, so you won't be able to build that mega-nation if you start from democratic Taiwan.
  • You can dance around this by releasing the People's Republic from democratic Republic of China, then re-unifying Republic of China into the now-democratic nation with capital at Beijing.
• If Taiwan has been reunified: This is much harder. It's too late to just re-release Taiwan, and in any case Taiwan's democratic government has been destroyed, but grinding the government score for giant China all the way up through Anocracy is a giant waste of resources.
  • Option 1: Leave China as an autocracy and work with it. This is probably most sensible plan, but if you have an ambition to democratize China, there are other things you can do.
  • Option 2: If Liberating Mainland China has already been unlocked and is in your available projects list, research it.
    • Now liberate Taiwan/Republic of China to its capital at Shanghai. Democratize this 1-region, 4-cp nation while the rest of China builds GDP, MC and boost and/or runs spoils.
    • When Republic of China is sufficiently democratic, unify the rest of China into it.
    • LMC will only unlock if the nation of Taiwan exists on Earth. And Taiwan is a weird nation that thinks its capital is in Shanghai but lacks a claim on it at game start, so you can't release Taiwan from China until you research LMC to give it that claim.
  • Option 3: With End of China, liberate Shanghai as Huanan. Democratize this 1-region, 4-cp nation while the rest of China builds GDP, MC and boost and/or runs spoils.
    • It will take a few years, but when you get there, start liberating more of China and unifying into Huanan -- it ends up being possible to unify about half of China into a huge democratic nation based in Shanghai.
  • Option 4: With End of China, start liberating as much of China as you possibly can. Use the liberated nations to demand territory from the PRC until Beijing rules as small a rump as possible. This is to reduce the amount of CAP you have to dedicate to the years-long project.
    • You can keep or abandon the liberated parts as you feel like, either building MC and boost, or using the time and CAP to control a different big nation while what's left of China democratizes. You probably won't have enough CAP to control all of fragmented China so you'll have to give up at least some of it.
    • When you think it's finally democratic enough, re-assemble China into the PRC, research Pan-Asian Combine, and collect the rest of east Asia.