The first 24 hours have had just under 3 hearts go, which is about the same rate Taranis was seeing at 7 controls (and much slower than it was seeing at 6 controls). Some of that is from increased activity - from EDDN reports, the system appears about 5 times busier today than it was last week.
A very quick model accounting for the activity (and ignoring the rate data from Taranis as unrepresentative) roughly matches up with the above-linear curve from XSF's experiments on bond payouts; a curve of resistance proportional to controls ^ 1.5 is a vaguely decent fit for both, certainly within the margins of error.
This gives some problems with planning in that how quickly the Titan falls depends on whether everyone can be confident that it is the final week.
Controls | Resistance | Days to fall (heavy attack) | Days to fall (normal attack) |
1 | 1.0 | 0.6 | 2.9 |
2 | 2.8 | 1.6 | 8.2 |
3 | 5.2 | 3.0 | 15.0 |
4 | 8.0 | 4.6 | 23.1 |
5 | 11.2 | 6.5 | 32.3 |
6 | 14.7 | 8.5 | 42.4 |
7 | 18.5 | 10.7 | 53.5 |
8 | 22.6 | 13.1 | 65.3 |
9 | 27.0 | 15.6 | 77.9 |
10 | 31.6 | 18.3 | 91.3 |
So under a heavy attack, 5 controls should be okay as a target to reduce to, maybe 6 since it'll have taken some damage on the way down - everyone working on reduction then switches to attacking the Titan in the final week. But if you can't guarantee it being done in one week, you can't do a heavy attack - it could fall in two weeks at eight controls, but the second week it would probably have some Alerts ignored in the first week mature [1], and then get tougher.
On the other hand, holding the Titan at 10 controls might be easier than reducing it to 6 controls ... but would need to be maintained for three months while the smaller forces available when containment is also required gradually wore it down.
The numbers don't look great either way, of course. Leigong was incredibly weak structurally; Taranis we got lucky with and it was also relatively weak structurally. From here onwards we should be expecting months per Titan.
[1] This is where the precise connectivity of the inner core starts to matter. Some Titans might find themselves unable to place Alerts for multiple weeks due to the containment, others might find their Alerts get bogged down in multi-week Invasions, and therefore a multi-week attack would be possible. Sometimes it might be desirable to allow Alerts or Invasions to persist a little to keep a Spire from attacking itself. Sometimes the right strategy might even be to get it down to 8, do as much damage as possible knowing it's going to grow to 13 again at the end of the week, then push it back down to 8 again over the next couple of weeks. This is all unknown territory and highly speculative; everyone will learn a lot from Oya, I think.
That's a nice bonus in that if you're absolutely certain it can be done this week you don't need to worry so much about continuing containment, but I suspect will be relatively rare. The only benefit is fewer residual controls to clear up afterwards, which there appears to be no urgency on anyway. And if you're wrong about the destruction schedule you might regret not fighting the Alerts anyway.
