Titanomachina: Stealth and Cloaking

 

The recent day of Bisexual Visibility got me thinking about ways to implement stealth and cloaking in Titanomachina. The joke was that line-of-sight is mutual, but putting it in those terms reminded me that there is space in the game's design for removing line-of-sight when it is available, as well as adding it when it isn't (the 'Detect' actions). 

Already in Titanomachina we have tall buildings, hundreds of meters in height and a fifty meters wide, being detected mid-battle only by Titans that are within 1km and engaged in high-powered sensor activity. I like to imagine that is because the Titans are drawn to battle by a recent disaster, the appearance of some sort of attack that encourages the already bellicose Titans to kick off and fight. As anyone who has seen large buildings collapse can attest, there is a tremendous amount of particulate in the local atmosphere, not unlike that of volcanic activity. It makes ranges short and detection a matter of deliberate action rather than a passive thing depending on pre-existing surveys and automatic scans. 

So a system that makes a 100m tall Titan disappear from the targeting systems of another Titan seems pretty reasonable, and falls neatly within the realm of the kind of 'Star Trek/Pacific Rim' combat that I want for Titanomachina. It seems like a system that manipulates line-of-sight in the other direction, that of reducing it, would be logical and something that fits into the Titanomachina ethos of expensive, pro-active defense. 

As is my instinct to over-complicate things, I would ideally want to have this cloaking system be able to cloak the Titan in levels or stages. So the initial stage, at the cost of one other system, would be something that needs a detect action on behalf of an attacking Titan to qualify as a target. Basically the equal of hiding behind a building, which is to say that the attacker knows you're there but cannot draw a lock. Then there would be extra cogs-worth of cloaking, corresponding to the amount of cogs a detection action would need to thereafter target the Titan. 

To restate it a bit, you activate this sort of Cloaking system and your Titan cannot be targeted unless it is detected by at least one cog. Activate this system with extra cogs due to crew, and your opponent will need to match it with Detect cogs. Maybe outgoing attacks reduce this value, as one of the tropes about being cloaked is shooting/punching people gives away your position. 

That is not the only space available for Titan stealth though. In a previous post I posited a hypothetical system that could extend the range of laser weapons by one tile. Likewise one might be able to reduce the range of incoming weapons, or perhaps increase the range between Titans. Quite what you might imagine that to be, or even call it I don't yet know. Given that the Titans employ a gratuitous amount of anti-gravity technology to begin with, there might be something to work with there for 'ludo-narrative consonance,' or perhaps something like the holo-field technology of Warhammer 40,000's alien Aeldari, a kind of distracting projection rather than invisibility. 

There is also the notion of something that might prevent crew from lending their Operate bonus to attacks, since the bonus from crew operating weapons (and other systems) represents the crew getting the most out of the weapon by aiming at vulnerable points, timing the firing just right, and generally making sure the attack is doing the most damage. This sort of thing seems harder to justify, but in a sense is the sort of thing that counter-measures such as flares, smoke dispensers, and whatnot exist to do. As a crewman you're trying to aim your gun at the target, but you can only really fire into the general area because you can't actually see what you're looking at. Probably not very intuitive though, and given how Titans are already wading through a soup of smoke, ash, etc, probably even counter-intuitive.