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.