Here's a quick guide to help you if someone you don't like owns China (, or any other nation with nuclear weapons), and that you want to export freedom without inciting a nuclear winter.
 

Introduction to the Problem

This has ever happened to you? As The Resistance or Humanity First, you reach the game’s middle. They have a strong set nations like the EU and Murica and a strong set councilors. You are attempting to colonize space and you notice that your old rival, China, is being run by The Servants. This nation is an economic powerhouse. However, their nuclear option means that declaring War would be a bloody affair.
 
 
What else can you do? Even with high public opinion you won't be able to prevent crackdowns or purges exceeding 0% due the huge economy. This is even with powerful councilors. It is also difficult to get public opinion up in a totalitarian country like China. Coups can be difficult due to the high cohesion and large economy. The AI will likely undo your progress, even if you have a few successes. If they hit the spoils target, it might make it more difficult. You're also likely to be detained if you spam that with low chances.
 
 
But they can't just have China . This would be a disaster for your game and the purple people don't deserve nice things. What can we do instead?
 
 
If we had some finesse, this could be possible.
 
 

 
 
This is certainly higher than 0%. Let's look at how flipping a nation works and then talk about how we can make it happen.
 
 
 

Introduction to Taking Nations

There are three ways to take over a nation that someone else controls, if you're new to the game.
 
 
Combining crackdowns with purges is the best way to go. Crackdown is a councilor mission which disables a control points and makes it easier for purge to take control. Crackdown will always go off before the purge. If you stack crackdown and purge at the same point, crackdown will likely go through. However, the purge will not go through (, as the AI usually has enough intelligence to go first). This is the best way to control smaller or more distant nations. It is possible with a high investigation officer and one with reasonable intelligence.
 
 
There are obvious drawbacks. It is often more difficult to defend a nation's interest than it should be. This can be annoying for smaller countries, but can often be a deal-breaker for large ones. Public opinion is often needed to coordinate with it. Most importantly, large nations like China have a natural defense against such operations. Their huge economies are the reason. This is why nations cannot run directly into the US or China at start of the game. Instead, they must use border nations which give bonuses to operations such as control nation.
 
 
The second option is a coup. Coups work well against countries with higher levels of unrest, which is usually anocracies such as Mexico. Although you can artificially increase unrest, you are fighting the tide in countries like China and the AI can also run in and stabilize it. This means that you will need high unrest success rates in the country, which is again difficult for nations like China.
 
 
The third option is war. This would be very easy if China didn't have nukes. Unfortunately, China does have nukes. While they don't possess the same nuclear arsenal as the US or Russia, do you really want them to try to build up their nuclear stockpile while wasting armies and causing havoc on the climate? Nukes are more affordable than armies and we don't forget to build navies. It's not like the Servers care about the destruction of the world.
 
 
There is one important factor that can be used to increase the success of operations like Crackdown or Purge: being above the CP cap. Your sworn enemy will lose influence if they go over the CP cap. It will also make it easier to crackdown on and purge their points. How can we use this mechanism to exterminate the suicide cult?
 
 
 

Take Advantage of the Cap

The game will tell you that exceeding the Control Point cap can cause us to lose influence and make it easier for our interests to be taken over. This can quickly escalate: although it is not usually a major issue, once we have reached the cap moderately, or worse, by a lot we start to lose a lot of influence and our countries become much easier to take.
 
 
The AI, however, will not usually go over this limit. After all, it's extremely detrimental to do so. Like everyone else, they would prefer to sit close to or slightly above the cap. How can we get them to go over their limit? We can't just give them the USA and tell them to go over their limit while they crackdown.
 
 
The key lies in the way the cap is determined, and also the order of operations. The cap is determined not only by the base but also by the research and, most importantly, the skills of your councilors. Theoretically, councilors could provide a total of 450 control points with max stats. Although this is unlikely, it does show how important they can be. Each point of command or persuasion will increase the point limit by one. Organizations also have an effect on this, so admin tends to return more points than the stats for those orgs. We want to lower their cap rather than increase it.
 
 
Although the plan is easy to understand, it will require coordination from all of your councilors. First, aside from having agents with assassinate/detain and high espionage/investigation, we want a double agent, so that we know who to target and can easily target multiple agents in the same turn. This is usually not difficult to do by mid-game. Once they have the double agent, the persuader is able to campaign to the masses of our target country, even though the effect may be minimal. It's better than nothing
 
 
Next, we execute a mass assassination or detainment of any high-persuasion, administration and/or command targets (, including the double agent. If they are very strong, just wait until AI figures it out, and fire them. It won't take long). (influence investment recommended. Even if the AI doesn't show any change when doing it). The assassination/detainment will go through before the crackdown. The enemy's cap will drop suddenly as dead men don't provide any CP. (at the moment of writing), I have found that the AI is often a little slow to replace/fire and replace them (. They also won't abandon nations) and even if they do, their replacements are often quite weaker, which leads to a lower CP cap. Our (crackdown, which should be directed at points like)'s security apparatus and then the executive shortly after), will suddenly have a significantly higher chance of success, as shown in the introduction. The follow-up purge is much easier from there: You can stack them together but if your purger has been busy shanking someone, that might not be an option.
 
 
This strategy is used to get the executive points after the first point has been taken. If we don't wish to keep it, we'll defend it and immediately disarm the country's nuclear weapons. We have two options. We can either keep the strategy going to get the remaining points or we can war the country. The executive point controls the nukes. The armies they still control would fight back in the latter scenario, so keep that in your mind. You must maintain control over the executive point at all times, except when you have disarmed the nukes. However, it is a good idea to do so throughout the war in case they wish to accelerate their progress.
 
 
The rest is up to you. You can either develop it with other nations or abandon it and make it your own. Even if you abandon a country like China it can take a long time for other factions take control. And, given that you just lynched your rival's entire government, they won't likely have the stats to easily take over anytime soon.
 
 
 

Final Notes

Remember that the () agents of the protectorate and the servants could be lynched repeatedly to piss off the aliens. This guide was created because of several people asking me about how to take control over these large nations. It's meant to be difficult because stealing these large nations is a huge power swing while taking control of a single African nation is unlikely to have much effect. Seriously, I was able to reduce the servant's mission control to nine through flipping China in that game. It's possible, even though it's difficult, if you take a lot of action. It's important to make sure you check on your own countries during the operation. It's easy for people to forget to defend them when all their councilors are fighting over a country like that. You'll want to send your agents down afterward, and play defensively with them. After they have recovered with some decent agents, the AI will target you again for such a powerful move.
 
 
This is why you will need maxxed-out agents before you attempt this. A low investigation crackdown will suck in almost all cases. A good stock of influence and ops is also necessary, which you will naturally build up over time. This strategy requires high levels of investigation and espionage. Persuasion is also important. (is the easiest and fastest way to use war.) is the harder and more expensive option. You'll need strong armies, as you can't control every army in the country you're destroying. A nation like China can also produce a new army every two months.
 
 
This strategy won't work if the faction has too many control points (, which is rare, especially if it owns nations like China). However, this could also mean they will fall behind. You should wait until they get better.
 
 
There are other ways you can help. The sanctioned investigation project will give you a +3, but if they have executive privilege (and you don't have global), then you are back to 0. Maximum effort will allow you to exert more influence on the problem. These will help you to be consistent and reduce the damage they do to their CP cap. However, you will still need to spend research on them.
 
 
That's it. As detailed below, you need to make sure that your new Chinese economy is managed in the most efficient way possible.
 

 
 

 
 
This is all about Terra Invicta – Take control of a nation; I hope you enjoy reading the Guide! If you feel like we should add more information or we forget/mistake, please let us know via commenting below, and thanks! See you soon!