MechaStellar Design Goals – SEP25 Update – Lethality

The latest update has quite a bit of changes both to the Core Rules, Wargaming supplement and the Unit Profile sheets.  In this post we’ll cover a brief overview.   Which we’ve broken into three segments.  Some of these we will cover more in depth in followup posts.  For the first segment let’s cover Lethality.

Lethality Update

One of MechaStellar’s claim to fame is having a level of lethality that emulates the world of Mobile Suit Gundam, where grunts, and even heroic Aces can meet their untimely demise from a well placed bazooka shoot or a beam vaporizing the cockpit.  And while we’re very proud of that, it also means living on the knifes edge both for gameplay and designing game balance.  But it’s also an incredibly fun challenge, and why we’ve continued to work on this game for the last, gosh, I guess we’re going on 9 years now.

MechaStellar has gone through many versions since then, each with it’s own version of lethality, with earlier versions leaning hard into the “instant-death” effects and the last few versions making failed armor saves (and now Finisher saves) being deadly but not always a guaranteed dead unit.  Some of these we’ve been working on heavily the last two months and others (like Battle Damage) have had intermittent tests since the switch from VER9 to VER10.  Lethality has been adjusted in the current update to MechaStellar VER10 in the following ways.

Armor Saves reduced from Max 5 Saves to Max 3 Saves. 

This is how it was in VER9 as well, but we’ve found beam weapons have had a little too much potential energy loaded in them, and dropping it down to 3 still keeps them lethal while not being overbearing against an HP sponge Super Robot that happened to roll five 1s. 

To balance that out, beam weapons have also been adjusted, in general going down -100 DMG, but going up +1 PEN, so they are more likely to have a deadly vaporizing hit compared to before.  This also has the added benefit of less times where a robot is destroyed from base beam damage without even needing to roll armor saves (which always felt a little odd). 

HP Rebalance

The HP formula has been on the operating table a lot the last 6 months now, although it’s not always apparent since we try to ensure that after we tweak it, most units stay roughly the same, while some outliers are brought in.  With the change to Armor Saves, we also want to make sure that grunts like a Zaku will still die when hit by a beam rifle, so if there’s several hits and 3 armor saves there should be a very sizeable change that Zaku is dead.  (Leo’s, of course are made out of explodium)

Shield Update

Shield bloat was cut down for the forthcoming Battle Damage update.  But another casualty of that, was all the GMs which had cheap shields, now had much more expensive shields.  This is a problem, because we try our best to make sure grunts mechs on both factions are equal points, and we also make the most of their equipment slots.  In order to ‘pay for’ these expensive shields we’d have to either drop GM HP sharply, or keep it the same and raise everyone else’s HP.  And I don’t think the world was ready for 4000 HP Zaku’s just yet.  Fortunately we found a compromise, by looking for another avenue to make Shields cheaper, while dropping GM HP but not as sharply.  We struck a good balance here, and Shield enthusiasts are overall happy.

Battle Damage

Speak of Shield breaks, we are bringing back Battle Damage from VER9 over to VER10 and this time it’s now a part of the Core Rules.  However, we’re able to keep the ‘optional module’ flavor by limiting this only to Elite Units.  Since Battle Damage can be a bit of pain to track, limiting it to Elite units helps A LOT.  Just don’t setup a game with 10 elite GMs and 10 elite different colored GMs. 

Battle Damage is a fun system to let you simulate all the times we see beam rifles shot and explode, arms cut off, thrusters hit, and the rare MAIN KA-MI-RA being disabled.  Right now, the system is still a little too fiddly so we will likely pare it down to just a couple options that are easier to remember in the future based on playtester feedback.  Overall, we’re happy that it works and it provides another avenue to keep your named pilots alive for longer.

Starting Momentum

Speaking of named pilots, the rules for Starting Momentum have changed and now in general you will be starting with much higher amounts of Momentum.  We’ll cover this in detail in another post.

Similarly, Flash and Iron Wall now have super version that all but guarantee you to survive a heavy hit (if you’ve got a surplus of Momentum).  Likewise, Valor is now limited to Round 2+ to prevent Round 1 Alpha Strikes which were becoming a problem again.

Finishing Blow

Last but not least we have Finishing Blow which received a major update.  We’ll cover this in detail in the next post.  The important thing to note, is that the target now rolls Finishing Blow (just like Armor Saves) and the numbers are now reversed being a 1 instead of a 10.