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.