Hello everyone, for this month’s we are adding in Gundam SEED to MechaStellar VER10. Gundam SEED is a franchise juggernaut with a lot of fans worldwide so we’re happy to finally get it into the MechaStellar roster. We’ve also updated some core rules and various pilot traits. You can find them on the game-downloads page. Keep reading below the break for more info on this month’s update.
The biggest change to VER10 was having both players roll dice for attack and defense. This opened up a lot more design space for us and made it easier to implement defensive abilities on various Super Robots and Warships.
It also let us give some boost to Luna Titanium, while it’s not perfectly show accurate by making the RX-78-2 immune to a Zaku machine gun, it’s been well received by players as a way for some units to be even more impervious than normal. Similarly for Phase Shift Armor, this became a lot easier to implement in VER10, essentially becoming a super version of Luna Titanium while having a color timer to balance it out. We’ve been testing out a lot of variants of Phase Shift in the last year and this one has been the most straightforward and the most balanced.
The Strike Gundam is very unique in this game, where it can shift forms similar to Getter Robo but less of a one unit army (it has the Moebius Zero / Sky Grasper and Archangel for support). We had some a lot of fun playtesting this one but eventually settled on moving away from Role changes and keeping it “Versatile” in all Roles to represent, well, how the Strike is Versatile.
Aegis, Blitz, Duel and Buster were set to 250pts to make them easy to form into pairs for either a 500pt, 750pt or 1000pt game. Each with their own tricks to make them fairly unique units. These are meant to represent the early game team, so feel free to upgrade them to Ace Pilots using the unit upgrade rules.
For rules we’ve updated Zeal, since the most recent update made it a little too broken to alpha strike and wipe out 3-4 units in Round 1. Now, Zeal’s momentum limit is tied to the Round and will not let you get up to +5 actions in Round 5. We’ve also updated some Pilot traits since M<5, Rally twice was too powerful.
Lastly, there’s a number of tweaks to the rules in preparation for the Warship QoL update, which unfortunately wasn’t ready for April’s update. It’s a very powerful update so I made the call to give it another month of testing.
Next Month we’ll have more Gundam SEED. A major update to make Warships competitive, and a weapons rebalance that will affect Rapid Fire and will most likely see most shield equipped units dropping down ~20pts.
We also have some Battle Reports that are long overdue.
Summary of Updates
- Added 8 units from Gundam SEED
- Rebalanced Death Ray AOE weapons. Wing Gundam most notably effected.
- Core Rules REV93 – Added note that Fly / Accel is required to engage/melee a Flying unit. Based on feedback changed Retaliate to +2d10/-2d10 instead of 3. Updated Push/Pull weapons to 4”. Updated Zeal to avoid Alpha Strikes.
- Core Rules REV92 – Removed Reload Warship Action, Reload will be removed from weapon profiles. Updated Repair so it is anytime instead of end of Round. Removed +1 Combat Action from Captain’s order OPS Support which effectively allowed for Valor + Zeal. Warships will receive an actions update to compensate.
- Wargame Rules – Updated various pilot traits and closed Tactician loophole.
MechaStellar 