MechaStellar VER11 – Design Goal – Making it easier to run Super Robot Wars style games

MechaStellar’s main goal for many years has been to make it easier for you to have a cross universe game fielding your favorite robots from various mecha anime.

As the years have gone by, the different versions of MechaStellar have often crept up in complexity, and Super Robots (and warships) have also been the most difficult to run. Not because they are bad units, but simply because of the sheet numbers of rules written onto each Super Robots’s profile.

Here’s the VER 10.5 prototype for GoLion (Voltron). 10.5 is what we call the in-between phase between VER10 and VER11 where we started including some VER11 mechanics but not all of them. Here’s a GoLion profile that has the new Trigger system (albeit very different from the final version) and also the new Save system. It’s still using the old “Bonus HITS / DEF” which would later be replaced with TNs to Hit modified by your piloting.

The last one is actually rather important. Letting pilot traits turn into passive always on improvements to Hit and DEF Target Numbers on Shooting, Melee, Evade and Melee DEF was a tremendous win for layout editing, because we no longer needed to use half a unit’s profile in just traits.

But the real win is that it made everything remarkably simpler to use. You no longer have to remember that GoLion has FIVE DIFFERENT PILOT ABILITIES, instead it’s just baked into the profile. Check out the below VER11 profile.

Now everything is baked into the mech unit profile sheet. GoLion being the ultraviolent legacy series of the 80s has very high TNs to hit and a huge pot of HP. Best of all, you don’t need to worry about forgetting any of those pilot traits, they are all passive upgrades. It also influenced our Design Ethos, to whenever possible avoid giving an “Active ability” pilot trait, just to make it easier to run multiple units.

Now while 5 traits on a unit, is certainly not impossible. Trying to run multiple super robots, especially combiners like the Combattler / Voltes twins became quite a burden. Then in previous versions you could only activate so many pilot traits at a time making the memory burden even worse.

Now you can comfortably run many Super Robots in your army and it feels just as easy as running multiple mobile suits. We hope you enjoy.

We’ll be running Super Robot Profiles for the rest of the month, look forward to it!