Titans
A Titan is a faction-specific super-heavy Icaroid - a walking fortress built in the Engineering Bay from a special Titan core. These behemoths stand twice as tall as a normal frame, carry the structure and slots of any 2-3 lesser Icaroids, straddle a seven-hex footprint, mount a single oversized titan-weapon, and grant its a faction-specific signature battlefield effect. This guide covers how a Titan is built, how it moves, and what each faction's Titan brings to the field.
What a Titan is
A Titan is an ordinary Icaroid, but larger, tankier, and stronger. The main difference is that it's built on a Titan core, but otherwise production and cost work exactly as they do for any other design. There's a few key differences in how Titans are built:
- One per faction. There is a single Titan core per faction - six in all - each a heavy, armored chassis with a unique signature effect.
- Gated behind a research node. Every Titan core is unlocked by the shared Titan Series research - a single T3 research node that opens your faction's Titan once completed.
- Enormous, but not invincible. Titans are incredibly durable and can carry a potent array of weaponry and gear, but it is slow, easily spotted on almost any terrain (it can never hide - see Vision & Detection), and its single Titan weapon, while very powerful, is still just one gun.
The Titan core
The Titan core has integrated mobility. Where an ordinary build bolts mobility components onto its core, a Titan core carries its own locomotion. This can be both an advantage - your expensive Titan can't be destroyed by a shot to squishy mobility components - and a disadvantage in that it's harder to take advantage of mobility tools and powerful mobility-specific ichor glyph effects.
Instead, a Titan carries a single Titan Weapon port capable of mounting one of a series of very heavy and durable weapons, plus a generous spread of normal component ports for weapons and gear.
| Trait | What it means |
|---|---|
| Integrated mobility | The core's own mobility and speed drive movement - there is no leg component, and no way to bypass the heavy armor of the core itself short of removing all attached weaponry. |
| 12+ height | A Titan stands at least 12 elevation units tall. This let it see over most obstructions easily and shoot even direct-fire weapons past most obstructions - and be spotted from almost anywhere on the map. You're going to need all that durability to survive. |
| Immensely durable | Structure, armor, weight capacity and slot count all scale up to roughly two or three ordinary frames' worth. |
Because it is otherwise a normal core, a Titan hosts its own large ichor grid, and follows every other rule in Building an Icaroid for how components attach.
Titan weapons
The Titan Weapon is a class of deliberately oversized ordnance that mounts only in a Titan core's single titan-weapon port. Any faction's Titan can field any of them, and they are far pricier than any standard-size weapon. The results, however, are well worth the cost. The full stat lines live in the weapon catalogue; in brief:
| Weapon | Range | Damage | Type | Role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Colossus Siege Cannon | 18 | 90 | piercing | Long-range armor-shatter, 2 shots. |
| Solar Lance | 14 | 120 | plasma | Bores through armor and has a very high chance to ignite tiles. |
| Saturation Rocket Battery | 16 | 60 | explosive | Indirect, wide blast that shreds lightly-armored foes in a massive area. |
| Wide-Aperture Beam Projector | 20 | 80 | laser | Extreme range, low damage (for a Titan weapon), but very high accuracy. An excellent tool for shutting down evasive enemies. |
| Immolation Cannon | 12 | 50 | explosive | "I just want to set the world on fire", the weapon. Shatters the earth itself and sets fire to everything near its target with each shot. |
The seven-hex footprint
A Titan does not stand on a single hex - it physically straddles seven: a center tile plus its six neighbours. The center tile is where it is "positioned" (line of sight, range, spotting and targeting all measure from the center, exactly like any other unit), but the whole footprint matters for the board:
- All seven hexes are blocked. No other unit - friend or foe - can move into or path through any tile the Titan occupies. The space around a Titan stays clear, and enemies have to go around it.
- It renders across the footprint. The battlefield draws the Titan's full seven-hex outline and an oversized silhouette.
- It takes hazards from every tile it covers. Standing over fire, acid, or unstable ground, a Titan eats the hazard of every footprint tile it blocks each round, not just the center - a big body sits in a lot of danger at once. Damaging terrain effects are one of the best ways to counter the slow-moving Titans, since they'll have trouble escaping the effects.
Movement & climbing
A Titan is far too massive to be slowed or snared the way a normal frame is, but gravity still has a say. Its movement follows three special rules:
- Immune to movement impairment. Every step costs exactly 1 move point - a Titan ignores all terrain, weather and battle-damage move penalties - and the Entangled, Pinned and Stunned movement-impairing effects do not slow it. Only its own Deploy anchor and stability damage can slow or stop its movement.
- It rests on the high ground beneath it. Because it stands on seven hexes at once, a Titan judges climbs and drops from the highest tile under its footprint, not the center - a rigid giant sits on the tallest ground it covers.
- Climb scales with its height. With no mobility component to set a climb limit, a Titan can change elevation by half its core height (rounded down) per step. A bigger differential up is impassable; a bigger drop down is a crash descent - the same heavy fall damage any frame takes. Please note, crashing a Titan hurts a lot due to their weight.
Standing-tile hazards and crash rules still apply in full - a Titan shrugs off being slowed, not being hurt. Any movement impairments it applies to itself still take effect.
Faction Titans
Each faction fields exactly one kind of Titan, and each type grants a single powerful signature effect based on that faction's identity:
| Titan | Faction | Signature |
|---|---|---|
| Iapetus | Welter | Bulwark - a magnetic repulsion field that negates a share of all incoming damage from itself and every ally under its umbrella. |
| Hyperion | Solari | Overcharge - the largest reactor of any Titan floods its energy weapons for a large damage boost. |
| Themis | Ironfall | Immolation Field - a selective immolation field sets nearby enemies alight every round. |
| Crius | Chorus | Resonant Crown - a resonant crown of Ichor set atop the massive core inspires its nearby allies, adding flat bonus damage to itself and nearby allies. |
| Rhea | Praxis | A mobile drone factory: Carrier Launch: MX-1 Tank releases a seemingly neverending stream of Praxis' unique drone catalogue. |
| Tethys | Exordia | Corrosion Field - a caustic haze unravels the armor of every enemy that draws near. |
The support Titans (Iapetus, Crius) want allies clustered under their aura; the aggressive ones (Themis, Tethys, Hyperion) want to be in the enemy's face; and the Rhea plays as a rolling factory, screening itself behind the drones it prints.
Fielding a Titan
Because a Titan is worth several ordinary frames, manual battles can cap how many each side may bring:
- Manual Battles: The host sets a per-side Titan cap in the battle lobby - no cap, a fixed number, or none allowed. It is enforced when you deploy, and an AI opponent obeys the same limit (and will prioritise buying Titans up to it).
- Campaigns: A Titan is manufactured like any other unit once you have researched the Titan Series and built it in a factory - it just costs a great deal of metal and ichor.