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.