MechaStellar VER10 Preview – Weapons

In our previous post we talked about a lot of the feedback we’ve got from playtesters in VER10 and the steps we’re taking to resolve some of the current issues. We also had a novel request to have Barrage affect the dice roll in the same way that Bullseye currently affects the die roll. Our proposed solution was to allow Bullseye to give +2d10 Shots when used, but in order to do that we’d have to rebalance the current weapons to ensure that the majority of weapons were less than 8d10 to take advantage of this request. We’ve finished up the weapon rebalance and wanted to share a few Dev insights when it came to this weapon rebalance.

The last weapon rebalance was February 2024 coinciding with VER9.4 which debuted Precision & Barrage (renamed to Bullseye & Barrage in VER10), and before that was October 2023 which was a big revamp for melee and close range weapons. While balancing units and weapons is a forever ongoing project in MechaStellar, we generally try to avoid doing a rebalance of the entire weapons armory unless we really, really need to. While balance is an important goal, constant change, especially on something as ubiquitous as weapons can be tiresome for the playerbase. .

For VER10, we initially kept all of the VER9 weapon stats, but adjusted a few items to fit the new system where both players will now be rolling attack and defense. You can read a bit more about the design process going from VER9 to VER10 on the core mechanic here.

Our initial goal with VER10 was to keep as much as we can, since it works well, while also trying to finally realize our design goal of having a unified core attack mechanic between shooting and melee. And luckily for us, the strong balance of VER9 made that fairly easy to port over and begin playtesting throughout the year. With the request to update barrage, we had to revisit many of the weapons, and while we did so we rather enjoyed the challenge of updating new weapons and to make them more distinct than they previously were.

Take for instance the beam rifle and the beam cannon. In VER9 it had the following stats:

The Beam Cannon is range 48″ 4 Shots, Rapid Fire (within 24″) -2 Shots, PEN5 DMG 400
The Beam Rifle is range 32″ 4 shots, Rapid Fire (within 16″) +1 Shot, PEN6 DMG 300

In general the beam cannon has better range and damage while the beam rifle has better armor penetration and far better suited to dogfights. This paradigm works fairly well, but in the universe of Gundam beam cannons are a mid range support weapon, and unless you’re on a very large table the rapid fire penalty will often lead to them being long range bombardment tools instead. Not a bad thing, but something a bit better for solid shell artillery rather than MS beam cannons. Likewise, for super robot shows, beam cannons are often a mid and short range weapon. So a goal when doing this rebalance was to make Rapid Fire a bonus for almost all weapons save for Sniper rifles and a few unusual missile varieties. So for VER10 our Beam cannon and Beam Rifle look like this.

NOTE: VER10 also includes a reduction in range of all weapons. It also has changed Rapid Fire to no longer be 1/2 range only, but instead a separate value listed on the profile, i.e. 24″ range, 16″ rapid fire range is R:24″|16″

Beam Cannon R:32″|20″ 5d10 RF+1d10 PEN4 DMG400
Beam Rifle R:24″|16″ 6d10 RF+1d10 PEN5 DMG300

So the beam cannon is still useful at longer ranges while becoming slightly better at rapid fire range (and the twin-linked version, common on mobile suits with RF+2 shots is even better). The beam rifle remains a better dogfight weapon with higher base shots, good rapid fire range and superior armor pen. One thing you’ll notice is that during the rebalance we had a chance to reevaluate Armor PEN on all weapons and pulled them back closer to their VER7 profiles with beam rifles being PEN 5 and beam sabers PEN 7.

We also had the opportunity to further separate kinetic and energy (beam) weapons, where armor penetration is almost exclusively for beam weapons while many kinetic weapons received a damage boost instead. This is especially true in melee weapons, where a physical sword is significantly higher damage than the beam saber which relies on its high armor penetration to deal damage.

The weapon rebalance also gave us a chance to make weapon profiles more closely match each other but diverge on either PEN or DMG. Let’s compare the beam pistol and the pistol.

Beam pistol R:20″|8″ 7d10 RF+1 Hit PEN4 DMG200 Support DEF
Pistol R:20″|8″ 7d10 RF+1 Hit PEN0 DMG400 Support DEF

The weapons are almost identical, so if you were outfitting your machine you would choose between the higher consistent damage with the kinetic pistol or go with the beam pistol for occasional spike damage from a failed Armor Save. We’ll see similar with Cannons.

Beam Cannon R:32″|20″ 5d10 RF+1d10 PEN4 DMG400
Cannon R:32″|20″ 5d10 RF+1d10 PEN0 DMG600

This is the generic cannon that is common on super robots. The artillery version will trade -200DMG for Indirect Fire.

Overall, we’re pretty happy with how weapons are looking, even if it took a long grueling time to get the full weapon rebalance completed. Now many of the different weapon profiles feeling like they have more of a distinct niche than they did before. We also got to fulfill some much older requests for people looking to have higher damage melee weapons. While the armor pen of beam weapons has dropped by 1 for most weapons, going from 3 to 5 armor saves more than makes up for it in many cases. For instance, with 3 Armor Saves on a PEN6 Beam Rifle has an 87% chance of at least 1 failed save, 50% for 2 failed saves and 12% for 3 failed saves. Meanwhile, 5 armor saves at PEN5 has a 99% chance for at least 1 failed save, 90% for at least 2 failed, 68% for at least 3 failed saves and then a 33% chance for at least 4 failed saves. Overall, a bit more deadly for some of the beam weapons.

HP is going up slightly (for Mobile Suits) as well, this is due to some work going on under the hood trying to make it easier to build some vehicle profiles like jets, tanks, and of course our eponymous Stellar warships. We’ve also changed a lot of the weighting on weapon stats, both to improve balance on mobile suits and in an attempt to make it easier to make small size weapons for the aforementioned jets and tanks (which will include Harlock and Yamato) and the upcoming small series like Aura Battler Dunbine.

Last but not least, we’ve gotten some good feedback on playtesting these new weapons and we’re happy to hear that in general Bullseye remains the go to choice for Sniper and pistol weapons, while Barrage is still chosen for machine guns, cannons and missiles. Beam rifles & Bazookas are still versatile enough to benefit from either depending on the target and the pilot. Thank you to our current playtesters and for those looking to play VER10 we’ll have the open playtest documents ready very soon.