Building, research and upgrades

Everything you ever acquire in Battle For Titan arrives through a queue. Buildings, defenses, troops, vehicles, aircraft, research levels and upgrades all travel the same machinery: you place an order, the cost is taken immediately, a timer runs, and the result is delivered. This chapter is about that machinery — what it charges, how long it takes, and what it checks before it accepts an order at all.

As in the previous chapter, some values below are round settings — the round administrator can change them per round. They are given here as the current round's values and are worth re-checking against what your own screens show. Anything stated as a formula or a rule is fixed for everyone.

The three lanes

There are three queue lanes, and they run independently and simultaneously. A building under construction does not hold up your troop production, and neither holds up research.

Lane	Carries	Scope
Construction	Buildings and defenses	Per base
Units	Infantry, vehicles, aircraft	Per base
Research	Research levels, upgrades, tier projects	Your whole account

Each lane holds 5 items at once in the current round. That is five in total, not five waiting behind a running one — the item currently building occupies one of the five.

Construction and Units are per base. Every base you own has its own pair of them, running at the same time as every other base's. Ten bases means ten Construction lanes.

Research is account-wide. There is one research lane for you, no matter how many bases you hold, and it is shared by three different kinds of work: research levels, upgrades and tier projects. Only one of those three can be progressing at a time in each slot, so an upgrade and a research level do compete with each other in a way that a building and a tank never do.

One order can be for many units. Queueing 20 Soldiers takes one slot, not twenty, and the units are delivered as they finish rather than all at the end — the count in your base climbs while the order is still running.

Every factory runs its own line

Within the Units lane, every copy of a producing building runs its own independent production line — not just every different kind of building. A tank order at the War Factory and a Soldier order at the Barracks always ran at the same time; now a second tank order does too, as long as you have a second War Factory to run it on. Three War Factories are three lines: order nine tanks with all three idle and they split three-to-a-line and build together, so more factories genuinely means faster delivery.

The split happens once, at the moment you queue, across whichever lines are idle right then. If every line for that building is already busy, the whole order simply queues behind whichever one frees up soonest, as a single order — it never carves itself up over busy lines later, and a line that frees up afterwards does not steal units back off one already running.

What the game will not do on its own, you can do by hand. A batch spread over several lines is labelled on the Production page as the one order it is, and carries two controls: Merge on any single line hands that line back and lets the rest of the order carry on without it, and Merge all folds the whole batch onto one line at once. Use them when you would rather have a free factory than the fastest possible delivery.

Merging costs you nothing. Units already built stay built, and the work put into the one still on the bench travels across with the rest — so the order is delivered in full, it simply takes longer now that fewer lines are working on it. Pooling those part-finished units can even push one over the line and deliver it immediately. Nothing is refunded, because nothing is cancelled: to actually call an order off and take the resources back, you still want Cancel.

However many lines an order gets spread across, it still counts as one order against the lane's five-slot cap — the cap counts orders, not the rows they split into. Losing a factory, to demolition or a raid, does not touch a line that was already running on it: that line drains to completion on its own, it just has nothing new queued to follow it.

The Production page lays all of this out directly: every facility on your base as its own card, what each of its lines is currently building, and how much of its capacity is sitting idle right now — the fastest way to see whether one more factory is actually worth building. Under whatever a card's lines are actively working on, it also lists what's waiting behind them — each order with its own picture, count, and the time it will genuinely be ready once everything ahead of it is accounted for — and any one of those waiting orders can be cancelled on its own, without touching what's already running.

A unit's producing building is the building prerequisite it needs most of. The Construction and Research lanes have no equivalent — they are single files, one item at a time.

What an order costs

Almost everything costs both currencies, and both are taken in full the moment you queue it, not on completion. Queueing is the transaction; the timer is just delivery.

• Titanite comes out of the base you are looking at when you place the order.
• ISC comes out of your account-wide balance.

That is true even for research and upgrades, which are otherwise account-wide: the ISC is yours, but the Titanite is charged to whichever base you happened to be viewing. If that order is later cancelled, the refund goes back to the same base.

Costs do not inflate. A building or unit has one flat price that never changes with how many you already own — the tenth Power Plant costs exactly what the first one did, and an order for five units costs five times one. Nothing in the Construction or Units lanes gets more expensive as you scale up. Research is the exception, and it scales steeply; see below.

How long an order takes

Each building, unit, research level and upgrade carries a base duration. The timer you actually get is that duration adjusted by up to three things:

time = base duration ÷ (round speed × producer condition) × (1 + build-time modifiers)

Round speed is a round setting, currently 1.0 — the normal rate. It divides every duration in the game, so a faster round shortens everything at once.

Producer condition is the health of the building doing the work, and it is the one most players miss. Buildings damaged in combat keep working at reduced effectiveness — 100%, 75%, 50% or 25% — and that percentage divides directly into the speed of everything they produce:

• In the Construction lane, the Construction Yard's condition governs everything. A Construction Yard at 50% doubles the build time of every building and defense at that base.
• In the Units lane, each order is governed by its own producing building. A Barracks at 25% quadruples infantry training time while the War Factory next door, undamaged, builds at full speed.
• Research is governed by the condition of whichever building that research line requires — a damaged Observatory slows Scanning and Espionage.

Repairing is the only way back up. Combat never destroys a building outright, so a wrecked producer is always recoverable — but until it is repaired it is taxing everything it makes.

Build-time modifiers come from your commander skills and your House:

• Construction Foreman (Logistics) cuts building time by 5% per level, to 10% at level 2.
• Drill Sergeant (Logistics) cuts infantry training time by 4% per level, to 12% at level 3.
• Some Houses carry an infantry training penalty — Hybris pays 10% longer on infantry.
• Research Directorate speeds up research.

Vehicles and aircraft have no equivalent modifier: their timers come from the base duration, round speed and factory condition alone.

All of this is locked in when you queue. The timer is calculated once, at the moment the order is accepted, and never recalculated. Repairing your Construction Yard does not speed up the building already under way — but it does speed up the next one. When a producer is badly damaged and you have a choice, repair before you queue, not after.

What the game checks before it accepts an order

An order passes through a fixed sequence of gates. Knowing the order helps, because the game reports the first thing that blocks you — so "not enough resources" genuinely means everything else was already satisfied.

1. The round is open. During a rebalance window new orders are refused. Anything already running is untouched.
2. The item is unlocked. Some objects cannot be built until an upgrade unlocks them.
3. Your tier is high enough.
4. Prerequisites are met. You must already own the required buildings — something sitting in your queue does not count yet. For buildings and units these are counted at that base: a War Factory at your main base does nothing for a prerequisite check at a secondary one. Research and upgrade prerequisites are counted across all your bases together.
5. Caps are respected — the item's own maximum, the refinery cap, harvester slots, and build space.
6. You can afford it.
7. The lane has a free slot.

The Build page shows all of this before you click: unmet prerequisites, what an item is locked behind, which currency you are short of, and how many you could afford right now.

Build space

A base sits on a rock patch of fixed size, and every building and defense occupies a number of tiles. The total of everything you own plus everything queued cannot exceed the patch's capacity, and the Build page shows how much you have used.

Concrete and other foundation layers are the exception: they cost resources and time but occupy no build space at all. Units never consume it.

Build space is the real long-term constraint on a base. Resources recover; tiles do not.

The refinery and harvester caps

Two caps deserve naming because they stop orders outright rather than merely slowing you down.

• A base may hold at most 5 Refineries in the current round.
• Each Refinery supports 1 Harvester, and the game refuses to queue a Harvester once you have no free slot — owned and queued Harvesters both count against it.

Refinery Logistics research is what raises the second number: +1 slot per Refinery per level, to 3 Harvesters per Refinery at level 2. Until you have it, five Refineries means five Harvesters and no more, whatever your income might otherwise support.

Power is not a gate

Nothing in the queue checks your power balance. You can always build a structure that pushes you power-negative. The consequence lands on your Titanite income instead — below 25% power your harvesting is halved — and that is covered in the economy chapter. The Build page previews what your queued buildings will do to your power balance so the surprise is avoidable, but it will never stop you.

Research

Research is organised into 10 lines of 45 levels in total. A line is a ladder: you take its levels in order, one after another, and each level is more expensive and slower than the one before it.

cost of level N = base cost × 1.6^(N-1)
time of level N = base time × 1.5^(N-1)

Colonization is deliberately steeper, at 4× per level rather than 1.6.

You cannot skip a level, but you can queue consecutive levels of the same line back to back and let them run through.

The current lines:

Line	Levels	What it does
Harvesting Efficiency	5	+10% harvester yield per level
Titanite Compression	5	+20% storage capacity per level
Refinery Logistics	2	+1 Harvester slot per Refinery per level
Vault Expansion	5	+25% safe capacity per level
Espionage	5	Sharpens spy report accuracy; basic spying itself needs none of it. Entered via a tier-1 expedition
Scanning	5	+2 minutes of attack warning per level
Long-Range Optics	5	+2 tiles of live viewing radius per level
Counter-Intelligence	5	Detects enemy spies; only a maxed line names the attacker
Allied Quarters	5	Capacity to host allied garrisons
Colonization	3	Unlocks the MCV and raises your base limit — 2, 3, then 4 bases

A line's effect is its current level, not the sum of its levels. Harvesting Efficiency at level 3 gives +30% — that is the whole bonus, not 10% added three times. Different lines do add together, and they add with your commander skills before being applied, so Harvesting Efficiency and a harvest commander skill combine into one bonus rather than multiplying each other.

Research is account-wide in every sense: a level you complete applies to every base you own, at once.

Two research effects act as gates rather than bonuses, and are worth knowing early. Colonization level 1 is what makes the MCV buildable at all — the MCV needs both that research and its ordinary building prerequisites before it can be queued, and it is the only object in the game gated that way. And Refinery Logistics is the hard cap on Harvesters described above.

Upgrades

An upgrade is a one-shot purchase attached to a building or unit type. You either own it or you do not; there are no levels. There are 49 of them, and they do one of two things — sometimes both:

• Unlock. A new object becomes buildable. The Engineer, the ATV and the Rocket Tank all arrive this way.
• Replace. Every one of the host type you own is converted into a better successor, one for one, and the old type is permanently retired from your Build page.

Replacement is total. The conversion reaches your stock at every base, the placements on your base map, and any order still in the queue — a batch of Trikes half-built when the upgrade lands finishes as Fast Trikes. There is nothing left behind to clean up, and no way back: once replaced, the predecessor is gone from your catalog for good.

An upgrade never costs you what the old type was good for. A successor still counts as the thing it replaced everywhere that matters — prerequisites that named the old building, the slot and cap rules it was subject to, and the jobs it did. Upgrading a building you rely on for something else does not quietly lock that something else away, so a strict improvement stays a strict improvement.

To buy an upgrade you need the right tier and enough of the host object — some require two of it. There is no research prerequisite on any upgrade; tier and host ownership are the entire gate.

Upgrade timers are the simplest in the game: base duration divided by round speed, and nothing else. Building damage does not slow an upgrade, and no commander skill speeds one up. It is the one queued item whose timer you cannot influence.

Upgrades and research do different jobs

They are easy to confuse and they do not overlap. Research and commander skills scale numbers; upgrades change which object you own. A research level makes your harvesters yield more. An upgrade turns your Trikes into Fast Trikes — a different catalog entry with its own stats, which your research bonuses then apply to exactly as they did before. Neither stacks with the other, because they never touch the same quantity.

Cancelling

Cancelling refunds 70% of what is still outstanding, in both currencies.

The word doing the work there is outstanding. You are refunded for what you have not received:

• Anything already delivered stays delivered and is not refunded. Cancel an order for 5 Soldiers after 2 have been built and you keep those 2 and get 70% of the remaining 3 back.
• The unit currently in progress counts as undelivered. Its progress is lost and it refunds at 70% like any other.
• Anything that finishes in the moment between your click and the server processing it is credited in full first, and only then is the remainder refunded.
• Position in the queue makes no difference to the rate. An order that has not started and one half-finished refund at the same 70%.

Research and upgrades are all-or-nothing, so cancelling one always refunds 70% of its whole price.

Two details worth knowing. A Titanite refund is trimmed to fit your storage — anything that would take the base over its cap is simply not paid, so cancelling into a full base loses more than 30%. And the refund returns to where the cost came from: Titanite to the base originally charged, ISC to your account.

The game shows you the exact refund before you confirm. That number is calculated by the server, not estimated in your browser, so it is what you will actually receive.

When things actually finish

Timers in Battle For Titan are real. An order finishes exactly when its countdown says, whether or not you are logged in, and whether or not anyone is looking.

What happens behind that is worth understanding, because it explains a small oddity. The game works out what you are owed when it is asked — when you load a page — and a background pass runs every minute for everyone who has not asked. So a building that completed while you were asleep was credited by the minute tick; one that completes while you are staring at the page is credited on your next page load. Either way you are never owed anything you do not receive, and time is never lost between one queued item and the next: the moment one finishes is the moment the next one starts, down to the second.