Titanomachina: The High Cost of Charging

Titans in Titanomachina are composed of systems, represented positionally by the dashboard card, and in the direction of time by the Titan deck of system cards. Players work through these Titan decks, drawing 23 cards in the first four rounds of play at a minimum, from a 23 card deck. Of these decks the default configuration 1 of each Titan has the following:

• 1 or 3 Sensors
• 2 Arms
• 2 Legs)
• 1 Sponsons or Turret
• 2 Deflectors or Shields
• 2 Thrusters or Jump Jets
• 0, 1, or 2 Capacitors
• 3, 4, or 5 Extra Armour
• 3 Weapons
• 4 Crew
• 1 Personality

Sensors have Scan and Detect actions, either increasing position in the initiative stack or placing at least one habitat back on the board (and ignoring LOS for a turn). Scan is charge 0, Detect is charge 1. 

Limbs, arms and legs in general, enable combined Walk and Attack actions. Arms and Plantigrade Legs are charge 1, while Big Arms and Digitigrade Legs are charge 2. 

Sponsons and Turrets can Twist and Block. Capacitors can have Full Power. Extra Armour has the Block action. Personalities have Walk, Repair, Scan, Detect, Twist, and Raise Shields. Sponsons, Turrets, Capacitors, Extra Armour, and Personalities have charge 0. 

Deflectors and Shields can Raise Shields or Intercept. While Deflectors have a charge of 1, Shields have a charge of 2

Likewise Thrusters and Jump Jets both enable Jump actions. Thrusters have a charge of 1. Jump Jets have a charge of 2. 

Crew can either Operate or Repair. Initiate crew have a charge of 0, Adherent and Master crew have a charge of 1. 

Weapons can Attack or Block. Attack actions range from charge 0 in the case of the Gun Battery to charge 2 in the case of the Macro Laser, Plasma Howitzer, Plasma Shotgun, Laser Blade, and Claw. The Macro Gun, Vulcan Gun, Hand, Buzz Saw, Rocket Pod, and Laser Battery are all charge 1. 

Now, the Sponsons, Turret, Crew, Capacitors, and even Limbs can change the outcome of actions down the line. The Twist action increases the arcs of a Titan's systems, allowing them to Attack even when otherwise out of the narrower arc, and change the direction of Jump actions. Capacitors add cards that can add new actions and enable combos as well as pay for otherwise unavailable actions. Using Sensors to take the Initiative may likewise enable Attacks that would otherwise no longer have a target when it came time to their turn. Crew simply add a bonus to the Effect of next Action, enabling all systems to work better. 

Notably in each case the cost of the chain of action means Titanomachina is a game of momentum; you don't want to waste cards on actions that don't score points or don't lead to scoring points. There's certainly value in psychologically goading an opponent into predicting a chain of events predicated on a particular card and taking the cost of play it as not outweighing the opportunity cost of not using it to play other cards. 

Playing a crew member for the operate bonus telegraphs a certain level of danger to the other players, and gives them time to move out of line of sight, arc of fire, or range of any potential attack. It might give an opponent time to land an attack destroying the weapon before the crew can operate it, or simply to play their own crew card in preparation for a devastating counter-attack.

Generally there is a certain rhythm that you want to be able to deliver attacks with to maximize both the damage those attacks do, and the number of victory points they score. Because shooting at habitats is easier than destroying systems on a Titan. It takes as much damage to destroy three habitats as it takes to destroy an Extra Armour system on a Titan. Once you're through the armour, and that can be exceedingly easy using Armor Piercing weapons like lasers that are relatively underpowered against a well-shielded Titan. 

The depth and penetration of weapons is particularly important when solving for the optimal geometry of a Titan's shields, as a Titan can block and intercept incoming attacks, redirecting attacks from their original high-value targets to low-value targets with heavy shield coverage. The High Explosive trait causes damage to additional targets beside the original target, and multiplies out the Shield Breaker trait, enabling these weapons to spread damage shallowly across several targets. These are also handy in the late game when shields are down and Titans have lots of heavy damage spread across their systems to defeat effectively blocking. Impact and Grapple weapons can likewise be used to spread the hurt across the target Titan and to nearby habitats and Titans, but depend pretty heavily on positioning to make sure the attack bounces the Titan off the right nearby building rather than the wrong one, or simply slapping them, and potentially helping them achieve a good angle rather than putting them at bad angle. The Shock trait attacks a Titan's ability to act and spend cards to pay for actions, effectively decreasing the tempo of the target's deck. Where a crew's operate bonus applies to whatever stack in a target's dashboard card ends up as the target after blocks, sometimes the easiest way to defeat a block is simply to use the power of friendship to combine crew bonuses on a single attack: whatever it hits is going to get hurt. Getting an opponent dead to rights for an Effect +7 attack is a holy grail of Titanomachina. On a Laser Blade it will hit a stack, remove one shield marker, do light damage to the top system going in, and then destroy three (!) further systems. If that armour is already heavily damaged it could make it four. Eos configuration 2 would see Their Extra Armour 3 suffer light damage, but then lose the Howitzer 1, Sensor 3, and Master Crew 1 (+8 VPs) in one fell swoop. That is, if it allows another Titan four turns in a single round activating all four crew cards for six cards in total and then the three cards for the Laser Blade and its charge of 2. That's nine cards, disregarding any other cards for position or having anything left over the next round except the basic 5 card draw. 

You know what? Styxx configurations 1 & 3 could do this, though more easily the configuration 3 with two capacitors, on the first round. The first 8 card draw for Styxx would need to be Laser Blade, Initiate Crew 1, Initiate Crew 2, Adherent Crew 1, Master Crew 2, Extra Armour 3, Capacitor 1, Capacitor 2. The player plays the two capacitors first, the first capacitor yielding a Deflector and a Sensor, with the second capacitor yielding a Sponson and a Thruster. Those last four combined with the Extra Armour gives a range of options for surviving until round 2. If completely out of position Styxx can activate the Sensor instead of the Laser Blade, giving them up to 8 more habitats on the board. Or the ability to move into range for a round 2 shanking, if they have the initiative (or even moving into position and then scanning to grab the initiative and stab in round 2). Although then that round two would see the Titan attacking on their fifth turn of that round 2, which is slightly ridiculous. 

Where you have five cards entering your hand at the beginning of every new round, and that enables up that many actions a round, and more likely 2.5 actions, building and maintaining a reserve of cards in your hand to take advantage of any opportunity becomes more likely to be done, at the expense of a second or third action that round. Capacitors, in replacing one card with two cards, accelerating the rate at which players go through their decks can open that up a bit at the expense of being a sitting duck and giving opponents additional time to react. But having five extra armour in hand, conversely, means the ability to control incoming fire: as mentioned earlier every three points of damage that scores an extra armour system could have destroyed 3x that number of Victory points in habitats, presuming it could be spread efficiently. 

Notably the Rhea configuration one has the cost of attacking with each of its weapons operated by a crew member or two as 12 cards. Add in 5 Extra Armour cards, and that leaves five cards for moving, and twisting. There's going to be no Raise Shields until round 5. On the other hand, Rhea can take it where shield tokens are two on front, sides, and back, and one each on the weapons. The tokens on the weapons absorb any high explosive effect, while the the armour blocks incoming attacks (so why worry about being attacked?). Ideally the Hand would attack, then the Macro gun, and then the Laser Battery, to break through shields and then through armour. More likely the hand will be out of range, and the Macro Gun will be blocked, leading to the Laser Battery just draining shield tokens in another block or simply not doing more than light damage to armour and its underlying system. However, if the Hand is disregarded (or traded for the Macro Gun depending on range) and the Macro Gun gains the +2 from the Adherent crew then that could be three attacks with 4, 3, and 3 damage, and potentially 5, 4, and 4 counting HE and AP damage. Either the target is going to lose a system or two, or they're going to lose all of their shields.