Note, Momentum points have been renamed to Morale Points in VER11, we’ll be referring to them as Morale Points in this post.

While making MechaStellar VER11 we wanted to update the gameplay in a lot of ways, especially with how Momentum (now named Morale Points) and Pilot Skills worked. Before we start deep diving on Pilot Skills we wanted to revisit Morale Points (formerly Momentum) and how the overall speed of gameplay has changed.

As mentioned in the previous post, Morale Points (formerly Momentum points) now come from one of two sources

1. Make a Rally Save when you activate a unit.
   1. Make more Rally Saves if they are [Elite] and/or a [Warship]
2. At the end of the Round gain Morale Points for each Control Point [CP] you control

#1 replaces Momentum Shifts that have been a staple for several years now.  Instead of gaining Morale Points from specific movements.  In VER11 we experimented with several ideas like moving closer to the enemy, starting or ending in engagement range, simply being in the opponents half of the battlefield, etc.  Here’s a DEVchat on the topic

Momentum shift = End a move action within Melee Sensors (2nd value) of an enemy unit or control point. 

Yeah that’s simple, but if you say end engagement range of an enemy OR A CP, it helps make Bullseye more valuable. 

Oh and I wanted to add, if you lose the move closer to nearest enemy part, then it’s harder to chase an enemy, i.e. GM 4″ vs Dom 8″.  The GM moves 8″ total trying to chase, the Dom moves 16″, you get no Momentum because you can’t end in engagement range. 

Ohhh I see.  But if we leave it as move closer and each move action is a momentum shift, couldn’t the GM gain M+3 from move move accel?  I feel like that’s way too much

Yeah….it’s cool if you’re the last model on the field for a heroic charge, but not if there’s a whole army there

For a lot of reason, we eventually left that mechanic behind and moved to a simple and easy to remember mechanic that rewards your high morale pilots.  Now your unit generates it upon activating, with high Morale characters having the best chance to generate Morale Points for your army.  It also lets you now at the start of your turn exactly how much Morale points you can spend, without having to hope you can earn more later.

That said, it does make Morale Points more rare, while VER10 was notable for being able to spam pilot skills almost every Turn, that’s less true in VER11.  You need to be judicious with how you spend Morale.  That said many skills are cheaper than before.

With slower Momentum generation it means the gameplay is now more focused on capturing CPs.  In VER10, with how easy it was to gain M+2 via a momentum shift on your turn, often times the boost from CPs at the end of the Round might not have even been necessary, with several playtesters reporting they maxxed out at M=10 at the end of the round via CPs 70% of the time.

Now CPs would be the focus, but we also wanted to make getting to the CP and fighting over it a bigger part of gameplay.  That means shortening movement across the board.  Later in VER10, many units moved from Move 4″ to Move 8″ after the Hexastellar update where everything moved to increments of 4″ instead of 2″.  Some units had Move 12″, some had 16″.

With very high moves across the board it meant some long range weapons felt useless, while short range weapons, with a power boost for their poor range, were getting used all the time.  It also meant if you shot someone, a fast character could easily melee you next turn.  Here’s a DEVchat on that topic

Take for instance an enemy that attacked you at range 24″.  With move 8″, you can move 16, you have a melee threat range of 4″, that’s 20 of the 24″ already.  One accelerate action puts you in melee instantly.  Perhaps these moments should be more rare.

While fun, and definitely has the Gundam Vs gameplay feel to it, it wasn’t for everyone.  It also made it trivial to bounce around Control Points all over the board.  We made the design choice to lower movements across the board, and make movement upgrades very expensive.  Not only does this affect capturing CPs, it also greatly reinforces role identify, where Raid and Battler types with their inherent move bonus, don’t feel like weaker roles, because in the past other units could easily purchase Move upgrades.  Now, almost no units purchase move upgrades.  Here’s a DEVchat on the topic

MOVEMENT

Make OYW Move 4″ by default and 8″ for Raid & Battler

Also, let’s consolidate Melee+Battler, Raid +Interceptor, the roles aren’t too different now

A lot of good can come from anchoring basic units at Move 4″, Raid = 8″, Jets 12″ it makes you want that role because only that role can move fast (and capture CPs, or get Tactical Advantage etc.)

Yeah but what about Tallgeese or fast units like Justice who aren’t really Raid or Battler types?

We can let them upgrade movement but it will cost a shit ton of points so you need to consider if that’s worth it.  Like if it costs 100 or 200pts for a move upgrade, you might want to invest those points in pilot or mech upgrades instead.

Oh, and thinking more on it, smaller base movements makes transforming MS more special (and the ability more worthwhile) by giving a nice move boost at the expense of melee defense. 

CPs are harder to capture Round 1 unless you are bringing a Raid, Battler, or Aircraft.  This made the game feel more leisurely in a good way, while allowing those 3 specific roles a chance to shine.  Round 1 had each player advancing and popping off shots at max range, then Round 2 to 3 the real fight for CPs begins.  The Bullseye weapons are great for letting you choose your target and also becoming stronger when the target is on the CP. 

Round 3-5, those high speed units can try to avoid combat, and dodge and weave in the oppponents deployment zone to try and capture their home CP.  It made for a lot of fun battles where there were reasons to do something besides attack actions every turn.  Overall, we think you’ll enjoy the new game pace in MechaStellar VER11.

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.