Combat and armour

A battle in Battle For Titan is short, deterministic in its rules and violent in its arithmetic. It lasts at most a handful of rounds, nobody retreats, and the result is decided almost entirely by two things: how much attack power each side brings, and whether the weapons carrying that power can actually hurt what is standing in front of them. This chapter is about that second half, because it is the one that decides most fights and the one that is easiest to get wrong.

This chapter covers the battle itself — the moment a force arrives. Getting there (travel, recall, joint operations, interception) and finding out what is there in the first place (scouting, spying, fog) are the next two chapters.

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

When a battle happens

A battle happens when an attacking force arrives at a specific base. Not at a player — at a base. If a Commander holds four bases, an attack resolves against the one it was aimed at, and the other three take no part in it: their garrisons do not reinforce, their buildings are not damaged, and their Titanite is not at risk.

Only what is standing at the targeted base at the moment of arrival fights. Units in transit, units stationed elsewhere and units still in the production queue are not there and do not count.

The defending force

Everything defending a base fights as one force, from the first round to the last. Two sources feed it, and they are worth naming because they behave very differently under fire — but neither of them waits for the other.

Source	What is in it
The field army	Infantry, vehicles and aircraft that have an attack value
Defence structures	Walls, Cannon Turrets, Rocket Turrets

Three consequences are worth reading twice.

Turrets fire from the first round, and they are shot at from the first round. A base defended by a field army behind a wall of turrets fights with both at once. Defence structures are not a second line held in reserve; they are artillery support and armour plating that an attacker has to chew through at the same time as your troops. It also means they can be destroyed while your army is still standing.

The armour matrix does the rest, with no special rule. Every wall and turret is Structure armour, so Siege and Bomb weapons tear them apart while Bullet weapons barely scratch them. Walls carry no weapon at all but a great many hit points, so they absorb a share of everything aimed at the Structure class and buy the turrets beside them another round. That is what a rounded defence buys you: an attacker built to kill infantry now has to spend part of every round on things his weapons are bad against.

Unarmed units do not defend and do not die. Harvesters, MCVs, Carriers, Engineers, Thumpers, Quakers, Medics, Saboteurs — anything with no attack value — is not part of the defending force at all. It does not shoot, it does not soak damage, and it is not lost when the base falls. Walls are the exception in the other direction: a Wall has no weapon, but it is a Defence structure, so it stands in the force and soaks damage there.

Allied forces stationed at your base join that same force alongside your own troops. They never bring defence structures — the walls and turrets are always yours alone.

The rounds

Combat runs as a sequence of rounds, at most 6 of them (round setting). Each round:

1. Both sides' damage is worked out from the state at the start of the round.
2. Both sides' damage is applied. Casualties are therefore simultaneous — a unit that dies this round still fired this round.
3. If the attacker is wiped out, the battle ends. If nothing of the defending force is left standing, the battle ends in a breach.

There are exactly three outcomes:

• Attacker wins (breach) — every defender is dead, field army and defence structures alike, and the attacker still has units standing. Only a breach produces loot and building damage.
• Defender wins — the attacking force is wiped out entirely.
• Draw — the 6 rounds run out with both sides still alive. The attacker goes home with its losses and nothing else. A draw is a defensive win in everything but name: the defender keeps every Titanite, every building and every research level.

Note what that means for a marginal attack. There is no partial success. Grinding a defence down to its last turret over six rounds pays exactly the same as being annihilated in the first: nothing.

What decides damage

Each side's damage in a round starts from its raw power:

raw power = Σ (attack × rate of fire × number of units)

Both stats come off the unit itself and are shown on your Build and Attack screens. Rate of fire is treated as at least 0.1 for any armed unit.

That raw figure is then put through a short chain of multipliers.

Attacker multipliers

Multiplier	Effect
Aggression stance	Passive ×0.90, Normal ×1.00, Aggressive ×1.15 (round settings)
House attack bonus	Hybris +10%; the others none
Commander: Assault Doctrine	+2% per level, 3 levels, only if the commander rides with the force
Commander: Shock Tactics	+5% per level, 2 levels — round 1 only, then it is gone

The house bonus and the commander skills add together inside the same multiplier, so a Hybris Commander riding with maxed Assault Doctrine attacks at ×1.16, before stance.

Aggression is a genuine trade: Aggressive raises your damage output by 15% and does nothing at all for your survivability, so it wins fights you were going to win faster, and loses fights you were going to lose harder.

Defender multipliers

Multiplier	Effect
House defence bonus	Asturian +10% when defending; the others none
Commander: Garrison Command	+3% per level, 4 levels, only at the base where the commander is posted

Both are read off the base owner, and both cover the entire garrison, allied contingents included. A stationed ally fights under your house bonus and your commander, not their own.

Hit points

A separate multiplier raises or lowers how much damage each unit can absorb before it dies:

• Hybris +5% unit HP, Ophion −5% unit HP.
• Commander: Veteran Corps +3% per level, 2 levels, only where the commander actually is.

Each side's units use their own owner's HP factor — a stationed Hybris ally at an Ophion base keeps its own tougher hulls.

Range edge

Range is a real combat stat, not decoration. Each round, the two sides' average weapon range (weighted by unit count) is compared:

range edge = 1 + 0.05 × (attacker average range − defender average range)

capped at ±15% (both values are round settings). The edge cuts both ways at once: it multiplies the longer-ranged side's damage and divides the shorter-ranged side's. A force built around Rocket Tanks (range 4) and Howitzers (range 3) walking into close-range infantry is collecting the maximum swing in both directions — roughly a 35% relative advantage — before a single other bonus applies.

Your turrets count towards that defending average, every round, because they are part of the defending force. A Rocket Turret reaches further than most things it stands behind, so a base with turrets in it hands a long-ranged attacker slightly less of an edge than the same base without them.

The roll

Finally each side's damage is multiplied by a random roll of ±10% (round setting), drawn separately for each side, every round. This is the only randomness in the exchange itself. It is small on purpose: it decides close fights, never lopsided ones.

Armour classes and damage types

This is the part of combat that matters most, and the part that is invisible unless you look for it.

Every object in the game belongs to one of five armour classes:

Armour class	Typically
Infantry	Soldiers, Troopers, Bombardiers, Commandos, Specialists, Engineers
Light vehicle	Trikes, ATVs, Raider Trikes, Octopods, Raiders
Heavy vehicle	War Tanks, Howitzers, Rocket Tanks, Wave Tanks, Harvesters, MCVs
Aircraft	Hawks, Banshees, Carriers, Cargo, Airlifters, Tankers
Structure	Every building, every defence structure, walls included

Note that the armour class is about the hull, not the role: a Trooper is Infantry armour even though it fires missiles, and a Harvester is Heavy vehicle armour even though it never fires anything.

Every armed object deals one of six damage types: Bullet, Shell, Siege, Missile, Sonic or Bomb. Where the two meet, a multiplier decides how much of that damage actually lands.

Damage type	Infantry	Light vehicle	Heavy vehicle	Aircraft	Structure
Bullet	1.50	1.15	0.40	0.00	0.60
Shell	0.60	1.15	1.50	0.00	1.00
Siege	1.60	0.75	0.40	0.00	1.50
Missile	0.60	1.00	1.50	1.50	1.15
Sonic	1.15	1.15	1.15	0.00	1.15
Bomb	0.75	1.00	1.50	0.00	1.60

Every cell is a round setting, so a round administrator can retune any single matchup. On a narrow screen the table scrolls sideways to reach the Aircraft and Structure columns.

Read down the columns rather than across the rows: the column is what you are shooting at, and the spread within a column is how much your choice of weapon matters. Against heavy vehicles the gap between a Bullet weapon (0.40) and a Shell or Missile weapon (1.50) is a factor of nearly four. Sending Trikes against War Tanks is not a slightly worse plan than sending Rocket Tanks; it is a quarter of the army.

Roughly, each type has a job:

• Bullet — the infantry killer, and nearly useless against armour. Soldiers, Trikes, Commandos, Cannon Turrets.
• Shell — the anti-armour standard, poor against infantry. War Tanks, Deflectors, Ravagers.
• Siege — infantry and buildings, helpless against vehicles. Howitzers, Bombardiers, Siegers.
• Missile — anti-armour, and the only thing that touches aircraft. Troopers, ATVs, Rocket Tanks, Rocket Turrets.
• Sonic — good against everything on the ground and nothing in the air. Wave Tanks.
• Bomb — the building-breaker, also strong against heavy armour. Banshees.

The anti-air rule

Only Missile damage can harm aircraft. Every other damage type deals literally zero.

This is the single hardest rule in Battle For Titan combat and it has no exceptions and no partial credit. A force with no missile weapons cannot kill an aircraft — not slowly, not eventually. The damage is not reduced and it is not redirected onto something the weapon can hit: it is discarded.

The practical shapes this takes:

• An armed aircraft garrison — Hawks, Banshees — cannot be killed at all by a bullets-and-shells army. Those attackers spend all six rounds and go home with a draw and their own casualties.
• The same trap catches an attacking air force. A Banshee deals Bomb damage, which is 0.00 against aircraft: an all-Banshee strike cannot kill a single defending Hawk.
• Unarmed aircraft parked at a base are not in the defending force at all, so they are neither a shield nor a loss. They simply are not in the battle.
• Missiles are not a late-game answer. Troopers and ATVs carry them from the start, and a Rocket Turret builds them permanently into your defences. One missile unit is the difference between a battle and a stalemate.

How losses are worked out

Once each side's damage is totalled, it is routed by damage type into the armour classes standing opposite, and then into individual units.

1. Per damage type, the game looks at which armour classes present in the target stack that type can hurt at all (multiplier above zero). Damage that can hurt nothing present is lost.
2. That damage is split across those classes in proportion to how much effective HP each class represents, and multiplied by the matrix value for that pairing.
3. Within a class, damage is split between the unit types in proportion to each type's share of that class's total HP.
4. Casualties are whole units, always rounded down. Leftover partial damage is discarded at the end of the round — it is not banked and does not carry over.

Two things follow from this. There is no targeting order and no "weakest first": damage spreads across everything in an armour class at once, roughly evenly by hit points. And within the battle itself there is no half-dead state: a unit is at full strength or it is gone for that round; nothing is patched up mid-fight.

That is not the end of the story for a unit counted as lost, though. A share of each side's casualties come home wounded rather than dying outright — carried off by surviving Medics (or their Healer successor) for infantry, and by surviving Mobile Repair Units for vehicles and aircraft, with a defending base's own working Repair Platform recovering a flat share of its losses even with no support units stationed. A wiped force saves nobody, losses past 60% of a group's starting strength are gone for good, and no battle returns more than 40% of what is left, however much support rode along. What gets carried home waits in a recovery pool at the base (the attacker's on return, the defender's immediately) and heals back into stock over time — infantry at a Barracks, vehicles and aircraft at a Repair Platform — for a share of the unit's build cost and time, pausing rather than failing if the base cannot pay.

The rounding-down rule quietly favours expensive units. Damage that is not quite enough to kill one more War Tank simply evaporates at the end of the round, and next round starts fresh.

What a breach costs the defender

Everything below happens only on a breach. A draw or a defeat costs the attacker their casualties and nothing else, and costs the defender nothing but theirs.

Plunder

The attacker takes a random share between 10% and 30% (round settings) of:

• the targeted base's Titanite — not the Commander's other bases, and
• the defender's ISC on hand.

Titanite and ISC in the safe are untouchable. Banked ISC cannot be plundered under any circumstance. If you expect to be hit and cannot defend, the safe is the answer — see the economy chapter.

There is no carrying capacity: the share is taken whether the attacking force is one Soldier or a thousand.

Engineers demolish buildings

Every surviving Engineer in the attacking force permanently destroys one random building at the targeted base — one level of one building each, chosen at random.

• On your main base, the Construction Yard can never be reduced below one. You cannot be locked out of the game.
• On a secondary base, it can. A secondary base whose Construction Yard reaches zero is razed — the base is gone.

Engineers are the reason a breach can be catastrophic rather than merely expensive, and the reason an undefended secondary base is a real risk rather than a bad afternoon.

Collateral damage

Independently of demolition, a breach damages buildings without destroying them. The number of hits is:

hits = 1 + (surviving Engineers, counted up to 3) + (2 if the attack focused on Buildings)

Each hit steps one random building down a performance level: 100% → 75% → 50% → 25%. Buildings never go below 25% from combat, and they are never destroyed this way. A damaged building still works, just more slowly — a damaged Construction Yard slows every build at that base, a damaged Refinery throttles your income. Repair is available from the construction queue.

Attack focus is the attacker's choice at launch: Units (the default) or Buildings, which buys those two extra hits.

Slabs absorb some of it

A building standing fully on a placement slab has a chance to shrug off each incoming hit entirely — both demolition and step damage:

Slab	Chance a hit is negated
Concrete	15%
Large Concrete	25%
Foundation	40%

All three are round settings. The slab is not consumed when it absorbs a hit.

Blueprint theft

If the attacker has surviving Engineers, there is a small chance a research level is stolen outright — granted free of cost and time. The chance scales with how many Engineers survived relative to how many buildings the defender has, between 0.05% and 1% (round settings). With no surviving Engineers the chance is exactly zero.

What can be stolen is narrow: only the attacker's next level in a line the defender has taken further, and only within the attacker's own tier. Both sides are told when it happens.

Who may attack whom

Five gates are checked before an attack can launch. All of them are round settings.

Gate	Current round
Your own base	Never
Newbie protection	The defender is protected for 7 days, and while their score is at or below 2500
Bashing cap	At most 4 attacks on the same Commander per rolling 24 hours
Rate limit	At most 6 attacks in total per rolling hour
Rank guard	Disabled this round — any score range is a legal target

Some detail on the ones that surprise people:

Newbie protection ends the moment the protected player attacks anyone. It is a shield, not a free shot. You get a warning 24 hours before it lapses on its timer, and a notification when it ends either way.

A recalled attack does not count against the bashing cap — a strike that never landed is not a strike.

Special attacks count as attacks for both the bashing cap and the hourly rate limit.

The rank guard is switched off on this round. When a round has it enabled, it restricts you to defenders scoring between half and one and a half times your own — and a revenge token, granted automatically to any Commander who is attacked, lets the victim ignore it once against their attacker.

What the defender sees coming

An inbound attack becomes visible to its target 10 minutes before impact by default. That window is widened by:

• the Scanning research line, +2 minutes per level, and
• the Rapid Response commander skill, +5 minutes per level (up to 2), at the base where the commander is posted.

Once the window opens, the defender is told who is attacking and when they arrive. If the defender already knows the attacker's base, they are told which base it launched from.

The defender is never told the size or composition of the incoming force, and never its route. A battle report after the fact is the only place composition appears. A joint operation shows only that it is one, and how many forces are involved — never who joined.

Ten minutes is not much, and it is the whole point: it is time to bank your ISC, not time to build a defence.

The battle report

Both sides — and only both sides — receive a battle report. No ally, alliance-mate or third party can read it.

The report holds the outcome, the number of rounds fought, both forces in full (what each side started with and what each side lost), a breakdown of damage and losses by armour class, the loot on a breach, and any buildings destroyed, damaged or blueprints stolen.

The damage-by-class panel is the most useful part and the least read. It is where you find out that two thirds of your army was firing bullets into heavy armour, which is a thing no summary of the result will tell you.

Reports are kept for the lifetime of the round.

Quick reference

Question	Answer
Maximum rounds	6
Random variation per side per round	±10%
Range advantage cap	±15%
Only weapon that hurts aircraft	Missile
What defends a base	The field army and your defence structures, together from round 1
Do unarmed units defend?	No — and they are not lost either
What a draw pays the attacker	Nothing
Plunder on a breach	10–30% of the targeted base's Titanite and your ISC on hand
Is the safe lootable?	No, never
Can a base be destroyed?	A secondary base can be razed; a main base cannot
Building damage floor	25% performance
Attack warning	10 minutes, plus Scanning and Rapid Response