Cogitator Manual

Documentation

Cognitae is a free community tool for Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus Guild Raids. Connect your guild once and it keeps the ledger that matters — every token and bomb your members spend, who's pulling their weight, and where your damage goes — plus public, anonymised community rankings. This page explains how it all works.

Overview

Cognitae reads your guild's raid data from the official Tacticus API and turns it into a command console. There are two ways to use it:

Your guild dashboard — sign in, connect your keys, and get leaderboards, per-player stats, attack telemetry, trends, and a boss planner for your own guild.
Public tools — the Raid Meta board and the Character Tier List are open to everyone, no account needed. They're built from anonymised data pooled across guilds.

Want to look before you commit? Open the live demo — a full dashboard populated with sample data.

Getting Started

Setup takes under a minute:

Create an account at the sign-up page (email + password) and confirm your email.
Connect your Tacticus account — add your Player ID and Personal API Key so Cognitae can see your roster. You can do this during sign-up or later from Settings.
Bind your guild (officers) — one leader or co-leader adds the Guild API Key once. Everyone else's data then shows up automatically; not every member needs to sign up.

If a leader has already bound your guild with its API key, signing up with your Player ID is enough — you'll be matched to the guild automatically.

API Keys

All keys come from the official Tacticus API portal at api.tacticusgame.com. Treat them like passwords — a key lets a tool read data, so never share one publicly.

Player ID

Found at the bottom of the Tacticus in-game settings page. It looks like TAC-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX and identifies your account so your hits are matched to you.

Personal API Key

Your own operative key. It lets Cognitae read your personal roster and progress. It is read-only and cannot change anything on your account.

Guild API Key

Only a guild leader or co-leader can generate this. It grants read-only access to the guild's Guild Raid data — the single key that lights up the whole guild dashboard. You only need one per guild.

The Dashboard

Your guild's console is organised into a set of views:

Overview — the season at a glance: guild damage, active roster, the current boss, and week-over-week deltas.
Leaderboards — members ranked by damage, with rank movement and faction.
Performance — a weighted index beyond raw damage (efficiency per token, consistency), so a grinder on lower-rarity units still gets credit.
Players — the full roster as a dense, sortable stat line, exportable to CSV.
Attacks — raw telemetry: every token and bomb, who threw it, damage dealt, and kill credit.
Analytics & Trends — damage by boss, token usage, and season-over-season trajectory per player.
Boss Planner — see below.

Data refreshes when the dashboard is opened and when your guild's API key changes.

Boss Planner

The Boss Planner helps officers coordinate a season before it's spent. It maps each boss to the team comps that perform best against it — derived from your guild's pooled raid history — and lets you assign players to bosses, tag the comps to bring, and hand out a "Boss → bring this Comp" worksheet in-app or export it to Discord/CSV. Side bosses, preferred comps, and token budgets are all accounted for.

My Roster

My Roster is your personal build-planning console. It measures your own operatives against the team comps the community actually fields, so you always know what to build next. It needs your Personal API Key (see above) to read your roster, and lives in the dashboard sidebar under My Roster.

Meta-Fit Board

One card per meta team. Each shows the five seats — the core units the comp is built around, plus the popular flex options for the remaining slots — and marks which you can already field. A single amber line calls out the one upgrade that moves that team forward, and complete teams read Team Ready. Click a card to expand the full breakdown: every unit's rank, stars, and ability levels against what the meta expects.

Ready at — your target milestone

The Ready at toggle sets the bar you're planning toward — Diamond III, Adamantine I, or Adamantine II. A unit counts as ready when it reaches that rank, hits Mythic stars, and has its important abilities levelled to the meta target. Raise the bar and the whole board re-scores instantly.

Level Next

A ranked to-build list: the specific upgrades that unlock the most meta value, weighted by how close each one already is — so the top of the list is the best return on your next resources. Focus a team on the board and Level Next narrows to just that team's units.

The yardstick is the same anonymised, cross-guild pool that powers the public Raid Meta board — real community lineups, no names.

Tokens & Bombs

Cognitae tracks how many raid tokens and bombs each member has spent and estimates their current available count and cooldown.

Token counts are an estimate. The Tacticus API doesn't expose a live token balance, so Cognitae reconstructs it by replaying your raid log. It's usually very close, but we flag confidence rather than pretend it's gospel — features that depend on it are gated on how confident the estimate is.

Raid Meta & Tier List

Two public pages, open to anyone, built from anonymised data pooled across many guilds over recent seasons — real lineups, but no names, no scores, and no guild identity ever leave the server.

Raid Meta

The Raid Meta board shows, per boss, the team comps the community actually fields. Each comp is shown as a core team (the units most guilds run together) plus the popular flex options for the remaining slot, its most-used Machine of War, and a rating tier. A comp only appears if at least 3 distinct guilds have fielded it, and very-low-scoring attacks are filtered out so the board reflects real attempts. It covers the current and upcoming seasons, plus a few predicted future seasons (the boss rotation is a fixed cycle).

Character Tier List

The Tier List ranks operatives S–F by the performance-weighted strength of the teams they're fielded in, pooled across guilds over the last few seasons, with tags for tier movement and niche picks.

Privacy & Data

Your API keys are read-only and used only to fetch your guild's raid data.
The public Meta and Tier List are fully anonymised — only aggregate, name-free lineups are ever published.
Your guild's data stays your guild's. The CSV export means you're never locked in.
See the Privacy Policy for the full detail.

Support

Cognitae is a free passion project by a solo developer, and feedback is genuinely welcome. Found a bug, or a number looks wrong? Want a feature?

Ready to bind your guild? Create an account or open the live demo.