Stellar Warships have come a long way since VER8. They’ve gone through several different styles of gameplay until eventually have their turns plays out the same as any of mecha unit in the game. VER10 continues to streamline Warships by having their profiles mirror those of the Kaiju with very high HP but poor evasion and the special Havoc stat that lets them blow apart cover.
VER10 has also overhauled several systems from VER9 and now that those have been in a relatively stable state with minor tweaks needed each month it’s time we start testing balance more often. While Warships are fairly strong on paper and currently are a great force multiplier, we had not yet had a chance to do any extensive testing of solo Warships. So the question arises:
Can a 1000pt solo Warship on its own take on a 1000pt multi-unit army?
Based on the rules for the last two months the answer to that question 8 times out of 10 is a resounding no.
For the most part that’s alright, in the MechaStellar design space we do want Warships to be support units bolstering your forces rather than doing all the fighting themselves. Additionally in Gundam, Mobile Suits, in their principal media (which greatly influences our design ethos) are meant to be the superior next form of warfare compared to outdated warships.
But that’s one series, and Space Battleships are a rather popular series. Some of them are resilient yet far from invincible like Yamato, others are overwhelmingly powerful fleet killers like some of the Harlock and Emeraldas OVAs. Others are plain goofy like the forthcoming Nadesico. So there’s a lot to represent here.
So for testing it was important to find out if our “Hero” version of a Warship can go toe-to-toe, or perhaps keel-to-toe. We’ve had fairly good results with Harlock in VER9 and in early VER10, so it was important to test out Yamato with it’s recent releases. We had good results with Yamato + Cosmo Fighters, but now we needed to test Yamato by itself.
When fighting against grunts like GMs or Zakus, it performed admirably and generally only lost if it couldn’t overcome swarm tactics. So we upped the stakes a bit and had Yamato face off against our “ship killer”. A Mobile Suit with the strongest antiship weapon we have and one of the strongest pilots on record.
Gundam Physalis GP02 with a Beam Bazooka.
Bazookas are one of the ‘ship killer’ weapons in MechaStellar and several times in previous versions they had some form or another of an antiship trait. In their current simpler incarnation being high damage and good range they tend to wipe the floor with ships pretty consistently.
GP02-BB has all of that along with a high armor penetration thanks to it being a beam weapon and potentially causing several thousand more damage.
Additionally in one series of test games after revising warships for a bit (and Musai’s becoming cheaper) we even squeezed in an Antiship rifle on GP02 as well so it could ping Yamato from a distance before getting into Beam Bazooka range.
We found that Physalis with it’s high attack power, Gato with his incredibly pilot skill, and repeated use of Valor was sinking Yamato over and over again. We even managed to nail the 10,000 DMG in a single attack victory condition for GP02 twice.
Things weren’t looking good for the current state of warships. It began to appear hopeless.
Fortunately MechaStellar is a game with a track record of continuous small iterative improvements. After adjusting several rules and warships stats we eventually got to a game where Yamato managed to best GP02, and just barely shot down the two Musai’s with <2000 HP left.
As a result of these tests several items are changing.
- We are adjusting how Size affects HP so many warships will receive several thousand HP bonus.
- (Some of you already noticed this from the previous Yamato posts)
- All larger size Super Robots will also get a smaller bonus.
- Warships will be able to use the Iron Wall skill, same as Kaiju, this greatly enhances survivability especially against Valor.
- Captain’s Orders are getting a little more flexible with additional uses at the cost of Momentum.
- We got a request for Warships to have more ways to spend Momentum a few months ago and this is the result of that.
- Warships being able to “Focus” on demand has also been helpful for survivability
- Target Lock on both offense and defense will instead give a bonus die. This will help out units with lower die pools for Evade.
- The other purpose for this change was to make Boost/Power/Havoc more unique in being a reroll ability
- Some weapons on the “Hero” warships have been improved.
- Already implemented, but having all Pilots / Bridge officers being active traits, rather than choose 2 per Round came as a result of this stress test.
MechaStellar 