In our previous post we talked about some of the weapon changes in broad strokes. Let’s look at a few items in-depth now.
Shooting vs Melee weapons
Since MechaStellar VER10 is unifying the Attack mechanic for Shooting and Melee, we had to do the same for Shooting and Melee weapons, which in previous versions had different weighting assigned to their game balance. After a few months of work we got to a good spot where shooting and melee weapons were balanced against each other using the same weighting criteria for their combat stats (range, attacks, armor pen, damage, traits, etc.).
That said there were always some weapons that blurred the lines a bit. Since MechaStellar VER4 through 9 had shooting and melee both as actions a unit could take every turn, we often looked for ways to give melee units a chance to do something with their shooting action. Thus weapons like heat whips and beam boomerangs became shooting weapons. In VER10 with only one combat action, we no longer had that constraining factor and now these weapons can be melee type weapons again, and receive the superior melee bonus from certain units.
Damage Ranges
This was mentioned in our last post as well, but Armor Penetration is mostly for [E]nergy only weapons. This design shift allowed us to up the damage (or attacks) on a lot of other weapons making cannons, missiles and especially melee weapons have more of a niche than they did before. We’ve gotten a lot of requests in last year or so to increase damage on melee weapons and now those players are in luck. Heat weapons do more damage, and standard swords do very large amounts of damage which will be perfect if you love to use super robots.
Support ATK / DEF
VER10 has been looking for small efficiencies to speed up gameplay, one of those was to cut down on die rolling in some areas (since overall, die rolling has doubled with both the attacker and defender rolling now). Machine Gun Overwatch became an obvious candidate for this.
Whereas this used to be a way to get a few shots in before you got pulverized in melee, in VER10 it would lead to A LOT of extra rolling. So early on we decided to scrap Overwatch on machine guns and similar weapons.
In their place we came up with the concept of Support ATK and Support DEF. While these are considerably different than their SRW incarnations we thought it would be a fun and useful addition to the system. Support ATK would provide bonus hits and Support DEF would provide bonus defense provided both the ally and the enemy were within range.
We liked this a lot since it encouraged units moving in squads, for example having 3x Zaku IIs moving together and staying within 12″ of each other so they could receive a nice boost to attack. That boost is often enough to tip the scales in their favor and potentially one shot an enemy if they get lucky on their attack roll. It also has the nice added effect of making the new Morale Rout mechanic work well due to unit placement.
It also gives us a bit more flexibility in design by making some weapons stand out, having Gundam Sandrock’s beam SMG be a Support DEF instead of a Support ATK weapon. And let’s units with multiple support weapons like Gundam Heavyarms or the Zaku Half-Cannon be one-man support units.
Vulcans
Vulcans proved to be the 2nd most difficult item to balance. We spent a long time trying to devise a system where vulcans would be auto-hit weapons, similar to Needle Missiles / Anti-Air missiles in VER9, with a profile of Range: 16″ and 6-8 Auto Hits.
We ran into two issues, the first being that this profile didn’t work too well with the weighting values we assigned to each stat, so to try and make it on par with other weapons it would either have to have extra traits (like Support ATK or Reroll 1s) or extra hits such as 10-12 Auto Hits. This brings us to issue number two.
Auto-hit weapons became extremely good once one player figured out they could combine it with Finishing Blow to immediately shred grunts. And so the GM’s vulcans instantly became the Zaku slayer. After a couple weeks and no headway we eventually decided to have vulcans mirror the machine gun profile but lower damage and higher shots.
Now they have their own niche, as well as variants with machine cannons, gatling vulcans and beam spot guns, and are often best used to finish off a foe. Although, some Skilled / Ace pilots like Amuro can still pull off a finishing blow with them.
Shields
Shields were the hardest item to balance. In VER 4 through 9, Shields gave a bonus DEF (Block) when being attacked but in exchange they lowered your Evasion chance. In these versions you would compare the attacker’s shooting accuracy (i.e. 10) versus your Evade (+4) to determine the number you would need to roll, (6+ on each d10 to dodge). So in this way, we balanced out the bonus Block from the shield by providing a penalty, +1 Block at the expense of -10% Evade chance may or may not be a worthy trade depending on the weapon you are defending against.
In VER10 however, that tradeoff would no longer work. Since Evade and Melee Defense, are now bonus success, rather than a chance, it wouldn’t make sense for a Shield to give +1 DEF (Block) and also give your Evade score -1 DEF. So we had to figure out a new trade off for Shields.
Over a long period (~6 months) we tried different options with Shields, and also a few where we removed the Shield penalty altogether. We wanted a Shield mechanic that supported units who prefer to Guard, instead of Dodge, and ideally in the future would support an optional module for Shield breaks which are rather common in Mobile Suit Gundam.
Our most successful idea and easiest to implement idea was to have Shields provide bonus dice (and no penalty) to Evade and Melee Defense dice pools. A Shield might be +1d10 Evade and Melee Defense, a Great Shield might be +2d10 Evade and Melee Defense.
While it worked well in terms of gameplay, and make it easy to do shield upgrades, conceptually it didn’t work out. In this system, the best person Evading was the one with the biggest Shield, so your GM Guard Custom had more Evade dice than the nimble GM Intercept Custom, which of course is the opposite of Intuitive. It also wound up with Dodge being the superior choice for Shield units. So back to the drawing board.
We finally settled on a system that is similar to previous Versions while providing some utility for upgrade paths on Shields. In this system taking a Shield would give bonus DEF based on their [S] value. So a Small Shield [S1], standard Shield [S2] and a tower Shield [S3] would give +1, +2 and +3 DEF respectively. Meanwhile, these Shields would have a penalty to your Evade dice, so while you got more reliable blocks you had less chance for Crits.
We spent a lot of time playing around with what the Evade penalty should be, and how much it should cost for increasing or decreasing an evade die (which also applies to slower tracked vehicles like the Guntank or Getter-3) and how this point weighting applies to other important stats like Performance. We eventually found a good spot for that and Shields started to feel right. Here’s some example stats.
Mobile suit – no shield – Evade 8d10 (best at Dodging)
Mobile Suit – [S1] combat shield – Evade 6d10 (heavy, but a free upgrade keeping the unit cheap)
Mobile suit – [S1] small shield – Evade 7d10 (points investment for better agility, you’ll see these more often in Zeta)
Mobile Suit – [S2] Shield – Evade 6d10 (significant points investment, usually used on the GM Command shields and most Gundams. Guard is usually superior but sometimes you will want to use Dodge.)
Mobile Suit – [S2] Heavy Shield – Evade 5d10 (cheaper version of the S2 shield, used on our cost efficient GMs. At this point, Guard is almost always the better choice over Dodge)
Mobile Suit – [S3] Tower Shield – Evade 3d10 (powerful but heavy shield)
MechaStellar 