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.