Titan, the battle moon. World of conflict. One of several worlds used to settle disputes between large groups, rather than outright warfare. And now, it will once again become a battlezone for Titan battle units, massive robots piloted by a small crew which are practically unmatched on these battlefields. Supported by swarms of autonomous robotic vehicles, these metal behemoths wage war across the surface of titan, in a contest of minds as much as metal, where the best design teams, strategists, and budgeters will come out on top.
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This is an arms race based around deploying colossal giant robots to fight the enemy colossal giant robots while swarms of smaller vehicles fight around said giant’s feet, supporting them, interfering with the enemy vehicles, and being stepped on as the fight goes on.
Remember that the Titans, the giant robots of which we speak, are the centerpieces to these battles. I know some people have opinions on giant robots and the viability thereof, but attempts to argue with these sort of fundamental setting assumptions will lead to naysayers finding out how easily a giant robot steps on them.
RULES
An Arms Race game is a 2-team "suggestion" game about designing new weapons, items, and other objects for your nation's military. These designs will be routinely compared to the other team's arsenal in Battle Reports. The game is split into several phases:
Phases
A Turn (three months-ish) is divided into several phases, done in order.
Design Phase
In the Design Phase, your design teams and researchers whip up new vehicles, parts, and weapons to be deployed in combat. Want to give your mecha laser arms, this is the time when you start doing that. Jet pack torso? Rocket Kick Legs? Ditto.
How it works is simple. Everyone gets to submit their proposals, and then everyone votes on which one they like the most, or at least think would be most useful. The submission with the most votes gets designed that turn. If your design didn't win, don't worry... just submit it again the next turn unless you've come up with something even cooler since you made your last thing up!
Revision Phase
In the Revision Phase, you fix the mess ups of past turns, and make what you already have even better. It works basically the same as the Design Phase, but instead of a powerful design action you can use to make cool new stuff, what you are doing here is revising your old gear to make it better. Revisions can't make something new out of whole cloth, but they can certainly use technology developed after something was originally designed to rework it into something newer and more useful.
Deployment Phase
In the Deployment Phase, you, well, deploy stuff. Shocker, eh? But no, really, that’s what you do here. You decide which crews to send to which lane, which Titans to build for said crews, and how many vehicle support assets you are going to buy to support the Titans in the lanes.
Battle Phase
In the Battle Phase, you don't actually do anything! This is when we, the relentless and sometimes kind masters of the game, take account of which teams have been deployed to which lane, what Titans the teams have been equipped with, and what vehicles are supporting said Titans and compare this information with what the other side sent to figure out who won this round. This phase ends when turn’s battle report is finished up and posted, so you may then take into account what happened to plan for the turns that come next. With the ending of the Battle Phase, the next turn’s Design Phase begins.
Each side has one home area, which they must defend at all costs. These areas are undefined at the start of the game, and will be defined by their respective sides as the war drags on.
The Top Path is across the Orbital Ring, which consists of the Industrial Zone, where ancient machinery toils away eternally, smashing the unwary traveler. The Solar Plant, full of open space and reflective panels, is a wide open zone, and yet also closed off, for the panels provide a kind of concealment and cover not often seen elsewhere. Lastly there is the Jungle Biosphere, a place where life thrives and one can easily spot both thick tree cover and fertile soil. Some of the native life even grows to such an extent that they can threaten combat vehicles, though few could hope to contest a Titan.
The Middle Path is made up of the Lava Rifts, where extreme heat and deep falls render travel by land treacherous at best, and deadly at worst. Second lies the Deep Desert, where the sands shall swiftly swallow the footsteps of Titans and the tracks of vehicles, and one should ever beware the chances of quicksand and scything winds. And last but not least there are the Mountains, those ancient spires which reach high into the sky. Here, any falls will be quite… perilous, no matter how big you are, while the chokepoints of the passes must be accounted for by even Titans.
The Bottom Path is made up of the Rocky Islands, desolate and barren, a mix of ground and sea where the isles stick up from the sea like the teeth of an ancient dragon, giving them excellent sight lines. This makes combat an interesting contest as titans attempt to ascend these rocky spires from the ocean depths while naval craft use the same isles as cover. Second is the Deep Ocean, where ground vehicles hold no sway, a naval battleground where one must beware both the waves and the storms, for many a fool has found themselves falling victim to the depths for underestimating the bite of the deep ocean. Last comes the Swamp Islands, where excessive groundwater makes the land of these isles soft, and there is little distinction between earth and sea. Here the ground and waters find themselves flowing together, making a place where one must watch their footing lest the mud drag them down.
Titan Parts
Basic Arm : Cost 0
As its name implies, this is the simplest arm type and is commercially available on the open market. Although it's relatively weak, the Basic Arm is cheap and far simpler to build than other appendages.
Basic Torso : Cost 0
The Basic Torso has no special features or abilities. It's just a cheap, quick-to-build body frame that can accommodate any appendage type.
Basic Legs : Cost 0
Basic Legs have no special features or abilities. It's just a cheap, fast pair of legs that will help you get a Titan "up-and-running" in a hurry.
Vehicles
Armored Combat Vehicle (ACV) : Unit Cost 0.5
This robotic combat vehicle consists of a central computer processor, wheels, commercial steel armor, and a low caliber low power cannon combined with an internal ammo storage. Neither smart nor strong, at least they are cheap.
Armored Skirmish Vehicle (ASV) : Unit Cost 0.5
A simple robotic combat vehicle with a central processor, a set of hover propulsion units, and almost nothing for armor. It is armed with a small missile launcher, surface to anywhere with built in ammunition storage. Not particularly smart, and the missiles are inaccurate as heck, but at least they’re cheap and fast.
Hovering Transport Vehicle (HTV): Unit Cost 0.5
These expansive hovering vehicles are large enough to transport entire tanks within, but are also large and lumbering targets. Completely unarmed, they depend on escorts for protection, both for themselves and their helpless cargo.
Mobile Defense Station (MDS) : Unit Cost 0.5
Tall armored towers on tiny treads, topped with a low power laser pulse cannon. Their computer cores hide deep in the bottom of the tower, and despite being made of commercial steel the armor plating is still thick.
In this game, instead of the normal resources of Materials and Fuel, you are instead dealing in Resource Points. Both sides start with 15 resource points, and will get more over time. Each turn, during the deployment phase, both teams will use their points to buy the transcendently enormous and expensive parts that make up a working Titan, as well as detachments of smaller supporting vehicles to, well, support said Titans.
Each Titan Part purchased is just that, a single part. If you want to equip a Titan with twin Rocket Propelled Drill Fists or whatever else the hellish imaginations of the designers invent, you’ll have to buy two of them, not just one. By the same token, each time you purchase a vehicle, you are not purchasing an unlimited amount of them, but are instead only purchasing a single detachment of said vehicles. Of course, if you want more, you can just buy more. Assuming you have the funding.
Neither purchased parts nor purchased vehicles shall remain between turns, but instead they, or more oftenly their remains, will be recycled to help refill your side’s budget, which will be returned to maximum, whatever that happens to be at the time, at the start of a new round.
Titans need people to crew them, represented by well, titan crews. You cannot use designs to get more crews, but you will receive more over time.
Each side starts with three Titan Crews, and each lane needs at least one Titan Crew (with attached Titan) assigned to it, or the enemy Titan will run Rampant without any respectable opposition.
Titan Crews have a Skill Rating, which starts at 1, and can have specific traits or perks that reward giving them specific types of gear to use. A Titan Crew with superior skill, or one with appropriate perks, has an advantage but can still be beaten by a poorer crew with better equipment or better support elements. Or if ganged up on by multiple enemy Titans.
Stolen without shame from NUKE9.13’s Battle for Aljadid, which hopefully he will someday update, this game runs off two four sided dice, or “2d4”, which are rolled and compared to the below table to figure out how successful the design or revision in question was.
Roll (Probability): Result
2 (1/16): Utter failure. You get nothing except the knowledge of what not to do.
3 (1/8): Buggy mess. Whilst you managed to make something, it isn't really usable.
4 (3/16): Below average. It works. Not especially well, but it works.
5 (1/4): Average. You get what you asked for, more or less.
6 (3/16): Above average. It works, and somewhat better than might be expected. Not a lot better, mind.
7 (1/8): Superior craftsmanship. It does its job and it does it perfectly. Its performance is exceptional and it is as reliable as clockwork.
8 (1/16): Unexpected boon. Not only does it work, but it does things you never even expected it to. If no 'bonus features' make sense, then you just get experience with some related field.
As you can see, this system tends more towards the middle then the extremes, which, yes, means you are less likely to do super well and get something super cool, but also means you’re less likely to fail miserably, completely, and totally. And isn’t that worth some minor sacrifices?
As well, each attempted design or revision also has a Difficulty. These ratings assign a modifier (+/- #) to the roll, changing the effective result. The Difficulties in question are Trivial (+2, Requires no new knowledge at all and has no notable challenges involved), Easy (+1, Actions where some minor challenge is found but nothing really that hard), Normal (+0, Actions involving new concepts or technologies, or old technologies being made better, but nothing intentionally revolutionary), Hard (-1, Entirely new concepts or technologies not using what you already have, but already implied or based on what came before), Very Hard (-2, Actions involving entirely new stuff where you only have a tiny idea of what you are doing), and Ludicrous (-3, Ok, this time you have no idea what you are doing, but according to theory it’s at least possible. Maybe).
There is also the Impossible Difficulty, which means you flat out fail because whatever you are trying to do is impossible with your current understanding of the world. You’ll still get some experience though, as you bash your head against the invisible walls of science repeatedly, over and over again. As well as a few headaches. But I'm sure most scientists would believe that is a small price for progress, especially the kinds of scientists found contributing to arms races.
In this game, designers must concern themselves with two types of creations. Vehicles, and Titan Parts. Vehicles are, well, what the name suggests. Vehicles. Whether aircraft, seacraft, or ground vehicles, a vehicle is a vehicle. And what a vehicle is, is a supporting unit. No match for a Titan on their own, vehicles provide vital supportive services such as scouting, fire support, ablative decoys, and countering the enemy support assets to the Titans that walk above them.
And speaking of Titans, let us speak of Titans. Titans are vast constructs, gigantic mecha piloted by elite cybernetically enhanced crews that tower over all else but other Titans. And each Titan is built from four parts. One torso, one set of legs, and two separate arms. As designers, you can, and should, develop new arms, legs, and torsos with which you will attempt to outmatch the enemy with and seize total victory for your side of choice.
Of note about titan parts, you can put weapons, or other gear, on any part, and legs don’t necessarily need to be human legs, or be the main method of movement. But if a body is busy being a jetpack it probably doesn’t have a lot of weapons, and if the legs are busy being sword tentacles they probably aren’t really good to walk on.
The two of us will each write the reports for one faction, and switch off writing the battle reports. With 1 of us writing a battle report, then the other, then we do a collaborative or announcer report. After doing a collaborative report we will switch which side we’re GMing for.
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Topic: Titan arms race Core thread: Turn -2 (Read 1374 times)