Better late than never, for the August MechaStellar Monthly Update we are releasing MechaStellar VER11. You can find the update rules and profile sheets on the MechaStellar game downloads page.

It’s been a long road from the VER11 announcement to release.  Check out the VER11 Roadmap post for all the design goals that went into VER11. 

Overall we want this to be the best Version of MechaStellar that is Fast, Fun, and most of all easier to teach to new players.  Switching to a “dice roll only” core mechanic does a lot to accomplish this, and we’ve rebuilt several systems like Pilot Skills, and Elite units to enhance this.  We think both VER10 and VER9 players will find a lot to enjoy in VER11.

We also want VER11 to be a more consistent and reliable edition which is why it went through a large amount of playtesting to try and iron out all the fine details. Some feedback from our beer & pretzel style gamers is that constant rules tweaks and balance updates made things hard to follow and easy to forget rules changes. Since MechaStellar started off as a garagehammer game we want to make sure we take care of those players too. Our plan is to only update the core rules every 6 months, rather than trying to patch the game every 4 weeks. (We’re still going to be updating the unit roster each month as normal.) That said, if you find something that’s broken, please let us know so can fix it for the next update.

Unlike VER10 MechaStellar is also launching with the Gundam Build Fighters rules from day 1 which has also been expanded to include simple to follow instructions on swapping out pilots and weapons and a system to design your own custom pilot.

With that said, please enjoy MechaStellar VER11!  On the initial release we have Mobile Suit Gundam Universal Century (UC) from 0079-0083.  In the upcoming weeks we will be releasing Zeta Gundam, CCA, Super Robots and Warships.  In October or November we will release Gundam 00 which will be the perfect accompaniment to the new Trigger Mechanic.  Look forward to it!

Please vote in the update poll to let us know which Tier 3 units you would like to see next!

As an aside, as the layout editor I wanted to say thank you all for your patience.  We had planned on releasing VER11 in August and the rules team finished before 01 August, but at the end of July I decided to update the format for VER11 and many profiles now use the bottom right quadrant to store the mobile suits weaponry as well an easy reference if you want to swap out pilots.  While it took a lot of time to implement (almost 2 months total to update UC Gundam from 0079-0083) I think it was well worth the effort but keeping the profiles cleaner and also minimizing profile bloat.

For example for MechaStellar VER10 final, the UC profile sheets had 86 profiles for Zeon and 69 profiles for the Federation.  In VER11 there are 64 profiles for Zeon and 60 profiles for the Federation (including 1 new one).  In total a reduction of 31 profiles.  With less profiles and more room from a cleaner layout we were also able to increase font size.

Also, due to an unfortunate glitch, all of our images got stretched and de-rez’d so I had to remove all of them and manually insert and resize all of them which unfortunately takes a lot of time.  On the plus side, it gave me a chance to adjust the file size for all the images, so the Mech profiles have gone from 32mbs down to 16mb in file size.

While the end product may not seem that different from VER10, altogether it took about 6 hours a week for 8 weeks to make this all functional.  I’ve learned a lot since then, and implemented a few tricks that will make updating Zeta, CCA and Super Robots much faster, so please look forward to that and thank you for listening to my layout editing gripes.

In the last few weeks while waiting for layout editing to finish, the rules team had a chance to tweak various rules and also update Victory points based on feedback from our all-star 40k players.  The Dev team also did some experiments regarding break saves, to resolve a problem with shields at a low power levels (One Year War) and while it developed a novel concept, ultimately we went with the simple solution that Siege weapons now also reduce Shield level by 1.  Thank you to all the playtesters who provided feedback on that.

Weapons were also tweaked to try and better align the expected damage for various weapon type, some of the siege weapons in particular were falling behind the crit weapons so various weapons were rebalanced, which is why some of the preview sheets (created 2 weeks ago) may not match the final product.  Thank you for understanding!

Thank you so much to everyone who volunteered to playtest.  And a big thank you to the Dev team, especially those who came out of retirement just for this update.  Thank you to Red, Yuria, Kyle, Tyler, Mike, Dominique, Charles, Rob, Yoshiaki, Sandeep, Alex, Jorel and Luyi; could not have done it without you.