Titan Talk

[The Other Dave]

For the moment, I'm dropping this thread as a bookmark for a place to put relatively in-depth discussion about Adeptus Titanicus and/or Legions Imperialis, the two GW "epic scale" Heresy games. MiJ and Yellowstreak have both expressed varying degrees of interest in getting into AT, while also wrestling a bit with the scattered and, well, physical nature of a lot of the rules. So any rules queries that come up in discussion here or on Discord, I'll pop a little explainer / Q&A in here and we can talk about it at length.

To start, though, the pitches!

Adeptus Titanicus is the crunchy, basically-a-skirmish-game, er, game, where each player controls a handful of titans, who face off against each other and try to smash face and cause catastrophic reactor meltdowns for fun and profit. It's a very well-designed game (a James Hewitt joint, if that means anything to you), regarded by many fans as one of GW's finest. I tend to agree. The principle is that it's a very granular game, where you have a whole B5-size sheet for each titan where you manage its reactor and shield levels, damage tracks, critical damage, and so on, and there's a lot of fun decision-making involved. It's also, while not exactly "cheap," at least cheaper than most GW games when it comes to getting all you need to get to play games - you absolutely can just get the pretty reasonably-priced starter set, have two reavers and two warhounds and a couple of knights lancer, and call it a day. But you'll probably want to get more because best of all, IMO the official models are excellent and very fun to paint, with great table presence once you get them together. (And I'm sure MiJ and YS will happily hop in to talk up how easy it is to find stls for the models if you want to go that route.) AT is real good, y'all.

Legions Imperialis is the newest version of Epic, the GW grand-scale infantry and tanks game. It shares the same scale with AT, and knight and titan models can be used in either. (Infantry and even tanks don't feature in Titanicus, except as "there are some foolhardy guys with missile launchers in these buildings who might try and target your titans" stratagems and such.) Six months ago I would have said it's fine, being based very strongly on the 2nd edition of Space Marine (from back in 1991, and showing some of the, er, design philosophies of those times), but the recently-released Liber Strategia did a lot to address some balance issues in the release version of the game, so now I'd say it's pretty good, actually. I like AT better as a game, but there's something about a whole mess of infantry and tanks and spider walkers, supported by a couple knights and maybe a titan, that scratches a certain itch.

The big negative a lot of folks have with both of these games is that they're very firmly Horus Heresy games - Xenos are not supported, and are not likely to be. While I appreciate the reasons they've done it this way (chief among them guaranteeing that any individual playing either game is going to be interested in most, if not all, of the releases, while your typical non-Jye 40K enjoyer will probably only really be interested in a small sliver of what comes out for that game) I do also understand that some folks just want to play Orks or Eldar.

[Konrad]

Hey Dave, speaking of Xenos, do you want some Ork Titan bits? I have like half a MekGargant. I think it was you who gave it to me years and years ago. Release your inner Waaaaagh! Get kit-bashing!

[The Other Dave]

Whoops, sorry, Konrad, missed your post! I think I'm going to go with 3d printing for any gargants I collect after all, but thanks for the offer.

[The Other Dave]

List building chat!

Games day is coming up, and I know mij has been hard at work painting and printing and getting all the physical accoutrements ready for our game. I've merely been obsessing over lists, so I thought I'd share my thought processes and see if mij (or anyone else!) wanted to bounce ideas around.

First is loyalty and legio. Mij wanted to use his loyalists, so I'll be using my traitor legio, which is Mordaxis, the sort of hapless "accidentally got all their titans nurgley corrupted after being a little too trusting of the Word Bearers" legio. I picked them purely on those fluff reasons, and because they're firmly on the corrupted side and the main reason I wanted to collect traitors is to play around with the corruption rules. They have a couple of impactful legio traits that really influence list building strongly, too, even if said traits aren't exactly... good per se. Namely, the weird daemonic techno-virus they're all corrupted with, which has two effects: Enemy titans within 4" get -1 to all their repair rolls, and my own titans can't ever push their reactors for movement or turning. The first is quite strong if you're within that 4", as it means enemy titans simply cannot reignite void shields and will find regular repairs merely annoyingly difficult. The second is quite a strong penalty, as it makes it difficult to get within those 4", and makes it relatively easy to outflank and outmaneuver my titans, in a game where maneuver is super important.

The thing I've really been pondering is titan and maniple selection. Currently I've got three ideas on the table (these are all 1500 point lists btw):

First is the good old Axiom maniple, with a warlord, a reaver, 2 warhounds, and a dire wolf. The axiom is a jack of all trades maniple that works with any sort of playstyle, as it just makes giving orders more reliable. It lets you take a nice range of titans, which is also fun and helps ensure you have a reasonable number of activations. To hit 1500 points with this I'd corrupt the lead titan, the warlord, which lets me give it a daemonic princeps trait, Distorted Form, that boosts movement and maneuverability, which is also nice. The main problem with this maniple is that it's extremely similar to what mij seems to be painting up, and I thought a more asymmetrical game would be interesting.

So the second choice is a heavier maniple, the Perpetua, which gives a bonus to repairs. This would be a warlord and three reavers, which leaves me a sort of annoyingly small but not too small number of points below 1500. I could either corrupt up several of the titans in the maniple, which would be fun but probably leave me outmaneuvered in terms of number of activations, or get a small banner of cheap dark mechanicum stalkers to give me an annoying little formation that is just dangerous enough that you have to spend some resources doing the not terribly difficult job of wiping it out. This second choice is a bit more boring but also a bit more reasonable. In this case I'd probably choose the Swift Killer princeps trait for the warlord, letting it make a turn before shooting in exchange for a to-hit penalty, which again helps counteract the lack of maneuverability and help the warlord keep enemy titans in the corridor arc of its carapace weapons.

Third choice is sort of the opposite track, two small light maniples. I'm looking at a Venator maniple of a reaver and two warhounds kitted out for ranged combat, since that maniple lets the reaver take a free shot at any enemy titan whose shields are taken down by one of the warhounds. I'd give the reaver the princeps trait that gives a small bonus to repair rolls, since it's the heat-producing volcano cannon that would likely be getting the extra shots. The second maniple is a Ferrox of another reaver and two more warhounds, equipped more for close-range and melee combat, since the ferrox gives an armor penetration bonus if you're up close and a to-hit bonus if you're very close indeed. A melee titan in non-boosting Mordaxis is a bit of a gamble, but I could corrupt it giving it the same Distorted Form trait the Axiom warlord gets, plus I can pop a daemon into it to improve its combat abilities and with the extra points I have, give it a good old disgustingly resilient-esque armor bonus for nurgliness. The ferrox maniple will also want to get in close, which would let me take better advantage of the nasty part of the legio trait. Main problem with this choice of list is leaving the warlord at home, since I haven't gotten a chance to use it since painting it up.

[Jye Nicolson]

I think too similar to MiJ is maybe not an issue if it makes it easy for him to reason about the game.

[me_in_japan]

Re too similar to me - I wouldn't worry about it overmuch. Take whatcha fancy, and I'll live with whatever happens.

Re listbuilding - so, am I right in thinking that choices should go: legio->maniple->princeps->wargear(/mutations)? Or are there other considerations to the order of choosing?

[The Other Dave]

Re too similar to me - I wouldn't worry about it overmuch. Take whatcha fancy, and I'll live with whatever happens.

Re listbuilding - so, am I right in thinking that choices should go: legio->maniple->princeps->wargear(/mutations)? Or are there other considerations to the order of choosing?

I'm less worried about just being similar and more just thinking asymmetrical battles are in general pretty fun. It's personal preference as much as anything.

I'd say generally, yeah - legio will give you the broad-strokes rules of what, if anything, your titans prefer to do, maniple will give you your actual titans and weapon loadouts and a special rule that will further refine your battle plan, princeps trait sort of shores up both those things a bit, and wargear is for your extra 60 points that you can't use on anything else.