Missions, movement and interception

Nothing in Battle For Titan teleports. Every force you send leaves a base at a known moment, crosses real ground at a speed you can work out in advance, and arrives somewhere it can be seen coming. This chapter is the companion to the previous one: that chapter covered the battle, this one covers everything around it — the orders you can give, how long each takes, what happens when it lands, and what can happen to it on the way.

Some values below are round settings the round administrator can change. They are given as this round's current values and are worth re-checking against your own screens. Anything stated as a formula or a rule is fixed for everyone.

The eight orders

Every force that leaves a base carries exactly one order, and the order decides everything that follows: how fast it travels, what it does on arrival, and whether you ever see it again.

Order	What it does on arrival	Comes home?
Attack	Fights the battle at the targeted base, and loots it if it wins	Yes — survivors return to the base they launched from
Scout	Reveals fog along its path and around where it stops, and finds bases it passes	Yes, unless you tell it to park where it lands
Spy	Files an intelligence report on one base you have already found	No — the report is the arrival
Special	Destroys a share of one category of stock at the targeted base	No — nothing was ever sent
Station	Joins an alliance mate's base as a standing garrison	Only when called back
Deploy	Founds a new base on an unclaimed rock patch	No — that is the point
Transport	Delivers Titanite and units to another of your own bases	It is already home
Intercept	Runs down a moving force in the open and fights its escort	Yes — survivors return

Three of these are covered in full elsewhere: Attack is the previous chapter, and Scout and Spy belong to the recon chapter that follows this one. What they all share — the travel — is here.

How long it takes

Your bases and every tile between them sit on a real map, and a force walks it. Travel time is not a function of straight-line distance alone: it is a function of the path, and the path goes around cliffs and pays extra to cross dune sea.

The whole formula:

travel seconds = path cost × seconds per tile ÷ force speed ÷ round speed

floored at 60 seconds — nothing ever arrives faster than a minute — and with no ceiling.

Each term, in turn.

Path cost is what the route actually costs to walk, in tile-units, not how far apart the two ends are. A diagonal step costs about 1.4 straight steps, and rough ground costs more than open ground, so two bases the same distance apart on the map can be very different journeys. This is the term you cannot read off a coordinate, and the only reliable way to know it is the estimate the game shows you before you confirm the order.

Seconds per tile is set by the order, not by the units. This is the single biggest lever on how long something takes:

Order	Seconds per tile
Spy	30
Attack, Station, Intercept, Commander redeploy	45
Scout	45
Transport	90
Deploy	120

Recon is the fastest thing per distance in the game; an MCV convoy is the slowest, at nearly three times the pace of a raid over the same ground. Logistics is deliberately expensive in time.

Force speed is the speed of the slowest unit you sent, and nothing else. A force is a convoy, not a race — one Harvester at speed 4 travelling with a wing of Eagles at speed 16 arrives at speed 4. This is the term you have the most control over and the one most often thrown away by accident.

Round speed is a global multiplier on every timer in the game. It is 1 on this round, so it changes nothing here.

Unit speeds

Fastest to slowest, across all four tiers:

Speed	Units
20	Teleporter
16	Eagle
14	Fast Trike, Hawk, Raider, Tanker
12	Banshee, Carrier, Raider Trike, Transporter
10	Airlifter, Octopod, Trike
9	ATV
8	Cargo
7	Guerilla Outlaw, Radical Deflector
6	Deflector, Infiltrator, Laser Tank, Mobile Repair Unit, Spy, War Tank
5	Commando, Healer, Howitzer, Imperial Commando, M-81, Outlaw, Rocket Tank, SCUD Tank, Wave Blaster, Wave Tank
4	Bombardier, Cannoneer, Cyborg Hybrid, Engineer, Harvester, Heavy Harvester, Heavy Soldier, Medic, Medium Soldier, Quaker, Ravager, Saboteur, Sieger, Soldier, Spacefolder, Specialist, Thumper, Trooper
3	Annihilator, Bombarder, MCV

Most infantry travels at 4 or slower, with the late-tier specialists breaking 5 — and the Spy, first-tier but built for pace rather than a fight, keeping company with them at 6. Any force with a foot soldier in it is an infantry-speed force, whatever else is riding alongside.

Aircraft ignore the ground

A force in which every unit is an aircraft does not path around terrain at all — it flies the straight line, at raw distance, paying nothing for cliffs or dune sea. Add a single ground unit and the whole force walks: it takes the ground route, at the ground pace, at the slowest member's speed. There is no partial credit for a mostly-airborne force.

What makes a force faster

Two bonuses, and they add together before dividing:

• House Ophion travels 10% faster than everyone else, always, on every order. Asturian and Hybris have no travel bonus.
• The Fleet Marshal commander skill adds 5% per level, to a maximum of two levels — but only when your commander is physically riding the force. It does nothing for a transport, a scout, a garrison you send to an ally, or a contingent you contribute to someone else's joint attack.

The way back

A force that is coming home takes exactly as long to return as it took to get there. There is no fast lane home and no penalty for it either — the return leg is the outbound leg, replayed.

Cargo does not change this. Titanite has no weight in the travel formula at all: only the units you sent set the speed, and a Transport carrying nothing but Titanite travels at the pace of whatever escort you gave it.

Recalling a force

A force can be called back while it is still outbound and has not yet arrived. Once its arrival time passes, the order stands — there is no cancelling a battle that is already resolving.

The cost of turning around is the honest one: the way back takes as long as it has already been flying. Recall a force ten minutes into a forty-minute journey and it is home ten minutes later. Recall it thirty-eight minutes in and you have a thirty-eight minute wait. Recalling early is cheap; changing your mind at the last moment is not.

Two orders cannot be recalled by the normal route:

• A special attack is committed the moment it launches. There is no recall, at any point, for any reason. Treat the button as the decision.
• An MCV convoy has its own recall, which turns it back the same way it turns back when it finds its landing site taken. It is the one deliberate exception to "committed once launched" — the convoy is too expensive to strand on a bad call.

Two things worth knowing about a recalled attack. It does not count against the bashing cap — a strike that never landed is not a strike against that Commander. And it is still catchable: a force on its way home, recalled or victorious, is as interceptable as one on its way out.

Hazards on the way

The journey itself can go wrong, independently of anyone attacking you. A pathed force samples the ground it crosses, and both a sandcrawler bite and storm damage can take units out of a force mid-flight. This applies to every pathed order, on both legs. A force that loses units on the way arrives with what is left of it — and a force that is eaten entirely simply never arrives.

What arrival does

The detail that differs per order, once the force is there.

Attack resolves the battle described in the previous chapter, against the targeted base and anything stationed at it. If the base you aimed at was razed by someone else while you were in the air, the attack turns back gracefully rather than landing on nothing.

Station parks the force at your ally's base indefinitely. It re-checks their Allied Quarters capacity on arrival, not just at launch: if their quarters shrank, or other allies filled them first, your force bounces and comes straight home rather than parking over capacity. A razed target bounces it too.

Deploy plants a Construction Yard and unloads its Titanite in full — a new base has no storage limit to overflow. If the landing site was claimed while the convoy was crossing, it turns back with everything intact.

Transport delivers units in full, always. Titanite is clamped to what the destination can still hold, and the overflow is destroyed — not returned, not banked. This is the one arrival that can silently cost you resources, and it is worth checking the receiving base's storage before sending a large shipment. A transport whose destination was razed mid-flight turns back with its cargo whole.

Special destroys a share of one category of stock at one specific base — not across the whole empire. There is no battle report, only a log entry on both sides.

Interception

Two different things share this name, and confusing them will cost you a force.

Standing defences

The first is automatic and belongs to the defender. Any scout or convoy that crosses the perimeter of a base rolls against that base's home garrison, and can simply be shot down. Nobody chooses it and nobody is notified in advance — parked units and turrets do this by existing. A scout crossing an alliance mate's perimeter is exempt.

Riding out

The second is deliberate, and it is yours: commit a force from one of your own bases to run down something you can see moving on the map.

What you can catch. Any hostile mover you can currently see: scouts, spies, MCV convoys, transports and — since the most recent ruling — attacks, whether outbound or heading home. A special attack cannot be intercepted; it carries no units and follows no route. Your own forces and your alliance mates' forces are never valid targets.

Who you can catch it for. Anyone. There is no requirement that the force be aimed at you or at an ally — an attack crossing your view on its way to a total stranger is a legitimate target. You need no invitation and the victim need not know you exist.

The lock-on is worked out before you commit, and it never misses by luck. The game solves for the earliest point on the target's actual route that your force can reach before the target does. If no such point exists, the order is refused outright — "too fast or too far" — and nothing leaves your base. There is no wasted sortie that discovers on arrival that it could never have caught up. What the preview tells you is whether you can catch it and when; it never shows you the target's destination or route. Denying the recon is the reward, not reading their plans.

The clash is a field fight, not a siege: your committed force against the target's escort, with no base, no walls, no turrets, no loot and no building damage. A spy carries no escort at all, so catching one is a certainty rather than a fight. An attacking force fights at its current strength — a raider caught on the way home fights as its survivors, not as the army that set out.

The two outcomes.

• You wipe the escort. The target dies with it — the convoy's MCV is lost, the transport's cargo is gone, the spy fails, the attack is destroyed outright.
• The escort survives. Its losses stick, but it carries on. A weakened attack presses on to its original target with fewer units. Riding out weakens a raid; it does not stop one.

Recovered loot goes to the victim, never to you. Catch a raider on its way home and the Titanite and ISC it is carrying are returned to the Commander it was stolen from — clamped to what their storage can hold, like any other delivery. Your reward is the kill and the commander experience, and nothing else. Interception is not a way to farm resources; it is a way to deny them.

The force you are hunting is never warned. No alert fires, no recall prompt appears, and nothing tells its owner an interceptor is inbound. Your force is an ordinary blip on the map under the normal visibility rules — a Commander watching the map carefully may well spot you coming, and that is fair, but the game will never volunteer it. If you fail to stop an attack and it presses on, its owner is told nothing at all: they find out from the battle report they were always going to get.

You cannot intercept together. There is no joint interception. Each intercept is one Commander's committed force, however many of you can see the same target.

Fighting together

Two mechanics let Commanders combine, one on each side of a battle.

Joint attacks

An attack can be launched as joinable, and alliance mates can add their own forces to it. Each contingent stays a real force of its own — its own travel, its own losses, its own way home — but they land as one battle.

Rule	This round
Who may join	Alliance mates of whoever launched it
How many forces	4 in total, including the leader
Join window	Closes 5 minutes before impact
How far it may delay the leader	30% of the original journey, at most

The arrival syncs to the slowest participant, but never past that delay cap — a late joiner from far away is fitted around the leader's timing rather than the other way round. Once the arrival has been pushed as far as the cap allows, it never moves again.

The leader's stance and focus govern the whole battle; joiners contribute units and keep their own house bonuses. Loot is taken once and split by how much damage each contingent actually did, and there is a single blueprint roll for the merged force, awarded to the largest contributor. Each joiner is checked against their own bashing cap and rate limit — joining is not a way around them.

The defender is told a joint assault is coming and how many forces are in it, but never who they are or what they are bringing. Participants see each other in full.

Stationing at an ally's base

You can send units to an alliance mate's base to stand as a garrison. They fight in every battle there, automatically, with no decision needed from you at the time — you are not required to be online, or even aware.

Rule	This round
Where	An alliance mate's base only, never your own
Capacity	25 units per Allied Quarters level, held by the host
Travel pace	Same as an attack — 45 seconds per tile
How long	Indefinitely, until called back

A garrison leaves only when one of four things happens: you recall it, the host expels it, you or they leave the alliance, or the round ends. There is no cooldown on sending it back.

What matters most is how the risk is divided. Stationed units join the host's field army — one of the two halves of the defending force — and never contribute defence structures; the walls and turrets are always the host's alone. Losses and kills are credited to whoever owns the units. But a garrison fights under the host's house bonuses and commander, not yours. And if the base falls, only the host's economy is exposed: the loot, the building damage and the stolen blueprints are all theirs. You risk your units and nothing else.

Two consequences that surprise people. A Commander under newbie protection cannot host a garrison, though they may freely station units elsewhere. And a spy report on the host reveals the garrison broken down by owner — stationing at a friend's base tells anyone who spies on them that you are there.