Author: Red Noa

Mecha Enthusiast Gundam Collector Super Robot Wars Enjoyer

MechaStellar Battle Report Defend the City Game 1 featuring Gundam & Pacific Rim

Note: This was a battle report from MechaStellar VER7 there are a number of updates to gameplay and victory points since that time. For instance in this version only a single armor save was rolled but failing it was instant death.

This is probably my favorite game we had of Defend the City. We had a tag team match with two players on each side. Defend the City is a game mode where the Defenders are trying to preserve the city while the Attackers attempt to destroy it.

The Attacker side had units from Gundam Wing (Wing & Heavy Arms) plus units from Gundam SEED (Freedom & Justice). In the 2v2 game each player picked a Commander trait, Wing had Vigilant Leader and Justice had Three Times as Fast.

The Defender side focused on Mobile Suit Gundam with an unlikely alliance between the Federation and Zeon. They had Big Zam, Zaku IIs, Gelgoogs, Amuro in the Gundam plus two Guncannons along with Gipsy Danger from Pacific Rim. In the 2v2 game each player picked a Commander trait, Big Zam had Resourceful while Amuro had Unyielding.

The players were using the Battle Damage and Climactic Events modules.

Below the break you’ll find the battle report. We were having a lot of fun with everyone at the table and the audience and so only remembered to take a few photos per Round.

Continue reading “MechaStellar Battle Report Defend the City Game 1 featuring Gundam & Pacific Rim” →

Where to Start with Classic Super Robot Anime

In this post we’re going to talk about some classic Super Robot shows, which we will loosely define as the piloted Super Robots created in the 70s and 80s. The shows will be listed in Production order. We will update this post as we add additional classic super robots to the MechaStellar roster.

Mazinger as well as Getter Robo are both large franchises and each have their own where to start posts.

Continue reading “Where to Start with Classic Super Robot Anime” →

Where to Start Mobile Suit Gundam

Kunio Okawara painting of the original RX-78-2 Gundam

Mobile Suit Gundam is a long running mecha franchise that created the “Real Robot” genre. To give a brief explanation, the Real Robot genre typically has a more militaristic feel where logistics, geopolitics, and the fragility of human life in a conflict are often at the forefront. That’s not to say Super Robot shows cannot do the exact same (and have done so), but Real Robot shows generally embody those traits while trying to stay as grounded and realistic as they can within the boundaries of their setting.

Trying to shoehorn every single mecha anime into a strictly Super or Real Robot classification is generally an exercise in futility, but the broad strokes of Super Robot and Real Robot can be useful when describing a show to someone else.

Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) followed in the footsteps of Space Battleship Yamato (1974) by delivering a science fiction show with the main theme being “War is Hell”.

We’ll update this post periodically as we add more Gundam series to the MechaStellar game roster.

Continue reading “Where to Start Mobile Suit Gundam” →

Give me a sign of Zeta

The Zeta Gundam drafts have been updated on the VER9 drafts page here.

This draft is all the units planned for the FEB 28th release and now includes Amuro’s Dijeh and Kamille’s Zeta Gundam. 

Amuro’s Dijeh is at 450pts, that way it pairs well with the Hyaku Shiki at 550pts to form a 1000pt team. Since the Dijeh was developed from the Rick Dias we used that as a base and worked to make the unit relatively low cost to stay in the 450pt range while also being a high end unit worthy of Amuro.

Kamille’s Zeta Gundam has two profiles, one for when he first gets the Zeta Gundam and one to represent him at the end of the show where he has the Hyper Mega Launcher as well as some of his unique attacks including the shooting his spinning beam saber (the beam confuse) and the Biosensor infused Waverider Crash. This final form was given a point limit of 750pts to match a number of other units that are at 750pts both currently released and those still in the playtesting phase.

When it comes to protagonist units we often like to make versions that are at 500pts, 750pts and 1000pts for people who enjoy playing the Defend the City / Rampge Endurance mode which allows for waves of reinforcements at set points costs such as 500, 750 or 1000. If those aren’t an option then we’ll usually have a partner unit add up to 1000pts, for example Shining Gundam (Final Fight) and Rising Gundam are 1000pts.

These drafts also includes an HP update that is going to affect all units in the February update. The HP update was originally an attempt to make a potential design change with 5 shot weapons work, however, as we learned from many playtest games the base of 5 shots was simply too lethal. 

However, while testing we had a chance to test out the increased HP values against the current armory of weapons and we found that it didn’t drastically change the game for Armor Penetrating weapons but did give a nice boost against high rate of fire weapons like machine guns and missiles which have been a little too powerful against expensive grunt units like the GM Custom and Hizack.

The Beam Carbine profile has changed from 4 Shots RF+3 PEN 5 to 4 Shots RF+2 PEN 6. This affects the Hizack, Marasai, Zeon Amphibious units and the GM Command, as well as any Super Robots which had a heat ray type weapon. 

Explosive weapons have received a rebalance, in general most of them went down by DMG 100 but gained increased shots instead.

Core Rules and Wargame Rules drafts have been updated with various tweaks

  • Added note about Transforming MS to core rules
  • Updated Crash through and Trample
  • Shooting limited to 3 Crits
  • Based on feedback Tear through the Ranks and Seize the Day cannot be used in Round 1 to cut down on alpha strikes
  • HP upgrade for MS and Super Robots with Armor 4+

VER9.5DRAFT Uploaded

I’ve taken all the proposed changes posted in the last week and a few other clarifications and revisions and uploaded them on the VER9 Drafts page: https://mechastellar.com/ver9-drafts/

I’ve also included what a potential HP boost looks like for UC Gundam units.

Here’s an update summary for the drafts

Core Rules

  • Updated Deployment, Challenge and IDF
  • Updated Crash through and Havoc
  • Destroy Terrain moved to core rules

Wargame Rules

  • Major update to Control Points
  • Defend the City game mode simplified
  • Pilot / Commander traits moved to Wargame Rules

Unit Profiles

  • HP Bonus to all units
  • Tweak profiles on some GMs, Doms and Gelgoogs, Gundam X and Super Robots
  • Adjusted scaling on range upgrades for machineguns and pistol types, rebalanced those weapons including O Thunder and Assault Rifles
  • Rebalanced Vulcans and reduced DMG on variants
  • Rebalanced e[X]plosive weapons
  • Upgraded Newtype

Playtests – 5 Shot Weapons

We ran a large number of playtests with five shot weapons to evaluate if we could include this suggested change without breaking game balance. You can read more about it in this previous post here.

In this series we had some asymmetric warfare with two 500pt units (Eva-01 and Big O) vs 1000pts of Zeon grunts (Zaku II, Dom and Gelgoog) with a few skileld pilots mixed in.

The extra shot made the game very dangerous for the two 500pt units. Big O was eventually take down by bazookas and great positioning in most games, while Eva 01 usually survived but once Berserk had a hard time chewing through most of Zeon’s forces.

In this series we had a cross era game with the same force from Zeon vs the Titans from Zeta Gundam fielding the Hizack,Marasai and Asshimar.

For some highlights, in the top left photo a Skilled Asshimar pilot with Barrage made 8 shot within Sensors range and landed 6 out of 8 critical hits, annihilating the Dom before it got to take a turn.

In the bottom photos we have an Asshimar jet forward while transformed as a UFO causing some havoc then transforming and punching a Gelgoog next Round before ultimately being cut in half. On the bottom right is a Hizack who managed to survive 2 rounds while surrounded.

This playtest series used units from Mazinger Z as well as a streamlined version of the Defend the City rules to spice things up. These are the Go Nagai Robot Collection figures.

With base 5 shots on most weapons things got very deadly with all the firepower units on the field. The Doublas M2 in particular were pushing out high volumes of shots as well as Venus A in return. Most of these games ended up being bloodbaths.

The highlight was when Boss Borot stole a weapon, which was Garada K7s horns and then proceeded to destroy him with them.

This game series with our Mobile Suit in Action (MSIA) figures had Mudrock and a basic Guncannon vs Char’s Zaku and a skilled Dom pilot.

The 5 shots were nice with Indirect Fire, but the enemy team had a high enough movement that they could get within shooting range rather quickly. Over a few games Mudrock folded pretty quickly after pressure was applied by Char’s Zaku, the extra shot with bazookas is extremely powerful.

Closing Thoughts

While all of these games using base 5 shot weapons were fun, we can’t deny that they have become remarkably more lethal with more games being over by Round 2 or Round 3 which is a bit premature. For about 2/3 of these games we also played with a draft revision with a nice bump up in HP but that still was not enough to slow the destruction going on in each game.

While it was a good suggestion I think if we want to implement this suggestion we would have to rework a number of weapon profiles to be considerably lower damage and/or further increase HP on unit. Something to think about.

Evaluating suggested weapon upgrades

We had a suggestion last month about raising the number of shots on weapons. Here’s a draft of what weapons would look like if we moved everything up to base 5 shots or higher.

  • Machine gun R24 Shots 8 RF+4H DMG200
  • Beam machine gun 24 Shots 6 RF+4H P4 DMG200
  • Beam Pistol 16 Shots 5 RF+1H P5 DMG300
  • Beam Cannon 48 Shots 5 RF-2 P5 DMG400
  • Beam Sniper 48 Shots 5 RF-2 P6 DMG300
  • Beam rifle 32 Shots 5 RF+1 P6 DMG300
  • Beam carbine 24 5 RF+3 P5 DMG300
  • Railgun 48 Shots 5 RF-2 P3 DMG400
  • Artillery 48 Shots 5 RF-2 P1 DMG500
  • Bazooka 32 Shots 5 P3 DMG 700
  • Missile pod 32 Shots 6 RF+3H P2 DMG300
  • Missile Salvo 48 Shots 5 RF+1H P3 DMG400
  • Fire support 48 Shots 10 RF-4 P2 DMG300
  • Micromissiles 40 Shots 10 RF+6H P2 DMG100
  • Needle Missiles 16 Shots 10H RF+10 P2 DMG100
  • Grenades 16 Shots 5 RF+3H P3 DMG300

There are a lot of things to like about having that bonus shot. It makes playing long range games a lot more viable and makes rapid fire not as huge an increase in overall shots. The downside is that the lethality of the base game gets high enough that a lot of things are being immediately one shot, including higher point units like the Hyaku Shiki. So there are three options to fix this.

  1. Return Critical Hits down to 1s on shooting and 10s on Melee
  2. Rebalance HP and give each unit additional HP
  3. Do nothing and keep weapons balanced the way they are

For #1 this would definitely solve the lethality issue in most cases. The downside of removing this is that it makes cross era play more difficult. To use Hyaku Shiki as an example again, it has an extremely large Evade value (higher with an Ace pilot) where 1s and 2s are essential for a grunt unit to threaten it.

For #2 this isn’t super hard to do but it doesn’t solve the problem for all weapons, for instance a bazooka is still likely to accidentally one shot some units with a base of 5 shots.

For #3, well, things are working well as they are but I know there are still some issue where long range fighting runs into some issues when shooting at units with shields and decent evade.

As someone who likes crits, and how those can influence the narrative, I’m leaning towards #3 or #2 myself.

VER9.4 Updating Challenge & Tear through the Ranks

Some of our playtesters who love to do 2v2 Ace Matches raised a lot of good issues when it came to challenge. Mainly that Challenge is extremely good in small games compared to larger games, and whoever goes first in a 2v2 games gets challenge and suddenly makes for a very deadly turn.

Since we usually play with 5+ models for mobile suits and 3+ models for SRW games it didn’t come up often for us in playtests, but I definitely think it’s an issue after hearing of their battles.

They suggested to transform the bonus into a defensive one. Currently Challenge gives bonus hits against the two people in the challenge, they recommended making challenge give a bonus block against every other unit. So let’s say GP01 challenged GP02, those two units now gain +1 Block against any other unit on the battlefield.

I think this is a great idea, since the mechanic helps reinforce that the challenge is between these two units while avoiding the deathblows they mentioned in their games. I think it’s worthwhile to include this in the next revision, let me know if you like this one or if you have a different defensive idea that is simpler than this one.

Thanks!

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Related note, they would really really like for Tear through the Ranks to require a new target, that way Altron can’t melee attack the same target twice in one turn hahaha.

So this is a tough one, I think it’s best to keep the flexibility in allowing you to attack the same unit twice but I can see their point that some melee heavy units being able to attack again in melee against say a firepower type is very powerful, especially since VER9.4 turned Pilot bonuses into always on offensive bonuses.

I’m leaning towards raising the [M] cost but giving it a cheap option if targeting a Frame 1-2 unit.

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Lastly we’ve gotten some questions about facing in the last few months so we’re updating the bullets regarding facing to be a little more structured and easier to follow.