Personality Card Development

 Lately I've considered putting the Personality cards into the player's decks after they're drawn, and further that while they're in player's Titan decks, maybe they can provide characterful 'free' actions as well as providing an extra card to charge systems and slightly alter the tempo of a deck from 22 to 23 initial cards. My first brain-storming of Personality actions was slightly off, as allowing a free Full Power action was a tad extreme, and ditto the free Operate action. After some discussion I think it would be better to have the following:

1. Pugnacious: Walk

2. Gracious: Repair 

3.  Sagacious: Scan 

4. Rapacious: Detect

5. Vivacious: Twist

6. Audacious: Raise Shields

Each of these is Effect 1 and Charge 0, so there's no charge-hexagon on the card, and there's no cards that need to be played face-down to play them face-up to activate their action. They can have an Operate bonus attached, however, a Full Power played after them will have them repeat their activation. 

Yes, the art on Vivacious and Audacious is something of a place-holder; I'll either need to save up for two additional pieces by Loic Billiau to complete the set of six, or do some fund-raising for the cash for the same. I think I'll hold off until I can play-test these in Tabletop Simulator.

Expanding the Personality Cards

I've come to the conclusion that adding the Personality cards to the Titan decks may be the right call. I reserve the right to abandon this development, but right now it's my darling. 

The notion behind the Personality cards are that I had four cards left over from a 54 card pack. Space I could add content without cost. Originally I filled it by weighting of scoring, encouraging certain behaviour by the players by the possession of the card. Balancing it, however, was beyond me and perhaps even a bad idea. So I shelved it. Later, I noticed that if I replaced the roll-off for initiative (originally bought through Human Resource pts) with cards, I could eliminate rolling dice from the game. 

Now, since the cards exist and economically would use the same backs as the others, why not put them into the decks after setting initiative by them? I've implemented this in the rule book. They can be used passively as a free 'charge' for Titans. But what if they could also be activated? Where they would already set Titan initiative scores, that made it easier to balance scheme of 'free' actions. Here is what I'm thinking.

1. Pugnacious Capacitor Effect 1 

2. Gracious Operate Effect 1

3. Sagacious Scan Effect 1

4. Rapacious Detect Effect 1

5. Vivacious Walk Effect 1

6. Audacious Raise Shields Effect 1

As you can see, I've been meaning to put initiative 5 & 6 cards in the game. They can be packed with the upgrade card packs, expanding player games with additional systems where a 54-card deck would have 30 Titan system cards, 8 Crew cards, 12 Weapon system cards, 2 Dashboard cards, and 2 Personality Cards for two Titans (Yellow & Pink, Green & Blue).

With 32 additional Titan systems (various types of alternate arms, legs, capacitors, jump jets, turrets, and such) there would be space for 5 & 6 Personalities, and still more space for 8 more crew members, 4 spare dashboard cards, and perhaps a couple of new systems such as a configuration cog, auto-repair, and more extra armour paneling. 

An upshot would be expanding the game to six players, enabling free-for-all of 6-vs-6, or even team matches. In the meantime I'm going to see about play-testing this. Once I'm satisfied, I'll implement it on TTS. 

New Card Design!

Let's be clear on one thing, that I am not a graphic designer. I managed to acquire the services of one willing to work at my price point, and I'm afraid I may have taken her work and butchered it. Nonetheless I like how these new cards have turned out. They retain the lovely Loic Billiau art, and replace the basic shapes I was able to find in Visio with an iconography that I thought better evoked what is going on in the game. 

A quick reminder of what is going on in the game: Players control giant Titans, represented by figures on a board, and by a dashboard card, representing their positional states and internal states, respectively. Connecting the two are the cards, played face-up for one of the actions on the card, or played face-down to 'charge' the card played face-up. So when a card is played face-down, it has art for a hexagon on its back. Correspondingly there is a hexagon with 1, 2, or 3 lightning bolts in it on the face of these to represent how many cards must be placed face-down for the face-up card to be activated. Some cards can be played face-up without any cards played face-down, and these simply do not have a hexagon indicating how many cards need to be placed face-down for their activation. 

There are one or two actions on the cards themselves, represented vertically. I've put the more pro-active ones on the left, and the more reactive ones on the right. The crew, for example, can either Operate or Repair; limbs can either walk and/or attack, or block. The effect of the card is at the bottom, represented horizontally, with the EFFECT score on the left. This configuration means players can hold the cards in hand as a fan and see the actions, charge-cost, and effect-value relatively easily.  

I have made some changes to the content of several cards, in fact all of them if you notice that the Human Resource has been left off of this iteration. I left it off because it made no difference in play and generally confused the players. The Human Resource costs, and hence Victory Points for destroying systems, are listed in the rule book. Otherwise I have reverted the Macro Gun to have the high explosive trait. It'll still push Titans it hits, but an experienced crew member operating it will ensure that it'll clear buildings and shields fairly effectively too. Sponsons, and the turret, have had their charge-cost reduced to 0 (and hence removed from the card) and that's because they're something of a support system in that they're only useful if you can play something after playing them. 

 

Rhea 2 Redux!

I've updated the Yellow Titan 2, figurine and dashboard, so that when grouped with other Titans they together have 1 copy of each weapon system. Also, I feel like this is a better configuration than the Rocket Pod/Plasma Shotgun that it was previously armed with, as it takes a similar configuration and edits it down into a more mobile/maneuverable format. Updates to the Macro Gun, reverting to a combination hard rounds/high explosive format gives Rhea more flexibility in pushing and clearing both buildings and shields, meaning she has a 1-2 punch of an operated attack from the Macro Gun, and then either a stab from the Laser Battery, or a slap from the Hand. 

Notably this configuration has a Plasma Capacitor, front-loaded into the first eight cards drawn, so the relatively light-weight armament can be deployed with full power and to full effect. 
 

Colour-Blind-Safe Update

 

I have updated the figures, building blocks, and building dice to use a 'colour-blind-safe' recipe that should make these game assets distinguishable for players with all varieties of colour-blindness. If the blue seems difficult to distinguish, it's because I chose the black-and-pink background of the synthwave board, rather than flipping to the side with the grey-ish weathered concrete. Of course, whoever is hosting the game on Tabletop Simulator can choose different shades, just in case they're not particularly pleased with how these tints are applied. It's just a right-click on the Titan or Building, and there's built-in capability to adjust the colours. The weapons will stay white though, as there's something going on with the models I don't understand; hopefully that gets figured out soon. on the bright side them standing out is a good thing. 

Notably I've also updated the lighting so that the art I've managed to put on the building dice is a little more apparent. 

At least they're distinguishable, right? Given that the point of putting Titanomachina up on the Steam Workshop for free is to make it accessible, I think it's a good idea to make sure it's at least accessible to the colour-blind. 

Default Titan Configurations

 

Alright, let's talk about this person, Eos, the Burning Dawn. This is the 2nd configuration, code-named 'regent' because it has four weapons mounted. Like all the Titans I've arranged a default order for the 22 initial cards in this Titan's deck, not including the personality card drawn at the beginning of the game and inserted in the bottom of the deck before round 1. As the cards are drawn 8 round 1, and 5 rounds 2-4 as follows:  

Round 1
Howitzer 1, Howitzer 2, Mega Gun 2, Plantigrade Leg 1, Extra Armour 1, Arm 3, Master Crew 1, Buzz Saw 1

Options: Move, Attack, Block, Operate

(1) Attack with both Howitzers, 

(2) Walk with Leg, Attack with Mega Gun and Buzz Saw, retain Plasma Howitzers in hand, 

(3) Block with Extra Armour, Attack with Mega Gun 2, Plasma Howitzer 2, and one card left over , 

(4) Walk with Leg, Walk with Arm, Attack with Howitzer, 

(5) Walk with Leg, Attack with Howitzer, Walk with Arm, 

(6) Attack with Howitzer, Walk with Leg, Walk with Arm, 

(7) Walk with Leg, Walk with Arm, Attack Mega Gun and Buzz Saw, 

(8) Attack with Mega Gun, Walk with Leg, Attack with Buzz Saw, Walk with Arm, 

(9) Walk with Leg, Operate with Crew, Attack with Plasma Howitzer, 

(10) Walk with Leg, Block with Extra Armour, Operate with Crew, Attack with Mega Gun, hold one card, 

(11) Walk with Leg, Operate with Crew, Attack with Arm, Attack with Buzz Saw, 

(12) Operate with Master Crew, Block with Extra Armour, Walk with Leg, Attack with Mega Gun,

(13+) There's more combinations, but that's the point of this layout, to maximize the number of choices that a player has, including the option to just hold cards in hand. 

Round 2
Plantigrade Leg 2, Extra Armour 2, Arm 4, Adherent Crew 2, Sensor 1

Round 3
Arm 1, Initiate Crew 3, Extra Armour 3, Sensor 2, Deflectors 1

Round 4
Arm 2, Initiate Crew 4, Sensor 3, Deflectors 2, Personality

Brand New Pi

 I recently bailed on Twitter and FB because attempting to promote Titanomachina is pointless, and as my own personal hobby these days I figured I might as well do it somewhere that let me post actual writing on a subject. I'm maintaining the Twitter account somewhat because I've found some fantastic artists on there, and it's my only method of communication with them, and to check out what they post in the future. In the meantime. I've also drawn back from Dakka Dakka again, and in time hope to quit browsing that site entirely. Which is why I'm reviving this old Warhammer 40k blog and re-purposing it to suit the hobby that replaced it. 

Some backstory: Around 2010 I went back to school to become a technical writer because I was flat broke and that was what was on offer. While I was there it occurred to me that I could use the training to do what I had always talked about doing, which was writing a game with a rule book that wouldn't see the kind of problems I had seen in Games Workshop products. Needless to say that notion is a pipe-dream, as usable documentation for games is very much secondary to art, background, and some semblance of a game to frame it, commercially-speaking. 

However, I started writing a game that I had always wanted to play, Adeptus Titanicus. To that end I dug up all the Titan-related material I could find and use those narratives to create a game where players could imagine themselves Irvine Hecate, Princeps of the Imperius Dictatio, or some similar Titan. This stayed on low-boil until about 2017 when, despite the warning signs I was not prepared, I decided to take it to Kickstarter after it had left its roots in AT behind. 

Needless to say after publishers passed on it, the two Kickstarters I ran failed, and failed so badly they made me wonder how exactly I had managed to talk myself into being so ill-prepared. My lessons are essentially two-fold: (1) I had convinced myself it was not a vanity project when it is very definitely a vanity project, and that's bad for a commercial product, and (2) I had not properly gauged the relative importance game buyers place on art and widgets. But you know what? Thanks to the Pandemic I have managed to release the game for Tabletop Simulator on Steam, reusing assets to bring the experience to the virtual tabletop and do a little development work in the process. 

The process of getting the game working on Tabletop Simulator has lead to some convergent development in both the solid prototypes I've found a hobby in building for myself, and in the virtual game available online. It's something I want to write about, as writing helps me organize my thoughts and acts as a wonderful self-soother in a time when I am under some stress to boot. 

The latest implementation is me going back through the initial models of Titans I put up when I finally figured out how to do so last year around this time. I've figured out how to crunch the size of the .obj files down to fit into the game, and so I've gotten around some of the technical constraints that made some of the initial starter-configurations kind of weird to use. Part of the design of Titanomachina is that the Titans themselves are modular, which is a feature it has inherited from the original Adeptus Titanicus game, with the benefit of giving players a way to customize the Titans they play, and a list-building component the game itself. I'm looking forward to discussing these features in this blog. 

Here's the link to the game, and you'll need a copy of Tabletop Simulator. 

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2091149334