VER10 Playtest Feedback

We’re still working on VER10, while we were hoping to get an open playtest copy out by the end of July, we’ve compiled some great feedback from some of our playtesters that we wanted to review and integrate first. Below you’ll find a quick summary of that feedback.

Damage

Resolution status: Fixed.

VER10 changes a lot of things so we’ve had to tweak the existing weapon profiles more than a few times. At one point we decided to try out doing damage in increments of 50s for high rate of fire weapons and a few others, so a Machine Gun might do 200 or 250 damage for instance.

Around 80% of our playtesters did not enjoy this. Around half like to use d10 dice to represent damage which works fine for damage in increments of 100, but not for 50s. The remainder didn’t enjoy the extra mental math while playing. A Bazooka doing 650 DMG per shot had players pulling out their phones when 6 shots landed.

So Damage is reverting back to increments of 100s. Which is going to be a good thing for the updated Iron Wall Skill.

Armor Penetration

Resolution status: Fixed.

With changes to how armor saves work, high ARM PEN weapons tend to be a lot stronger so we have rebalanced many of the weapons (mostly upgraded ones) to reflect that.

Pilot Skills – Flash & Iron Wall

Resolution Status: Fixed

In the previews we talked about Flash giving +5 Crit Range on Defense while Iron Wall gave a flat +5 DEF. One thing we hadn’t accounted for, was the logistics of play when it comes to the Flash Skill.

So the Flash Skill allows you to activate it after rolling. The problem arises when it comes to counting up DEF and then deciding to use the Flash skill. A lot of players prefer to pick up dice while they’re counting, picking up a 5+ or 10 as they tally up their total DEF. After picking up the dice they may decide to use the Flash skill, but now they’ve forgotten which of the dice they picked up were regular DEF (5+) and which were Crit DEF (10) since the Crits would get no benefit from +5 Crit Range.

We had revised the wording to make it work with this player habit, but ultimately the wording was pretty clunky and we got a lot of questions about it. So like with all things in MechaStellar, we apply Occam’s razor so the simpler the better.

The Flash Skill will take over the flat +5 DEF bonus.

Iron Wall Skill will instead be a 1/2 DMG skill (Round up to the nearest 100) when being attacked. So far our Super Robot players prefer this one a bit more since it allows them to weather a storm of machine guns and bazookas evenly.

Momentum Shifts

Resolution status: Ongoing

The initial feedback has been that more playtesters like the comeback mechanic of going from 0 to 3 Momentum in a pinch. A common complaint (including among the design staff) is that it feels a little too gamey when it comes to the interactions between Zeal and Momentum shifts.

Zeal allows you to burn Momentum to gain actions, so clever players (and a certain designer…) will drop from 3 to 0 Momentum on their turn with Zeal, then immediately move forward to recapture 2-3 Momentum and still have a net benefit afterwards.

We need to think this one over a bit, it’s not necessarily a bad thing but it does feel a little too gamey. We may raise the cap on Momentum shifts to 5 or 6, or we may limit to the Mission Commander without any Momentum caps.

Pilot Bonuses

Resolution Status: Ongoing

Players still like the Barrage and Bullseye (formerly named Precision) mechanic.

Bullseye is very well liked and a few players have asked that Barrage have a similar mechanic that affects the die itself instead of being a bonus hit. We’ll talk about some solutions to this in a follow-up post.

Oh, and in other good news we had a Tier 1 vs Tier 3 battle that was somewhat close. Something only possible in VER10.