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Okay.
So, the Warlord Titan is now out for pre-order, providing a capstone for the range of huge war engines (assuming we never get an imperator, which would be truly ridiculous).

The problem is this: Titans don't really fit in the scale of 40k games. By which I mean, yes, you can use a pair of warhounds against a reaver in a 40k game, but these three behemoths slugging it out actually has less granular detail than three 'normal' tanks engaging one another; each one is just a block of hull points and largely ignores the rules.

There is no real reason to take any weapon save as many destroyer laser barrels as will fit on the chassis (4 for the warhound, 8 for the raver and warlord) and little encouragement to manouvre intelligently. Furthermore, titans exchanging fire are like submachineguns at twenty paces - an imperial or eldar titan can generally blow another titan of the same weight class to scrap metal in two shooting phases. With it being genuinely hard to claim cover saves, whoever shoots first generally wins.

40k has plenty of 'bolt on' game variants - at the other end of the scale, Kill-team turns a fight between two tactical squads into a genuinely tactical, engaging game - so why couldn't there be one for the big boys?

What would be needed as a rules set to allow a 3000 point (ish) titan game (i.e. 1 warlord/phantom, 2 reavers, 3 revenants/hierophants, 4 stompas/warhounds or 6-8 hierodules, knights or wraithknights) to be fun and interesting? "A new rules set" is an easy answer but not terribly helpful - I'm talking about 'bolt on' rules like planetstrike or kill team.

What would you need?


My first thoughts:

a) Missions. Mission objectives are the key to making people actually move. If you can make people manouvre, you can reduce 'shooting gallery syndrome'

b) No small units. Infantry and tanks can get knotted. My best suggestion, actually - looking at the old adeptus titanicus rules - is that areas of the board occupied by enemy infantry is essentially the games's version of dangerous terrain, since difficult terrain does slow a superheavy walker (a bit) but since Move Through Cover is part of their standard suite of rules, it can't actually hurt them normally.

c) Movement restrictions/improvements. Yes, you can increase the board size, but I wouldn't want to increase it that much - going from 6' x 4' to 8' x 6' is not unreasonable, as it essentially requires a second realm of battle board. More than that will strain the space of people's playing areas, so increasing the board size is not a realistic solution. Besides which, close action makes assaults more worthwhile; I'd rather stick with 6' x 4' if possible. At the moment, however, any titan can move 12", come about 180 degrees and fire all its weapons, so there's not too much strategy of maneuver. It needs to be carefully thought through, though, because making it harder to reach the enemy makes melee weapons even worse than they already are.

d) destroyer weapons. Something needs to tone them down. I've no problem with the damage they do in theory, but as noted, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to arm a reaver or warhound with anything but turbolasers. The problem is that armour values matter for other guns and don't for destroyer weapons - with a result that in the extreme case of the AV15 armoured ceramite warlord, the S10 titan-sized multimelta on a reaver is virtually unable to hurt it but destroyer weapons still punch through with ease. The 'kill each other in two turns' effect tends to be driven by scoring a '6' on the destroyer table, as well; 'normal' titan weapons can trade fire for some time. This goes double for gargantuan creatures like the hierodule, which despite being tough against normal shots, tend to undergo spontaneous existance failure the moment destroyer weapons come into play.

e) large blasts, templates and the vulcan mega-bolter. The primary anti-titan weapon of the Adeptus Titanicus is the volcano cannon. Supposedly. But it's actually the laser blaster, because three destroyer hits are better than one. When you take massed lighter units out of the equation, having a larger blast is more or less irrelevant aside from a slight increase in accuracy (and if you were having trouble hitting a titan with blast markers...... I pity you). Theoretically, if you hit them with a blast that big, you should probably cause multiple hits to a target as big as a titan. If you reach back into epic:armageddon, they actually did someting like this - hitting a war engine with a barrage marker caused one hit, but if you caught it with the centre hole of the marker it took D3 hits. The inferno cannon and vulcan mega-bolter would also need some sort of benefit rules. They have a place in a titan-on-titan game - as the most efficient weapons for dropping an enemy's shields - but at the moment the rules don't support this role. You'll notice that both superheavy tanks with vulcan mega-bolters have the all power to weapons rule, which goes a long way to making up the weapon's lack of punch, but titans don't.



Comments? Thoughts? Suggestions?

I like the ideas but you'd need a second mortgage to afford the starter set for such a game.

Models aside, I think what he has here is a solid idea.

I love the theme behind a lone Warlord being sent in to clear out a Chaos Knight House or something similar

As for scaling it down, go for 12" 'actual' = 2" 'Titanicus', which should solve the problems of range & movement, although it would make the models even more disproportional than they already are in our setting of 8 foot superhumans being 'normal'

Or for that kind of game remove the d weapon table replace with s 12 does d3 hull points Wounds ect.