Titanomachina: Going Hunting

  

In the quest for balance, so players can feel like there isn't only one way to play Titanomachina, there is a gold standard for power and that is Rhea's quaternary configuration. That's the one with two macro guns and two vulcan guns, and has five extra armour systems and a sensor system to maintain a favourable initiative. The best defence in the game along with an array of charge-efficient systems, makes this Titan a brutal opponent, particularly when piloted by my favourite opponent. 

I'm trying to figure out a material response to this monster, mainly so I don't have to rejig the game to balance it out, but I'm currently thinking about Eos and Styxx. Eos has a pair of capacitors in primary and secondary configurations. Styxx has three sensors as well as a capacitor, taking only a single thruster instead of Eos' dual jump jets, and mounts stronge but charge-thirsty limbs. I want to take Styxx's primary weapon configuration (plasma shotgun, rocket pod, laser blade) and stick it on Eos' primary chassis.

1. Sponson 1, Jump Jets 1, Capacitor 1, Plasma Shotgun 2, Deflectors 1, Initiate Crew 3, Deflectors 2, Extra Armour 1 (5 actions, 5 damage, shock)
2. Jump Jets 2, Capacitor 2, Laser Blade 1, Initiate Crew 4, Extra Armour 2 (3 actions, 4 damage)
3. Master Crew 1, Rocket Pod 2, Arm 1, Leg 1, Extra Armour 3 (3 actions, 6 damage)
4. Adherent Crew 2, Arm 2, Leg 2, Sensor 3, Personality (4 actions)

The strategy isn't just using high explosive and shield breaker to clear Rhea's shields, shock to interfere with tempo, and armour piercing to pick off valuable systems. This could be done, perhaps even more effectively, by Styxx's primary configuration. 

1. Sensor 3, Master Crew 2, Rocket Pod 2, Deflectors 1, Initiate Crew 2, Deflectors 2, Extra Armour 1, Arm 2 (4 actions, 6 damage)
2. Turret, Capacitor 1, Plasma Shotgun 2, Sensor 2, Leg 1 (4 actions, 3 damage, shock)
3. Adherent Crew 1, Arm 1, Sensor 1, Extra Armour 3, Laser Blade 1 (2 actions, 5 damage)
4. Initiate Crew 1, Leg 2, Extra Armour 2, Thrusters 1, Personality (3 actions)

Rhea Configuration 4, for comparative purposes:

1. Sponson 1, Macro Gun 1, Extra Armour 1, Vulcan Gun 1, Leg 1, Master Crew 1, Shields 1, Adherent Crew 2 (4 actions, remainder 1, 8 damage)
2. Sponson 2, Macro Gun 2, Extra Armour 2, Vulcan Gun 2, Leg 2, (3-4 actions, 7 damage)
3. Shields 2, Initiate Crew 3, Initiate Crew 4, Extra Armour 3, Arm 1 (2-3 actions)
4. Extra Armour 4, Extra Armour 5, Arm 2, Sensor 3, Personality (3 actions)

The question, I suppose, is how will this mix with the personalities? And maintaining an advantageous position in the initiative order, as well as low-angles to Rhea (and not letting Her slip behind me this time!). 

Titanomachina: Escape From Gaia ready for Play-testing

I saw this mechanic in a wonderful game about modern art ("Art Society"):

Initiative goes to the player that plays the highest card, with ties going to the previous card value, and any further tie going to the ship with the most fuel. 

Ships are dice, used to track fuel.

Players move their ships in initiative order.

• Up an orbit costs 2 fuel
• Moving along the same orbit costs 1
• Moving down an orbit earns 2
• Moving into space with a planet earns 1
• Moving into a space occupied by another player costs 1.

There's all sorts of other bells and whistles I could put in there, like giving cards special rules or whatnot, but right now seven poker cards (1-6 and a joker) should do it.

Players win by moving up, out of the solar system. Players can't have less than 0 fuel, and start with 4 points of fuel. Planets are spaced out so that players can't immediately bootstrap themselves out of the solar system.

Titanomachina: Multi-Titan Riot Play-Test #4 Analysis

 

Still working on a multi-Titan game-mode for Titanomachina, and so far it's working fairly well, but I think some more changes need to be made. Currently players have two or more Titans that act as single targets with a single stack of shield tokens,  a draw-deck of 9 cards for each Titan including their Titan's personality card (as well as Arm, Leg, Jump Jets, Shields, Weapons x3, Sensor) for actions, a support-deck of the rest of the systems, drawing one for scoring each time a Titan suffers 3 points of damage. Players draw directly from the draw-deck as play, either to charge other cards or to activate them (or to block attacks). 

Previously I had figured High Explosive wouldn't do extra damage, but Shock is really cruel in this version, and allowing High Explosive weapons to do damage seems to work pretty well in balancing out the otherwise under-performing HE weaponry.

The Gracious Personality is a bit troublesome because there is no other opportunity for repair, and the point of repairing is to mainly get a damage system working so you can use it. Fixing one point of damage is not great. 

Automatically assigning the #1 of any set of systems to the draw-deck means Titans are all south-paws. I'm pretty open to allowing players to assign any 8 non-duplicated cards to their draw deck, although there's a bunch of complications there if it's more flexible that switching up the Arm 1 for the Arm 2 and so on. It's also worth considering what happens what one of the regent-configuration Titans would have in their draw-deck, or one of the raptor-configuration; I'm thinking Eos tertiary and quaternary configurations, with four arms as well as four weapons. 

Speaking of systems, a constantly-activated sponson/turret system is ridiculously effective at time, especially the turret or two-sponsons combo. I think it may need to be something invoked like the capacitor. Something to track invocations of the capacitor and any other invokable systems might be a good idea as well. 

Likewise the Vivacious Personality allowing twist actions is tricky given that the twist action from sponsons and turrets might be invoked or permanent. 

Damage mark-up, I've found, is an interesting matter. One way is to simply pick a column on the Titan's damage diagram and use that. Another way is to mark up 1 & 2 points of damage in an empty slot, and when taking 3 points of damage to draw a card and put a line through the slot corresponding to that card on the damage diagram. If you take 3 points of cumulative damage erase the 1 or 2 existing points and re-apply to where the card(s) was lost. Either way seems to work. 

Drawing random cards from the support-deck seems like it could be problematic in terms of scoring, particularly when losing expensive stuff like crew or capacitors, but then there's also drawing extra armour pieces without using an armour piercing weapon to perhaps draw something else. It might be an idea to figure out some procedure players can follow to equitably distribute support-deck decks rather than randomizing them by shuffling. Putting things in the order suggested on their dashboard cards is one idea, but might be a problem depending on the draw-deck players choose. 

Something that is obviously a problem is collisions, as they double the damage inflicted, allowing weapons (and limbs) that impact or grapple a Titan into some buildings to vastly increase the damage done via the magic of multiplication. I think it might be something to minimize collisions, so a 3-damage Macro Gun doesn't do a further 3 points of damage in a game where 3 or 4 shield tokens is normal. I think reducing it to single, extra points of damage might be something, so that Titans can still cut-across small buildings and trample them when pushed back.

Finally, I think I need to return to the issue of when exactly the game ends and why. I don't think the regular game's ring-out/knock-out/time-out really works for multiple Titans. One idea, since I have a certain axe to grind, is that each player should stick a pass card in their Titan's support deck, either randomly or injected after a certain number of cards, and have the game end when all Titans have lost their pass card. I should probably spend an entire post brain-storming some solutions to this issue. Currently I have a vague idea about there being a race to one condition, keeping a time-out condition, and then perhaps objectives or something. 

I should also note that so far I've been play-testing with two Titans per player, each Titan of a different colour. One intention is that players be able to use 2+ Titans for each colour as well. It's something I'll have to think about regarding running two at one with the same initiative.  

Titanomachina: Myrmidon Mega-Ants Part 3

Like Aristotle before you, many of you may be wondering what the telos, or purpose this all serves. After all, the Myrmidon Mega-Ants are playing a different game than the Titans. Or rather, they are playing the same game of coordinating parts to achieve victory. Which makes one wonder, does it not, what exactly victory looks like? Titans have time-outs, ring-outs, and knock-outs, one for each of the victories of time, space, and material. Obviously the Myrmidons should have the time-out, as fighting an enemy to a standstill, while scoring a strategic advantage in material is suitably heroic. Also, no changes need to be made to the rules for timing out. You play 9 or 18 rounds and then score habitats and destroyed systems. A knock-out will depend on the human resources needed to include each card and matching squad in a swarm of Myrmidon. I think 1 for Tactical ants, 2 for Assault and Support ants, and 3 for Heavy ants. Ring out is obviously impossible in the sense of pushing an enemy Titan off the board, but where Myrmidons have the following actions, perhaps there's some way of there being a risk of shocking a swarm of Myrmidons off the board.

Reinforcement Action

The player rolls xD6 for each action rolling x cogs. If they can roll above the number of reinforcement actions being called, the player can place that many Myrmidon squads on tiles around the edge of the board. 

Retreat (Reaction)

The Myrmidon squad may move one tile when attacked, before contact is resolved. 

In terms of a knock-out then I think I want a set ratio or fraction indicating that Myrmidon players ending a round with that few units on the board is knocked out. I think knocking them all off the board would be a knock-out condition, because otherwise a play may use a Command and then a Reinforcements action, using 4D6 to get 3x 4+ dice results. That could be 18 units of ants, potentially. On its own Reinforcements would be 2D6 to 2x 3+ dice results. 

How would the ants knock-out a Titan? They're going to hit Titans hard, doing between 2 and 6 points per attack. With 16 units of ants, all of them activating in four rounds, that would be 23 actions. That's nearly six actions a turn. Which is a good number because players are going to be throwing a lot of dice. Dice to move, dice to attack, dice to spot, dice to reinforce; the tension for the Myrmidon player should come from this stochastic machine. Because shots may do devastating damage, but the real play of Titanomachina is developing that damage past armour and shields, with ants not only surviving to do damage, but being at the right place and time to do that damage. 

Speaking of, when a Myrmidon force has the initiative and surrounds a Titan right off the bat, then it was probably a good idea for the Titan to set up in a corner of the board to avoid attack from every direction. Once again Rhea Quaternary would be the gold standard for massacre.  

Titanomachina: Multi-Titan Mayhem

I've been wracking my brain, trying to figure out how players could play multiple Titans at once without it becoming unplayable, and here's a first draft of what I've come up with so far: 

Players draw a card from each of their Titans' decks each turn. In initiative order players choose to: 

• play a card face-up, activate it, and resolve the subsequent actions,  
• play a card face-up to be activated later. 
• play a card face-down to charge another card from that Titan, either for immediate activation of a face-up card, or for later.  

Cards can only be activated if the player has built up sufficient charge (face-down cards), either because they have enough cards already face-down in play, or because they just played a card face-down. 

After a card is activated and its action(s) resolved, place the card on top of any cards needed to charge it on top of a discard pile. Once a player can no longer draw cards, this discard pile is flipped over. 

• Capacitors act as charge cards when they're activated. 
• Emergency Power lets you recover a card with block or intercept from the top of the discard pile and play it in reaction to an attack.
• Shock has players add the next card at the top of their deck to the discard pile.

Rounds end after five cards have been drawn, whether they're activated, left un-activated, or used to charge activated systems. Charge cards and un-activated systems (as well as activated crew) persist past the end of the round, although twist actions, detect Titan actions, and body slams do not. 

Edit: Players get three unactivated systems out on the table to begin the game. I also need to figure out how to count those rounds better...

Further edit: Someone on Bluesky made a very good suggestion for players to put a pass card five cards deep in their decks at the beginning of the game and every new round. 

Titanomachina: Myrmidon Mega-Ants Part 2

More first-draft thoughts about Myrmidon Mega-Ants!

Players activate types of Myrmidon Mega Ants, so playing a Tactical card means you can choose to activate any unit of Tactical Ants for the actions on that card. Players also get the choice of distributing the cogs as dice to any actions they choose, like Titans. 

Moving and attacking is resolved using D6s. Like a D6 to move, D6 to attack. Each cog is a D6

Tactical Ants  Walk 1 | Attack 1 | Cog 2 | Range 2 | Range 4 |

Assault Ants  Walk 2 | Attack 1 | Cog 2 | Range 1 | Range 2 |

Support Ants  Walk 1 | Attack 2 | Cog 2 | Range 2 | Range 5 |

Heavy Ants Walk 1 | Attack 1 | Cog 2 | Range 1 | Range 3 | 

Ants can attack up to one of two ranges, rolling a D6 per cog, picking the highest, and subtracting the range to determine damage. Likewise they can move by rolling D6 per cog, picking the highest, and moving that many adjacent squares (no diagonal movement for ants). 

Some of the cards will not activate ants directly, but enable things like aerial/orbital support, command & control to 'operate' the next unit of ants, and to summon reinforcements from the pool of dead ant units that have been removed from the board. Each Ant unit would contribute an equivalent card to the deck, so increasing those extra cards would run up against the 22 card limit. 

Ant movement through habitats would be slowed down, so one point of movement would let them enter a road tile, whereas it would only allow them to enter one habitat, and so would need 4 movement points to attain the roof of a 3-habitat building from an adjacent road. Quite how we might track them inside of habitats I'm not sure. 

Titanomachina: Eurybia Configuration 1

Here's an initial version of a dashboard card for the Titan Eurybia, using the new Coolant system and a Capacitor instead of Rhea's Thrusters, but sharing in Rhea's abundance of Extra Armour systems (and crew, but when I finally find the cash to buy more art for crew cards you can bet Eos, Styxx, and Eurybia get all-new crew). It'll be interesting to see how Eurybia gets on with no jump jets in Her primary configuration, but it may be a while before I need to worry about Her tertiary and quaternary configurations; trying to squeeze Her model down to well under 2MB is proving to be challenging. 

Speaking of challenging, aside from a variety of melee weapons, I thought it would be fun to introduce some new additional effects, starting with Recoil. Represented by a grey icon with a black arrow pointing down, the inverse of the Impact icon, Recoil would affect the Titan using the weapon to attack. Each attack would either push the Titan back opposite the direction of the attack's target, or turn the Titan 45° left or right depending on low-angled (between 0 and 45°) shots. 

This naturally had me thinking of the Kzinti Lesson from Larry Niven's Ringworld: "A reaction drive is a weapon, powerful in direct ratio to its efficiency." Which is to say, if you de-couple the cavitation converters on a plasma weapon, you get plasma jets! I would update the card art and label as well, eventually...

Titanomachina: Coolant System

I've mentioned it before, but I'm mentioning it again because I've made some head-way in implementing it, the Titan Coolant system. Titans have a variety of systems that don't directly affect combat, but can be used to improve their combat capabilities, including crew and capacitors. I want to add a coolant system that enables players to draw activated cards back to their hands. This needs to work with other systems like crew and capacitors, and not be an overwhelming no-brainer. 

Currently crew members can add their cogs to the cogs of whatever system is subsequently activated. If they're re-activated, they can be used twice. So the cost of a coolant system at charge 1 seems pretty reasonable as it will return an activated card to your hand at the cost of two other cards, the coolant system and whatever is paid to activate it. Using a plasma shotgun or howitzer twice in the same turn would require the player have at least seven cards in their hand, three for the first shot, two to recover the plasma weapon, and two more for the second shot. 

Maybe the player has a capacitor in their hand, then the player can attack with the plasma weapon for three cards, recover the cost using the capacitor, recover the plasma howitzer using the coolant system, for six cards. Time-wise, though, that's four turns compared to three for not using the capacitor. So pretty reasonable in terms of combos, although one might wonder whether that is true if a junior crew member is used to recover both plasma weapons on the turn they've been used (requiring nine cards, or eight including a capacitor) or one plasma weapon and one master crew member. That's a total of three cards and two turns to recover those. 

It's also possible a player might recover those cards in time for the next round, meaning the player only needs to build up eight cards in their hand. There's the possibility of a Titan having two coolant systems and going for a kind of perpetual motion machine using one to reactivate the other and a crew member, who in turn reactivate the first and a crew member. Keeping the charge cost at 1 ensures that doing this will have diminishing returns, although a caveat making sure that players don't attempt to reactivate the coolant system being activated will probably be required. 

Finally, I want the reaction to be something interesting and different from the three other reactions available to the players, and perhaps to port that reaction to the jump jet and thruster systems: things exploding to the detriment of the attacker. In particular there is a scene from Pacific Rim whereby Raleigh opens up the Gypsy Danger's coolant system (to no apparent detriment) in order to freeze Otachi's tail while it has been blocked by Gypsy Danger's arm. How to accomplish something like this in Titanomachina might be to cause the attacking system to take damage equal to the damage it is dealing out to the target, or to take only one point of damage, or some middle ground that doesn't make Titans with coolant systems invincible in close quarters. Figuring out how that would affect weapons like plasma howitzers or macro lasers would certainly be an act of imagination. Mind you, super-cooled weapons attempting to discharge are probably wildly unsafe. Maybe it would be something to say that systems being activated to attack from an adjacent square suffer damage equal to their cogs (ignoring any crew bonus or damage penalty) when this reaction is played.

Edit: Another two ideas, the second of which I prefer:

1. One of the systems on the reacting Titan is deactivated, to be put back into the player's hand. This is a more powerful version of the card's basic action. It prevents the card from being pulled back and activated again that round, but most of the time the end result is the same for the cost of one less card. 

2. It deactivates an attacking system at range 1 unless the attacking player pays an extra card face-down. Which is really specific, except much of the game tends to be spent at range 1 and the result matches that of the Gypsy Danger vs Otachi frozen tail thing. 

The 5th Titan: Eurybia

Lately I've been collecting art advice in order to take a more active part in producing Titanomachina art. At best maybe people will enjoy it and be inspired, and at worst I'm participating in one of the ineffable rites that separates woman from widget. Since I like mucking around with 3D Build and I saw someone doing some great work with BattleTech miniatures, I decided to start working on a 5th Titan codenamed 'Eurybia.'

The notion was that 3D Build doesn't really do soft shapes, but if I built the Titan from the bones up I could just move shapes around to pose (and re-pose) the figure. Plus I'd seen that experienced artists often drew figures from the skeleton on up to really get proportions and shaped right. Whether I've managed to replicate this, I'm not sure, but the Heisei Gojira-shape I've been going for is working well. 

Additionally I've used the Titan models made by Jason Miller for their hexagonal weapon plugs and proportions, so I'd like to credit him as well.