In making MechaStellar VER11 we had a lot of new and interesting design challenges to improve the game. Our overall goal to take VER10 and make it faster, more fun and easier to teach. Weapon Triggers definitely fulfill the more fun part and so far its been fun to teach new playtesters that “yes you do get to roll another bucket of dice” and see their smiles in response. Since Barrage was the genesis of weapon triggers, and also the one that experienced the most changes we wanted to write about it first.
For Reference here’s how the Barrage discussion started
Enfilading fire = We could make Barrage an anti-squad weapon. But then it would only be useful against squads and not useful every game.
Sustained fire option = We could have barrage convert failed failed hits into hits, low power, not too exciting, and doesn’t keep parity with other weapons
Triple Crit option = Maybe Barrage triggers could be worth 3 Hits instead of Crit which is 2 Hits. Fun and definitely a hail of gunfire.
Dakkadakka option = threshold hits generate extra dice. Very fun, but we now we have an issue of weird mental math with dice overflow. Like start adding dice to your pool, but then if it goes over 10d10 then it’s extra hits. It’s not too strong but it’s not smooth at all.
SuperDakka option = What about an option where you reroll the trigger dice. And keep reroll trigger dice until you stop rolling triggers? This was max. fun, but then one playtester demonstrated how annoying it can be when you “pick up, and drop a die” and magically it keeps landing on the same number.
From there we settled on the following:
- Barrage 8+
- Every 8+ is an exploding hit, after counting Hits & Triggers. Reroll all your Trigger dice for bonus Hits. This reroll is considered a separate roll and does not count against the 10d10 dice cap.
Now we had to sanity check this in a couple games to see how powerful this is compared to Crit weapons. As mentioned in a previous post, we decided against all weapons have CRIT on 10s and instead CRIT would only be for certain Triggers like CRIT or BULLSEYE.
So rolling a 10 on Barrage was just a regular hit (that you got to roll again). Barrage has been the most fun ability, but statistically it’s slightly weaker overall than Crit, but it does have a higher chance of getting at least 1+ (albeit lower DMG) hits through.
The DEV Discussion looked like this:
We need to explain how to pick up dice in quick dice section. First remove the 1s and 2s. Then pick up all hits that are not threshold, i.e. Barrage 8+, pick up 3-7 as hits, and count your hits. Then pick up the threshold and count (don’t forget crits) and reroll them, then final count.
Actually maybe we should remove crits.
Definitely remove crits
Okay so if Focus moves back to +1 Hit and Hit on a 3+, then we need to make barrrage always hit on a 3+ otherwise we have a massive sequencing pitfall where players might scoop dice before focusing then forget how many 3+ they had.
At the time we were developing Barrage, some of the pilot skills were getting Overhauled. Focus would no longer be the “Hit on 3+” skill because now elite pilots were already hitting on 4+ or 3+. Later, one of the in development pilot skills would let you hit on a 2+. With all that in mind, we realized we would have sequencing issues with barrage.
If you wait for the reroll to declare skills, do you then have to go back in time and count those dice with the better Hit Target Number? What if you declare it before the reroll, but then it didn’t matter because all your reroll dice were Hits anyways.
- From that discussion we decided that:
- Barrage (Passive): This weapon always hits on a 3+.
- [Anti Squad] Elite Pilots get +1 Hit per Model, Ace Pilots also get +2 Hits per model in enemy unit.
Eventually, the “Anti-squad” effect got moved into an upgrade ability.
We were also considering a combined arms ability where Barrage causes a Suppression effect if the target is <50% HP they must make a Morale Save or lose a Move Action. This would combo with Bullseye which Crits against crippled targets that have only one move action. Ultimately, this train of thought let to “Mobility Saves [MB6+]” which we’ll discuss in the Saving Throw post.
Since Trigger and Skills were in parallel development paths, we had to keep updating Barrage as well. When the “Hit on a 2+ Skill” went through testing, Barrage instead turned into
- Barrage (Passive): The Hit on a 2+ Skill is [M-0] for Barrage weapons, however, you may not use the Zeal skill.
Eventually that skill was removed entirely (who knows, it may reappear one day), so Barrage just reverted back to
- Every 8+ is an exploding hit, after counting Hits & Triggers. Reroll all your Trigger dice for bonus Hits. This reroll is considered a separate roll and does not count against the 10d10 dice cap.
But it doesn’t end there. In the last week of VER11 development we came to a breakthrough. The other Triggers had hit roughly even parity, but Barrage still lagged a bit behind, a fun trigger but mathematically slightly weaker than all the others. While we were doing the very last round of testing, one DEV asked:
Is there any reason why we only reroll the triggers? What if we rerolled all Hits instead?
The reasoning was that we didn’t allow for rerolls to spawn Triggers. The reason was, back then, before we developed the Save system, we didn’t want any more triggers or saving throws because that could cause an insane tidal wave of damage. If they reroll all those dice, players might mistakenly assume they could hit and trigger again.
However, since the Save system also finished its parallel developed, the number of saves was drastically reduced per attack action, and Barrage weapons all had 1/2 DMG saves we realized there was no longer a reason to prevent additional Triggers or Saves. And we so we come to final barrage.
- Barrage
- After counting up Hits & Triggers, remove all Misses then reroll the remaining dice one additional time adding any new Hits or Triggers to the original total.
First Count your Triggers (especially for Barrage) – Place a different color die showing the number of Triggers. This marker reminds you how many saves it will cause later. Pictured above the unit hits on a 5+ and will Barrage on 8+. They placed a different color d10 showing the number of triggers [3]. The player then removes any misses like the [1&2] then sifts through the Hits [6] and Triggers [8,8,9].
Barrage – At this point the player says to their opponent “OK, 4 Hits and 3 Triggers”. Then the attacker picks up successful (TN 5+) dice [6,8,8,8] and rerolls them into [5,5,10,10] = +4 Hits and +2 Triggers. “Ok, 8 Hits and 5 Triggers, your turn for Defense”.
Next post we’ll talk about the evolution of Siege & Bombard.
MechaStellar 