Titanomachina on Tabletop Simulator: November Update

I've decided to make a couple of changes to the rules and to the default set-up for the month of November. 

The rules change simplifies how the buildings are targeted, changing the three targets on the corners of building blocks to the blocks themselves. This alters the efficacy of various weapons in clearing buildings, and increases the relative efficacy of weapons with the high explosive and armour piercing traits. Pushing Titans into buildings likewise has a relative increase in utility for destroying buildings, as Titans pushed into two buildings will still inflict one point of damage to each. Conversely the problem of collateral damage is now limited to high explosive and armour piercing weapons, and perhaps pushed Titans.

The change to the default set-up will see the Yellow Titan Rhea's 4th configuration change in Her armament from Macro Gun, Rocket Pod, Hand to Macro Gun, Laser Battery, Hand. This is done so that all the reaper configurations together cover the twelve weapon options, as an example of what a hard-copy of the game might feature in the basic set.

Here's a link to the update rule book for November: Link 

Update: I found errors in two diagrams, the second one about Armour Piercing and the third one about pushing (diagonally, into two buildings).

Titanomachina: Why You Fight

IMAGINATION & EXPERIENCE

Imagine, if you will, that parts and wholes are somewhat arbitrary, but the logic according to which they function can be used to parse stuff like math and mechanics in very useful ways. Logic isn't necessarily discrete, but in its simplest examples logic is a set of rules for manipulating structures. Then there's grammar, lexicon, and the model or universe of discourse to which it applies. This lines up nicely with organization, context, and purpose, a handy organizational method in documentation. The purpose of this blog, after all, is to document Titanomachina as a game and a world in blog form. I hope that there's a relationship between the logic of a game, and the experience of players playing it, with the latter following former in enjoyable ways. 

I think it's enjoyable to roll a dice, not knowing what will come up, but having some reasonable expectations based on its size and the desired result. Here 'desired' is not some ideal, or preferable state, but an experience of desire. Games can be about wanting things. Similarly to film, the pace at which these desires is denied, fulfilled, or subverted matters to the player experience. In the case of Titanomachina I've chosen opportunity cost via cards, so players can tell a story as a series of questions and replies. 

This experience is highly individual, or local to the player, but nonetheless we can likewise estimate its appeal. The visual/audio art needs to give you a promise (well, the marketing of which it is a part) that the gameplay needs to pay off, just as audience identification with the characters and insight into their character pays off the plot as they act accordingly. I'm hoping that the art so far is enough, but I'd certainly like to sponsor more. I can add more words about the world of Titanomachina though. 

TITANS & THEIR COGS

Who are the players supposed to identify with though? If you want to compete in Titanomachina you are identifying with the Titans, who are willing to spoil their crops for the sake of enjoying giant robot battles. Well, some of their crops. Eventually you, as a Titan, need to take a stand before you run out of crops, and your ability to repair, restore, and otherwise make good the damage of the last fight. Those human resources are also cheaper than auto-repair and have a knack, a flair for combat that the Titans themselves lack; they are the knack in affordable free range, cruelty free livestock. Well, maybe a little cruelty, as the Titans are businesses after all. 

The human resources aren't just a workforce that builds, maintains, and deploys the Titans, they are also the Titans, incorporated. Humans are inexpensive cognitive substrate, and do surprisingly well with a massively parallel network running in the backgrounds of their consciousness. On board the Titan's body there's a hard link that cannot be jammed or interrupted by less than anti-shipping grade weaponry, so they also act as crew. They are cog[nitive]s in the great machine, telling it where to go and what to do as much as repair salvageable damage on the spot.  A Titan with a good set of cogs is a very dangerous proposition, but it comes at the burdensome cost of raising a human crop (disregarding that it's so incredibly lucrative the Titans can afford to stomp a few underfoot in a kind of pastoral horseplay). 

Some Titans prefer to cultivate a certain team ethos, others are satisfied (and perhaps entertained) with some dynamic personal interfaces. Nobody is stupid enough to put a teenager alone in a Titan's body when deployed, however. The senior-most priest, the 'master,' of the Titan's Temple is always on call, while adherents to the temples' creed draw a weekly rotations. Those freshly initiated in the mysteries of the temples, and coping sufficiently well with the Titans addressing them directly, are called up irregularly, as needed to replace losses in the higher ranks. Advancement, career-wise, is into the workspace of the previous incumbent, frequently to scrub their remains out of the upholstery. 

It could be worse. They could be working in the habitats, fabricating parts, driving forklifts, and otherwise participating in either the heavy industry for the Titans themselves, or the light, blackmarketish work supporting the human population. Or, should they not be particularly productive, maybe reduced to scavenging in the ruins left from Titanic Battles of yore, left fallow until they're built over with roads or habitats, ichorplasma generators, listening posts, shield generators, and defensive turrets. There is always work for those wishing to eat.  

ICHORPLASMA

What is Ichorplasma? Ichorplasma is cold fusion, a room-temperature plasma that becomes incredibly energetic under pressure, such as that provided by localized manipulation of gravity. Each Titan contains a reservoir at their heart, pumping it to systems where it's needed, carefully balanced so the Titan ichorplasma pumping system delivers sufficient power to gravitic engines, weapons, shield generators, neutrino sensors, turrets, jump jets, and capacitors to get the most out of a finite supply. You can drown in it, and then flash fry when ignites. A sufficient charge will energize a Titan's hull plating, causing loss of pressure, and even unpleasant leakage into the crew compartments.

LIMBS & GRAVITY

Mainly though, a Titan's gravity engines can only nullify the acceleration of mass towards the planet, giving Titans the ability to skate around on the paved surfaces of their cities like homicidal figure skaters. Nothing of a Titan's dimensions and mass would be able to wade through the softer parts of Gaia's crust without this gravity manipulation. Housed in vast mechanized nacelles the gravity engines function as limbs, enabling a Titan to walk, and attack, and block; to engage in energetic hand-to-hand as well as calmly delivering an optimal firing solution. 

Supplementing the limbs, Titans can contain turret systems allowing both weapons to be mounted despite a lack of additional limbs, and the internal bracing needed to twist and bend with comfortable agility. They can have jump jets, if they really need to move, igniting ichorplasma directly into the atmosphere of Gaia. 

DEFENSIVE MEASURES

Of course, to counter the blaze of incoming fire and mega-tonnage of incoming blows, the Titans are frequently equipped with onboard shield generators (or deflector arrays, if they're cheap) to put out force fields to absorb and dilute incoming fire. Titans also have a system of telemetry-loaded extraneous armour systems that can both deliver direct kinesthetic feedback to the crew, and protect the vulnerable inner systems. More pro-actively Titans deploy neutrino sensors to scan the battlefield for salient tactical information, or detect habitats for protection, or for use as cover. 

ARMAMENT

The weapons, of course, allow a Titan to attack and to deliver pain to something bending the local curve of space-time; a traditional assortment of guns, lasers, rockets, plasma throwers, and a variety of energized close combat weapons. Each one is a solution to several tactical and strategic problems foreseen by the Titan, and audited by the crew. A poorly aimed weapon can reduce whole city blocks to pyroclastic flows. Well-aimed aimed weapon can reduce several city blocks to ash and rubble. It can take a very cleverly orchestrated attack at full power to do significant damage to an enemy Titan.

DEADLINES

The whole business is quite civilized in the sense that a city is involved and chattel are sacrificed for the good of all. But it remains a sport, with a strict score, lest it rage out of control and once again drown the surface of Gaia in blood. Three Hecatoncheires orbit Gaia, ready to land and enforce the peace if the Titans are unwilling. Like the Titans they are descended from the original space-going vessels in which the Titans fled Gaia, of the same family as the Titans themselves. Unlike the Titans the Hecatoncheires never returned to Gaia to spread across Her surface, but remain colossal and forbidding new moons, like sea urchins made out of weapons, drives, and hate. 

The Titans look up and know that these ancient enemies once defeated them and cast them from the surface of Gaia, to wander the stars for long ages with their herds of human cogs. They do not begrudge them, for the Hecatoncheires stand guard over a world that gave them birth, Gaia, to whom they are very sentimentally attached. They can forgive their younger siblings and live by their rules if it means they can once again shout and revel and kill with abandon, at least for a while. Compared to the wastes between the stars and the horrors beyond, life on the surface of Gaia under their cyclopean gaze isn't terrible. 

Titanomachina Updates on October 19, 2021

First of all, new logo! By @ariana_t6 on Twitter, this is an alternate to the grim darkness of the previous logo. Notably directions included the CYMK recipes used for the Titans on Tabletop Simulator. It goes well with the synthwave side of the board, and I think I might update the logo on that side of the board some time in the near future, leaving the weathered brass to go with the weathered concrete 9x9 grid. @ariana_t6 also did the road tiles you can see the Titans standing on in the pictures below.

The original plan for the deployment of Titanomachina to Tabletop Simulator was to have, essentially, each of these configurations available to the players. At some point in the process it occurred to me that it was a good idea to have a slightly wider range of configurations available to the players, and not just the variations on the jump jets and capacitors. So Green represented the Big Arms and Digitigrade Legs (and a Turret), and Pink/Yellow got their regent (4-weapon) configurations, with Pink rocking Digitigrade Legs. Having iterated four waves of Titans to show off their customizability I think it's probably worth working through what players would be able to have if they could customize their Titans entirely with blank dashboard cards and the 3 decks so far available in the game. Currently there are 144 cards in the game, organized into three decks. The first two decks of 54 each allow players to field two of the following configurations, with 2 Personalities each deck, and the third deck of 36 allowing players to branch out of with extra Sponsons, Digitigrade Legs, extra Arms, Big Arms, and extra capacitors and jump jets (and two more Personalities).

A note on the Titan models, they are simplified versions of the models designed by @BigMillerBro1 for 3D printing, to fit into the 2MB size limit for meshes on TTS. The printed models (see below) have an octagonal base fitted so that their facing is clear in real-life where we don't have the strict 45̊ tool, and don't have weird clipping issues. Note that the board here used art and production in PVC by @tinywargames who does a fantastic trade in gaming mats, and helped me get going in the synthwave direction here. 

Titanomachina: What's It About?

I first conceived of Titanomachina as a v2 of the 1989 game Adeptus Titanicus, published by Games Workshop and designed by Jervis Johnson, in 2011 when I was retraining to be a technical writer in Ottawa. I enjoyed the original game, and I was enthralled by Dan Abnett's novel Titanicus, as well as his comic Titan (illustrated by Anthony Williams), published by Games Workshop. Unlike its contemporary, BattleTech (published then by FASA Corp.), Adeptus Titanicus was fast and gave players toys like buildings and shields with which to play their games. It was less an exercise in book-keeping and much more a fun activity, supplemented by wonderfully janky modular plastic Titan models complete with rondel bases. It was my preferred giant robot game, is what I'm saying. 

Of course, the product was expanded into the Epic line which eventually ended with Epic: Armageddon, which streamlined Titans and other 'war engines' into big bricks with hit points (not particularly interesting on their own, but as part of the game it made sense). In each incarnation Adeptus Titanicus has really paid off its theme of Titans as 'walking battleships.' Games Workshop successfully published a second version of Adeptus Titanicus in 2018, authored by James M. Hewitt. It was the year of the giant robot, seeing GKR: Heavy Hitters, Giga-Robo, and Pacific Rim: Extinction all kickstarted. They all delivered too, and along with Adeptus Titanicus (2018) it was the year of the giant robot. 

My project, previously named Titanomachia, for the great Titan war of Hellenic Greek legend, was put up on Kickstarter twice in 2019 under the title Titanomachina. It failed, due in no small part to my own lack of experience. Perhaps I should have learned that I am terrible at sales in my aborted finance career. Needless to say, after the second time I received some very good feedback and advice from some very clever and successful people who had used Kickstarter to bring games to market. By that time I had run out of money, because Kickstarter costs quite a bit of money; you don't go to Kickstarter to get money, you go to save a few bucks on risk management for a pre-order. And I hadn't done 90% of the work required to produce a game, as I had merely designed and developed the game, priced out a deliverable product, and contacted some fulfillment companies for quotes. It would have been a disaster.

The problem, of course, is that being fun and playable has very little to do with whether anyone will buy a game; games are mainly sold on art, weight of components, and marketing (which isn't dismissive, as companies like Games Workshop, WETA Workshop, and so on are marketing behemoths for their products). There's a reason why so many games today look the same and do things like include miniatures and dice and cards, and it's because those things are familiar and hew to what, by and large, sufficient numbers of people with disposable income want. Beyond having a massive case of Dunning-Kruger, not even knowing what I didn't know, about production, I had decided to tailor Titanomachina to my own peculiar tastes. The result was that Titanomachina would have been dead on arrival even if I had put in the work on production and marketing, because what I was marketing was only appealing to me. I think I would feel worse if I didn't enjoy the game so much, so turning Titanomachina from a business idea (a terrible one) back into a hobby was the right answer. 

I mean, maybe it'll be a commercial product some day, but I have no money to put behind it, and where it's something I enjoy working on I'm loathe to flush it down some production firehose so that it's lost in a landfill somewhere with all the other unsold, unplayed hobby gaming products that are out there. The fact is that games, and especially board games, rely on churning product to keep ahead of those nasty times when your expenses steal a march on your income. Designers are encouraged to 'fail faster' so that they can hit on that nifty game idea they can sell to a publisher who thinks they can turn a buck producing it. It seems to be the way it is, because business and human flourishing don't really line up well against each other. Like I said, I suffer from an intense case of Dunning-Kruger when it comes to the business of producing and marketing products, and I don't really know what to do with any of that. However, I do see products kickstarting, spending several years in production hell, and delivering long after people have moved onto the next game-of-the-week produced by a large company with all their ducks in a row. So nobody is going to produce anything revolutionary or lasting or even particularly interesting in a model that only produces what a large market (yet still niche) demands and established companies (or at least people with $100 to make $101) can deliver. If I can even claim to have made it. 

In the meantime, however, and since 2019 I have continued to develop Titanomachina, and the result that I have shared for free on the Steam Workshop is something of a 2nd edition of the game that was kicksharted. I first put it up in March of 2020 and since then have gained ~70 subscribers as of writing. I continue to spend time and money on developing the game and its components, thanks to a fantastic team freelance artists (Jason Miller, Ariana, Nate Phoenix, Kristina Amuan, Alice J. Fish, Tiny Wargames) who have helped me update components, and by cannibalizing the wonderful artwork of Loic Billiau, whom I hope to buy more from someday (perhaps via funds gathered under Patreon). Which brings me to the question of 'Why?' 

I mean, 70 subscribers when bootleg copies of Godzilla: Tokyo Clash typically have 1,000s of subscribers seems absurd right? Well, here's the thing, and the reason I don't think I'll bother with another Kickstarter: I like it. I really enjoy Titanomachina as a game, and I love playing it. I love working on it, and finding things that I can improved without all the headache and misery of trying to implement those in production all the while keeping an eye on production since several companies exist that can produce prototypes for me for the equivalent of a big GW starter set/boxed game that I'll never be able to play with anyone except by myself. I also enjoy the art, janky and poorly laid out as it is (graphic design is my apathy), from the Titan designs to the artwork on the building dice that I can't use because it's virtually useless as a visual signifier of ownership (integral to the game's design). I love taking gratuitous promo screen-shots of my Titan figurines using 3D Build or in Tabletop Simulator, and then manipulating them using Google Photo. I love taking pictures of my physical prototypes and looking at those pictures. I could play games like Adeptus Titanicus, or Tokyo Clash, or Giga-Robo, but those aren't games I want to play. I want to play Titanomachina. I want to share it with people, and run tournaments, and continue to develop and expand it. 

Part of my design brief for Titanomachia, as I called it in 2011, was to capture some of the magic of Warhammer 40,000. Some of the magic of that game, such as it was around 2011, was that players could spent a considerable amount of time between games not only building/painting model soldiers and scenery, but thinking about how to make the most of them in a game. It got to a point where many players believed they could predict a game's winner based on the army lists alone, the lists of models that players assemble prior to a game to ensure a relatively fair game (and, for competitive players, to make sure their thumb was as heavy on the scale as possible). And you know what? There was a certain magic to that, that players could plan a strategy in advance. That's why systems and buildings and so on have HR points in Titanomachina, so that players could chew on that fascinating problem of strategic advantage in a putatively fair fight, setting up intricate engines or machines designed to input the assets they had brought and output victory at the end.

The other bit of Warhammer 40,000 magic is in its dice, in that players roll lots of dice, hoping for lucky rolls, and doing their damnedest to hedge against unlucky rolls. The game has a surprising amount of constant tension because at any moment the dice can turn and bite you in the ass, or your opponent might make some improbably but entirely possible roll far out in the shallows of probability. List-building relies heavily on what fans call 'math-hammer' or essentially risk management, but there's still that uncertainty despite the 'best' lists frequently being countable on one hand. I got rid of the dice in Titanomachina, but with the players themselves bringing so much uncertainty to the game themselves, having them subject to the additional uncertainty of the dice meant the uncertainty in the game merely made it feel loose, or un-eventful. Without the dice, with the outcomes of actions certain, Titanomachina present players with a plethora of choices, nearly all of which will throw a wrench into your opponent's plans. The resulting back and forth, the struggle of trying to catch your opponent in the right position at the right time is, I think, fantastic.