MechaStellar VER9 – Combat Roles Update

Doing an overhaul of melee weapons meant having to update all of the current Mecha Unit Profiles. Whenever we have to do a pass over everything it’s also a good time to implement any other system wide changes. Today we will look at the update to the combat roles starting with the Attacker role.

This was spurred by the Attacker role. We had realized that while we had several roles that excelled at melee combat, we did not have one that was good at melee but also evasion. This could be very evasive mecha such as Eva Unit 01 or Gundam Barbatos who move with an bestial intensity as well as the humble Gouf which is no Zaku.

To that end we decided to modify the Attacker role to be a Melee and Evasive role. Previously it was a counterpart to the Raid role, which was high move and high shooting while the Attacker was high move and high melee, now Attacker would be a counterpart to Interceptor which is a shooting / evade role.

We’ve been working on the MechaStellar RPG rules (which hopefully will be ready next year). These rules allow you to build your own personal mecha without being limited to the current roles. Essentially we have to assign a point value to each of the different stats that go into a role (Shooting, Melee, Evade etc.) and ensure that each of the current roles add up to the same value.

Prior to the current update each of the roles added up to about 13 points, our problem was that if we wanted to have the Attacker role take on an Evade bonus there was no way for it to keep a decent melee bonus as well so we had to rethink our system. We played around with a few different weighting options to see if we could somehow squeeze in the evade bonus on attacker but ultimately none of them were a perfect fit.

So we increased our limit to 15points and applied a few of the different weighting ideas and now we had a attacker role we were happy with. It provided a Melee bonus of +4 and an Evade bonus of +1 putting it in-between the Battle and Melee role.

This may sound like an easy fix but it took several weeks of tossing numbers around, revising our points weighting and then testing it out both in unit creation as well on the tabletop. Fortunately we were able to put together a system that didn’t have a big departure from the previous combat role stats.

Now for those remaining roles.

The extra build points gave us a bit of flexibility to modify the existing roles a bit. The raid role will now be multi-purpose giving a +2 bonus to Shooting as well as Melee thus it could cover down on the old attacker role. Snipers got an extra boost to Sensors and Melee units got a nice boost to movement.

Battlers, Interceptors and Firepower role got an improvement to Shooting Accuracy which will help all of them quite a deal. The Battler role had been lagging behind several others as a generalist, its also the most common role we have so we wanted to make sure it didn’t feel under powered compared to the others. With an equal bonus of Shooting+3 and Melee+3 it’s not a great option to choose for those who don’t want to go all-in on Shooting or Melee.

The Firepower role in return for its higher shooting is getting a Evade-1 penalty go along with it. Firepower units will be much deadlier on the battlefield but in return it will be easier to take them out from a distance.

For Super Robots and Kaiju we are going to do an alternate version of the Firepower role which has lower shooting accuracy but a bonus action. This way our Super Robots which are overladen with weapons can bring more of them to bear.

One last thing to note, the Assault Special role is going to have a HP-1 effect to balance out it’s bonus action, so you’ll see a small HP drop on several units while a few others have been rebalanced and had their EQ slots or costs adjusted to keep their old HPs.

Summary of Combat Roles

• Attacker = Melee+4 Evade+1.
  • Delta: Melee+1, Evade+1, Move-5
• Interceptor = Shooting+2, Melee+1, Evade+1
  • Delta: Shooting+1, Melee-1, Move+2
• Battler = Shooting+3, Melee+3
  • Delta: Shooting+1
• Melee = Melee+6, Move+4
  • Delta: Move+3
• Raid = Shooting+2, Melee+2, Move+6
  • Delta: Melee+1, Move+1
• Sniper = Shooting+4, Evade-1, Sensors+2
  • Delta: Sensors+1
• (MS) Firepower = Shooting+3, Actions+1 Evade-1
  • Delta: Shooting+1, Evade-1
• (Super) Firepower = Shooting+1, Actions+2 Evade-1
  • Delta: Shooting-1, Action+1, Evade-1