The most common question we have gotten in MechaStellar for years has been “Why are shooting and melee so different.”
MechaStellar VER9 has been on a stable chassis first built in VER5 and refined with every version update since, with most Version updates being an overhaul to the melee system to make it either more dynamic, more balanced or simply more fun to play with.
During those years, we’ve been contemplating ways to have Shooting and Melee work the same mechanically and we finally have a way that works well and has good balance approaching the previous system.
Naturally after getting that question so often, we’ve been looking for ways to unify the combat mechanic. In VER10 both in Shooting and Melee you will roll d10s, every 5+ is a Hit and every 10 is a Crit Hit. Shooting, Melee and Evade will still continue to receive bonuses based on your Frame, Performance and Combat Role.
But first a quick history lesson.
MechaStellar Balance Focus
While we strive to keep unit profiles to be a good representation of the animated universe these shows come from we also sometimes have to sacrifice performance granularity and raw power in order to maintain game balance. That’s why your Zaku and GM (and their equivalents in AUs) are often very similar in power levels, even though you could argue that one is strictly better than the other. It’s always been a priority for us to have the mainline grunts be ‘on par’ with each other, but over the years we’ve managed to work in some mechanical differences that make them more distinct.
VER5 was out in 2020 and since then we’ve released a lot of updates and did a massive expansion on the roster, even starting to include Super Robots in 2021. We’ve also worked really hard to maintain balance, both in-universe and cross-universe games. We’re very happy with how balanced the core mechanics have become, of course optional rules and unit upgrades can still break it from time to time, the core rules function well and a finely tuned around grunt units so both players can have an enjoyable game.
But with an ambitious goal of including multiple mecha entries, as well as allowing for small and large armies there are problems. Momentum being one of them, that we continue to refine. There are also limitations with what we call Cross-Era play, in terms of Gundam this would be between Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 and Zeta Gundam 0087, where units from time periods can still fight each other and it’s not a completely lopsided match.
Unfortunately, any further than that (and even lower performance vs high performance units) and the system, specifically Shooting and Evade does not work well. For instance taking a bottom performance unit from 0079 and putting it against the best 0083 has to offer is a grueling battle for the player with who is using outdated machinery. Crits on 1s and 2s do a bit to alleviate this problem but it’s not a patchwork fix.
When it comes to the comparison mechanic, Shooting minus Evade, it leads to a quick roll (Shooting 10 vs Evade+4, need a 6+ to Evade) but it has some severe limitations. The wider the gap becomes between units, either because of Performance or a unit’s role, the harder it is for a unit to hit its target. This is fine in most cases, but for units who are specialized into melee for example, shooting is often a very unreliable action for them. With the new system in VER10, all units have the same baseline accuracy, but the number of dice and bonus hits they will have will differ. So that melee unit with a machine gun now has a much greater chance of landing a couple hits, whereas in VER9 it is mostly fishing for crits.
With the update to the core mechanic we’re hoping to enhance Cross Era play. And who knows, if it works very well, you might even be able to field a 0079 army against a Char’s Counterattack (0093) army. Only time will tell, but we look forward to trying it out.
Unified Combat Mechanics
In VER10 both in Shooting and Melee you will roll d10s, every 5+ is a Hit and every 10 is a Crit Hit. Shooting, Melee and Evade will still continue to receive bonuses based on your Frame, Performance and Combat Role. Now the question is how will this look.
In VER5 through 9, a unit might have Shooting 10, Evade+4 for instance, and these two numbers were compared to find the target number to evade an attack, in this case a 6+. Meanwhile, Melee was it’s own system, with a dice pool. A unit might have Melee 9d10 which it could split those attack into Attack and Defense, going all in on offense, or saving some in case of a counterattack.
There of course was beginner traps with this, for instance if the attacker put any dice into DEF and the defender put 0 dice into Counter ATK, then the attacker has wasted his dice. Otherwise, it worked pretty well, and allowed for melee heavy suits to function very well in melee without being so invincible you never wanted to attack them.
Since VER9 functions well, and we really like the current trade offs between different combat roles, we first tried adjusting the system without adjusting any of the numbers on the different combat roles. For instance, if previously a Battler had +3 Shooting and +3 Melee, we kept those and translated them to a new system.
I should note at this time, we were also working on splitting Melee into Melee ATK and Melee DEF stats, this way there were no more dice pools, no more newbie traps, and melee became massively faster as a result.
One of our first ideas, had all the Mech’s Shooting and Evade stats mirror Melee. Let’s say a Unit had Shooting 14, Melee 9d10 and Evade+7, we would then convert this into Shooting 9d10, Melee 9d10 and Evade 7d10.
There was also briefly talk about making Shooting / Evade a single stat, like melee, where each time you were attacked you could allocate dice between Evade and Counter-Shooting. A neat idea, but way more trouble than it’s worth (but the spirit would live on in a different mechanic later on).
This system worked decently, but we would have to do something different for weapons. If previously a machine gun made 7 Shots, well, what would it do now. It could be bonus dice, but you would very quickly run into the 10d10 dice pool cap. To avoid that you could have weapons give bonus hits. Using the existing weapon balance we had, we did a quick pass and subtracted 3 from all the weapons and wound up with Machine Guns giving +4 Hits and Beam Rifles giving +1 Hit.
There were two problems with this approach, the first was it made Rapid Fire a bit odd. A beam rifle would be +1 Hit and another +1 Hit in Rapid fire range, but then a Beam Carbine would be +1 Hit, +2 Hits in Rapid Fire range. Mathematically, it wasn’t that big of a deal, but intuitively it felt a bit weird, since for many years we were used to weapons being 3 Shots, RF+1 Shot, or 4 Shots RF+2 Shots etc.
The second problem was a major one. It GREATLY favored units that invested their equipment slots into weaponry. It was such a large bonus, that any unit that didn’t invest heavily into equipment (which refers to almost every common Mobile Suit) felt underpowered. It also felt a bit odd, that a units weapon was far more important than it’s performance since weapon’s guaranteed Hits while Performance only gave dice (60% chance of hitting).
After much rubbing of heads, someone had the brilliant (and eminently obvious) idea to flip things. Performance would give bonus Hits / Defense while weapons would establish the number of dice being rolled.
The first reaction was, “Wait, didn’t we do this before” and after looking through some old files, yes, this is how Melee worked in VER6. A heat hawk was ATK 7d10, DEF 2d10. The other obvious conclusion was, “well yes, Shooting has been like this for a while”, because the target is rolling the dice some of us weren’t making the connection that Machine Gun 7 Shots was no different than Machine Gun 7d10.
What can I say. Sometimes you get so laser focused on problem solving you manage to ignore some very obvious conclusions lol.
So we got to work on some quick prototyping. Keeping all the Role bonuses from before, but instead of bonus dice these would be bonus Hits / DEF. For reference a Battler was Shooting +3 Hits, Melee +4 Hits, Evade +2 DEF. Shooting weapons, were initially kept the same, so 7 Shot Machine Guns became 7d10 and 4 Shot Beam Rifles became 4d10.
Now what to do with Evade? One of favorite ideas in MechaStellar, which originated in VER3, was having the attacker declare a target and the Defender gets to roll to Evade, giving a bit of agency on whether or not they got hit. It’s a beloved mechanic, and the person who came up with it was a genius in that moment for perfectly encapsulating the feel of dodging attacks in a mobile suit, and so we’re loathe to lose it.
But who says we have to lose it completely? Why not let the Defender roll as well?
We should let the Defender retain that agency of avoiding a deadly strike, or completely failing Evade and having their cockpit vaporized lol. So both the attacker and defender will roll, not unlike how Melee operates now. But where do the dice come from?
At this some point someone had the good idea of establish a generic dice pool. The idea was that shooting weapons would have 5d10 by default (much to my elation, Beam Rifles would finally be elevated to 5 shots!) and Evade would be 5d10 by default. So every time an attack occurred, the attacker grabbed their weapons ATK dice and the Defender grabbed their Defense dice.
- Example: Attack uses its Beam Rifle 5d10 and shoots the Defender who had 5d10 Evade
- The Attacker has +4 Hits when Shooting, the Defender has +2 DEF when Evading
- The Attacker gets [2,3,5,5,8] = 3 Hits + 4 = 7 Hits
- The Defender gets [1,4,6,7,7] = 3 DEF + 2 = 5 DEF
- 2 Hits gets through and now the target has to roll 2 Armor Saves or take catastrophic damage from the Beam Rifle
It was a great prototype and worked well. It also opens up a lot of design space for us. We could use this profile instead of traits like Chogokin Armor, Tracked Vehicle, Getter Vision etc.
Having a dedicated Defense profile, much like a weapon, means we can modify it and allow for upgrades. We could have some units have higher or lower than 5d10, perhaps Guntank was only Evade 2d10 on account of it having treads instead of legs, perhaps we could give Getter-2 a reroll ability to reflect it’s incredible speed.
We also decided to use this Defense profile as a way to portray the different defenses between MS, Super Robots and Kaiju. When it comes to combat stats, MS had the best Evade and worst HP while Kaiju were the opposite with Super Robots in between.
We decided to take those background Evade boosts and put them in the dice pool instead, so you can look at a unit and instantly know where it functions well and where it doesn’t. Mobile Suits excel at Evade but are weak in melee, no surprise to anyone who’s seen a Beam Saber cleave through mobile suits, meanwhile, Kaiju are exceptional at melee defense and rather poor at Evade, no surprise to Kaiju fans as the giant god lizard walks through powerlines while getting pelted by tanks shells. The final baseline looks like this:
- MS Evade 8d10 Melee DEF 4d10
- Super Robots – Evade 6d10 Melee DEF 6d10
- Kaiju (& Super Heavy Robots) – Evade 4d10 Melee 8d10
From there we had even more playtesting to do. Deciding how to balance shooting and melee weapons against this baseline and overcoming many headaches implementing Shields. The rewards for this testing was that we had established a fairly tight balance, almost on par with VER9 but with much more variability, a natural consequence of doubling the dice rolls involved. But we were happy with it, and more importantly had a lot of fun.
Having a tight balance between Attack and Defense also meant that the focus of each unit turn would be on whether or not they would be spending Momentum. And with momentum generation being much more rare in VER10, this becomes a very important tactical decision each turn. We’ll talk more about Momentum in tomorrow’s post.
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