MechaStellar VER11 Design Goals – Pilot Skills

Continuing from our previous post on Elite units and pilots now we’re going to briefly touch on Pilot Skills. In making VER11 we’ve kept the same pilot skills from VER10 and revamped them for the current system. We’ll deep dive on the pilot skills in later posts. Next post will be on Momentum and Morale Points.

In VER10 we had the following pilot skills

• [M-3] Valor = Gain +5 HITS
• [M-3] Flash = Gain +5 DEF
• [M-X] Zeal = Gain bonus actions

Early on MechaStellar VER10 we had a very tight balance between bonus Hits and bonus DEF.  That common units when they were attacking each other would average 0-2 Unblocked Hits, which meant that damage was relatively small.  Often Zeal was never a worthwhile choice unless you were a much stronger unit attacking grunts. 

Typically if you wanted to Hit you would go with Valor which your target could trump by using Flash to reset field.  Balance wise it worked extremely well, but +5 Hits vs +5 DEF sometimes felt rather underwhelming for some players.  And if one player could secure a lot of Momentum they could quickly wipe out more powerful enemies which hurt the experience.

However, as MechaStellar continued that finely tuned balanced started to fall off.  Unit roles had further expanded combat bonuses, starting with a range of +0 to +2, then later +0 to +3, then +1 to +4 for roles like Sniper, Battler, Versatile etc. 

With these the average number of unblocked hits kept creeping up, and eventually Zeal supplanted Valor as the best way to attack multiple units, or to completely obliterate a single unit, not to mention wiping out the target’s momentum pool by forcing multiple Flashes.  The Iron Wall skill was updated to counter Zeal by providing a defense bonus for the full turn but for some matchups Zeal would be the better choice than Valor.

After over a year of trying to keep balance in check, new features were added like the Support and Squad system it soon became impossible to keep game balance.  Certain units could stack bonuses, along with pilot traits to completely tear through the system launching huge amounts of hits on attack and counterattack while avoiding all but the most severe reprisals from the enemy. 

Obviously something had to change.

VER11 had the big task to fix this issue.  Weapon Triggers which we’ll discuss later, replaced Rapid Fire and gave other outlets for growth on small unit weapons you’d see on Votoms, Dunbine or Code Geass.  Pilot traits which we discussed previously, switched over to smaller passive bonuses rather than traits you could stack for potentially tremendous benefit.  Pilot skills would also need to be changed.

We’ll go into the pilot skill evolution in a separate post but in general we wound up with this frame work.  Additionally, as we mentioned before ship Captains could now use all but one of the pilot skills making gameplay more universal and easier to remember.

• Focus – Cheap but powerful offense skill
• Flash – Potential large bonus for DEF based on your die roll.  Not usable by Warships or Kaiju
• Alert – Warship / Kaiju only.  Bonus to DEF and Counterattack chance. 
• Iron Wall – A chance to nullify the damage or effects of a failed save
• Valor – An expensive but powerful offense skill that also integrates Finishing Blow
• Zeal – Bonus actions with a hard cap to prevent abuse.