Titan Start to Finish

[Arf]

The mechanics of Titan are pretty simple, the team that controls the most silos gets the first shot at the enemy core. The trick is that, unlike Conquest, holding more silos has no immediate benefit. You have to earn it by holding a silo for 2 minutes and failed attacks and defences are punished.

Titan mode is kind of like a game of tag pulling squads back and forth between offence and defence. Your squad starts on offence since the round begins with all silos neutral. When you move into a neutral silo it fires off a missile putting you up one shot over your enemy. Now your squad is on defence holding the silo. If the other team captures thar silo within 2 minutes they'll fire off their own missile and negate all your hard work. You end with one shot fired at both Titans. If you can hold that silo for 2 minutes it will fire again. Now if the enemy manages to capture your silo you'll still be up one missile. If you loose it after that then it's your turn to take the silo back before they fire off 2 missiles and start gaining their own advantage. Simple, yes?

The point to this mechanic is that you can control most of the silos most of the time and still loose your shields first. This tends to come as a shock to Conquest players who are used to bleeding their enemy to death. Playing a game of whack-a-silo without holding any silos is going to bring your shields down as quickly as your foes. For clarification if you control only one silo the entire round and the enemy controls the rest as long as you keep them from holding one for more then 2 minutes you'll completely negate their advantage and come out with a slight advantage of your own.

More to come but that's the fundementals.

[BHack]

Yes. This is one of the reasons why I don't really like Titan mode. If you tweaked the missle to fire every 2 minutes only and not upon ownership switch the game mode would make more sense to me.

[Arf]

Originally Posted by BHack

Yes. This is one of the reasons why I don't really like Titan mode. If you tweaked the missle to fire every 2 minutes only and not upon ownership switch the game mode would make more sense to me.

I thought the same thing when I first played Titan mode.

The thing is that you would loose a lot of the depth. The game would just be played like BF:2 was before you had to get out of the Blackhawk to capture a flag. Dropships would fly over and drop squads on silos capturing them right before they fired and steal the missile. Or players would rush from FAVs, Gunships, the Titan etc.

[Arf]

What I like about silos is that they're more flexible then flags. Flags are all about numbers and location while silos are about timing. On Conquest you can tell who's winning by the number of flags they hold. On Titan it's a little more abstract. On the map every silo has a counter that tells you when it's next launch is. You can tell who's winning by checking these timers every once in a while. The team with the consistently fullest timers is winning. Silos that consistently have emptier timers are just rapidly changing hands and aren't providing either team with an advantage.

The key to playing Titan is all about the timing. On Conquest the critical flags never change but on Titan it's always shifting to the silo closest to firing. So protect your Silos that are about to fire and concentrate on capturing the enemy's. The other half of the timing is silos that are held fire slower (only once every 2 minutes). If you can't hold a few silos then attack and abandon silos. The faster they change hands the faster they fire. If every other silo is firing 2-3 times faster then the silos the enemy team holds they'll still win by missiles. The advantage you'll get is there wont be as much time between your shields going down and their shields going down. Then it goes to a fight for the core rooms.

Don't interperet that as saying it's going to become a game of whack-a-mole. It's not if you think ahead. Capturing a silo isn't always going to help your team. Time it and take the most valuable ones.

[=Sarc=]

Originally Posted by Arf

For clarification if you control only one silo the entire round and the enemy controls the rest as long as you keep them from holding one for more then 2 minutes you'll completely negate their advantage and come out with a slight advantage of your own

Just to clarify, stopping the enemy from holding a silo more than 2 minutes means turning the silo to your side. If it turns to your side, it fires a missile and negates the missile fired when the enemy turns it back.

I do like the depth that Titan brings to Battlefield. Conquest has long become old for me. Most of the time, you don't have to hold the majority of the flags because ticket bleed only activates when a team holds all the flags (eg. Camp Gibraltar). My only goal in Conquest is to not die because that means losing a ticket. Basically, it's die less than the other team. In Titan, I can be a little more free and focus on the objectives (capping/holding silos and titan boarding).

[jepzilla]

You're right about it being more abstract, Arf. To summarize, a Silo fires immediately after capture, and every two minutes after that. And I don't think many people actually understand the implications of this, from a strategic perspective. I've even heard from seasoned, strategic-minded TG players that it encourages silo-hopping to win. This is incorrect.

To put it simply, you cannot judge which team is winning the ground battle based on the number of silos that it holds at an instant in time. A team that holds three silos an entire round can have its Titan shield drop, and have its Titan destroyed, before a team that holds two silos. Let's say the EU team holds silo 1, and defends it through the entire round. The other four silos are constantly changing teams, although usually PAC holds three of the four. Well, Silo 1 is consistently firing a missile at the PAC titan once every two minutes. The other missiles are consistently firing a stream of missiles at both Titans at an equal rate, because the EU team doesn't let the PAC team hold a silo for more than two minutes. So even though PAC holds three silos almost the entire game, EU will destroy the PAC titan first (assuming neither core is breached in a Titan assault).

It's more important to hold silos to the two minute mark than to hold the majority of the silos.

[Arf]

The second big change from Conquest is that on Titan APCs, Dropships, and Titans all act as mobile spawn points. Any of these can be used as a spring board for the entire team to attack so pay special attention to all of them.

The strategic difference is that as long as you can keep a steady stream of transports to a location you can apply continual pressure on any silo. It's in the best interest of the team to manage these assets carefully. Keeping them occupied prevents them from being captured and keeps your team from being immobilized and getting pinned into a single silo.

To manage all that chaos you have the Titan. While it moves slowly and takes time to reach the front once there it becomes the center of your forces. The Titan is the mega transport. It'll give you a huge tactical boost allowing you to deploy squads anywhere it's pods reach which is a radius that can cover 3 flags and you can use the guns to destroy incomming enemy transports, blast enemy beacons, and bombard contested silos. As an added bonus it will carry your aircraft right to the front.

[jepzilla]

Originally Posted by Arf

The second big change from Conquest is that on Titan APCs, Dropships, and Titans all act as mobile spawn points. Any of these can be used as a spring board for the entire team to attack so pay special attention to all of them.

The strategic difference is that as long as you can keep a steady stream of transports to a location you can apply continual pressure on any silo. It's in the best interest of the team to manage these assets carefully. Keeping them occupied prevents them from being captured and keeps your team from being immobilized and getting pinned into a single silo.

To manage all that chaos you have the Titan. While it moves slowly and takes time to reach the front once there it becomes the center of your forces. The Titan is the mega transport. It'll give you a huge tactical boost allowing you to deploy squads anywhere it's pods reach which is a radius that can cover 3 flags and you can use the guns to destroy incomming enemy transports, blast enemy beacons, and bombard contested silos. As an added bonus it will carry your aircraft right to the front.

And, of course, the downside is that taking your Titan to the front makes it much more vulnerable to assault once its shields are down.

[Arf]

Originally Posted by jepzilla

And, of course, the downside is that taking your Titan to the front makes it much more vulnerable to assault once its shields are down.

Yea, there's just too much to cover in a few posts so I'm going to keep adding things until this thread becomes relatively comprehensive. I figure eventualy if we start talking about what works and doesn't we'll get some tried and true tactics that will bring the level of game play on par with the Conquest server.

[MDawg77]

After playing most of my time on the Titan maps, it is abundantly clear to me that the more organized your team is, and the team that follows the commanders orders the closest will win the match. My strategy would be to hold 3 of the 5 silos for the entire round. I would place 1 squad at each silo to defend. In addition to the 3 defense squads, I would have one squad selected to be a rapid response team. The job of this squad would be to quickly fly to silos that need additional back up, and to quickly move in to deactivate enemy silos nearing their firing point.