Epic: Let's Build some Adeptus Titanicus terrain

The Panau Tourist Office has denied reports that massacres, chaos and factional fighting have affected the tourism industry this year. Tourist deaths this month reached 750, but ministers played down the figures, saying that the sinking of the cruiseliner "Happy Days" distorted the figures. An average mortality rate of 50 tourists a month is quite acceptable in this day and age, our glorious leader confirmed.

 - Radio Panau

One of the things that made me get into Adeptus Titanicus was the idea of building Epic-scale terrain. I admit that this may seem backwards to some people, but I really like building terrain. I was very disappointed when my 15mm collecting plans fell through, mostly because I was looking forward to building a miniature service station!

Now that I have Titanicus, though, I have a great excuse to build some even tinier terrain pieces. I thoroughly enjoyed my first ever game: the Battle of Bitter Tower was fought over improvised terrain, and as it turned out, all of the terrain we deployed ended up being tactically or symbolically significant. Below, in the foreground you can see Del Monte Tower, which my Princeps Seniores spent several turns hiding behind.

I feel like a good starting point would be to make a proper version of Del Monte Tower; namely, a honking big fuel silo. Earlier, I invested in this lovely little Titanicus terrain kit:

It has all kinds of super adorable little bits and bobs, and I've added a selection of the fuel pipes to a cocoa tin to make what I maintain looks very much like a big as heck fuel tank. My flatmate cut me a circle of sturdy cardboard to serve as a base.

Here's the pipe, and because it's physically impossible to extract the correct amount of green stuff for anything, an entirely superfluous crater.

Then it's just a simple matter of covering the cardboard base with PVA glue and Noch Z-scale ballast.

And we're ready to do some spray-painting.

Then it's a simple matter of painting the whole thing in Vallejo Light Gray, with some select bits in Gunmetal, and applying the Panau Oil colors of red and white. I've played too much Just Cause 2 to be able to paint a giant fuel silo any other way.

Then it's time to paint the base in Iraqi Sand and we're done!

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Now that I'm building fuel infrastructure and I've been playing around with the Manufactorum Imperialis kit, the next thing I'm making is definitely a tank farm. I remember bombing them in Microprose's F-117A Stealth Fighter when I was very young, and I can't really think of many things more Panau than huge, explosive fuel tanks.

I tried to place the tanks so that Knights could move around them, but Titans would find it difficult. They're glued onto a piece of MDF board.

I then covered the whole thing in Noch ballast, which I'm really starting to like.

After a whole bunch of Iraqi Sand paint, we have ourselves a terrain piece.

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The thing with the Manufactorum Imperialis kit is, though, that while it contains lots of cute little things, most of the terrain you can make out of it is just too tiny for Titanicus purposes. So I'm setting it aside for the moment; I do have some ideas for what to do with the rest of it. So now we're going to do some proper scratchbuilding.

Since I had earlier decided to go with Vallejo Iraqi Sand as my base color, and I've now embarked on this Panau terrain project, I think it's time to draw the appropriate conclusions and say that our battles are taking place on the Imperial desert world of Lautan Lama.

One of the most succesful pieces of improvised terrain we used in our first game was my copy of the Black Book of Communism, i.e. Communism Peak.

I feel like the most appropriate way to translate this into a Panauan desert would be to make a mesa about the same size. Also, Sunny Mesa is my favorite landmark in Alpha Centauri. I'm calling it Dataran Tinggi Komunis. As luck would have it, we had a long piece of Ikea cardboard lying around that was almost the exact width of my Black Book.

Three layers of it made a stack almost exacly the height of the book: in other words, the perfect base structure for Dataran Tinggi Komunis.

I need the edges to sort of flare out from the top of the plateau, so I'm mounting this whole thing on a base cut out of 2mm thick cardboard.

I tried making one of the short edges out of Milliput, and while I think I may have applied it unnecessarily thickly, I think it worked out all right.

That exhausted my previous supply of Milliput, and the only kind my hobby store had was terracotta, so that was what I made the other three sides out of. It's superior to regular Milliput in that it doesn't look like marzipan, so you don't have to resist the temptation to eat it.

While I was working on Communism Plateau, I also made some destroyed Titan markers. I stuck one of the extra Warhound carapaces and half a head on a properly sized base, and made a crater on another one out of Milliput.

I'm quite pleased with the end result!

Once the edges of Dataran Tinggi Komunis were filled in, it was a fairly simple matter of plugging any remaining gaps with filler and gluing ballast to the top and the base.

I used the leftover Milliput to make a Reaver-sized crater.

After spraypainting, the plateau looked more or less like a fucked up cream cake.

I then applied some Vallejo Snow texture to the sides with an old, coarse paintbrush, with up and down strokes to create a pattern and hide the cracks between the bits of Milliput. I'm really happy with the result!

I painted the vertical bits Tan Earth and the flat surfaces Iraqi Sand, and gave some of the more textured bits of the walls a drybrush of the same.

I'm very happy!

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Finally, to store my Titanicus paraphrenalia neatly and securely, I of course turned to Feldherr.

I simply love their raster foam; it's perfect for holding Titan weapons and even the little plastic doodads for the command terminals. I now have a Feldherr Minus bag that keeps all my extra weapons safe, and there's still plenty of room for more.

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So, here we are: I've built some proper terrain to replace the books and cans and whatnot we used the first time around. I can't wait to see it in action!

Let's Read Tolkien 88: Vae Victis 15-16

The Nazgúl!

No, we still can't have more than one kind of diacritic. The person Haladdin finds sitting by the fire is, indeed, a Nazgûl. He introduces himself as Sharya-Rana, a famous mathematician and theologian from ages past, who is now a ring-wraith. Of course, on this Middle-earth, that means something entirely different: these "Nazgúl" are protectors of the scientific civilization of Mordor. This Nazgûl interrogates Haladdin about some of the choices he's made, during the war and before it, and tells him that he's the perfect person for their plans because he's so completely irrational that the enemy won't be able to predict his actions.

That's chapter 15; chapter 16 is a huge infodump on how magic works in Middle-earth, and frankly, it's boring. The gist of it is that there are two parallel universes, a magical one and a mundane one. The two worlds are connected, and anyone from Middle-earth who's been to the magic world is a wizard. The Nazgúl are one bunch of wizards and the White Council another. The Mirror (as in of Galadriel) connects the two worlds. The elves are trying to turn Middle-earth into another magical world, where nothing ever changes. This is why they had to destroy the scientific civilization of Mordor. The White wizards have given the Mirror to the elves, so now Haladdin has to save Middle-earth by destroying the Mirror.

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So the central idea here is that Haladdin is the right guy for the job because he's so impossibly irrational. I'm now going to complain, because this annoys me. The idea that someone being so irrational and unpredictable is a strength is an ancient trope, and it's almost always a really stupid one.

It's used succesfully several times in the original Star Trek - mostly on machines, where the specific premise is that they can't handle human irrationality, or on half-Vulcan chess players who one suspects are more invested in demonstrating their superior logic than actually being good at the game. The most satisfying chess experience of my life was against an engineering student who insisted that their superior grasp of mathematics and logic meant they must be much better than me at chess. They walked into a variant of the fool's mate because they didn't actually know how to play chess.

When it comes to more complicated human endeavours, the idea that sheer unpredictability is an asset becomes a whole lot more difficult. As a strategy, it isn't great. So-called madman theory has been tried and the results aren't exactly overwhelming. Even in poker, the idea that it's good to be unpredictable has certain limits. Yes, you want to play poker in a way where your opponents find you difficult to read. If you play 100% consistently, you'll never win any money because no-one will ever bet against you. But if you constantly play irrationally, you'll inevitably lose money in the long run because you're playing against the odds. The rational approach to something like poker or indeed strategy is to use your resources in the way that gets you the best return on your investment. It's worth investing some resources in confusing your opponent occasionally by doing some irrational things, but too much will bankrupt the whole operation. If sheer unpredictability was a virtue, armies would have officers rolling dice and reading tea leaves as standard procedure. Most of the time, going about a task irrationally and unpredictably is just going to mean doing it badly.

As a military strategy, it reminds one of the adage apparently contained in the Mordor field manual: never do what the enemy expects. This is trite at the best of times, and at worst turns into an endless spiral of second-guessing: what if the enemy expects you to do what they don't expect? This was put forward as a strategy by British self-appointed great military thinker B.H. Liddell Hart as "the strategy of indirect approach", which has been criticized on exactly the same grounds: if you always take the indirect way, it then becomes the direct way. An example of Liddell Hart's indirect approach is the allied Mediterranean offensive in the Second World War, which was a gigantic waste of time, resources and lives to strike at the "soft underbelly" of the Axis, and ended up achieving pretty much nothing in terms of the actual war against Germany. And this, in the end, is the main point: it's never enough to be unpredictable. You also have to be able to do something effective that your enemy can't easily counter.

The other problem with this scenario is that none of the "totally irrational" things Haladdin does are really particularly irrational at all. He makes wartime decisions that are less than totally cold-blooded; he joins the military during a war due to peer pressure and to impress his fiance. If this is hopelessly irrational, I don't know whose behavior the "Nazgúl" model of rationality can expect to predict.

If you want a fictional example of doing something that the enemy would think is so insane it never even occurs to them someone would try it, and that they therefore don't take effective action to stop, what comes to mind is sending a hobbit to throw the enemy's ring of power into a volcano. So I don't know, this feels the same as the author's very clever socio-economic reimagining of the War of the Ring that actually makes no sense whatsoever: it's like he's trying so hard to be very clever and subvert Tolkien's story, and he ends up with basically the same thing but worse.

However! The plot is advancing, and for that we are grateful.

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Next time: more wraith-exposition.