I had been feeling guilty about not completing my first bout of sci-fi grand strategy game Terra Invicta – six months on from my 1.0 write-up, I’m still trying to colonise my first asteroid – and now here come developers Pavonis Interactive to smother us in nuclear fire. And swanky new spaceship designs.

Publishers Hooded Horse have announced the XCOM-flavoured simulator’s very first DLC pack – Dark Skies. It adds a couple of new starting scenarios. The nicer one moves the starting date back to 2003, at the height of the US-led assault on Iraq.

That’s 20 whole extra years to prepare for the alien invasion, though it won’t necessarily be to your advantage – fewer people will believe you when you start yelling about little green men, and while the main alien fleet is decades away, you’ll still have to contend with offworld infiltrators and turncoat humans. “This start date brings new projects and technology to research, as well as a longer, slower fight on Earth,” the press release explains.

The 2003 start date sounds like an absolute picnic, however, next to the “Broken Earth” scenario. This takes place in an alternate timeline in which the Cuban Missile Crisis turned the Cold War hot. “A century later, the world that emerged is unrecognizable,” the press release explains. “The major powers have fractured, giving rise to unique polities. A divided humanity must claw its way back to strength to stand a chance against an implacable alien force.”

New scenarios aside, the DLC introduces a couple of new visual styles for spaceships, one inspired by NASA, the other by “industrial hard sci-fi aesthetics”. Do NASA not count as “hard sci-fi” now? They will be distraught. What is the Artemis programme to you, Pavonis – some kind of BABY’S TOY?

Terra Invicta’s Dark Skies DLC will release on July 27th via Steam, GOG, the Epic Games Store, and the Microsoft Store. I guess I’d better hurry up and get that asteroid base operational. Don’t even talk to me about warfleets – I’m relying on one of the NPC human factions to stick it to Jimmy Vogon, for the moment.