Welcome back to Goonhammer’s series for aspiring Titan Principes. 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 taking a more in-depth look at the various Legios of the Collegia Titanica – exploring their origins and how to use them on the tabletop, from maniple selection and their loadouts, through to how to command them on the field of battle to secure ultimate victory.
This column’s usual authors took a week off to go vent some plasma (?) or whatever this strange game is about, so here’s Greg, introducing the Goonhammer Approved Adeptus Titanicus Maniple-ator.
I don’t know anything about Titanicus, despite having painted an entire battlegroup and played the game at least once. Condit cyberbullied me into it, which was honestly an easy sell due to the cultural zeitgeist and Big Relatable Mood of “warhammer retail therapy” and “there is nothing else happening in the world right now”. I trawled second-hand sales until I was able to build out a maniple of my very own, hit the table with it, and promptly exploded myself so hard that everything died. Anyone reading this site can probably relate, due to our shared experience of fearing death too much to go outside and also being very into small, indoor, robots.
Aside from the Legio choice, which was simple for me because I easily and smartly chose the one that looks cool and makes itself catch fire while hucking extra Belicosa shots across the table, my biggest hurdle to getting owned in this game was figuring out what kind of Maniple to run with the Titans I had. Tools exist for this, but the actual rules for list construction are spread across five or six different books that I don’t own all of. To that end, and to remind myself what JavaScript feels like, I created the Titan Maniple-ator, which is current as of Defense of Ryza, and will be updated if GW ever stops making idiotic new fortifications and dice, and gifts us more Titanicus content.
It works like this: add and remove Titans at the top to match either your collection or your planned shopping binge, and the Maniples below will color-code based on what your options are for open-palm slamming those bad boys into a list. Green and Yellow are the good colors, since those are either a perfect match or leave you with extra support Titans, and red means you somehow haven’t bought enough models, you absolute degenerate. Note: I didn’t include Knights because I hate them, and I didn’t include the Legio-specific abilities to swap around Titan classes because it’s too hard to code.
If you were wondering, the models required to fill all the compulsory slots and have your choice of any Maniple in the game are: 3 each of Warhounds/Reavers/Warlords, and 2 Warbringers. Congratulations are due to the Extergimus here, as it single-handedly ups the cost to achieve omni-maniple annihilation by an extra hundred bucks. Throwing points to the wind and committing to an unplayable and unescapable morass of a game, you’d need 5 Warhounds, 4 Reavers, 2 Warbringers, and 4 Warlords in order to fill out all the optional slots and be able run any possible maniple at maximum size. If you somehow have even more Titans than that, I don’t even know what to say, you screwed up bad and should stop buying Titans because it’s getting out of hand. You have a problem, and we’re worried about you. Is everything ok? I’m kidding, of course. It’s not ok, because nothing is.
Here’s a test case for the Maniple-ator. Suppose you took Condit and Soggy’s advice, and picked up the starter set. What can you use them for? Well, a few things:
- Venator Light Maniple (Core Rules)
- Janissary Battleline Maniple (Titandeath)
- Ferrox Light Maniple (Doom of Molech)
- Firmus Light Maniple (Defense of Ryza)
The Venator requires using your second Reaver as a support titan, if at all, but the rest of them will allow you to build a pretty decent 1250-ish point list, and use every model in the box. Including some Knights, because you’ll have them, but again I don’t respect the lowly Imperial Knight, so you can get out of here right now with that weak Grandis scale trash.
Condit: Technically, the Warhound Scout Titan is also Grandis-scale, but we’ll forgive Greg his transgressions this once because watching fully two-thirds of his list detonate in his own damage control phase reached new heights of entertainment. Anyway, I’ve still got a few Reaver chainfists to do maintenance on before I’m back to my regularly scheduled “standing 8 inches away from Zach’s Titans while gazing mournfully both at them and the 1 I just rolled to issue that Charge order.”
Or maybe you bought the Grandmaster Edition when it was released, and it’s been mouldering in your Hams Cabinet Of Shame ever since. It waited patiently, until one chilly fall evening a mysterious stranger approached you on a website and told you to play titanicus. Here, the stranger said, are all the maniples you can make with that box:
- literally none of them
But, you later learned, that website burned down ten years ago this very night!
If you have both starters, even if you have nothing else, you suddenly have a wealth of options available, but I’ll leave figuring that out as an exercise to the reader. The Adeptus Titanicus Maniple-ator is here, and your normal crew of authors will be back next week, probably, with a better and more useful article. I’ve also typed the word “maniple” so many times that it’s lost all meaning to me, so I think it’s time to call it quits and skulk back into my Posting Cave.
In conclusion, play titanicus.
