Unless you're high up in an alliance or have paid for one yourself and lost it on the alliances behalf no alliance is going to toss you a titan. No corp has hundreds of titans lying around either. PL is rumoured to have ~20 on unsubbed accounts but thats the biggest stockpile.

The statements in the article disagree with your numbers. It was stated that one side had lost 18-23 titans and had destroyed more than 40 titans on the other side, with "more to come".

I guess we could debate semantics over what "lying around" means in this case, but it seems to me that the big corps have access to a large amount of titans if they are losing them in those numbers. They don't even seem to be particularly concerned about it.

Some members of those alliances still certainly have titans. But the alliances themselves don't have them laying around to redistribute to those who lost them and it will be difficult for them to replace them since the build time on a titan is over 2 months each and there are not that many builders in game capable of making them.

I wasn't supporting the notion that corporations have "hundreds" of titans sitting around waiting to be activated. I'm just saying that I would double or triple your number and I would be more likely to agree.

The last report I saw suggested over 70 titans destroyed. You don't commit that many highly expensive ships to a battle unless you can replace them, or you are really really desperate to keep that system.

Also, keep in mind that this is apparently just another skirmish in a war that's been waging since October where dozens of Titans have been lost so far.

I'm getting the impression you might not play the game actively. With that in mind let me assure you that as both a player and a super capital pilot that yes they are used without easy ways to replace them regularly. Even if you can afford to replace them straight away build time cuts into that an no alliance can afford to have 70 titans sitting around waiting as replacements. The side that dropped sov in this has had near immunity with using their super capitals as the other side was more risk adverse with them. The other side decided that this was the time to go all in and they happened to win. One of the sides is believed to have a small cache of titans for rainy days. The other side isn't.

Dozens is also high for how many titans have been lost in this conflict. It's been going on for a while but from what I can remember the number is actually less than 12 up to this point with no other real super on super fights.

Another point is that at this level most of the people are just looking to finally use their titans in a fight. When you fly a titan for most alliances almost all you will ever do is bridge other fleets so its not hard to convince titan pilots to get into a fight.

You're changing my words to fit your beliefs. I never said the large alliances have even dozens. Only one alliance is believed to have a decent stock pile of alliance available titans. And even thats just a rumour. You can say that this doesn't mesh with them using them if you want but the fact remains.

To answer you last question it's because it is a LOT of work to build them and not fun work either and it is extremely expensive to get into building them so the number of people that do it is limited and the people that do it tend to do it when there is orders for them and it'd be pretty well known if one entity was offering to buy none stop production.

PL is believed to have a decent cache(~20) the other alliances involved don't. I'd be amazed if the others had even one or two spare ones each, best case they convince a few inactive titan pilots to log on and give theirs to someone that lost one in the short term while they build a replacement for them.

>why not spend it all on building the biggest ships in the game?

Because only a handful of people can fly them and they are almost never useful. It's much better to spend your resources on smaller ships that everyone can use and get 2000 pilots out there not worried about dying.

Flying a Titan often times has more to do with who you know rather than skill progression and amassing wealth, which can take 2-3 years minimum.

Even if someone has only been playing six months, if they are competent, highly trusted, and they fit in, being provided with a Titan and a character to fly it with is a fairly common occurrence.

I'd say it's extremely uncommon. Only a handful of alliances can actually afford to pay for multiple titans and I can't think of any of those that would give one to a player thats less than a year old(most of those wouldn't even accept a player that was less than a year or two old).

You're right; a one year minimum is a lot more realistic than six months, strictly from an experience perspective.

When you take trust into account though, giving the best friend of an already-trusted player a bunch of high value assets, despite the fact they've only been playing for a year, makes a lot more sense than giving those same assets to some player who's been in alliance 4 or 5 years, but nobody really knows them well.

Also, I would argue that at least half of all players with Titans are heavily subsidized. There are organizations that are so obscenely wealthy that such things aren't a very big deal at all.