Titanomachina: Eurybia

 

The Primary and Secondary Configurations, tentative, for Eurybia would be: sensor (1), arms (2), plantigrade legs (2), shield generators (2), sponson (1), extra armour (5), crew (4), and coolant (2). That's thirteen systems requiring no extra charge, twelve if you consider Detect mandatory. If it is, then it's five systems requiring +1 charge (one card played face-down), and two requiring +2 charge. So without activating shields or weapons Eurybia may do 12 + 5 to move 4-6 times, activate sponson or sensor more than once every four rounds. But what do you give up to get that? Giving up two cards (one coolant, one face-down to +1 charge coolant), probably extra armour or shields, to de-activate one (or more with crew) activated system. Using initiate crew you could de-activate two systems already activated. Including the crew... Of course that is the same as not using an initiate crew, and different than not including the crew. Activating two limbs could be a good use of an initiate crew, a coolant system, and the power to extra armour 4 & 5, or even a shield generator. 

Which brings me to weapons. A rocket pod so Eurybia doesn't have to chase, and a vulcan gun, laser blade combo. The vulcan is defensive, but reactivated and operated by another crew member it could win a game. The laser blade is because it combines well with a rocket pod. Which all sounds pretty incredible right? It's like having two extra copies of weapons except you're firing two rocket pods at the cost of six cards, the rocket pods themselves, the charge for them, super-cooling to deactivate for a second activation next round, and the charge for that. Two separate rocket systems would do that with four cards. To activate all weapons the primary configuration will require seven, eight to ten if you want crew in on it. That leaves 12 cards for manuever and defense. 

More importantly not only do the coolant systems make the primary configuration less predictable and more agile, it can also be pushed to make the Titan faster and hit harder. 

The secondary configuration ups the ante to make the range shorter and the threat bigger. Using coolant on the claw and getting in multiple grapples into buildings, or simply into arc of the laser blade, may make up for an inability to multi-task offense and defense. She still has the best armour and shields in the game, and can leverage that hardiness to absorb damage as well as prevent it. 

It's worth considering that using the coolant system will leave Eurybia dead in the water, spending at least one other card, leaving itself in place to be shot and two cards short on defensive options. It's not gaining anything until the next round, so using it might signal that a player can do nothing else.

Either way, it'll be interesting to get these two out on the board to see what happens. 

Titanomachina: Escape From Gaia ready for Play-testing

I saw this mechanic in a wonderful game about modern art ("Art Society"):

Initiative goes to the player that plays the highest card, with ties going to the previous card value, and any further tie going to the ship with the most fuel. 

Ships are dice, used to track fuel.

Players move their ships in initiative order.

• Up an orbit costs 2 fuel
• Moving along the same orbit costs 1
• Moving down an orbit earns 2
• Moving into space with a planet earns 1
• Moving into a space occupied by another player costs 1.

There's all sorts of other bells and whistles I could put in there, like giving cards special rules or whatnot, but right now seven poker cards (1-6 and a joker) should do it.

Players win by moving up, out of the solar system. Players can't have less than 0 fuel, and start with 4 points of fuel. Planets are spaced out so that players can't immediately bootstrap themselves out of the solar system.

Titanomachina: Coolant System

I've mentioned it before, but I'm mentioning it again because I've made some head-way in implementing it, the Titan Coolant system. Titans have a variety of systems that don't directly affect combat, but can be used to improve their combat capabilities, including crew and capacitors. I want to add a coolant system that enables players to draw activated cards back to their hands. This needs to work with other systems like crew and capacitors, and not be an overwhelming no-brainer. 

Currently crew members can add their cogs to the cogs of whatever system is subsequently activated. If they're re-activated, they can be used twice. So the cost of a coolant system at charge 1 seems pretty reasonable as it will return an activated card to your hand at the cost of two other cards, the coolant system and whatever is paid to activate it. Using a plasma shotgun or howitzer twice in the same turn would require the player have at least seven cards in their hand, three for the first shot, two to recover the plasma weapon, and two more for the second shot. 

Maybe the player has a capacitor in their hand, then the player can attack with the plasma weapon for three cards, recover the cost using the capacitor, recover the plasma howitzer using the coolant system, for six cards. Time-wise, though, that's four turns compared to three for not using the capacitor. So pretty reasonable in terms of combos, although one might wonder whether that is true if a junior crew member is used to recover both plasma weapons on the turn they've been used (requiring nine cards, or eight including a capacitor) or one plasma weapon and one master crew member. That's a total of three cards and two turns to recover those. 

It's also possible a player might recover those cards in time for the next round, meaning the player only needs to build up eight cards in their hand. There's the possibility of a Titan having two coolant systems and going for a kind of perpetual motion machine using one to reactivate the other and a crew member, who in turn reactivate the first and a crew member. Keeping the charge cost at 1 ensures that doing this will have diminishing returns, although a caveat making sure that players don't attempt to reactivate the coolant system being activated will probably be required. 

Finally, I want the reaction to be something interesting and different from the three other reactions available to the players, and perhaps to port that reaction to the jump jet and thruster systems: things exploding to the detriment of the attacker. In particular there is a scene from Pacific Rim whereby Raleigh opens up the Gypsy Danger's coolant system (to no apparent detriment) in order to freeze Otachi's tail while it has been blocked by Gypsy Danger's arm. How to accomplish something like this in Titanomachina might be to cause the attacking system to take damage equal to the damage it is dealing out to the target, or to take only one point of damage, or some middle ground that doesn't make Titans with coolant systems invincible in close quarters. Figuring out how that would affect weapons like plasma howitzers or macro lasers would certainly be an act of imagination. Mind you, super-cooled weapons attempting to discharge are probably wildly unsafe. Maybe it would be something to say that systems being activated to attack from an adjacent square suffer damage equal to their cogs (ignoring any crew bonus or damage penalty) when this reaction is played.

Edit: Another two ideas, the second of which I prefer:

1. One of the systems on the reacting Titan is deactivated, to be put back into the player's hand. This is a more powerful version of the card's basic action. It prevents the card from being pulled back and activated again that round, but most of the time the end result is the same for the cost of one less card. 

2. It deactivates an attacking system at range 1 unless the attacking player pays an extra card face-down. Which is really specific, except much of the game tends to be spent at range 1 and the result matches that of the Gypsy Danger vs Otachi frozen tail thing.