ROSTER
This update is a huge expansion of the VER10 roster with all VER9 mobile suits from the universal century of Gundam getting converted over to VER10. We’ve also added in the shuffle alliance from G Gundam. Next up will be mobile suits from Gundam X & Turn A Gundam. In February or March we’ll have VER10 drafts ready for Gundam SEED.
Super Robots are also getting VER10 additions with the Getter Robo G (Dragon, Liger & Poseidon), Raideen and Daitarn 3. (We’ll need to update our Where to start Classic Super Robots post as well). With the new upgrade rules both Combattler V, Voltes V and Yamato received a substantial power upgrade.
CORE RULES
Based on feedback from our players and playtesters we’ve made a few small but significant changes to the core rules.
Challenge now has a fun adjustment where you get free Counterattacks if someone besides your challenge target attacks you. We think this will be a great way to simulate the “GET OUT OF MY WAY” we see so often in mecha anime, it’s easier to remember and it’s a bit less fiddly than stacking bonuses on top of bonuses.
Target Lock has been adjusted to give a set of universal bonuses when the enemy is within Sensors range. The old Target Lock was still heavily influenced by VER9.5 and all but exclusively upgraded Barrage/Bullseye (and later Dodge/Guard), but since VER10 has made this traits for Elite pilots only, it meant that a Sensors boost was relatively pointless for your average grunt suit. This has been changed and now every unit can benefit from it. Also Cover, received a nice boost.
Oh, and we rolled back “Super Energy” to “Power” for Super Robots since we’re going to need to use [EN] on Phase Shift Armor to save space on layout editing.
The morale system has been tweaked, with Skilled Pilots dropping down to 6+ Morale and you may now do one last Momentum shift after your opponent has run out of activations. This should be very helpful when fighting against a small elite force with only a few activations. Zeal also has been tweaked so you use it later in the turn, this helps with choice paralysis some players have reported when they activate a unit. It also gets rid of the gameyness of using Zeal to immediately Momentum shift after; we may bring back the “Momentum shift per Move action” mechanic but we want to do a lot more testing first.
In a similar vein, Commander’s orders have been updated. Trust is now closer to the SRW games where it restores HP. The previous two orders have been renamed simply to “Rally” and “Rout” for ease of remembrance, they now target the closest two allies which cuts down on people trying to do the perfect measurement when playing to stay outside of Daunt / Rout morale bubbles. Additionally, all Commander’s orders get upgraded in Round 4.
The nomenclature for Pilots has been fixed, where all non-basic pilots are referred to as “Elite Pilots” instead of “Level 1+ Pilots”. Based on feedback that the jump from Basic Pilot to Skilled Pilot is way too powerful, we’ve added in a new tier of pilot. This is called a “Battle-Tested Pilot”. This tier allows you to make use of abilities like Barrage/Bullseye/Dodge/Guard etc. but you do not get a pilot trait. This upgrade is relatively cheap for VP and is perfect if you want to represent those well-trained (but still nameless) grunts on the tabletop.
Based on almost unanimous request we’ve also added in a summary page for all things related to pilot in the core rules, and also a brief unit turn summary page as well. We’ve also added how many Victory Points (VP) a unit is worth on each profile. We hope it helps for new player and VER9 converts!
Wargaming Supplement
Many of this should be familiar for VER8 and 9 players, while the full Wargaming supplement hasn’t been completed yet we have managed to include all of the original unit upgrade rules with a few expansions.
It’s worth mentioning that all of the pilot traits have been rebalanced, and a few names have been swapped to different effects. The rebalance effort was based on a lot of feedback that certain traits were too strong to play against. We’ve worked to try and balance all the traits around the simple yet straightforward Renowned Pilot.
So far, we feel like this incarnation feels a lot more fair than the previous version, where Momentum generating abilities were starting to dominate. This update also brings back some mechanics of early VER10 before the open playtest, where units could recover or even improve their HP. We think these are pretty fun, even if they lay pretty heavy on the abstraction for HP.
Pilot Traits have been slimmed down as well. All the traits that modified Barrage/Bullseye/Dodge/Guard / Glorious melee have been shifted into upgrade traits. So you can now pick your favorite trait, and then upgrade your pilot to be a sniper, a dodge machine, or a melee monster.
The previous upgrade traits which gave “Hit or Defend on a 4+” have been removed since they proved to be too powerful. Lastly, the upgrade traits now have limits, so you can only put so many traits on a single unit, in general we encourage spreading your upgrades around multiple units rather than just one.
Balance Patch
We’ve been working on this one since November and as we alluded to before we needed to put in some additional work for the combat Role rebalance. We’re finally happy with this one, Firepower has been curtailed a bit and we’ve also had a chance to differentiate some of the roles with Versatile and Battler being distinctly different for instance. Also of note, the Sensors boost for Firepower / Sniper types has been updated so you should see a large boost for most of those units with dual sensors profiles.
The Tallgeese Super Vernier and Getter Vision have been nerfed, since reroll 1s & 2s plus Focus was way too busted, thank you playtesters for catching that. For Shields we’ve turned the Commando shield into a cheaper inbetween a [S2] Heavy Shield and regular [S2] Shield which should help bring down the cost on Nemos which were becoming very expensive in playtesting.
Shoulder shields have now faced their ultimate demise. The Zaku II shield is an interesting item, since it’s on the wrong arm it’s not actually able to be used to protect the body while firing, it does however protect the shooting arm. We had been treating Shoulder shields as a melee defense booster, and while that’s fine, for your famous and iconic grunt, it’s a point sink that isn’t especially helpful since many Zaku’s don’t get into melee combat range. So we killed off shoulder shields for Zakus, Dijeh and other units and instead treated it as an HP boost.
Speaking of HP, we’ve adjusted HP scaling for all units, with some adjustments to large and small size units. Many units receiving a mild to moderate HP increase while some of the higher end units saw a minor HP downgrade. This is to work in with some new design criteria that allow units to further improve their HP without facing evade penalties, directly related to the death of shoulder shields above. It’s also nice, since the nice round number of 500HP meant that weapons that were DMG 500 or DMG 800 tended to be “ideal” weapons as one playtester put it. With a larger spread of HP, a DMG 700 weapon is now very valuable against a target with 2100 HP.
Some weapons have been adjusted, most notably long range weapons such as warship cannons, regular cannons and incoms/funnels. Warships in general received considerable adjustments due to the size / weapon / HP rebalance.
Last but not least, there were A LOT of cost errors on the Zeta units. That’s all been fixed. We’ve also updated a lot of the Zeta units to have upgraded Sensors which in turn increased their points cost. Sensors upgrades have gone from +10pts in VER9 to +20pts in VER10 since they can provide a much stronger benefit now.
Roster Update
- All of universal century VER9 mobile suits have been converted to VER10 (50+ units converted)
- G Gundam – Shuffle Alliance added
- Super Robots – Daitarn 3 and Yuusha Raideen
Thanks for reading, happy holidays and here’s hoping you got some great new mecha figures to field on the tabletop!
MechaStellar 