Titanomachina: Battle Begins Anew!

Some days you win, and some days you hear a record scratch and have to explain how you got into this position via a flashback. This recent game was one of those, where having gotten the Gracious personality (while my opponent drew the Pugnacious personality) and having first choice of Titan I decided to abandon my plan for taking a configuration of Styxx with a coolant system, and took Eos' tertiary configuration of a plasma shotgun, laser blade, and rocket pod instead. My opponent chose Rhea's tertiary configuration, which is a beast of a Titan, but also nearly the ideal target for Eos Tertiary's armament. 

The first problem, I think, was looking at the default order of Eos Tertiary's Titan Deck and going for a kind of round four frenzy, instead of daring Rhea to waste time and power trying to get that armament into position. As it was Rhea was set up with Her macro gun pointing directly at Eos, and in range of the laser batteries. Eos is a bit of a glass cannon, so I figured I'd do what I could to get Them dodging, ducking, weaving and dodging...

Needless to say it did not work, with the final score being a knock-out for 27-19 victory points on round 7! How did this happen?

The Titans are set up on the board, with Rhea reacting to Eos' conservative deployment by setting up outside of the arc of Eos' plasma shotgun, and with a clear line of sight for macro cannon shots. So help me I was spooked right then and there. Not in a panicky way, but in a "Well, I don't get arms and legs loaded until rounds 3 & 4, all I have are jump jets and a single sponson" kind of way. 

Here is where I got too clever for myself, using my sponson to threaten my opponent but then not following through on the implied threat in order to strengthen the shields protecting Eos' left leg, the leg I with which I was planning on blocking the upcoming macro gun shot. That puts me down three cards to my opponent's two, which isn't a great start where having more cards is a crucial advantage Eos should have. Especially since Eos still holds the initiative...

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.

Seeing Eos' ample high-energy systems, Rhea reverses course and stomps back after Eos, who slides back behind Rhea and then swings around for a friendly plasma shotgun blast to the rear before Rhea also ducks and swings behind Eos! Nothing to worry about, I think. Eos has another arm and leg coming right up. But Rhea scans the situation and seizes the initiative...

Now it's time to settle Rhea's and Eos' scan seizes the initiative, only to have Rhea seize it back! With no chance to claim the initiative, Eos attempts to settle Rhea's hash with a reverse kick into the buildings behind Her, but Rhea is able to take the kick on Her knee to little effect beyond heavy damage to Her armour and a slight clockwise slide. This slide segues into a leftward slide as sponson rotate right, and Rhea cuts loose with all Her guns! Despite Eos' best efforts Their rite side is savaged, plasma shotgun and armour lightly damage, jump jets and deflectors heavily damage, and shields burst! Nothing destroyed yet though, therefore so far so good, right? 

Reloading Eos' cooled sponson, They take a swipe at Rhea with the laser blade, looking to perhaps slow Rhea down, but Rhea can't be shaken off Eos' back quite so easily, and Eos' rite deflectors are destroyed as Rhea continues to boot Eos in the hip! Eos has crew on deck though, originally intended to operate the laser blade until Rhea dodged out of the way. So Eos' position hasn't improved, and perhaps is worse. Still, perfectly salvageable.

Thinking Eos' biggest problem is having Rhea on their six, Eos moves to get Rhea in front of them and Rhea keeps on trying to shatter Eos' kidney-area, destroying their jump jets and putting them on the precipice of a knock-out. Eos puts this behind them, and prepares to do some damage to Rhea in return. 

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!