Titanomachina: Quaternary Quarrel

Some days a game turns on a tiny, insignificant mistake the consequences of which compound and spall through the sights of victory. In this case, I made a series of obvious and painful blunders that were immediately and mercilessly exploited by my opponent, who was running Rhea's gun show quaternary configuration to Eurybia's. Rhea clinched it in what appeared to be round 5 with 23 to 19 victory points.

The first mistake was that I had the option to reconfigure my shields and perhaps maximize their coverage of Eurybia's blue prow. I did not take that chance, and found Eurybia's shield coverage evaporating under Rhea's hail of gunfire. The second mistake I made was trying to use the coolant systems early in the game, rather than using them to power my active systems (particularly shields, to raise them back up after Rhea shredded them). The third mistake was not activating a junior crew-operated arm to get Eurybia's back off the ropes before a ring-out in round 5. Where it looks like we set up in the second round, the first round saw both players, sagacious Rhea and gracious Eurybia alike both play pass cards. So we started in round two with 13 cards each...

Eurybia made another mistake here used Her master crew and gun battery to open up some lines of fire, and to reduce the number of yellow habitats. The notion was to use the following coolant system to bring them back for another round of firing next turn, but what it did was give my opponent card advantage as Rhea calmly advanced and clipped Eurybia with macro gun fire. 

I tried to claw back the card advantage at the expense of Eurybia's shield coverage, by holding off on any action, and Rhea continued Her merciless advance maintaining fire and elbowing the odd blue habitat when the opportunity presented itself.  

I note that we didn't appear to be moving the round marker along the track properly, so this is more like round 5, and also shows how Eurybia pursued Rhea for an opportunity to use that hand to even the score by grappling Rhea into some buildings. In retrospect maybe using up my senior crew to prevent Rhea from retreating wasn't a great idea either. 

Finally, the hand comes into play, but since Rhea is also heavily armoured, all Eurybia could grab was a leg and like that Rhea levered Herself back into play (and Eurybia back under Her guns). 

Here is where my tactical and strategic nous deserted me, as I looked at the board, I looked at what Rhea was lining up, and I looked at the arm I had prepared to activate and somehow decided not to activate it. Donald Davidson might have forgiven me for having four cups of coffee that day, but Rhea did not. Having run me out of any remaining defensive cards Rhea used a crew-operated vulcan gun to blast Eurybia off the board through a pink and yellow building for a final score of 23 VP to Eurybia's 19 VP.  

Titanomachina: Coolant Systems (The Super-Cooling Action)

Something I have noticed is that the Coolant system's numbers are kind of funky, leading to it feeling wrong somehow. I've encountered this sort of thing before and it's why I consider development to be so important, because I think I got the Capacitor system's Full Power action right. 

Currently the Super-Cooling action enables a Titan to de-activate a system card for each cog it has available after crew is added and damage subtracted. This costs one other card to charge it to activation. This allows a Titan bring a card it activated back to its hand at the end of the round, available to play again next round. 

Now, a quirk of Titanomachina is that some systems have a direct effect on the score, such as weapons and limbs doing damage, or sensors detecting buildings. Other systems have an indirect effect, such as blocking an attack, moving the Titan, raising shields to absorb damage, and blocking to de-optimise attacks. These indirect systems need to be well above the curve in their effects to justify players activating them instead of using them to power weapons, limbs, and sensors. The capacitor system accomplishes this by reducing the cost of one system by one card. Crew accomplish this by increasing cogs or decreasing damage, with the master crew giving three cogs for two cards, above the curve. 

So what? Well, paying two cards, including the Coolant system itself, to deactivate one system is giving up two cards to give up another two cards. It's certainly not forcing your opponent to spend an extra charge card like the Emergency Venting does to Range 1 attacks, which works pretty nicely. There's really no motivation not to classify these as defensive systems like shields or armour, than support systems like crew or capacitors. Or at least in terms of giving players another live option in their hand. 

I need to either increase the cogs of the Coolant system, decrease its charge cost, or change the way the Super-Cooling action works from doubling a system's availability over two rounds for the cost of two other cards face-down to something else. Something, of course, compatible with the other support systems. Something that allows the card to cost one cog for two cards. 

What if the player just drew the card back to hand like the capacitor system does? I think that might justify the usurious cost. There's a marginal gain by which you can play the recovered card to block or simply leave in-active. It acts something like a swap then, putting the card back in hand as a preferred choice. 

That's compared with, say, making it a charge 0 system, increasing its cogs to 2, or both. I think immediately returning a card to hand rather than merely deactivating it jives with the established capacitor mechanic, and in a similar way because now the system can be used to charge other systems, as well as be activated (or simply played unactivated), for a tempo bonus.  

Titan Hanger Update: Efficiency Be Damn'd

 

I've added several figurines, three yellow, four green, three blue, and three pink to the Titan Hanger DLC for Tabletop Simulator (TTS). I haven't added their dashboards yet, but in some cases they are just like existing configurations of Titans with just a weapon swap, so I'm not panicking. It's playable, but obviously I need to put up their own dashboards and decks for players that just want to swap out easily. 

Some are not so easily playable. In the case of the configuration of Styxx that leaves off its turret-mounted weapon system and mounts two claws, I think that just swapping in a capacitor should make this configuration perhaps barely playable. I am uncertain quite how this would play out, and I think the best way would be to start in the middle, even in a three or four player game. This means the other players either need to set up in the middle as well, within range of the claws, or away in the danger zone in the outer three squares of the board. Sounds pretty good eh?

Well, there is a configuration of Rhea with two gun batteries and two hands, but also with big arms and digitigrade legs. Literally has more armour, more weapons, and only missing the jump from the thrusters. There is a configuration of Styxx with two turrets, two hands, coolant and capacitor systems, two thrusters, two legs, three extra armour, three sensors, four crew, and two deflectors. Maybe a pair of arms would off-set the higher rate of action.

There is also the two pink configurations, one with all lasers and one with all plasma. I'm actually pretty curious to see how those would fair against Rhea Quaternary with Her guns. I've tried with the all-plasma configuration, and while I lost in that particular encounter, I feel like a path to victory exists there. But lasers right? 

Would that even be fun? 

Give up shields to fire both laser batteries, and the capacitor to fire both macro lasers in conjunction with the fore and aft extra armour. That leaves arms, sponsons for powering digitigrade legs, sensors using junior crew, leaving leg armour to do the majority of defensive work blocking incoming fire. That leaves two senior crew, one junior crew, and the personality. That's for senior crew bonuses. First on the laser batteries, then on the macro lasers once shields are shredded.

Three cog 2 armour piercing shots and one cog 1 armour piercing shot is a knock-out on an unshielded Titan. That's ignoring any work the arms and legs can do. It's also going to need to coordinate those with the sensor for a very deliberate and expensive rounds (arm or sponson, sensor, senior crew, laser battery for 7 cards), probably alternating with a leg activation.