With Styxx's master crew out of action (or at least considerably less enthusiastic about moving around0 the remaining crew work together to kick Tethys, even as Tethys wrenches Styxx around with Her claw; despite the chaos, the crew lands a solid kick that destroys Tethys' gun battery (and heavily damages Her claw). Tethys gives Styxx a sharp elbow, further damaging Her plasma shotgun, but it's moreso insult to injury. With that, the cease-fire deadline arrives and the Titans stand down as the orbiting Hecatoncheires tell them to knock it off.
Friday, September 12, 2025
Titanomachina: The Revenge of Styxx
With Styxx's master crew out of action (or at least considerably less enthusiastic about moving around0 the remaining crew work together to kick Tethys, even as Tethys wrenches Styxx around with Her claw; despite the chaos, the crew lands a solid kick that destroys Tethys' gun battery (and heavily damages Her claw). Tethys gives Styxx a sharp elbow, further damaging Her plasma shotgun, but it's moreso insult to injury. With that, the cease-fire deadline arrives and the Titans stand down as the orbiting Hecatoncheires tell them to knock it off.
Friday, August 29, 2025
Titanomachina: Eurybia Walks!
While I haven't been able to get Eurybia's model up on Tabletop Simulator, I do have a beautifully printed version that I was able to get onto the table last night for meat-space testing. I was reminded of the advantages of playing live, such as the opportunity to game out the set-up stage of the game, using every dastardly trick in the book to make sure my opponent couldn't sweep the board of my habitats and vice versa.
My opponent piloted Eurybia Primary, in all Her unpainted grey glory, since he has a better win-record, and would probably suss out any overwhelming effects of Her dual coolant systems better than I could. I took Tethys Primary, as She is a fantastic all-rounder, and would be a good test for Eurybia. Speaking of, Eurybia got the Gracious personality, while Tethys got the Sagacious personality.
Sunday, August 24, 2025
Titanomachina Hypothetical Systems
As people that have been following this project and blog may know, I occasionally like to brainstorm new systems to cram into the game. These systems would be played prior to activating the weapon they're affecting.
Ammunition Selector for Guns:
- Add High Explosive (+1)
- Add Armour Piercing
- Add Shield Breaker
Refractive Collimator - Adds one tile of range to laser weapons
Rocket Warheads
- Add Detect to Rocket Pod actions
- Add Attack to Rocket Pod actions
- Add Twist to Rocket Pod actions
Friday, August 22, 2025
Titanomachina: Battle Begins Anew!
As I prepared Eos for a jump by activating an initiate crew to operate the jump jets, strictly forward now that the sponson's thrust vectoring is finished for the last round, Rhea storms forward, presumably to do something awful to Eos with masterfully-operated lasers. Eos makes the jump, and blows Their capacitors to recover the cost of charging those jump jets. Eos is outside of the arc of Rhea's lasers, and I feel like I accomplished something. However, Eos now has Their back turned on their opponent, and still no arms or legs until the next round.
In a final and perhaps most ill-considered round, Eos desperately tries to tank Rhea's firepower on Their armour while manoeuvring for a solid kick to the right leg, but it's not enough. However, perhaps it is too much, as it exposes Eos' plasma shotgun to a close-range shot from Rhea's macro gun, and a knock-out shot. Having lost armour, deflectors, jump jets, and a plasma shotgun Eos cannot go on, and is indeed quite salvageable.
So that was the game, a series of increasingly bad decisions that culminated in my opponent winning on both buildings and destroyed enemy systems, and ending the game on a knock-out. Typically things are slightly closer, and they certainly felt closer than the final score might have indicated, particularly since my initial strategy for my Titan deck was to hit hardest in the fourth and eighth rounds.
Often in a game of Titanomachina, often a closer game, there is a single decision that stands out in retrospect as where everything went definitively wrong, but in this case it was the slow attrition of increasingly bad decisions, from not going for a head-on exchange of fire in the first round, to staying too close to Rhea where Her agility and armament wasn't going to be outweighed by Eos' capacitors and jump jets. The fact that Eos barely landed a hit on Rhea is at once extremely pleasing to me as a designer seeing a Titan's mobility and agility being its primary defensive measure, but also indicative of a bad decision being made to turn Eos' back on Rhea, which itself can be traced back to silly buggers with the order in which Eos would load systems instead of a solid, conservative spacing out of crew, limbs, and weapons for a solid, straight-forward fight.
In retrospect my initial impulse to pile shield tokens on my front and legs, the stacks containing Eos' extra armour packages, was probably correct when facing a laser-boat like Rhea Tertiary. Any high explosive damage from the macro gun could essentially be cancelled by Eos' Gracious personality, a free point of damage repaired, and then the hits from the lasers and macro gun blocked by the armour. Conversely then the rocket pod might have been fired, the plasma shotgun would have shocked Rhea's own systems offline, and that laser blade might have done what it was supposed to do.
In fact, this can all be traced back to what I think of as the army-building phase of the game, which is in between games when players get to think about what sort of material, tactics, and strategy they want to bring to their next games. I wanted to bring a Styxx configuration with the combination coolant and capacitor systems, but I didn't really have a good game plan in case my opponent decided on Eos or Rhea's Quaternary configuration. I was also planning re-actively, in the sense that I wasn't really thinking about what to do if I had the initiative rather than my opponent. With this gap in my planning, I lacked a proper plan to lean on once the game had started. Let that be a lesson.
That said, it was a fantastic game despite the loss, as I was constantly on the cusp of taking control of the game and doing unto my opponent what they ended up doing to me first. In particular I had found that my decisions were being guided not just by who might get the first hit, or the best hit, but how any action might lead to a chain of hits, and hence events, that would somehow be worse than the present circumstances. Indeed, as round 4 shows, I had plenty to be worried about. And I enjoyed that because it felt like a cool gun-kata (referenceing 2002's Equilibrium) style of match where one wrong move is a knock-out!
Glory to Rhea and my opponent!
Friday, August 15, 2025
Titanomachina: Eurybia Changes
Friday, August 8, 2025
Titanomachia: The Two Towering Battles
This is, I think, one of the strengths of Titanomachina as a game, in that for all its pretense at deterministic rules the game is something of a ouija board wherein two or more plans mesh toward to create a kind of unpredictable chaos that can surprise and upset even the best laid plans of Titan and cogs, and keep players wanting to walk the face of Gaia again!
Monday, August 4, 2025
Titanomachina August 2025 Update
It's something of an August update. I've only made one major change, and it's the body slam combo converts collisions to attacks with impact.
I've made a ton of cosmetic changes, and did some editing for clarity. Previously I had been trying to explain each rule in eight or so words, like I was making a card game out of the rule book.
July 2025 Titanomachina rule book
There's certainly room for improvement, but game wise I think I'm running out of things to change. Probably a good thing, and I think it's time to declare the change moratorium I like to put in place prior to Hal-con each year.
I should be working on a print-and-play that I can distribute at Hal-con.