This has come up in the Manta thread and its true to a certain extent. I just wondered is the answer for getting a better balance with the Titans to make them have a certain amount of anti titan firepower. Its big bangs but typically focused. In this way they would be very powerful but weak in some ways verses swarms of smaller troops. Who for instance on the regular Warlord in the Imperial lists would not swap the volcano cannon for a turbo laser, rocket launcher or gatling blaster? Its not enough to focus on an enemy WE, but at the same time when you do fire the ability to lay waste to a dozen lesser units is wasted.

Currently we arm titans to take on hordes and trust to the fact enemy WE are fairly rare. Is this right?

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Oooh, I like that idea.

(votes 'yes' to fearless death duels)

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Yeah! That would be cool! Though a little silly if (for example) a lucky commisar stand managed to hold up a titan for a whole turn!

Fearless WE's perhaps?
R>

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So if my Warlord opens up at that Reaver over there, you're seriously telling me that the Reaver wont be seriously in trouble or dead once the dust clears?

My Phantom titan has clocked up some very impressive engine kills over the last 9 months or so too.

Standard config titans are decent against other titans, though not amazing. Would you hope them to be able to slag an enemy battle titan with one round of firing anyway? Depends what the titans are armed with too - variable weapons fit ones can be tooled to take on titans more if desired and perhaps one of the alternate weapons configs that were planned to be made available to all Imperial lists before SG got cut down would have been more anti-titan? Thinking about it, considering we've written up a plethora of new lists is there any reason why we haven't created and playtested Net-EA rules and points costs for a few more configs? It does feel like a strong failing of EpicA that they're all the same and it makes the games/lists more boring and less interesting than they could be. Maybe this deserves a thread of it's own.

I dislike the total invulnerability Fearless gives you to resolution damage in Epic and think if a Fearless unit looses combat very badly there should be a chance of them taking a little damage.

However your suggestion Rug may be a bit too good in some situations and people would regularly use it as a titan killing strategy.

Using the commissar example, say, all an IG player needs to do is CC the titan with one more stands than it has attacks and the commissar is guaranteed to survive. A properly set up assault with blast marker advantages from say a Mech Inf Comp vs a Reaver would start with +5 advantage. On average Reaver kills they would win the combat by 1 and cause a point of damage on the Reaver on average resolution dice, if the resolution roll went strongly in their favour they could even kill it.

Personally I'd rather Fearless units were vulnerable to resolution damage, but that they'd have a special 2+ save preventing it, rolled separately for each hackdown hit applied to them. They'd nearly always survive anyway, but there'd be a slim chance of hurting them some and it would make things more interesting.

Currently reading Titanicus. Ther eit seems in a Titan vs Titan shootout a Titan is pretty much blowed to shreds pretty quickly once the shields go out.

Reminds me of SM2nd/TitanLiegion rules where one hit could cause the Titan to be destroyed once the Shields are gone.

In EA you have to literally put holes in unimportant things of the Titan and if you reduce it to 0DC it instantly crumbles. No in betweens.

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That was one of my biggest complaints about E:A when I first read the rules, not being able to reduce a Titan's capabilities as it took hits.

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A page from the L4SoTR ... Titans are very heavily armed & armored mobile weapons platform. Or should be ... NO Close Combat Weapons on Titans. I's a waste of a hard point. As many powerful ranged weapons as possible should be mounted. Titans should move on the board, hopefully behind some cover on Turn 1 and proceed to pummel the Enemy Titan(s) ... Titans are priority targets from as many weapons systems as possible. Artillery, CAS, Orbital assets etc. should target the enemy Titan(s).  Titans like CAS are there to support ground forces & vis versa. Each side must attempt to gain Titan Superiority, to relieve ground forces of the threat, like with Air Superiority, to give them the ability to maneuver freely. Within a few turns the enemy Titan(s) should be useless smoking hulks. Friendly Titan(s) will be probably on their last leg by this time. But they did their job destroying the enemies Titans, in support of ground manuever forces ...    

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In general I don't think Titan vs Titan is that bad. Ok you don't want to walk in front of a Volcano Cannon but even the favoured TLD has enough shots to at least worry enemy Titans and whittle a few DC off. It also does seem to be an AMTL issue in taking weapons to suit the enemy, shooting infantry and AV's with very little WE hunting. I'm sure if there were a lot more titan lists then general purpose titans would be more popular than the fixed loadouts in the standard lists that mix in a bit of anti-titan weapons.

Full Titan vs Titan battles using just titans though might get a bit dull.

This is one of my "new year's resolution" projects.


As to Chris' point, many/most of the playtests for AMTL have assumed a non-AMTL enemy. Once the list starts seeing Tournament play, then it will have to start taking some anti-Titan weaponry, or else risk being trashed by the first AMTL army it met!

As ever, the Metagame affects things, and the metagame of playtesting is different to the metagame found in the wild.

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Yes, back in the days before SM1, I played a number of Titan vs. Titan games ... it became boring rather quickly ...  It repidly ended up like an Old West Gunfight ... or Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.  Sacrificing manuever for fire ... all Titans stood there and fired everything they had (which basically meant rolling 6s) and that went on until there was one man(Titan) standing ... much like Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral.  But unlike Earp, all Titans suffered damage, many severe or were burning/smoking destroyed hulks ...  

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Interesting what other threads lead to...

My perspective on this is that Imperial Titans fighting Imperial Titans should be a wash, possibly resulting in the mutual destruction of the two combatants because they are relatively speaking, equally armed.

Titans are not really designed to fight titans, they are designed to maximize force at a local area and overwhelm non-titan defenses.

I think E&C's approach of testing AMTL against non-titan armies is the right way to go and what the list should be balanced against. If all you got were draws or "lucky" wins Titan vs. Titan, then I would consider that balanced from a WE perspective.

Now that does not mean that other races "titans" should not be able to engage Imperial titans effectively, because in theory they bring something different to the table. I would expect a Tyranid Titan, that survived the incoming fire, to have a good chance of ripping an Imperial equivalent to pieces. Same with Orks, though I would expect them to come with a decent amount of firepower as well. I would expect that an Eldar titan that had Holofield integrity to outshoot it's Imperial opponent. Not sure what Necrons ought to do and from a Tau perspective, I would expect their superior weaponry, once past the shields, to rip them up pretty good.

These are just my "expectations", but based on the various racial characteristics, their behaviour should come close to that model.

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