Titan: Infiltration - Facility and Outpost Units

Light Military Facility

Medium Military Facility

Heavy Military Facility

Whilst military facilities do not directly contribute to the operation and expansion of the RTN in the same way reactor, production, and research facilities do, they nonetheless fulfil an invaluable service. They have an above average number of RTN interfaces, on a par with a command centre, and they are exceptionally hard to kill! This is owing to an increased number of component and weapon slots and greatly increased operational tolerances regarding power and heat management.

They are typically used to fortify strategically important areas, either geographically or from the perspective of the RTN mesh topology. In addition to affording considerable protection to other units in range, they can smooth hot spots on the RTN mesh to allow power to flow more freely where it is most needed.

As with all other facilities and outposts, if you can get close enough by punching a hole through their defences, military facilities can be fully explored and attacked from within, although you should expect to encounter a much-increased combat resistance inside to make the formidable weapons systems outside.

Locating the historical artifacts in these facilities is one of the hardest things you will need to do in the campaign!

Light Production Facility

Medium Production Facility

Heavy Production Facility

Apart from a small subset of mobile units the command centre can manufacture, the production facility is responsible for all mobile unit production throughout the entire engagement. Production requests are submitted to the facility via any of the outposts responsible for mobile unit management with the outpost typically selecting the closest production facility under the least load.

The facility maintains a schedule of works for all requests submitted by all outposts and, by default, they are processed in the order they are submitted, although any given build request can be reprioritised to the top of the list to get rushed through.

As a given build is nearing completion, the facility will request an allocation of power from its closest, least loaded reactor facility (which may well not be the same one powering the requesting outpost). The reactor will reserve the requested amount of energy and transfer it over the RTN to the production facility. Once the unit is built, it is then dematerialised and transmitted over the RTN again to the requesting outpost where it undergoes final re-materialisation and assigned its initial combat orders.

If any RTN interface connections become oversubscribed due to power demands of downstream facilities and outposts, the speed with which mobile unit related energy transfers take place may well decline, unless it has been prioritised above servicing operational power. In this case, mobile unit builds will continue to operate at 100% but there may not be sufficient power to sustain high load when downstream buildings are under heavy attack and have many systems operational.

Light Reactor Facility

Medium Reactor Facility

Heavy Reactor Facility

In terms of criticality, the reactor facility is only second to the command centre. The efficient extraction and distribution of geothermal energy is the primary resource to manage across the battlefield, which is supplemented with secondary energy reserves from wind farms.

It is usually the second facility built but don’t be tempted to rush the process and build adjacent to the command centre just to get it operational as quickly as possible! The efficiency of the reactors is, in part, driven by the thickness and composition of the crust at a given location. Equipping your deployment bot with an environmental scanner (and upgrading that scanner as quickly as possible) will start to build a resource heat map that shows you the optimal build sites as well as those best avoided. Choosing the correct location can double or even triple the amount of power a reactor can provide per unit time!

Be sure to also think about the placement of your reactors as your forces expand across the island. As all facilities and most outposts have at least three interfaces, as much as possible you want to plan for multiple, diverse routes of power to each building. Having a long chain of buildings stretching across the island may help you cover territory more quickly, but what happens if one building in that chain is lost and you have no alternate paths? Suddenly you have several facilities and outposts, potentially behind enemy lines, running on internal power only which may be enough to keep the lights on for five minutes or so.

Light Research Facility

Medium Research Facility

Heavy Research Facility

The only conventional means of progressing through the tech tree and expanding the array of technology available to your team is by undertaking research and that requires the construction of research facilities. In line with the ECZ rules of engagement, you must go on to win that campaign to retain any research undertaken in any given campaign. If your team loses, all research gained is forfeit. Additionally, you can acquire research from the black market prior to descending from orbit – the technology still needs to be acquired in order (you can't just jump to the latest and greatest) but you do get to retain it no matter the outcome planet side.

Much the same as production facilities, research activities are added to a work queue and are processed in the order they are added. As with production facilities, research can be prioritised and pushed to the top of the queue but if it's ultra-urgent, it can be distributed across all research facilities. This greatly accelerates the process but comes at a cost to other research activities in progress.

As with all other units, when the research facility is actively researching, it will draw considerably more power than when it's simply in an idle state.

Research can be undertaken either from the tech tree map on the command bridge or from the HUD when selecting any unit. In both cases, the research is automatically assigned to the facility with the least load at that time. Once a research task completes, the tech is immediately available to all production facilities and can be used for construction. Existing units are not upgraded unless they are garrisoned and told to do so.

All configuration profiles for units will automatically select the most advanced version on any weapon or component available, assigned to a given slot.

Light Stockpile Facility

Medium Stockpile Facility

Heavy Stockpile Facility

The stockpile facility is very much a strategic tool. It is used to securely store pre-created mobile units ready for rapid deployment in response to threats. It serves to smooth out the impact on power draw when large numbers of units are required quickly as they have been pre created and ‘cached’ during periods of low demand.

When needed, the mobile units can either be re-materialised directly by the stockpile facility or transported via the RTN to any suitable outpost for re-materialisation. While there is a load on the RTN to transfer the energy pattern, this is considerably lower than the energy required to perform the initial build and the units are transported to where they are most needed much faster than it would take to build them from scratch or pull them in from other areas.

Critically, the units in storage are impervious to damage as long as the facility remains operational. The facility can be configured to perform an emergency dump of its stored units to other stockpile facilities or, indeed, outposts, should it become critically damaged and is at risk of failing.

A word of caution, however, is that if a stockpile facility should be sequestered by enemy forces by hacking, they will gain access to all stockpiled units in addition to the facility once they connect it to their RTN. In most cases, it would be preferable to initiate self-destruct than allow a stockpile facility to fall into enemy hands.