The economy and the tick

Everything in Battle For Titan is paid for out of the same two pots, so this chapter comes before all the others. It covers what produces your income, what modifies it, what caps it, how the game keeps that income running while you are away, and where it goes when you spend it.

A note on numbers. Some of the values below are round settings — the round administrator can change them per round, so they are stated here as the current round's values and are worth re-checking against the numbers your own screens show. Anything described as a formula or a rule is fixed for everyone.

The two resources

Titanite is the raw material, and it belongs to a base. Each of your bases has its own Titanite balance, its own harvesting operation and its own storage. Moving Titanite between your bases means physically shipping it; there is no shared pool.

ISC is the currency, and it belongs to you, not to any one base. There is a single ISC balance across your whole account, and it is the same number whichever base you happen to be looking at.

That split matters more often than it sounds. A build order that costs both will take the Titanite out of the base you are currently viewing and the ISC out of your account — so you can be perfectly able to afford something at one base and short of Titanite for it at another.

You start a round with 8,000 Titanite at your first base, 2,000 ISC, and a single Construction Yard. Nothing else.

Where Titanite comes from

Titanite is harvested, and harvesting needs two things working together: Harvesters to do the digging and Refineries to process what they bring back.

A Harvester only produces if a Refinery has a free slot for it. Each Refinery supports one Harvester, and a base may build at most 5 Refineries — so the number of Harvesters actually earning you anything is:

supported harvesters = min(harvesters owned, refineries × 1)

Any Harvester beyond that number sits idle. It still cost you, it still takes up space, and it produces nothing. If your income has stopped climbing as you add Harvesters, this is almost always why — the next thing you need is a Refinery, not another Harvester.

Each supported Harvester brings in a base rate of 6 Titanite per minute in the current round. That is the figure everything else in the next section multiplies.

What modifies your production

Your actual income is the base rate with a chain of multipliers applied to it. All of them are live — nothing here is stored or banked, so a change takes effect immediately rather than at the next hour or the next day.

income per minute
    = supported harvesters
    × base rate × (1 + research and commander bonuses)
    × carrier pairing
    × power
    × refinery condition
    × eruption
    × catch-up
    × round speed

Research and commander bonuses

Harvesting Efficiency research adds +10% per level to the base rate, and the Harvest Overseer commander skill adds +4% per level. These two add together into a single bonus fraction — two levels of research and one of the skill is +24%, not a compounding chain. They are not the same kind of bonus, though: your research bonus applies everywhere, while Harvest Overseer only applies at the base your Commander is currently posted to — move him, and that base's income drops back to the research-only figure until he settles somewhere new.

Carrier pairing

Each Carrier airlifts one Harvester, and a paired Harvester yields more. The bonus scales with how much of your supported fleet is actually paired, reaching a maximum of +50% once you have as many Carriers as supported Harvesters. Carriers beyond that number add nothing — pairing cannot go past one-to-one.

Power

Power is not a resource you accumulate. It is a live balance: some buildings produce it, others consume it, and what matters is only the ratio between the two right now. There is nothing to store and nothing to run out of overnight.

If your power ratio falls below 25% of what your base is asking for, Titanite harvesting is cut to half. That is the entire penalty — nothing else throttles, and nothing shuts down. Above that threshold there is no bonus for having power to spare; the cut is simply not applied. The Power Discipline commander skill softens the cut when it does land.

Refinery condition

Refineries damaged in an attack process less. A damaged refinery line reduces your output in proportion to the damage until it is repaired.

Eruptions and catch-up

Two situational multipliers can push your income above normal. An active eruption event boosts harvesting for any base inside its region for as long as the event runs. And a catch-up boost applies to Commanders who joined late or restarted, fading away as they approach roughly half the median active player — it is self-expiring and needs no action from you.

Round speed

Every round has a speed multiplier applied to production. The current round runs at 1×.

Storage, and what happens when you are full

Each base has a Titanite storage cap, made up of the storage capacity of everything you own that provides it — your Construction Yard, your Refineries and any Silos — multiplied by your Titanite Compression research bonus, which adds +20% per level.

When a base is at its cap, production stops. It does not spill over, it is not converted, it is simply not earned. This is the one and only way that being logged out costs you anything, and it is worth sizing your storage against how long you expect to be away.

Titanite already sitting above your cap — delivered loot, for instance — is never destroyed or confiscated. It stays where it is; you just earn nothing further until you have spent back down below the line.

ISC has no cap. It is money, not matter, and no amount of it needs storing.

The tick, and what happens while you are away

Battle For Titan is a real-time game that does not require you to be present. Two mechanisms make that true, and it is worth understanding which one is doing the work.

Your resources are recalculated the moment you look at them. Whenever you load a game page, the server works out exactly how much time has passed since your base was last settled — down to the second — and credits the whole of it at once. This is not rounded to minutes, hours or ticks. There is no queue of missed intervals to catch up on and no partial credit.

Offline time and online time are identical. There is no presence check anywhere in the calculation, no bonus for being logged in, and no decay or penalty for being away. Twelve hours asleep credits exactly the same Titanite as twelve hours spent watching the screen — subject only to your storage cap, above.

A background pass runs every minute to settle things that have come due on their own: finished build and research queues, arriving missions, starport deliveries, completed scout runs. This is what makes your army arrive and your buildings finish while you are logged out. It applies exactly the same rules a page load does; it just does not wait to be asked.

A daily pass runs at 00:05 for the things that are genuinely once-a-day: the bank's interest roll and the day's interest credit, the starport's daily prices, and the score recalculation.

Turning Titanite into ISC

ISC is not harvested. It comes from the Imperial Bank, which exchanges in both directions.

The bank quotes a mid rate that re-rolls once an hour, landing somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 — each roll is an independent draw within those bounds, so the rate does not drift or trend and there is nothing to predict. It is the same rate for every player in the round.

On either side of that mid rate sits the bank's spread, currently 5%. You sell Titanite at 5% below the mid rate and buy it at 5% above, which means selling and immediately buying back always loses money. There is no rate at which round-tripping through the bank is profitable — that is deliberate, and it is what stops the exchange being an infinite resource printer.

House Ophion pays half the spread, which makes them the best traders in the game without breaking that rule; their round trip is still a loss, just a smaller one. The Banker's Favor commander skill reduces the spread further, and can floor it at zero — but never below.

While a bank robbery event is running, exchanging is suspended entirely. Deposits, withdrawals and interest are unaffected.

The safe, interest and transfers

Deposited ISC sits in the safe, where two things are true of it: it earns interest, and it cannot be looted. An attacker who breaks into your base takes from your liquid balances only.

• Maturation. Each deposit is locked for 2 days. During that window it earns no interest and cannot be withdrawn.
• Interest. Matured balances earn a daily rate that re-rolls each day between 0.5% and 2%, credited once a day.
• The cap. The safe holds up to 2,000,000 ISC; Vault Expansion research raises it.
• Emergency withdrawal. If you are genuinely broke — under 500 liquid ISC and under 500 Titanite across all your bases — you may break a locked deposit early, forfeiting 25% of it.

Transfers to other Commanders are taxed at 10%, capped at 20% of your liquid ISC per transfer, and limited to 3 transfers a day.

Spending: queues, costs and cancellations

Almost everything you build costs both currencies. Each building, unit and research has its own Titanite and ISC price, and both are checked and taken in full the moment you queue it — not on completion. Queuing something is the transaction; what follows is just the timer.

There are three separate queue lanes — Construction, Units and Research — each holding up to 5 items at once. Construction and Units are per-base, so every base queues its own. Research is shared across your whole account: one queue, wherever you started it. Within the Units lane, batches from different producer buildings advance in parallel rather than waiting in line.

Cancelling refunds 70% of what is still outstanding. Anything that had already been delivered when you cancelled stays delivered and is not refunded — you are only ever refunded for the part you did not receive. A Titanite refund that would take you over your storage cap is trimmed to fit.

The other ways your balance moves

• Being raided. When an attacker breaks through, they take between 10% and 30% of the Titanite and liquid ISC at that base. Banked ISC is untouchable. If several attackers are involved, the haul is split by how much damage each did.
• Raiding others. The same rule, from the other side. What you carry home is capped by the storage headroom at the base receiving it.
• Protection. New Commanders are protected from attack for 7 days after joining.
• Upkeep. There is none. Units and buildings cost nothing to keep once built — the only ongoing demand they make is on your power balance, and the only consequence of failing that is the harvesting cut described above.