Titanomachina: Omnipotence

It's dark and She is in a cave together with you. You see the marks on the wall, and how they tell a story with the flickering ight of the torches behind you. You see the shadow that you cast upon the wall of the cave, and that of the Titan standing behind you. It's a dream, but the Titan is there and you see where the shadow of Her finger points, marking a deeper shadow than Her penumbral digit. This is your task, your orders, your word of God. You are, after all, God's favourite person. It is time. It is time to leave the cave. It is time to embrace the bright new dawn of the Titan. 

Being a Titan crewmember is an ordination of sorts, and while some may resentfully serve, it's a pretty good gig on Gaia. The Titans are strong believers in efficiency, and while all that brain-power is spare, there's also a lot of labour value to be extracted. There's sourcing, manufacturing, assembling, freight, and so many other jobs that can be done by a monkey in a saucy hat as by a cognizant human. The 'cogs' chosen to serve the Titan are often chosen for their personalities as much as their actual ability. For many, the life of long periods of maintenance, followed by short bursts of frenetic violence, the life can be somewhat harrowing. Your actual risk of death goes down if you serve as a Titan crewmember in active combat, with shields, armour, and life support all strenuously between you and sudden violent death. 

The Titan, bless her heart, has proclaimed that She will defeat any Titan that threatens the survival of Gaia as a whole. No one doubts Her good intentions. From what, exactly, remains to be defined in any actionable way, except by responding to perceived threats from rival Titans. After Rhea's defeat of Tethys, Rhea made a deal with the Hecatoncheires orbital battle stations: So long as hostilities would only last for so long once the Titans had positively identified, the Hecatoncheires wouldn't annihilate Titan presences from orbit. So far she has battled the Titan Tethys, former Queen of Heaven, and now the Surging Tide, as well as the Titans Eos ("The Burning Dawn") and Styxx ("The Mouth of Victory"). Rarely defeated, and never deterred, Rhea has had Her crew compartments melted, vaporized, shredded, crushed, and flooded with depressurizing ichorplasm. Sometimes life-support simply fails and the fire gets you. 

Perhaps it is this generous attitude Rhea takes with the lives of Her cogs that can disgruntle crew. However the Titans themselves may enjoy a cool, refreshing dash of violence now and again, and who is to say that it isn't actually working out for them. The Titans share Gaia with the Myrmidon Mega-Ant, the post-human civilization and current indigenous occupants. The Myrmidon respond to any Titan stepping foot off a strictly designated battlefield with a belligerence that does their fore-sisters proud. In the meantime, Rhea would count this a positive, directing additional funding and resources to Gaia via Her powerful shipping concerns. Can a God create a cake so baked that She cannot have it, and eat it too? Rhea believes so, and thus it is ordained. 

Fight well, and you may survive to return to the cave, and to the marks on the wall under the fire-light and shadows, and see Her warning, pointing off into the darkest shadows of deep space. This is your task, your orders, your word of God. This is your call to action.   

Titanomachina: Rhea

The Titan Rhea holds a special place in my heart because She is a reaction to Games Workshop Titans. Fully upright, and featuring decent armour coverage with modular weapon pods. It also has influences from Greek (Corinthian helmet) and Roman armour (Lorica Segmentata), as well as proportions somewhat like the Vitruvien Man. 

She is named after Rhea, from the Titans that sided with the Olympians during the mythical Titanomachy. Interestingly, according to primary sources, Rhea and Chronos weren't the first Titan Queen and King of Heaven after the overthrow of Ouranus. They had won the throne via a wrestling match against Tethys and Phorcys, respectively. 

Rhea is heavily armoured and shielded, able to both tank hits and sacrifice protection to scan the situation and maintain the initiative.

Rhea's primary configuration has a macro gun for both longer range bombardment and close quarters combat. She has a laser battery on a sponson mount over Her left shoulder for defeating enemy armour, with a hand for grappling and defeating shields. A pair of thrusters helps to make up for Her leg of raw speed or power.

Rhea's secondary configuration swaps out Her primary weapons for a plasma howitzer on Her right arm, a vulcan cannon on the shoulder mount, and a buzz saw for a left hand.

Rhea's tertiary configuration swaps out the thrusters for a second sponson mount and a second laser battery to mesh with Her primary configuration weapons. 

Rhea's quaternary configuration doubles down on the guns, mounting paired macro guns and vulcan guns to dominate the battlefield. So far it seems that this configuration is undefeatable, able to flatten buildings, and to knock Titans out, or off the battlefield. In theory She is still vulnerable to lasers, to opponents who can exploit low angles, and no Titan does well coming under crossfire. 

This is just as well, because Rhea is the golden god-queen, the self-styled Queen of Heaven and foremost of the Titans of Gaia. Her corporation controls the flow of shipping, both on planet and off, and it was Rhea that ordained both thay the Titans should return to Gaia, and that clearly they needed the opportunity to let off some steam.

By Rhea's wiles the great Hecatoncheires battle stations permit the Titans residence, and by Her might does She rule the Titans on Gaia. While Her ancient rival Tethys plots to overthrow Her, the Titans Styxx and Eos have returned to Gaia drawn by the promises of wealth and violence alike. 

Titanomachina: A Veritable Chess Match

My opponent remarked that it would be cool to have names for opening moves in Titanomachina, like they do in Chess, and I agree. Usually I think of them in representative terms, like 'ambush' when Titans set up directly next to each other, and 'challenge' when they are set up facing each other down a road-way. But I think it would be something to start naming various manoeuvres and strategies. 

Which is a deft segue into the following Titanomachina battle report that saw something of a reversal from a previous one that saw me operating a gracious Titan against a rapacious Titan. In this battle I took rapacious Eos in Their tertiary configuration with dual plasma howitzers, vulcan gun, and buzz saw  against my opponent's gracious Tethys quaternary configuration with dual rocket pods and matching laser blades. Rather than a running battle, chasing each other around the board, or a steely-sensor'd staring match punctuated by a quick series of precise, shattering blows, this was a straight-up brawl initiated by Tethys when She was set up facing Eos directly behind a row of buildings. 

I had set up Eos to cover both ends of the street with plasma howitzers, but was prepared to swing them both around far enough to fire directly forward where their 180° sponson-enhanced arcs overlapped. The ensuing game proved, somewhat, that agility only really makes up for thick armour and heavy shields when there's space to use it. I realize now that I had boxed Eos in, and didn't place Them well to pivot away from blasting Tethys from a safe distance away from those laser blades. The game ended with a 26-25 Victory Point score in a time-out favouring Tethys, and almost a draw until I recalled that Eos' back-right arm had been too heavily damaged to knock a pink habitat.

What happened?

Eos deploys expecting an ambush, and Tethys obliges...

Tethys flutters Her cyclopean sensor pod as though aiming at Eos through the intervening buildings, but re-routes power as Eos' sponson system spools up. A quick scan assess the situation just as Eos' titanic foot crashes though one of the buildings, and reveals the glowing mouths of Their howitzers. The first one discharges, connecting the two Titans with an arcing stream of plasma! Tethys blocks the stream with a laser blade, and deflects it across Her the armoured faring of Her rocket pod. It's too little, too late as Tethys fires a spread of rockets into Eos, bursting shields and exposing Eos' core. Eos pauses as Their capacitor fires, shunting ichorplasma to Their other plasma howitzer while Tethys seizes the initiative. Eos then discharges Their other plasma howitzer into Tethys' other shoulder, looking to disarm Their opponent. Having seized the initiative though, Tethys' sends Her junior crew scrambling to stations!

Now Tethys stabs Eos, angling for a decapitation, but Eos twists and the searing blade of photons gouges through shields hastily sent to intercept the blow, through armour and length-wise down the barrel of Eos' right howitzer. Forced on Their back foot, Eos braces against the buildings behind Them, and blocks Tethys' colossal follow-up stomp with Their prow, crashing Them back through the buildings behind Them! Eos' front armour is shattered, and Their rear arms are broken! Perhaps importantly though, Their front arms and armaments are unharmed and ready to return the favour...

Tethys swings right around the remaining yellow & pink building, stepping out of the arc of Eos' vulcan gun, but Eos lurches forward to drive a heavy punch into Tethys' face, Tethys ducks absorbing the punch on Her back shields and armour, but catches Eos' buzz saw to the face as She straightens up. 

Now Tethys' crew assembles to operate Her arm as Eos turns to bring Their vulcan gun to bear on Tethys. They wrench Tethys up into a flying elbow drop onto the broken remains of Eos' rear left arm, tearing it off and crushing the deflector array below it in Eos' hip assembly. This wrenches Eos around left, enabling Them to discharge a stream of bullets from Their vulcan gun into Tethys' face, merely splintering armour as She whips shields up off Her leg to intercept. In the distance Eos' roving eye greedily spots an unaccounted blue habitat atop a building..

Tethys' situational awareness is second to none here, and She immediately back-pedals away from the glowing maw of Eos' re-charged and fully operational left plasma howitzer. Eos' right plasma howitzer isn't fully operational, but it manages to spit out enough plasma that Tethys is forced to block with Her shielded left leg, leaving Her right shoulder open to a solid kick that smashes the remains of the rocket pod off!

Tethys arrests the momentum by having Her junior crew swing out Her arm and catch a blue building to step out of the arc of Eos' left plasma howitzer and Eos turns and steps back in case Tethys is thinking of inserting another laser blade into Their hull, but Tethys' position at the very edge of the battlefield ferments a notion in Eos' many heads as They fall behind on buildings and body parts...

Eos charges in with a savage punch, wrenching Her around and exposing Her savaged back armour. Tethys is not inactive though, and has Her crew aim a knock-out kick to Eos' right leg, and only the hasty intervention of Eos' vulcan gun sees the fight continue despite Their dismemberment. Eos' return back-hand hammers Tethys back but Tethys takes the hit on Her opposite leg to slash Eos with Her laser blade as Eos discharges Their plasma howitzer. The exchange leaves Eos with a damaged buzz saw and another broken arm, while Tethys' rocket pod explodes!

It's nowhere near enough though, and Eos staggers away, hoping that They can equalize the score on buildings. Tethys isn't done with them yet though...

As Tethys lines up a final stab, Eos spots a tall blue building in the west and staggered south-west waving the stump of Their back-right arm as though They could knock down one more pink habitat. Tethys is left with victory, although perhaps not the gory knock-out Her crew was hoping to achieve.

In terms of learning from my mistakes, I think primarily it was not setting up where I could take the best advantage of Eos' forward armament and all Their arms to clear pink buildings. Tethys' player did a great job of starting with a building advantage and then cramming laser blades in Eos' face to distract me from that deficit. While I took Eos Tertiary with the objective of oppressing my opponent with plasma howitzers, I think that would have worked better had I used the crew to aim them rather than relying on snap-shots, as I don't think I was able to really exploit the shock effect as well as I could have to push a card advantage. 

There was some discussion about vulcan guns, particularly the use on round 4 as a single big shot rather than several smaller ones, and I think I have changed my mind, in that the single shot did not really work to inflict damage, while several smaller shots would have cleared the shield coverage that kept Tethys in the game. My opponent did a really good job of using the shield systems to maximize Tethys' initial shield coverage rather than wasting time and power restoring it, which struck me as clever. I think that's potentially how I lost the card advantage, because my opponent was able to distribute damage more evenly and that's pretty clinch where the Titan is also gracious. In a game where 1 can be a big number, and stand between scoring 3 and 0 points, I think it made a big difference. Multiple shots might have overwhelmed that strategy, clearing those rocket pods faster, and getting more 3 cog shots against Tethys' surface rather than Her shields. 

All that said, after the game my opponent noted that in round 5 that Tethys had turned further left than She should have, moving Eos out of the arc of Her laser blade, and preventing an early knock-out. But importantly that did not happen, and while part of the design is to enable players to identify and analyze mistakes in play with an eye to improving as players, another part is to allow players to make mistakes (and to allow other players to capitalize on them). A perfect game is possible, but I like to think it remains an open question what that would look like.

Certainly the game was an interesting switch-up from the more careful, more studied games of late, and as a designer its nice to see how pitching into an immediate exchange of blows right away is a legitimate strategy! As a nod to Chess, perhaps this should be called the "Hammer's Gambit."

Titanomachina: Be Cool Eurybia, Be Cool

As mentioned elsewhere, I've been thinking of changing the Super-cooling action of the Coolant system to allow players to take face-up cards back to their hands. So far it's working pretty well. Here gracious Styxx fought rapacious Eurybia to a 27-26 victory, eking it out due to what was probably the one time I remembered that I could bottle someone with Styxx's claw. 

If you're not aware, the Claw has the Grapple trait, meaning that when you attack someone with it, aiming at the outer-targets will drag the target Titan stack toward the attacker, and aiming at the middle will enable the Titan to forcibly move the target Titan into an adjacent square, usually in order to force a collision. I realized that (a) turning Eurybia's Laser Blade and Claw towards Styxx wasn't healthy for Styxx, and that (b) a yellow habitat existed within range of both the Claw and the target, enabling Styxx to not only destroy that habitat and lower Eurybia's habitat score by 1 point, but convert the Grapple temporarily into an Impact, turning Eurybia away. The upshot was not only doing damage to both Eurybia and Her habitats, but also mitigating Her position. Early in the game Eurybia advanced to Styxx rapidly because She was armed with a Vulcan Gun, Laser Blade, and Claw, weapons with ranges of 3, 2, and 1 respectively. Pulling Eurybia into position on all three was also a bad idea. So a spot of luck for Styxx then.  

An interesting comment was made about the Emergency Venting reaction in comparison with the Block reaction: "This one [Emergency Venting] will inconvenience someone, while this one [Block] will save your life." Which is interesting because my opponent cleverly used a Coolant system to get a leg cooled down and re-loaded into his hand, and then kicked off Styxx's damaged Gun Battery before the game ended on a time-out. That +2VP addition saw Eurybia's score almost close the gap before the game ended. I'm okay with Emergency Venting being a weaker option compared to Block, so long as the math works for Super-Cooling. 

I do need to order some new prints of Eurybia, not only the capture the configurations that I've devised with additional legs, but also to clarify what direction Eurybia is facing in, as the pose seen in these pictures is cool, but doesn't really have all three weapons pointing in a clear and unified direction. Likewise, I should order the latest version of the board so that I don't need to lay out these prototype tiles on top of one of the original prototype boarded, to make set-up faster and easier. But that's just stuff to make things easier to set up and prettier to photograph rather than to change game-play.

Something I do want to do to change game-play somewhat is to update how the Sensor systems Detect Titan, which is to say that one cog should let a Titan 'see' (or ignore line-of-sight interruption) through a single building. This would do two things, the first to make line-of-sight a bit more granular, with seeing through more buildings commensurate with the skill of the crew member operating the system system, and in doing so enable the second which is the introduction of systems that can reduce this line-of-sight bonus for some Titan cloaking and stealth. 

 

Titanomachina: Making Coolant Cooler via Test Match

As recent blog posts make suggest, I've been worried the Coolant system has been insufficiently cool. When adding to Titanomachina my instinct has been to introduce elements somewhat conservatively with the notion that it is better to make something better than to pare it back when it turns out to be over-powered. Needless to say that was not a problem with the Coolant system as the ability to deactivate systems had some weird knock-on effects in terms of card-play. Super-cooling a system to play it next turn screwed with tempo, essentially stealing a normally cooled system from its loading back to hand three rounds after it was played. It was a disappointing system for what I had imagined.

Instead, we tried playing Eurybia Quaternary vs Styxx Tertiary because both of them mount Coolant systems and Styxx mounted a Capacitor for comparative purposes. In this case we played it that Coolant systems just return a card to the players hand for every cog available when activated. This reflected the Capacitor system in that it returns cards to player's hands, except that Capacitors only returned cards that had been played face-down to activate other systems at a 2:1 ratio. This results in a savings in system charge, at the cost of time spent on the action. Coolant systems would return face-up at a 1:2 ratio, paying a steeper opportunity cost, but also a savings in system charge. What that means is that Eurybia with two Coolant systems was not giving up card advantage easily, keeping pace with Styxx and eventually grinding a win. 

Perhaps interestingly there was no particular point at which I thought to myself (well, that's a mistake I should learn from), and Styxx maintained the initiative throughout the fight, which was probably pretty good. I think I may have under-utilized the Rapacious personality given how I lost significantly on habitats, but I think I came pretty close to a knock-out of Eurybia at times. Eurybia definitely benefitted from the Pugnacious personality, using that to avoid a one-two punch from Styxx's weapons. 

From a design perspective, I think I might try it again against a Titan without coolant systems to see what advantage it confers, but for Styxx I just about shut down the Coolant system, Thrusters, and Deflectors to hound Eurybia around the board, and then use the Coolant system to keep the plasma shotgun in play in the late game. It's a handy trick rather than a work-horse system, it seems. 

Please note it seems I forgot to get a screen-shot of round 4, which unfortunately breaks the spiral into the middle of the board that seems to have resulted from game play. 

Round 4 is missing. Oops.