MechaStellar VER11 Design Goals – Saving Throws

While making MechaStellar VER11 we wanted to update the gameplay and make it overall less lethal while still allowing for some lethal spikes in gameplay that are ideally player controlled. One of the biggest steps to making this design goal a reality was the update of the Saving Throw or [Saves] system. Saving Throws have been greatly expanded in MechaStellar VER11, in retrospect it’s a very simple and elegant change but it did take us a while to get here.

In VER3 – 10 Saving Throws were almost universally Armor Saves, saves you rolled against an Armor Penetrating weapon the majority of which were beam weapons and heat weapons.  Depending on the VER sometimes kinetic weapons had PEN albeit much lower, and various melee weapons had PEN.  An Armor Save worked like this:

• Armor Save
  • Make a number of Armor Saves equal to the number of unblocked Hits your unit took. (Max 5)
  • Roll a d10, if it is equal to or exceeds the weapons Armor Penetration you pass. 
    • VER8-10 If you fail, take 1000 DMG.
    • VER3-7: If you fail, the unit is destroyed. 
      • [Elite] units could spend [M] to avoid death.

MechaStellar has always had the ideal of emulating the persistent lethality present in the universal century of Mobile Suit Gundam, but over the years we’ve adjusted how armor saves worked to make games either more fun, more balanced or both.  VER11 takes this two steps further.

Step 1 = Barrage Weapons

These weapons have very high rate of fire, so we realized we needed to change something.  So for Beam Machine Guns all of them gained a special note saying [AP Saves = 500 DMG], this way if the beam machine gun is pumping out 10 hits (failed saves = 500 DMG) while the rifle only gets 5 hits (failed saves = 1000 DMG), they end up roughly even.  Naturally, weapon balance doesn’t always work that perfectly, but that’s the initial goal we set.

Step 2 = # of Saves = Triggers

Previously the number of Saves would be equal to the number of unblocked hits.  So if you got 5 times, you were making 5 saves. 

While developing the weapon Triggers system, we experimented with some triggers like Pierce, Siege and Finisher generating Saves if you roll the Trigger.  It worked out amazing for beam weapons.

Suddenly you could take 9 hits from a beam rifle, but because of an unlucky roll the attacker only had one Crit Trigger, meaning you only had to roll 1 Armor Save, then take 9 low damage hits.  In the previous system it was 9 Hits and then 5 Armor Saves which was often super overkill for most units that weren’t a Super Robot, and even then it was catastrophic.

Now games would no longer potentially end early because of one lucky attack that absolutely obliterated a model while you lacked any momentum to protect the unit. There was one major downside.  Triggers = Saves is great, but……what about weapons that didn’t have Armor Penetration?

A while ago we had removed Armor PEN from all regular weapons like rifles, bazookas etc.   Those weapons could never benefit from that, which was a bummer.

Then the Eureka moment

“What if we just made alternate Saves for each weapon type”?

Again simple in hindsight, but never really occurred to us before.  The impetus for this idea came from several competing ideas we were working on.

Suppression Mechanics on Machine Guns

Some wargames try to simulate suppression from machine gun fire by making morale worse or pinning a unit down and stopping their movement, we were trying to do this with machine gun traits already.  Then we realized we could just make a “Mobility Save” where failing it could limit your movement.

(It was originally named Suppression Save, SP, but we didn’t want two S saves, and so Stun (or Stagger) kept ST abbreviation while Suppression became MB mobility Saves.)

Shield Breaks via Siege weapons or Finisher Phase

At this time Shields were extremely cheap in development and no longer modified your defense dice, so having one blow up was easy, involved no sheet changes and was encouraged because of how cheap they were.  Figuring out how to do that was difficult.  At the time, the Siege trigger was blowing up cover so we expanded it to include Shields, but it wound up with some weird sequencing issues.  We also tried to do the same with the [Finisher Phase], which was still pretty rare.  We stuck in a position where shields were cheap and hard to blow up, so everyone wanted one.

To solve this, we had the “Break Save”.  All our regular weapons like cannons and bazookas which had 0 Armor Penetration, now had a reason to use a Save, a BR Break Save, which could blow up Shields on a failed save or cause damage.

Expanded Design Space for Weapons

Thanks to Step 1, we realized these saves didn’t need to do 1000 DMG either.  MB could be 500 DMG, Break Saves could be 500 or possibly higher.  Barrage MB weapons could be 200 DMG. 

We no longer had blank space on the Save column of a weapon profile for non-beam weapons, and best of all, because all weapons now had a reason to invest into improved Saves, it made it much easier to balance weapons.  All the weapons that used to have 0 Armor Penetration used to have very high damage.  Instead of 700 or 800 DMG bazookas they were now 400 or 500 DMG. 

Likewise, our problems with machine guns having no where to invest points into attack dice, we could now put those points into better Barrage Triggers, or high mobility saves.  This game a lot of design room for all kinds of weapon types and was a tremendous win for the DEV Team.

Of course, we couldn’t forget ST Stun Saves or PP Push/Pull Saves.  While these existed in VER9 as special Armor Saves, like 6S or 8P; we could now formalize them as separate saves in MechaStellar VER11.  The mechanics got simpler and easy to use and we were able to shrink down the Push / Pull and Stun Saves special rules from 1 page down to 1/2 a page. 

Overall the Save system was full of numerous wins.  Weapons were easier to balance and less deadly.  Saving throws, especially beam weapons were less deadly, all other weapons gained utility by possibly causing movement penalties, action penalties, forced movement or shield breaks.

With the universal rule that Saves = Trigger Now every weapon follows the same format

• Roll attack.
• Count hits.
• Count triggers.
• Hits = damage.
• Triggers = saves.
• Done.

There were definitely some concerns about lethality especially beam weapons going down. Here’s a DEVchat on that topic

HP is way too high if weapons are only doing like 1 Save per attack. Even worse if Iron Wall can let you take the beam shot…

Yeah, that’s a good point and Iron Wall is a cheap gurantee

To use Guncannon as an example, if the enemy has M=2 (and they almost always will) I would never use beam rifle when I could use cannons, because cannons will actually deal damage, when beam rifle gets even 4 hits through, if on average I pass 2 and Iron wall passes the other 2, I take no damage

So either Iron Wall needs to become M-3 or we need to make beams dangerous again

I guess we could change Iron Wall to maybe do +1 DEF & Pass 1 Save for the rest of the Turn . That also makes it Anti-Zeal

Yeah but then it’s stepping on the toes of Flash again, we’re trying to keep the two very distinct swim lanes now

True, true. What about Focus?

While lethality is down overall, it’s still very possible for your [Elite] and [Ace] pilots to still be very deadly.  We’ll cover Pilot skills in depth in the future, and the most basic skill allows you to turn 1 die into a 10, meaning you can always add +1 Trigger and thus +1 Save to the target.  Rest assured, if the dice are aligned Amuro can still one shot a Zaku with a beam rifle, and a beam saber is often no question. 

On the other hand, we’ve had battles of 3 man squads of Zakus and GMs go 2-3 rounds of melee without wiping each other out.  It’s led to some really fun moments on the tabletop with “WAIT HE SURVIVED”, “NO WAY, THE LONE SURVIVOR JUST KILLED 2 GUYS”.  We hope you get to enjoy moments like these as well with the new and improved MechaStellar VER11 Save system.