Titan Talk
Posted: Fri Jan 02, 2026 4:48 am
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.
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.