The map, fog and recon

Almost everything in Battle For Titan is decided before the shooting starts, and most of it is decided by what each side knows. The map is not a backdrop — it is a real surface with real ground on it, and your view of it is a record of where you have actually been. This chapter covers the world itself, the rules governing what you can see of it, and the two missions whose entire purpose is to see more.

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 world

Titan is a sphere, and the playable surface is the band between the two poles. Everything from 65° of latitude to each pole is a storm cap — permanently uninhabitable, never holding a base, and impassable to anything you send. What is left is the habitable band, and every base in the round is somewhere in it.

The band is divided into four quadrants: 1 north-west, 2 north-east, 3 south-west, 4 south-east. Each quadrant is a 20 × 20 grid of coordinate squares, which is where a base's address comes from. An address reads q.x.y — quadrant, then x, then y — and it is the only way anyone refers to a base's position.

Two grids, and why the difference matters

This is the single most common misreading of the map, so it is worth stating plainly.

Base addresses are coarse. The ground is fine. The q.x.y address sits on the 20 × 20 coordinate grid above, but terrain, fog, scout radii, travel paths and minimum spacing are all measured on a much finer grid laid over the whole planet — 1024 tiles around by 512 from pole to pole. Every distance in this chapter given "in tiles" means a tile on that fine grid, not a coordinate square.

So a reveal radius of 15 tiles is not fifteen addresses wide. It is a circle of ground, and how many bases fall inside it depends entirely on how crowded that stretch of the map is.

The world wraps east to west, and not north to south

Travel east far enough and you arrive back where you started; the map has no left or right edge. It emphatically does have a top and a bottom — the storm caps close both, and no route ever crosses a pole. A journey that looks impossibly long on the flat map may be a short hop the other way around, and the path the game plots will take it.

The ground

Four kinds of terrain exist, and every tile on the planet is exactly one of them.

Terrain	Passable	Move cost	Buildable
Dune sea	Yes	×1.5	No
Flats	Yes	×1.0	No
Rock	Yes	×1.0	Yes
Cliff	No	—	No

Move cost is the multiplier a ground force pays to cross that tile, and it feeds straight into the travel formula in the previous chapter. Dune sea costs half as much again as open ground, which is why the shortest-looking route is frequently not the fastest one. Cliff is not expensive — it is impassable, and a route never crosses one; it goes around, however far around that is. Aircraft ignore all of this, as the previous chapter set out.

Terrain does nothing else. It does not change combat, it does not change what a building costs, and there is no resource terrain — harvesting is exactly as productive on flats as it is beside a dune sea, whatever the ground happens to look like. If the planet appears to shimmer somewhere, it is scenery.

The planet is generated once, when the round is created, and then it is fixed for the whole round. A new round gets a new planet.

Rock patches

Rock is the only ground you can build on, and it does not occur in scattered single tiles. It occurs in rock patches — contiguous areas of rock, usually ringed by cliff, and a patch is what a base actually stands on.

The size of the patch is not cosmetic. A base's total build space is the tile count of its patch, and the sizes of everything you have built there must fit inside it. A base on a small patch will run out of room to build long before a base on a large one does. A handful of unusually large patches exist — fortress patches — and they are worth what people will pay for them.

Where the cliff ring around a patch is broken, the gap is an entry. Ground forces have to use one, because cliff is impassable; aircraft do not, because they ignore terrain entirely. No extra defensive bonus attaches to a narrow entry today — the advantage is simply that a ground attacker's route is forced and therefore longer.

Where a new base may be founded

A Deploy mission has four conditions to satisfy, and it is re-checked on arrival as well as at launch:

• the target must be a valid founding site on a rock patch,
• the site must be unoccupied — a razed base frees its site up again,
• it must be at least 40 tiles from every other active base, yours and everyone else's,
• and it must be inside ground you have already revealed.

A site that fails any of these is refused with the same message whichever one it was. That is deliberate: a more specific refusal would let anyone map their unexplored neighbours by watching which coordinates came back with which error.

Fog of war

You do not see the world. You see what you have found of it, and that record is personal to you and resets each round.

Two different facts

The distinction below is the one that catches people out, and it is worth reading twice.

Revealed ground means you know the terrain there. Ground cannot change, so a revealed tile stays revealed for the rest of the round — it never goes dark again.

A discovered base means you know that a specific base exists at a specific address. This is a separate event, and it is permanent too, but it does not follow from the first one:

Revealed ground is not surveillance. A base founded on ground you revealed last week is not discovered. You would have to go and look again.

Discovery is also per base, not per Commander. Finding one of a rival's bases tells you nothing about their others.

Where reveal comes from

Four things.

Your doorstep. Ground around your own bases is revealed for you at the start.

Your viewing radius. Every base of yours projects a live circle of vision from whichever qualifying building it has:

Building	Viewing radius
Observatory	6 tiles
Radar	10 tiles
Command Center	14 tiles

Best building wins — these do not add up. Two Observatories see no further than one, and a base with a Command Center gains nothing from also having a Radar. On top of the best one, the Long-Range Optics research adds +2 tiles per level across five levels, and the whole thing is capped at 24 tiles. A Command Center plus fully researched optics lands exactly on that cap.

This circle is the one kind of vision that can be taken away from you. It is live, not recorded: lose the building or lose the base, and the circle goes with it.

The road any force walks. Sending a raid, a spy, a convoy, a garrison, an MCV or your own Commander out over real ground permanently reveals the narrow corridor it crosses, the same way a scout's path does. It reveals the road and nothing more — no circle opens at the far end, so an army teaches you the way there without teaching you what is waiting. Learning what is actually at a place you have not scouted is still recon's job alone.

Scout runs. The rest of this chapter — the only mission built to reveal wide ground at a stop, not just the road to it.

What your alliance shares, and what it does not

Base discoveries are shared across an alliance, live. When any member finds a base, every member knows where it is.

Terrain fog is not shared. Your map of the ground stays yours no matter who you fly with.

Neither kind of knowledge is ever unlearned. Leave an alliance and you keep everything you found while you were in it; join one and its existing discoveries are handed to you.

Known location

Whether you know a particular base's coordinates is a single fact the game checks everywhere, and it gates more than the map: map pins, the standings, profiles, the attack target picker, coordinate search, and spy launches all ask the same question first. If the answer is no, the base is not merely hidden from your map — it cannot be targeted at all, and the picker will tell you to scout them first.

You hold a base's known location if it is yours, if it belongs to an alliance mate, if you or any current alliance member has discovered it by scouting — or, in this round, if its owner has attacked you. Attacking someone tells them where you live.

Scout runs

A scout run is how the map gets bigger. It costs no ISC at all — what it costs is one Trike, taken from the launching base's garrison and unavailable for anything else until it comes home. An upgraded Trike scouts just as well: a base holding only Fast Trikes can still launch a run, and it rides out at the Fast Trike's own, quicker pace rather than the ordinary Trike's. You need an Observatory somewhere in your empire to launch one.

Plotting a route

A scout run is not a single destination. You plot a route of up to 5 stops, and the trike drives them in order over real terrain — the same pathing every other mission uses, around cliffs and the long way around dune sea. Clicking impassable ground snaps to the nearest tile it can actually reach.

Scouting travels at 45 seconds per tile this round, and the trike's own speed and the round speed apply on top, exactly as in the travel formula.

You may have 5 moving scout runs at a time. Parked ones do not count against that.

By default the trike returns the way it came and rejoins its origin base's garrison. Turn auto-return off and it stays on station at its final stop instead — sitting out on open ground indefinitely, still yours to recall or re-task later, and still perfectly killable where it sits.

What it reveals, and where

Two different shapes, and the difference between them is the whole tactical content of scouting:

• Along the entire route, a narrow corridor of ground 3 tiles either side opens up as the trike travels. This reveals terrain and nothing else.
• At each stop, a much wider circle of 15 tiles is revealed — and this is the only place bases are discovered.

Driving past a base does not find it. The corridor reveals ground, never bases. If you want to know what is in a region, you have to stop there.

Reveal happens progressively as the trike moves, not in a lump at the end, and both legs of the journey reveal.

What can go wrong

A trike is unarmed. It never fights; it is only ever caught.

Crossing a perimeter. Every enemy base within 10 tiles of your route rolls once, per pass, to shoot your scout down. The chance depends on how much that base has sitting at home:

chance = 5% + 55% × min(1, garrison score ÷ 5000)

so a base with nothing home is a 5% risk and a heavily defended one approaches 60%. Garrison score counts what is actually there — units away on missions do not defend — and turrets count triple, because shooting down a scout is exactly what they are for. Outbound and return are rolled separately, so the trip home is its own risk. Alliance mates never roll against you.

Sitting still. A scout parked on station inside a hostile perimeter is checked roughly every hour for as long as it stays there. Parking is genuinely useful, but a parked scout inside someone else's perimeter is a slow leak, not a free camera.

The ground itself. Sandstorms and sandcrawlers can take the trike, as the previous chapter described. With no escort to thin, it is all or nothing: the run simply ends.

When a scout dies, you keep everything it had already revealed, and a wreck marker appears where it fell. The wreck is itself intelligence — something down there is dangerous.

The defender, meanwhile, is normally told only that an unidentified scout was destroyed. Who sent it is a separate question, answered further down.

The danger estimate you are shown before launching is a floor, not a forecast. It only counts bases you have already discovered, and the whole point of scouting somewhere is that you do not know what is there. A quiet-looking route through unexplored ground is not a safe route; it is an unmeasured one.

Spying

Where a scout answers what is out there, a spy answers what is in that base. It is a completely different mission and shares none of the scout's mechanics except the perimeter it has to cross.

A spy launch stakes one trained Spy out of the launching base's garrison — it needs an Observatory and a Spy standing there, and no Espionage research at all: basic spying is free for every Commander. The target base must already be a known location — you cannot spy on somewhere you have not found. It travels at 30 seconds per tile, and it is one-way: the report is the arrival, and the Spy comes home the moment it is filed. A run that is intercepted along the way loses the Spy outright — nothing comes back from a caught one.

You may have one spy in flight per target base at a time, and you target a specific base, not a Commander — spying someone's capital tells you nothing about their outposts.

What the report tells you

Exactly one thing, in detail: what is standing at that base. Every unit type present, by count, across four categories — infantry, vehicles, aircraft and defensive turrets. If allies have stationed forces there, you also get a per-owner breakdown of who has parked what, which is the only place in the entire game that information is visible.

What the report does not contain is worth committing to memory, because assuming otherwise has cost people armies:

A spy report shows no Titanite, no ISC, no buildings, no research levels and nothing about what they are currently building. It is a report on the garrison, and only on the garrison.

The counts are estimates, and Espionage sharpens them

The numbers you get are deliberately fuzzed. Each unit type is rolled independently — the report is not uniformly optimistic or pessimistic, so one line being too high tells you nothing about the next.

How wide the fuzz is depends solely on your own Espionage level — and every Commander starts at the roughest band below, research or none:

Espionage level	A true count of 100 reads as
0 (no research at all)	50 – 200
1	50 – 200
2	71 – 141
3	79 – 126
4	84 – 119
5	87 – 115

The band is 2^(1/level) wide in each direction. Level 1 is barely better than a guess; level 5 is close enough to plan against. Sending more spies does not help — there is no stacking, and a second report is simply a second independent roll at the same accuracy.

The Espionage research line itself is entered through a tier-1 expedition — the Commander plus a small spy escort. Completing it opens the line for purchase; owning nothing in it costs you nothing except the sharper read levels 2-5 give.

A report is a photograph

The report records what was there at the moment the spy arrived, and it never updates. It sits in your events history and can be read back at any time, and it will be just as confidently wrong a week later when they have rebuilt.

Your stored reports are what the combat simulator and the attack planner run on — the planner picks the freshest report for the base you are aiming at. The simulator can only ever know what you know, noise and staleness included. Nothing warns you that a report has aged. Check the date yourself.

Getting caught

A spy crossing an enemy perimeter is rolled against on the same geometry as a scout, at roughly half the chance — call it 2.5% at the low end and 30% against a heavily garrisoned base. A spy that is caught is destroyed outright: the 500 ISC is gone and no report is filed. The defender sees an anonymous perimeter contact.

Note the ordering, because it matters: being caught happens on the way, and it stops the report. Being detected, below, happens afterwards and does not.

Counter-intelligence

By default you are never told that you have been spied on. Learning about it is a research line of its own — Counter-Intelligence, five levels, available once you have an Observatory at level 2. At level 0 you roll nothing and hear nothing.

A spy that gets through files its report either way. What Counter-Intelligence buys you is finding out that it happened:

chance = 30% × 1.5 ^ (your Counter-Intelligence level − their Espionage level)

clamped between 5% and 75%. Evenly matched, it is a coin weighted slightly against you at 30%. Every level you hold over their Espionage multiplies your odds by half again; every level they hold over you divides them.

The top level of the line does something the others do not: it names the attacker. Below level 5, a detected spy and a destroyed scout are both anonymous — you know it happened, not who. At level 5, both events carry a name. That applies to spy detections and scout kills alike, and it is the only way to learn who has been looking at you.

What else is on the map

Three kinds of world event show up on your map, and two of them can hurt.

Sandstorms are regional and they drift, tracking a steady wind at about 75 seconds per tile. While a storm is over ground, it hides it — a storm shroud sits on top of your personal fog, and whatever you had revealed underneath comes back when the storm passes. A storm that sweeps across one of your bases damages its buildings, stepping down their performance, and it does this at most once per storm — a storm that lingers over you does not grind you down. Because the track is predictable, you get a warning about 45 minutes ahead of a storm reaching one of your bases. That foreknowledge is the only thing that makes a moving storm fair, so act on it.

Sandcrawlers roam the dune seas, and there are two of them out there. They travel under the sand, so cliffs and rock do not stop them, and they move fast — 60 seconds per tile this round. Uniquely, wormsign bleeds through fog: over ground you have revealed you see the crawler clearly, and over ground you have not you still get a faint tremor with no detail. It is the one thing on the map you are never entirely blind to. A Thumper escort cuts the risk to a force crossing sand; a lone scout trike gets swallowed whole.

Titanite eruptions are the good one. A stretch of dune sea erupts for a few hours and bases inside the radius harvest at a bonus rate. Nothing about it is dangerous.

A negative event will not hit the same Commander twice within 12 hours. Good events carry no such protection.

The two views

The world map and the globe are one surface in two projections, not two features. Everything the server is willing to show you appears on both: base markers, moving forces, scout blips, storms, wormsign, event regions, coverage circles and warning rings. What differs is how it is drawn — the globe renders a fog-clipped route in three dimensions, the flat map draws the same route as a line connecting its numbered stops on a grid, fading out where your scanners lose the trail exactly as the globe's route does.

Use whichever suits the question. The globe is better for understanding where things are in relation to each other; the flat grid is better for reading coordinates and for any device that cannot run the globe, and it is what you fall back to automatically if yours cannot.

Whichever you use, the travel time in the sidebar is the authoritative number. Distance on a sphere is deceptive, and terrain makes it more so.

Quick reference

Question	Answer
World	4 quadrants, each 20 × 20 coordinate squares
Ground grid	1024 × 512 tiles; wraps east–west, never north–south
Buildable terrain	Rock only
Minimum spacing for a new base	40 tiles
Viewing radius	Observatory 6 / Radar 10 / Command Center 14, best wins; +2 per Long-Range Optics level, cap 24
Scout cost	One Trike, no ISC
Scout pace	45 s/tile
Scout corridor / stop circle	3 tiles / 15 tiles
Stops per run / concurrent runs	5 / 5 moving
Scout intercept chance	5% → 60% by garrison; turrets count triple
Spy cost	500 ISC, one-way
Spy pace	30 s/tile
Spy intercept chance	Half the scout's
Spy report accuracy	2^(1/Espionage level) band
Spy detection	30% at equal levels, 5%–75%; level 5 names the attacker