As a follow-up to yesterday’s post we’d like to talk a little bit more about how sizing will affect the game. Since MechaStellar is intended to allow you to recreate a Super Robot Wars style tabletop skirmish that means we need to have someway to differentiate Mecha that are much larger than others.
In these images we see a comparison of various Mecha from the 80s, quite a few of the very popular or groundbreaking series are around 20m +/- 5m, including Tetsujin-28 (Gigantor in the US), Gundam, Marzinger and some of the Macross Valkyries to name a few. Then you have much large super robots that are 40+ meters like Zeorymer, Gekiganger-3 and Shin Getter-1. Then we have even larger robots that tend to dwarf everything else like Raideen, Daitarn 3 or the Ideon pushing 100+ meters.
MechaStellar’s goal is to let you run your favorite giant robots, we want size to be an important factor here but at the same time we don’t want it to be such a massive factor that a smaller robot simply cannot win against a larger robot. After all, many beloved series will show the smaller robot vanquishing even larger enemies including Gurren Lagann, Nadesico, and even the already gigantic Gunbuster to name a few. We’ll be trying out a few systems to decide which one we’d like to represent size disparities as a simple tabletop mechanic.
For now here’s the basic size categories we’ll be using with most units we’ve already released falling into the “Standard” category.
Small (Size 0) 0 – 10m
Aura Battler Dunbine, Escaflowne, Scopedog
Standard (Size 1) 10 – 25m
Examples: Mobile Suit Gundam, Macross, Mazinger, Gurren Lagann
Giant (Size 2) 26-49m
Examples: Getter Robo, Gaogaigar, Dangaioh
Massive (Size 3) 50-80m
Examples: Evangelion*, Shin Getter Robo, Big Zam/Neue Ziel
Colossal (Size 4) 80+ Meters
Examples: Daitarn 3, Pacific Rim Jaeger / Kaiju
*Note: The Evangelion size varies quite a bit in the TV series, between 40 and 200 meters depending on the scene. It’s first semi-official height was 40m in SRW. In the 2000s a book was released showing them to be about 80m to the top of the pylon and around 70m at the top of their head, we are keeping them in the Massive size for our MechaStellar.
MechaStellar 