Expeditions

Every other order in this manual is given by a base. An expedition is given by you. It is the one thing in Battle For Titan that belongs to the Commander rather than to a plot of ground: it does not care which base you are looking at, it cannot be aimed at another Commander, and no amount of building will produce a second one. Most of them you send out into the deep desert: gone for a known length of time, back with a result. A few work another way entirely, and that difference is the first thing worth learning about them.

This chapter covers how the list works, what decides whether you may go, what an escort costs you, and what lands in your events when the dust settles. It deliberately does not tell you what is out there. Finding that out is the point of the system, and the reference catalog at the back of this manual is missing exactly the same things for exactly the same reason.

Where to find it

Expeditions have their own page, under Military in the navigation. It is not a base page — open it from anywhere and you are looking at your Commander's whole record, whichever base you happened to be standing on.

The nav entry carries a badge when something on that page has newly become visible to you. That is worth paying attention to, because the list is not static and nothing else announces a change to it.

Two kinds of expedition

Nearly all of them are journeys. You choose a base, usually send an escort along with your Commander, and the whole thing is a timed round trip: it leaves, it is away, it comes home carrying a result. Everything this chapter says about escorts, travel time and grades is about journeys.

A handful are objectives instead. Nothing travels and your Commander does not move. The page names a real thing to go and do elsewhere in the game, and how many times to do it; you press Take it on, and it completes itself the moment you have done it. There is no escort, no travel time, no grade, and no way for one of these to cost you units — it is either not finished yet, or it is done.

One warning the page gives you, worth repeating because it is easy to assume otherwise: taking an objective on starts the count from that moment. Anything you already did before accepting it does not count towards it.

Each entry says which kind it is, so you never have to guess.

Your list is not everyone's list

This is the part that surprises people, so it comes first: two Commanders in the same round see different expedition pages, and neither of them is seeing all of it.

Anything at or below your own tier is fully visible to you — its requirements, its escort rules, its travel time, all of it. A row you can actually reach is never hidden from you.

Above your tier, each entry sits on one of four rungs, chosen by the people who write the content rather than by any round setting:

That last rung is not about tier at all. Some expeditions are windows rather than destinations: they stay unlisted until a storm, wormsign or an eruption arrives at somewhere you own, at which point the entry appears in full. Once a window has opened for you it stays on your list afterwards, marked as waiting on the weather — because a window that has opened once will open again, and there is no reason to make you forget it existed.

So an empty stretch on your page is not a bug and not the end of the content. It is a tier you have not reached, or weather that has not come to you yet.

What has to be true before you can go

Five gates. The first four are worked out fresh every time you look at the page; the last is checked at the moment you actually go:

• Tier. The expedition's tier must not exceed yours.
• Commander level. Every entry has a minimum. The ones far out in the deep desert and the ones that are political rather than military demand more than the rest.
• Its predecessor. Some expeditions come in chains, and a link only unlocks once the one before it has been completed outright.
• Its weather. A window expedition is only launchable while the event it waits on is actually live at one of your bases.
• The units you are sending. On a journey, the escort has to exist, at the base you are launching from, right now. An objective has no escort, so it has nothing to check here.

Two things are deliberately not on that list. You do not need a particular building, and you do not need a particular research. Expeditions are a way into capability, not something capability buys — several of them hand you research you could not otherwise reach, and none of them charge you research to attend.

The six states

An entry is always in exactly one of these, and most of them are worked out from the clock at the moment you look rather than being set by anything running in the background:

The escort

Escorts are a journey matter — objectives have none. Most journeys let you send units along, drawn from the infantry, vehicles and aircraft standing at the base you launch from. The rules differ per entry and the page states them before you commit:

• Some forbid an escort entirely. Those are the ones your Commander is meant to face alone, and the page says so plainly.
• Some set a minimum, a maximum, or both.
• Some accept only particular units, and refuse everything else no matter how much of it you bring.

All of that is enforced on the server, not just in the picker. If the roster is refused, nothing leaves the base — you do not lose a partial force to a rejected order.

One composition rule is worth knowing: a Thumper in the escort lowers the chance of the run going badly, and a Quaker counts as two of them. It is the same machinery that keeps a sandcrawler off a worm's menu, capped the same way, so past a few of them the extra ones buy you nothing. On an expedition that forbids an escort it buys you nothing at all — which is rather the point of forbidding one.

Coming back

This section is about journeys; an objective has nothing to come back from.

Travel time is fixed per journey and scaled by the round's pace, and the return leg mirrors the outbound one exactly. Nothing about the timing is random: the moment you launch, you know when it lands. The page gives you the round-trip figure before you commit.

What is random is the grade it comes back with, rolled against odds the entry itself carries:

A setback takes a fraction of each unit stack you sent rather than the whole force — bounded at both ends by the round's settings, and always at least one unit once it fires. Success and partial success cost you no units at all.

Crucially, a setback is not a dead end. The expedition re-arms after its cooldown and you may go again. That is true by construction, which is why a chain can never strand you: the only way to lose an expedition permanently is to never go back.

What lands in your events

A journey files three entries in Local events over the life of a run: one when it launches, one when it reaches whatever it was going to, and one when it comes home. The last of those is the one to read — it carries the grade, what you gained, what you lost, and how long the whole thing took.

An objective files one, at the moment it completes. Accepting it and the progress along the way pass unremarked; the page is where you watch that.

Like every other event, it is kept. You can read a return back weeks later, which matters more here than elsewhere: an expedition is a one-time thing, so its report is the only record you will ever get of it.

Quick reference