| Purestrain |
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Joined: Thu Feb 13, 2003 10:52 pm
Posts: 9617
Location: Nashville, TN, USA
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Titans and gargants are NOT a battleship/weapons platform in the EA rules.  It would be much more accurate to compare them to a walking fortification. They share the following traits:
1) Fortifcations tend to be hard to suppress.
2) Fortifications can take a lot of punishment, i.e. they concentrate on defense over firepower.
3) Fortifications surrender operational initiative.
Suppression. WEs are only suppressed when their DC is matched, but that also breaks them. Titans, being Immune to Panic, can continue to fire even when broken. So, they have to be destroyed to really take them out of the game.
Defense. A Warlord titan has 6 shields and DC8. That means, assuming that no shields are regenerated, it's going to take 6 hits to down the shields, and about 24 more to give it a good chance of being taken out. That drops to about 12 with MW attacks, and even a d3 titan-killer is going to require 3-4 hits after the shield is gone to reasonably expect to kill it.
That's going to be very difficult to pull off, especially without shields regenerating.
That leaves assaulting to kill a titan. Again, they are tough to kill. Many assaults do as much damage on the resolution as they do from direct FF or CC hits. Titans are Immune to Panic, so they do not take additional hits if they lose an assault, nor do they have to retreat more than the ZoC (usually 5cm). Every point of damage has to be done by direct attack and beat the reinforced armor, plus shields for those units in FF range.
With respect to firepower, titans have considerably less than an equivalent points value in troops and vehicles. 850 points of Orks, for instance, can easily match the number of TK weapons a titan can carry, plus quite a bit more.
Operational Initiative. This is the biggest drawback to titans. imho. They concentrate a lot of points in a small area and aren't terribly maneuverable. This means that your opponent is going to get to pick where and when he fights most times. That's what you get for sitting in your "castle" while the opposing army besieges you.
Since they match the abilities of a mobile fortress, it seems logical that would be the best way to use them. Send them to take an objective (you get 3 turns to reach it), preferably one that also has a commanding field of fire over a second objective, and/or is close enough that the titan can contest both simultaneously. Luckily, you get to place 2 objectives in the GT scenario, so you can plan for this.
As always, try to maximize fields of fire while maintaining some cover from wide-open LoS. Titans are small for the points and have restricted fire arcs, so they can frequently find terrain that blocks LoS from the flanks (hindering them not at all), while still having good fields of fire. They are also walkers, so it's easy to move them into terrain to take advantage of the -1 to be hit.
My personal experience has been that titans and gargatns fielded in this manner do, in fact, control large segments of the battlefield.
Then the test is whether your forces have surrendered too much initiative and firepower to stop the enemy from "storming the castle." 
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Neal
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and it has a powerfist).
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