MechaStellar Roster Update – SEP2024 – Space Battleship Yamato

For this month’s MechaStellar update we have Space Battleship Yamato (Uchuu Senkan Yamato) both the classic series from 1974 and the 2199 revival from 2012. You can find the profiles under warships on the VER10 page: https://mechastellar.com/ver10-drafts/

This month also sees several updates to the VER10 draft rules. VER10 main focus is unifying the core attack mechanic so Shooting and Melee follow the same rules. While we’ve gotten good feedback so far on the core mechanics, some items have needed a lot more fine tuning of the balance which you can read about below.

The biggest change for combat is moving Counter and Finishing Blow out of the Level 1+ Pilot abilities and making it a universal ability for all units. Counter has been further reduced by making it -3 Hits, and also requiring [M-1] to activate.

Finishing Blow is available to all units, in response to several users providing feedback that machine gun units are remarkably more powerful as skilled pilots with Finishing Blow to the point of almost requiring a pilot upgrade to use them effectively. We’re still a little wary of Finishing blow getting out of hand, since it can be an automatic grunt killer, but we’re willing to give it a shot in the meantime.

Barrage and Guard have dropped down to 1d10 instead of 2d10. However, Target Lock has been expanded to also include Barrage and Guard so they are now on an even playing field with Bullseye / Dodge.

Support ATK / DEF got a minor boost where solo units can use E[X]plosives like Fire Support Missiles or Needle Missiles to boost their own Attack or Defense. This is useful if you’re running Gundam Heavyarms far from any allies, and also a nice trick for any Super Robot with a single intercepting missile like Great Mazinger or the forthcoming Raideen and Daitarn 3.

Momentum shifts have been updated to be more flexible, changing the [M<3] and [M>3] to [M<5] and [M>5] but capping the bonus at one per Turn to try and avoid the ‘gameyness’ that came with using Zeal then immediately going for 2 Momentum shifts. If this proves too weak, we may upgrade Momentum shifts to [M+2] later on.

Last but certainly not least, the scoring for Simple Battle has been updated. We’ve finalized some point weighting on Victory Points, which in turn caused a rebalance of several defensive items (Shields, Luna Titanium, Gundanium, Chogokin Z, etc.) and some points adjustments on several units. For scoring a unit’s Performance will now affect it’s Victory points, Frame has also gone up as well with Frame 1/2/3/4/5 = VP 1/2/4/6/7.

With VER10 going into open playtest last month we’ve spent most of our time on testing and balancing and so haven’t been able to update as many profiles to VER10 as we would have liked to, including Yamato where some additional units from 2199 will be released next month along with the Gatlantis Empire.

For roster additions we have the aforementioned Space Battleship Yamato, as well as Combattler V, Voltes V and Shin Mazinger. If you have any units you want to see updated to VER10 leave a comment below or contact us on social media.