Welcome back to Goonhammer’s series for aspiring Titan Princeps. We here at Goonhammer’s own Collegia Titanica know that Adeptus Titanicus can seem intimidating to players unfamiliar with its particular quirks, but this series aims to equip you with everything you’ll need to play out epic clashes on the battlefields of the far future with your very own Titan Battlegroup. In this series, we’ll be walking you through how to build your battlegroup and command it to glory, including everything from which Titans to include and how to equip them, through to how to command them on the field of battle to secure ultimate victory.
By now we’ve all seen the news about the latest Adeptus Titanicus models, the adorable pocket-sized Armigers. They’re cute! Tiny little robots that you can pick up and make them kiss. The problem is that I hate them.
I think I’m supposed to like them because they’re small, but lots of small stuff sucks. Wasps, or certain dog breeds, for example. The Toyota Yaris. Being useless and weak doesn’t make them cool, it just means I’m going to 3D-print a 6mm locker and shove these nerds into it.
Adeptus Titanicus is supposed to be about big stupid robots doing what they do best: endlessly careen into scenery and attempt to blast each other into ragged chunks. I guess the tiny knights can still do that, but they don’t belong there. Put them in Warhammer. They’re too dang small! The game is called Adeptus Titanicus, not Adeptus Dreadnoughticus, and these little squishy bugs are barely bigger than a Redemptor. They belong in the insect hut at the local zoo, so the real titans can tap on the glass and scare them, which is all they’re good for. Unless there’s a rule that a real big model can smoosh one flat and then wipe their power claw off I don’t want to hear another word about Armigers.
They don’t even have a bunch of dumb crap to keep track of during the game! Normally, ok, that would be cool, I don’t usually want to consult gunnery charts and movement ranges, because I’m not deranged, but I admit that that’s what Titanicus is for, and if you aren’t going to play by the same rules I think you should get off the ride and go back to the miniscule planet you came from. Liliputian machine. Scrappy Doo-ass child. Go away!
You want Options? Well the Armigers have Options. For example you could use Armiger A, with gun arms, or Armiger B, with a chainsaw arm, and another more different gun. Except actually that isn’t a choice, you only get enough arms in the box to do half of each and the loadouts are locked-in. No, you can’t have the small gun and the chainsaw. Fortunately, no one cares. These come on approximately 10mm bases and will easily be lost in the shuffle around other, cooler (bigger), robots. If anyone looks at them at all it’ll be because they think it’s part of your basing material that fell off, and they’ll sweep them off into the nearest tiny garbage bag where they belong. What would be a lot cooler would be if you took a Warmaster Iconoclast and used the Armigers as tracking pips for your ludicrous A3-sized command terminal, or maybe as paperweights to hold down all the cards for the weapons and subreactors. I’m just throwing ideas out here, struggling to find a reason to make an absurd purchase like a Titanicus-scale Armiger.
Titanicus, as I’ve slowly realized after getting outflanked and ripped apart by chainswords a number of times, is a game about movement. The giant himbo machines need time to set up their positioning, which includes the fact that they aren’t clever enough to turn more than like twice while running, and that it’s completely possible to wind up facing the wrong direction and have nothing to do but helplessly blast your humongous plasma cannons into the side of a non-combatant cliff face. It rules. An entire class of comically stunted goobers with no turning problems that can parkour all up and around and ping ineffectual autocannon rounds into void shields doesn’t fit with that vibe and it never will. Playing with Titans should feel like driving a boat, just hurling them into motion and watching them slosh around the table, barely under control. Armigers barely even lumber. I need more lumbering.
The reactor management and repair stuff is, bizarrely, my favorite part of Titanicus. Choosing whether to push your reactor into the red in order to fire off a few shots or line up a charge, or praying for the repair dice to be kind, is a big part of the game. My first time playing Condit, I chose very deeply to Find Out, and the end result was that I lost a thousand points of my own engines in the repair phase. A red-lining Warlord exploded and knocked over a Warhound, which fired its guns on the way down and hit a second Warlord, which also blew up. It sucked so bad to be that stupid, but also it was unbelievably cool. The Armiger reactor track is somewhat simpler. It has two settings: normal, and dead. Where is the fun in that? It’s not there. Nothing about that is fun. You want free movement and a bunch of meltaguns on your army with 40 models? Just play Warhammer 40,000.
The Armiger knights are cute but they can go directly to hell, for all I care. I do not respect them.
Thank you for reading. Actual Titanicus Princeps will return next week.
