Hooded Horse have announced the Early Access launch date for their sci-fi grand strategy game, Terra Invicta.

Terra Invicta is a new grand strategy game by the team that created XCOM‘s infamous Long War mod. After several delays, the game will finally enter Early Access for Windows PC via GOG and Steam on September 26th.

Terra Invicta is set in the near future, after humanity detects an alien fleet of unknown origin and intent entering our Solar System. As Earth is thrown into chaos while trying to decide how to address the situation, 7 shadowy organizations emerge with their own ideas about how to unite humanity against the coming threat.

Choose your faction and unite Earth using any means necessary to ensure humanity’s survival in a scary and unknown future. Start your operations on Earth and gradually expand into the Solar System, building colonies and fleets to maintain dominance on both Earth and in space.

You can find the new release date teaser trailer below.

You can find the rundown (via Steam) below:

An extraterrestrial probe is detected approaching Earth. Unknown to humanity, an alien force has arrived in the far reaches of the icy Kuiper Belt and has begun mining a dwarf planet to prepare for an invasion.

With Earth’s nations unable to unite to address the alien arrival, transnational groups of like-minded political, military and scientific leaders develop covert channels to coordinate a response. With the aliens’ motives uncertain, factions emerge, driven by hope, fear or greed.

You will control one of these factions.

• The Resistance works to form an alliance of nations to mount a coordinated defense
• Humanity First vows to exterminate the aliens alongside any who sympathize with them
• The Servants worship the aliens and believe they will solve all the troubles of the world
• The Protectorate advocates negotiated surrender as the only means to avoid annihilation
• The Academy hopes the alien arrival heralds the opportunity to form an interstellar alliance
• The Initiative seeks to profit from the chaos and destruction
• Project Exodus plans to build a massive starship and flee the Solar System

Gameplay

From the creators of Long War, Terra Invicta bridges the gap between civilization on Earth and the vast interstellar empires of other space strategy games. Gain command over Earth’s nations…

…and take humanity’s first steps in colonizing our Solar System…

…where over 300 asteroids, moons and planets in constant motion create an ever-changing strategic map.

You begin on Earth as the head of a shadowy organization competing with other factions for control points representing a region’s military, economic and political leadership. Geopolitics is your sandbox, and you may unite or break apart nations as best serves your ends, while using those under your influence to conduct proxy wars against the other six factions.

Factions work through a council of politicians, scientists and operatives whose abilities can be enhanced by obtaining influence over organizations like intelligence agencies or powerful corporations.

Terra Invicta has a global research system that creates opportunities for both competition and cooperation. Shared scientific advancement unlocks private engineering projects. Factions can choose to focus on private projects, at the cost of weakening Earth as a whole and ceding influence over global research direction to other factions with different priorities.

The other six human factions are not your sole competition. Throughout the game, illustrated events will present you with difficult choices as you investigate growing alien activity on Earth.

You cannot remain on Earth alone, and space launch facilities are of vital strategic importance.

Your conflict with the other factions will extend to space, where you will compete to mine asteroids and construct bases on planets and moons throughout the Solar System.

Stations built deep in space can refuel your ships, while those closer to home can serve as research or construction facilities.

Spaceship design in Terra Invicta draws from the best of scientific speculation and hard science fiction. You can design your own ships, selecting from an array of weapons, drives and radiators to place on a variety of hulls.

Tactical combat is built around a realistic simulation of Newtonian physics, where momentum and maneuver in 3D space are just as important as the firepower your ships carry.

Mods

Terra Invicta is built with modding support in mind, and much of the game is accessible to modders without a coding background. We hope that the Solar System setting and geopolitics simulation will provide a useful framework for modders to realize their own creative visions.