vid87 said:
Why do they let cadets get eaten by the slow-moving Titans when their weak point are wide open? Why do they state outright that field missions in open plains mean their belts are useless, yet they don't devise caltrops, trip-wires, any secondary defense other than flares?
The titans are essentially zombies, albeit really tall ones. The primary defense against zombies in a situation where you're in the open rather than a fortified position is to rely on your superior mobility and situational awareness, and keep moving so that a big horde can't form. Caltrops do nothing to giant zombies for the same reason they do nothing to regular zombies (they don't bleed and the effect of tissue damage on their movement is negligible), and they DO use trip-wires in the one instance where they have the terrain to anchor a trip-wire to anything.
There are actually quite a few tactics that they use to dominate the titans in the way that any moderately clever society with a fortified base tends to dominate zombie hordes; funneling them into tight spaces, setting them on fire when it can be done safely, outright blowing their heads off (using artillery), etc. As mentioned in the opening episode, the things haven't been any real problem for the better part of a century because they're slow and stupid (and the heavy losses in the away teams is due to them doing some experimental/seditious conspiracy stuff that gets them killed, not an actual issue with the Titans as such).
The reason they're suddenly getting pounded in the series is that the start point is where the nature of the war changes-- some of the zombies start demonstrating immunity to what had been their standard weaknesses for years (e.g. they grow their heads back if you miss, some of them are armored, some suddenly have the intellect to open doors, attack weak points, put a hand over weak spots, etc) such that the only weapon in the human arsenal that remains remotely effective (other than the plot weapon) is the people manually going in and killing the damned things, which was previously really a worst-case last resort. The conservative faction that wants to wait for it all to blow over is only still a problem because they've only had like a month to adjust to everything going sideways suddenly (or rather for the years-earlier exception to prove it wasn't an isolated incident).
This is actually one of the things that the series is BEST at portraying, actual reasonable tactics and adaptations between two forces trying to rapidly one-up each other while bluffing that they're still the same dumb opponent they used to be. Honestly it's the half-assed narmy characters where the quality level drops, not the strategies/politics.
