Titanomachina: Always room for improvement

Since removing the Telemetry trait from the Extra Armour systems and giving them the Scan action instead I've found a number of other things that needed tightening up, including the question of number in the total Effect of systems. In most systems with anything beyond walking and attacking I had added words to the effect that the extra trait thingy required a total Effect of 1, so I broadened that out and stuck it at the beginning of the action rules as it covers all actions, and explicitly stated that you cannot choose to activate a card that is not going to do anything, that has total Effect 0. I figured why just lay down a blanket prohibition? 

That segued nicely into a discussion of how personality actions work, which is to say they're like an extra action by a system: you're going to need at least one leg to take advantage of the Pugnacious personality, for example. And that leg will need to be either relatively un-damaged or relatively well-crewed. Likewise the Detect action's combination with a weapon to remove the requirement of a line of sight when attacking is therefore limited having a total Effect of at least 1 because otherwise the sensor can't be activated. When it is activated, the combination only works for that sensor system's arc and line of sight. This also opens up space to key personalities to various body parts. It might be something to key Sagacious-ness to Extra Armour, but maybe in the next go-round. 

I also inserted some of the diagrams that I created for the outgoing target card, the one explaining the arcs and that needs fancy artwork. As well there is the player mat, which isn't something I am terribly thrilled with, but it provides something for new players to focus on and to bootstrap some of the concepts: it's not necessary for players, but it solves problems around marking up the cards directly. Concurrent to this I figured out that in Tabletop Simulator I could de-couple the shield tokens from the snap-to grid in place to help with placing the Titans and the habitats. So those are easier to use, for the value of that in Tabletop Simulator. 

Further changes that I have planned continue to be things like the addition of weapon systems held by hands, further types of buildings that affect play, and more psychological cards (things like mood, trauma, and whatnot to allow players to push the envelop of the basic game. Something I'm also going to try is writing an annotated rule book, explaining some stuff about the rules because I think it's worth going with the old 'maybe the author's inane rambling will explain stuff' but better. The rules, after all, have a purpose. Sometimes that purpose is to represent the world of the Titanomachina game, and sometimes that purpose is to define what kind of game is being played and why. 

Titanomachina is a game of inches. Each habitat is 25mm in each dimension, or at least the cubical blue ones are. Your job as a player is to draw the right cards at the right time, held in tension with your job as player to play the right cards at the right time. Instead of the player handling a shuffled deck, however, it's about planning ahead. Players are being asked to plan and execute a strategy, which is resolved in a combinatorial fashion. Each combination of cards and positions should be variable, depending on the conditions on the board and on the dashboards. Even the value of the initiative varies.

In the two-player game, there's less attacker and defender than there are hunter and hunted. The hunter or chaser is ideally the player with the lower initiative, as that gives them the opportunity to react to an opponent attempting to move out of the range, line of sight, or arc of an attack. Likewise if you need to escape a situation, having the higher initiative is good because you may be able to move where they can't follow, and you can do so before getting hit. But where an opponent can't evade, having the initiative means you get to hit first, possibly shutting down an attack or knocking them out entirely. Likewise where no contact has been made, going second allows a player the opportunity to move into position to pounce. Players can sacrifice their sensors' ability to detect habitats and ignore line of sight, or their extra armours' protection as an active defense, to change that order. 

Who goes first can be good or bad. Likewise the various combinations of weapons, shields, limbs, and so on are trade-offs in terms of everything having a cost-benefit and an opportunity cost. Doing one thing prevents you from doing another. But in terms of going first or second, and in what position, there are basically those four situations. There's chasing, evading, trading punches, and stalking. Stalking and damage control, raising shields and repairing damage, are pretty much the same position of relative safety. But whether you are in these positions is a matter of the cards available as much as the relative positions of Titans on the board and shields/damage on the player mats. You need to make sure that you are not left with a hand of cards leaving you vulnerable for a turn. 

The Eos and Styxx Titans, for example, having only three extra armour systems when it would take them both four rounds to rotate entirely through their Titan decks. Fortunately their capacitor systems enable them to fast-track 11 cards ahead (at, it must be said, the cost of eight cards and the focus of the entire crew). That's more than enough to get a plasma howitzer or macro laser back into a hand in the next round though, but that will require using that extra armour system to charge the weapon system. Maybe a macro gun or rocket pod is the safer weapon for that choice. But only three extra armour systems will succumb to damage faster, and still won't cover vital systems like deflectors and capacitors. Capacitors allow a Titan to do more, but that Titan will have to do it with fewer systems and less capacity to absorb damage. They're great for chasing, but less so for trading punches, and while stalking is definitely their strong suite, evading is less so because there is far less opportunity, time-wise, to get those capacitors firing. Conversely, evading with four or five extra armour systems is less productive because you're so much better protected and should use the charge spent evading on trading blows. Chasing is less ideal because you're spending time moving that you could be aiming and hitting with the extra armour, but that's also about the weapon mix chosen. 

My point being? It's time to cash out those strategic and tactical puzzles as representing certain idealized situations of giant robot combat. 

Titanomachina: Initiative Issues

Lately I've received feedback about how initiative works in Titanomachina. In case you don't know how it works, every player gets 25 habitat blocks at the beginning of the game with their Titan figurine. Of those 25 habitat blocks, 24 are available to be placed on the board and 1 goes into the initiative stack. Players stack the initiative stack in the order of their personality cards, from highest to lowest. Going from the top downwards and looping around is the order in which players take turns. Playes can change their position in the stack by activating sensor systems for the Scan action or by activating extra armour systems for the Block action and taking damage to that system in order to trigger the Telemetry trait of that system. 

If that last part seems really kludgy it probably is, as I've received feedback that makes me come back to why that was implemented, and how it could be changed without disrupting how the game works too much. The first problem is that when you're at the top of the stack another player can knock you down to the bottom of the stack if you activate an extra armour system to defend yourself. Apparently it feels bad to have that happen on top of all the other results of being attacked (damage, positional change, losing cards in hand). The second problem is that an attacker can essentially earn themselves a free consecutive turn if they're shooting another player directly below them in the initiative stack. I'm kind of okay with this, but apparently again it feels bad to some players. 

Part of the reason for this is the telemetry rule, and part of this is that the initiative stack works by the person with the next block in the initiative stack takes the next turn regardless of whether the initiative changes that turn. Having chewed on it for a bit, I think this can be resolved without radically changing the core of the design. 

Firstly, I think it's a matter of changing the rule about who goes next in the initiative stack: the player that would have gone next if the initiative hadn't changed. It kind of kicks the problem down the road, because there is a purpose to mixing up the initiative and creating that imbalance in the number and order of actions. But it prevents weird effects depending on the number of players, and prevents increasing a player's position in the initiative stack from giving the previous player a 'free shot' so to speak, meaning that the Scan action doesn't double its time-cost. It's also about the minimum that can be changed in the rules. 

Secondly, I think changing the extra armour system is a good idea, and removing 'telemetry' from the game. Much like how I changed 'ablative armour' to 'extra armour' because 'ablative' is apparently obscure (and it is) I think telemetry is un-necessarily confusing and difficult for players to grok as they learn, and outweighs the benefit to the experienced players to have. Yes, it can be used to reverse the initiative, rewards aggression, and so on, but most of that might be retained if extra armour exchanges the telemetry trait for a scan action, giving it a pro-active purpose as well as a reactive purpose. Which also ties into the aforementioned problem with giving the previous player another immediate turn by increasing your own initiative, as giving up an extra armour card to give them another shot on you seems like a strong disincentive to play the card. Giving up extra armour to attack them first seems like a better structure of incentives and choices, at least from the perspective of dealing with these 'problems.'

Titanomachina: Updated Table and Cards

 Most recently I've updated the table and the dashboard cards for Tabletop Simulator, and prior to that I updated the rules (and cards) for capacitors, turning them from doubling a prior action to tempo-increasing card. So far Titans that lack capacitors don't seem to be at a disadvantage for not having them, and Rhea's armour doesn't seem over-built. What I haven't done recently, however, is take Rhea's secondary configuration out for a spin. The last rationalization of Human Resource (HR) / Victory Point (VP) costs fixed this configuration's cost at 41 HR, the lowest of any Titan configuration on option in Tabletop Simulator. 

Looking very close to Titanomachina's cover art of Rhea being ambushed by Tethys, and swapping out the macro gun for a plasma shotgun, this configuration is all High Explosive. Moreover it'll start with 24 habitats on the board, and essentially starting in the lead by sacrificing expensive equipment like capacitors, lasers, and guns in favour of armour, high explosives, and a head start. The obvious strategy seems to be engaging enemy Titans as soon as possible, so that they don't immediately tank that lead by destroying a few yellow habitats. However, that plasma shotgun is both expensive in terms of charge, and relatively slow-loading compared to an equivalent plasma shotgun on a Titan with capacitors. 

Consider that nearly all of Rhea's systems require charge 1, except for the shields and plasma shotgun. That means that Rhea can engage in four actions in the first round, and two in the second round if one of them is raise shields or attack with the plasma shotgun. By comparison Eos' primary configuration if They get a capacitor off operated by Their master crew, gets about five if they stick to charge 1 systems. Of course, Eos will also get some of those systems back earlier, like the fourth round or even third. Both Titans are probably going to want to use crew members to buff their actions, at the cost of 1-2 cards. 

Now it's kind of interesting that if Eos gets hit with the plasma shotgun in the first round, that full power with the capacitor nets Eos +1 card and essentially swaps the master crew, capacitor, and another card for four others. That's also at the cost of pausing to activate the master crew and then the capacitor, leaving Eos a sitting duck for two turns. If Eos goes the route of just activating two capacitors for full power without crew operation, that's again netting +1 card after being hit by the plasma shotgun. Certainly that might enable a further master-operated plasma howitzer shot, but that would be two more turns and five cards. Rhea might be able to tank the shot, with clever enough shield placement over the frontal extra armours 3 & 5. 

What could Rhea do though, during those four turns? And over the course of four rounds? Certainly with two arms, two legs, and two thrusters a player can keep Rhea moving more than once a round. Out of twenty-three cards though that would be twelve. Then there's one for the sponson, because that agility is important. The four crew would be six cards. That leaves four cards for the three weapons, the two shields, the sensor, and the personality. Of course the arms and legs can attack, and bolstered by the crew can do some work, but that is one card short for the plasma shotgun. That's not counting any incidental blocking that might happen over the course of those four rounds. Where Rhea has five extra armour packs as standard, then one or even two a round is possible. I think keeping the plasma shotgun for blocking purposes might work best with the occasional opportunity shot might work best. 

For preference I think it would be better for this configuration of Rhea to have either the Vivacious or the Pugnacious personalities. Audacious and Gracious don't add much to the heaviest defensive posture in the game, while the extra speed and agility helps middling speed and agility. Controlling the initiative with Sagacious is great, but I think it would work better with a Titan that's trying to scout and scoot, rather than a stand-up brawler like Rhea, and while Rapacious works for everyone where this configuration starts with 24 habitats it might not be as useful as enhancing Rhea's actual performance.      

With Vivacious, I think I would set up in the middle of the board, with one shield token over each front, back, and right/left leg, and then three for each arm. The idea is to tank weak hits with the plasma shotgun or arms, so that any incoming HE gets the extra armour, and then to play for a time-out while threatening a ring-out to keep opponents focused on the threat to their Titan. With Pugnacious it would be straight into an ambush situation and then just keep hammering an opponent for a knock-out. With other personalities I think I would choose a different Titan, or at least a different configuration. 

I haven't played Tethys in a while, and Tethys tertiary configuration just calls to me. Maybe it's the double gun batteries, or maybe it's the macro laser. There's always Styxx's quaternary configuration... Of course, Titanomachina is designed for this kind of rotation of strategies. In theory we would be designing the optimal mix of systems, crew, and habitats, but the available Titan configurations on TTS gives players some opportunity to anticipate or react to their opponent(s) choices. Eos is the knock-out fighter, while Styxx is going to be best at pushing a time-out thanks to their sensors. Tethys is also a knock-out fighter with some grappling ability, while Rhea is intended to maximize that board control with some knock-out ability.