MechaStellar VER11 Design Goals – Sensors + Target Lock

In making MechaStellar VER11 one of our design goals was to repurpose existing stats to accomplish some heavy lifting on core mechanics instead of having to rely on specific traits or abilities.  Like the Morale stat before it, Sensors became part of this paradigm shift, becoming an invaluable stat to boost your weapon Triggers.

In VER10 we debuted Dual Sensors profiles for Snipers and Firepower types, to represent how they had advanced sensors for long range combat whether it be sniping or long range bombardment / indirect fire, while the second value referred to their regular Sensor value.  We also upgraded sensors to let it be both offensive and defensive, giving you a bonus d10 to ATK or DEF if the target was in your sensors range.  It was a good idea on paper, but was often forgotten until later leading to many times where an attack was finished and one player went “WAIT, I forgot I got +1d10 to DEF because you’re in my Sensors range”.  We wanted to avoid that situation in the future.

Still, we had to come up with an idea that would make Sensors valuable, not just for shooting characters.  Something that would benefit melee centric characters.  We experimented with a few mechanical ideas, but actually one of the Dev’s had a great idea about Sensors as a utility instead of a combat stat.  And so we have the “Sensors Sweep” action.

Sensors Sweep

Designer’s Note: This is a mission-oriented action to earn VP. Create a narrative or use one of these examples: “Locate a missing scientist”, “map the battlefield”, “find the asteroid demolition charges”, “New Mech telemetry”, or “Analyzing Reactor Signatures”.

• VER11 Scan a Control Point (CP) or enemy unit within Close Range Sensors, neither of which have been scanned before. Gain VP = 10x [Your Frame + Performance Level].
  • If you are able to capture that CP, do so immediately.

The idea for this action was pulled from the VER10 Wargame rules for “Actions on Objective” which said:

It can represent searching for a missing pilot / scientist, secret cache of equipment, or top–secret design information.  It can also represent performing necessary actions to complete the mission like setting demolition charges to break apart an asteroid or destroying the power conduits in a colony laser.

Now it’s integrated into the MechaStellar base game as a fun and useful utility to earn VP while playing the game.  It’s a great way to simulate the various mecha shows, both real robots and super robots like Dancouga pictured above where each mission (or episode) isn’t centered around fighting but instead a very specific plotline like locating a missing person, making contact with rebel forces, finding the enemy mind control machine etc.

We briefly considered letting it generate Morale Points (Momentum) but decided against it.  However, it has become an extremely useful ability to capture a CP without having to end your turn on top of the CP.  Giving players one more action to use instead of burning 100% of your actions attacking the enemy.  Also very valuable for our strategists with a cheap low performance rear echelon unit.

Long Range and Close Range Sensors

That said we still wanted that second sensors value to have more meaning, and we knew that Sensors = Defense bonus would not be returning.  So we took some inspiration from Armored Core and now we have a Long Range Fire Control System (FCS) and Close Range FCS.  So a Sniper might be Long Range Sensors 24″ and Close Range Sensors 0″, meanwhile a Battler is 0″/8″ and a Versatile unit is 8″/8″ which gave a really strong unit combat role identity.

The Long Range sensors would improve shooting attack while close range sensors would improve melee attack.  Initially we were hesitant to give melee a boost, since in VER10 every unit had a “Close range stat” of 8″, but then we decided to make that melee or versatile types only, so now those units would get a bonus with beam sabers while snipers and firepower types would not.  Likewise, your melee monster isn’t getting a shooting bonus. 

From there we also adjusted which weapons would count as melee, making the cutoff roughly 20″+ = Shooting and <20″ = Melee, so Vulcans moved into the melee category, and considering how many melee monstrosities rely on vulcans it actually worked out pretty well.  But unfortunately, added about 6 hours of work for our layout editor.  Sorry….

Last but not least, we are bringing back “Sensors = Starting Deployment range” from previous editions, but this time only for Close Range sensors.  This way you’re melee and front line versatile units can start further away from the table edge, and also allowed us to drastically simplify deployment rules.

As for bonuses, as we mentioned in the Elite unit post, we were trying to eliminate bonus dice abilities to give us more range to work with when developing weapon dice and combat roles, so Target Lock instead provides an extremely powerful “Improve Trigger Target Number by 1”.  So if you normally Crit on a 9+, if you get within sensors range you can now Crit on an 8+. 

Very powerful and very worthwhile, so for those of you worried about Rapid Fire being removed meant we would go back to castling, there is still a very powerful incentive for getting closer or for upgrading your Sensors with the Unit Upgrade rules.  We’re also experimenting with making sensors boost a freebie for advanced grunts to make grunt units cheaper across the board.  We’ll see how that works out!

In the next post we’ll start the deep dive on weapon triggers.