MechaStellar NOV23 – Shields & Evade Overhaul

For me personally some of the most fun is when you have a favorite unit who is rolling really well and managing to evade a lot of attacks. From VER5 to VER7 Evade was in general pretty high, especially for the high mobility units, VER8 did a good job of flattening the shooting / evade range for most units so when you are playing with OYW units it was very rare you ran into a situation where a shooty unit didn’t have a reasonable chance to hit even a unit with high evade.

The most recent balance patch in October gave a nice improvement to the Battler, Interceptor and Firepower role, unfortunately it appears to have tipped the scales a bit too much onto the shooting side, especially compounded with the new Target Lock rules. In this post we’ll look at some options we considered before moving forward.

In order to tip the scale back typically that would involve either reducing accuracy by 1 across the board or improving evade by 1 across the board (or perhaps limiting it to Mobile Suits only while Super Robots and Kaiju rely on their higher HP).

Raising Evade by 1 would solve the issue, but we also don’t necessarily want all units to have improved Evade. Having a Kaiju, Guntank or Warship at zero Evade feels very appropriate. As a fallback option we could apply the change only to Mobile Suits and perhaps Super Robots while Kaiju and Warships keep their low evade but high HP pools.

On the other side reducing Accuracy is a quick fix that would reduce most units back to their Shooting values prior to the October patch. In essence, Battle and Firepower units would stay the same, while Sniper, Melee, Raid and Attacker would all drop 1 accuracy which is not ideal.

Since the two above solutions are really just two sides of one solution we had to come up with another one that ideally wouldn’t bust the game too much. Over a couple days we had a good idea come up regarding Shields. Balancing units with Shields vs units without Shields has always been a challenge over the years. This suggest had a novel solution, which was to give units without a Shield +1 Evade.

Not a bad idea, but what about melee shields, don’t they deserve +1 Evade since they have no shield block for shooting attacks? Fair. And what about units with incredibly small shields like the Dra-C, should it still retain a Shield that gives a block while also gaining the Evade bonus? All good questions. We decided to see what we could do about Shields.

For a long time we wanted to have Shields fall into 3 simple types, a small shield, a standard shield and a great shield providing +1, +2 and +3 blocks respectively. But that hasn’t been an option for a couple years since we switched to a baseline of 3 shots on most ranged weapons, since as you can imagine 3 auto blocks becomes broken very quickly. We started working on a few shield ideas and here’s what we came up with.

• A Small Shield provides +1 Block to Shooting or Melee, and gives a bonus Block vs DMG<300 (Machine guns, some missiles, etc.)

This is the current profile for a standard Shield and is now migrated down to the standard shield. Most units with Light Shields will swap to small shields, while a few like the Dra-C will keep the light shield which is shooting only. The Melee shield will actually go up to 2 Slots since it’s a steal at 1 slot for most units.

• The Standard Shield will still provides +1 Block, and then a bonus Block.

Our first idea for the bonus block was to have it apply when the attacker is within 24″. The intent here was to provide a bonus block against rapid fire range but still include the bonus block vs machine guns and beam pistols. It also makes for interesting play where that Shield wouldn’t be helpful against a Beam Sniper Rifle and creates some additional tactical choice when it comes to positioning.

Still it had two things going against it. The first was that the next shield would have a different ability and thus an inelegant solution instead of continuing the +1 Block vs X00 DMG trend. The second issue is that it creates some odd situations, for instance if a Bazooka fires at range 24″ you get a bonus block, if it fires at range 32″ you don’t. So a player might be wondering what kind of abstraction has it easier to block the bazooka while it’s closer as opposed to the attack that is further away and provides more time to react.

It also ended up being kind of a pain in the testing stages.

So instead we decided to follow the approach of the current rule. Small Shields gain a bonus block vs DMG<300 (machine guns, pistols and some missiles) standard sized shields gain a bonus block vs DMG<400 (which is a lot of weapons) and the great shield vs DMG<600 (which is most everything except Death Rays and Bazookas).

This paradigm was easier to play with and provided some tangible benefits to those with standard and great shields to compensate for the evade penalties. It also required an adjustment to various weapons who received either bonus shots or damage which we think will be a lot of fun. Here’s a comparison of HP and Weapons before and after the adjustments.

OLD Grunts HP Zaku / GM 800

• 4 hits from a machine gun
• 1-4 hits from a beam spray gun
• 1-3 hits from a beam carbine or rifle
• 1-2 hits from a beam cannon
• 1-2 hits from a bazooka
• 1-4 hits from a missile pod

New Grunts HP Zaku / GM 1400

• 7 hits from a machine gun
• 2-7 hits from a beam spray gun  (average 2)
• 1-4 hits from a beam carbine or rifle (average 2)
• 1-3 hits from a beam cannon
• 1-2 hits from a bazooka
• 1-5 hits from a missile pod

OLD Grunts Dom / Armored GM HP 1600

• 8 hits from a machine gun
• 3-8 hits from a beam spray gun (average 3)
• 2-6 hits from a beam carbine or rifle (average 2)
• 2-4 hits from a beam cannon (average 2)
• 1-2 hits from a bazooka
• 3-8 hits from a missile pod

NEW Grunts Dom / Armored GM HP 2600

• 13 hits from a machine gun
• 3-13 hits from a beam spray gun (average 4)
• 2-7 hits from a beam carbine or rifle (average 4)
• 2-6 hits from a beam cannon (average 4)
• 2-4 hits from a bazooka
• 6-9 hits from a missile pod

Cover will swap to this new paradigm and so your Gundam Ground Types and other units with small shields can gain a benefit from Cover, whereas units with full size shields will continue to have mobile cover.

Alright so now we have a new Shield paradigm and some additional evade bonuses for units without shields that were struggling. Sounds great right?

Well, this in turn pushes a domino onto Melee and Attacker units who have poor accuracy and will now struggle harder to hit a shield-less unit who just got +1 Evade. It may seem like a push / pull issues where you can’t raise shooting / evade without impacting another role but it’s not an impossible issue to fix we just have to think laterally.

A few months back we overhauled all close range weapons to make them more useful for melee and attacker types with boomerangs, whips, rocket punches etc. gaining bonus hits instead of bonus attacks. We can do the same thing but with common weapons we see on melee / attacker types.

If you noticed in the last update most of the thrown weapons had a reversal, for instance previously they may have been 5 Shots (R16″), Rapid Fire +3 Hits (R8″), instead they were flipped having 3 auto hits at range 16 and a bonus 5 shots at range 8″. This way the melee / attacker types have reliable weapons all the way at range 16″ without having to fish for critical hits.

We can do the same thing for some other weapons as well, so we’ll adjust grenade launchers and needle missiles to have hits at max range and bonus shots in RF range. This gives more tactical choice since typically the best option is usually to full throttle rather than waste time attacking (unless the target has low evade like a Guntank etc.)

On a related note to Full Throttle, we noticed that the rocket anchor was rarely more useful than just using Full Throttle so we adjusted those weapons to be a lot more valuable. Big O, Gouf and Windmill Gundam fans should be ecstatic.

On the topic of close-range weapons, our Nataku and Gouf fans have asked for the change to heat whips and dragon fangs be reversed. Not a problem! With range 8″ weapons able to be used in engagement range we can keep heat whips and dragon fangs at range 8 and allow for some shooting to go on while locked in melee.

Points Adjustments

One final note for this update. Since we were already going profile by profile to resolve the Armor 4+ issue I also took the time to adjust the points costs to simplify a few cost formulas. This has been on the to-do list for a very long time so it’s nice to get that out of the way.

The end result is no real change to Performance 1, 2, 3, or 6. Performance 5 gained an EQ slot but lost 2″ movement (which for some units became a wash). All Performance 4 units went up 10pts although some were rebalanced to maintain a previous cost anchor. Likewise since we were going through each profile we rebalanced a number of them and fixed various errors we noticed.

Related to the points cost simplification we also adjusted how Frame affects Performance, so for a few Frame 3 & 5 units you may notice their Shooting / Melee went up by 1 and their Evade went down by 1.

Oh and various errors for points costs, HP, move, etc. were fixed. You can find a summary of updates below.

Combat Stats

• Gave all units without a shield +1 Evade
• Raised HP of all grunt units a moderate amount proportional to their previous HP, raised HP a minor amount proportional to their previous HP for all other units.
• Provided a bonus for Armor values of 4+
• Adjusted penalties for when Armor exceeds Frame level

UNIT PROFILES

• Fixed errors on Tomahawk Boomerang, Big Zam, Striker Eureka (HP), Dinogeist (Evade)
• Fixed cost errors on GM Spartan (didn’t including Jamming cost), GM Striker (wrong Sensors cost)
• Simplified cost formulas.  Most units unaffected except for Performance 4 and 5 units.
• Adjusted Super Alloy Z, Gundanium Armor, Cast in the Name of God, and 12,000 Armor Plates to provide bonus armor saves instead of HP.
• Updated Tactician, Merciless Melee & Furious Fusillade

WEAPONS

• Adjusted Shields to provide bonus blocks against DMG tiers
• Adjusted most weapons to have either bonus shots or damage to compensate for the change to Shields and HP.
• Updated most Stun / Push / Pull weapons to bypass Shields
• Converted assault rifles into upgraded 2 slot weapon and gatling guns as 3 slot weapons both using the machine gun profile.  Established a separate profile for Rifle which will be used for AC units in the future.  Currently used by the Evangelion Pallet Rifle.
• Merged Railgun and Railgun sniper into one profile with the sniper being a higher slot weapon.

WARSHIPS

• Adjusted formula for EQ Slot and HP
• [AA] weapons were missing the [360] tag
• Rebalanced warship missiles so they weren’t lethal to mobile suits without significant slot investment
• Upgraded Expert Gunnery Crew

Since almost all of us are travelling for the holidays we are pushing out this balance patch early as a draft you can find here: https://mechastellar.com/ver9-drafts/

Only UC Gundam for now, we’ll do the rest along with the roster update (Gundam X, Dai-Gurren Battleship and enemy Ganmen) at the end of the month as usual.