The battle for Beta-Garmon II involved the single deadliest Titan-on-Titan battle of the Horus Heresy, with hundreds of god-engines left as smoking wrecks on the outskirts of Nyrcon City. In The Great Slaughter, the first campaign supplement for Legions Imperialis, you’ll be able to fight these world-shaking battles yourself with brand new Titandeath rules.
Titandeath games are so lethal that only Legion Support formations consisting of Titans and Knight Households can take part.* Luckily, the normal restrictions on these formations are lifted, so you can fill your points limit with big, stompy god-engines and unleash incredible amounts of firepower against your Loyalist or Traitor foes.
This does mean that weapons with the Engine Killer rule, which are specifically designed to combat enemy Titans, are much more prominent in these games and lack their usual drawbacks. As such, a new rule increases the points cost of units with such weapons based on how destructive they are against the star players of this game mode.
A number of new rules also govern how Titans operate in these games, adding extra durability to their void shields while limiting how many targets they can shoot in one barrage. Crucially, their weapon attacks are resolved one-by-one rather than all at once, so you can choose to have a rapid-fire weapon bring down a target’s void shields before scoring an Engine Kill with a judicious volcano cannon blast.
Otherwise, you’re free to pick whatever you like from page 205 of the Legions Imperialis Rulebook. These powerful armies then duke it out in their own Titandeath missions, which have simplified objective layouts to account for the more unwieldy units in play.
Like regular games of Legions Imperialis, you also need to choose a Secondary Objective, and The Great Slaughter contains six designed to work directly with Titandeath armies. Mobile armies with loads of Knight Households and fast Titans can play to their strengths with Control the Battlefield, which rewards spreading your army out, while hard-hitting forces with powerful Battle Titans can pick Stand Tall and focus on knocking out their opponent’s largest units.
From there, you play out your game as normal, issuing Orders and activating Detachments. Here’s Thomas, one of the game designers, to explain a little more:
“A Titan Legion at war is a spectacle, a clash of god-engines that shakes worlds and obliterates lesser combatants. Legions Imperialis showcases the power of Titans alongside massed armies, while Adeptus Titanicus showcases the minutiae of Titan combat such as Princeps orders and reactor management.
“This complexity is great. But sometimes, you want to feel the full power of a demi-Legio or entire Legio at war, with dozens of Titans marching across the field of battle in glorious combat. This is where Titandeath comes in, a game mode named for the eponymous campaign at Beta-Garmon where, well, a lot of Titans died.
It’s faster to play than Adeptus Titanicus and features rules dedicated solely to Titan and Knight warfare, so it allows a game involving scores of Titans to be played out in a few hours, rather than a whole weekend. It’s brutal, fast-paced warfare between god-engines that allows even the most legendary of princeps to marshall their full collection on the tabletop.”
You can get your own Titandeath games going when The Great Slaughter goes up for pre-order this Saturday, and read all about the lore behind these apocalyptic battles in the meantime.
* Unfortunate lesser troops would evaporate in seconds!