As mentioned in our previous post we’ve been testing out various ideas. In this post we’ll look as size modifiers and the recent change to defense dice.
One of them has been turning the Size modifier into a 0 cost change, that would provide some benefit (in this case additional HP and equipment) but at the expense of Defense. We’ve been experimenting a lot with this and using Daitarn 3 as our guinea pig early on. To great success, with Daitarn winning a staggering amount of early matches.
(For our classic super robo fans, We still need to update Daitarn’s profile to the latest changes and release as well.)
Most recently we’ve been testing it with warships thanks to Space Battleship Yamato and identified a few issues which were either making Warships not work as well as we intended. Fortunately we didn’t have to revise the size system too much but it has resulted in Warships getting minor tweaks every month or so, which would only be noticeable to our warship fans.
In the October update, one of the biggest driver in Ships (as well as defense dice updates) has been a lot of R&D work going into vehicles. While vehicles aren’t super common in Gundam’s universe, outside of the One Year War, they are very common in stellar battleship series like Yamato and Harlock. We’ve had vehicles and low cost units on the back burner for a while and decided that since we were working on Yamato we my as well include the famous Cosmo fighters (and in turn the various aircraft from MS Gundam).
In order to make that work we had to continue to tweak how Size affected a units HP and equipment slots. This was a difficult needle to thread for a while there, sometimes we got a vehicles stats just right, but it’s points were absurdly cheap, and as we (and other players have learned) ultra cheap units tend to break the game.
Other times, we adjusted several factors, got a great vehicle but the points were conspicuously high. Eventually we found the right spot for vehicles by adjusting the size modifier, as well the number of defense dice these units would get.
- A Mobile Suit is currently Evade 8d10
- So for a Jet we went with Evade 6d10
- And then for a tank Evade 4d10
In this way a Mobile Suit, which is the futuristic and idealistic machine that replaces both the jet and tank in its respective universe, comes out as an extremely agile combatant (it’s AMBAC giving it extremely improved turning time compared to a jet) and just as if not more durable than a tank.
The Jet and Tank having inferior defenses, wind up with a cost reduction, taking our most recent model and dropping the large points down to something reasonable, giving us many OYW vehicles in the 25pt to 50pt range, and letting our starfighters from Yamato and Harlock be strong combatant while also being significantly cheaper than their original drafts. (That said, the Yamato fighters are getting a glowup for the November update so expect the costs to go up, but the ability to strike Finishing Blows to skyrocket!)
Last but not least, we have gotten A LOT of feedback that mobile suits are currently too weak in melee defense. We hear you and we agree, so all mobile suits went up to 6d10 on Melee defense. Super Robots went to 7d10 on Evade and Melee Defense, while Super Heavy types will be between 4d10 and 6d10 on Evade depending on if they are a warship, kaiju, or unbeatable robot, and 8d10 on Melee Defense.
MechaStellar 