MechaStellar Design Goals – Squad System

In our previous post we talked about changes to Support ATK / DEF, and how in this update we needed a new mechanic to represent the old gameplay of letting your grunts support each other and become more deadly. With this we created a Squad system with the goal of making it as simple and easy to use as possible. We took some inspiration from the Official Gundam 1/400 Tactical Battles rules which also features a Squad System (complete with base-to-base mechanics) and tried to streamline that idea as much as we could into MechaStellar.

For Squads we wanted a very simple way to boost their effectiveness. The old Support ATK system was perhaps too generous, since it allowed you to gain bonus hits on any attack. Thus you would often see a pair of machine guns supporting a bazooka unit (I know, I’ve certainly done it a lot myself), allowing for the weapon machine guns to get +2 hits on the very high damage bazooka. It was a very effective combo. Unfortunately it didn’t just apply to grunts, but also your overpowered units like a Gundam or Mazinger.

The Squad system wanted to provide a simple attack bonus to your grunts, without providing a massive attack bonus to your already powerful units. Afterall, the intent is to improve you grunts, and let them fight against tougher opponents and help break through their defenses.

So for squads we allow you to pair up similar units, and you get bonus attack dice from your squad members when using the same weapon. I.e. +2 machine guns from your squad mates gives your Squad Leader +2d10 attack dice, 1 bazooka and 2 machine guns does not give you bonus dice.

This ended up being a simple and easy to follow system, but we had to build in some limits so you weren’t pairing up Leos with Wing Gundam or Heavy Arms to immediately give them a huge attack bonus for a relatively cheap cost of +2 Leo units. So to pair up similar units they would have to have the same Role and the same performance. This lets you pair up various kinds of Zaku variants, it also lets you pair up Mass produced units, for example in the future you might have a Nu Gundam + MP Nu’s in a squad.

Lastly, we needed a way to make this worthwhile for Ace units. We had a lot of success using the squad system with Battle-Tested pilots like the Cosmo Falcons / Tigers from Space Battleship Yamato, but overall, the system was not great for Ace Pilots like the Black Tri Stars. The simplest fix to that, was to let Elite units gain a Defense bonus, so your Black Tri-Stars were getting +2d10 on Attack dice, but also on Defense dice, massively improving their survivability.

We also updated the Coordinated Attack event for the Black Tri-Stars, and we updated Tandem Fighter to be support focused, while also making it powerful if you lose one of your three Aces. So the Black-Tri Stars with Tandem Fighter still fight very effectively when they are down to only 2 members.

We really enjoy the new squad system but there are likely still some wording loopholes we missed. If you notice any, or just break the game in general, please let us know. You can shoot us an email or contact us on social media.

MechaStellar Design Goals – Support Weapons

Support Weapons were a big update at the very start of VER10, they were one of the last big design changes before VER10 moved from closed playtest to open playtest. Support Weapons replaced the previous “Overwatch” trait on weapons like Machine Guns and Beam Pistols with Machine Guns gaining Support Attack to represent firing on the enemy while Pistols got Support DEF to represent them being a last ditch sidearm when the enemy closes in.

Time has certainly flown since then, and with many revisions as well, we are currently at REV 121 of the Core Rules. This last update had some major changes to Support Weapons and also added in a related Squad system which we’ll tackle in the next Design Goals post.

Support Weapons were a fun mechanic and allowed for your grunts units like Zakus and Leos to support one another, allowing for your cheapest and most common units to get a few bonus hits for themselves and allies. Occasionally we would get feedback that it’s not the same as the Support ATK/DEF system present in Super Robot Wars, but that system if implemented in MechaStellar would be remarkably too powerful, essentially allowing for two units to completely unload on an enemy (or allow two units to defend against one).

Recently, and by recent I mean in the last year, we have gotten feedback pretty consistently that Support ATK / DEF while fun and helpful, is also slowing the game down pretty dramatically. The reason for this comes down to measuring. For those who do virtual tabletops it might be no problem since you can instantly measure with an electronic tool, but on physical tabletops having to measure (and often pre-measure) to make sure your units are within each other Support ATK / DEF range was causing turns to take very long times.

This was a very big impact on large model count games (10-30 modes). Since large model count games was what MechaStellar was originally built for, we are very sympathetic to the woes of those players. So we decided to revise Support ATK / DEF.

The new model is more closer to Armored Core style gameplay, where you utilize your various weapons against a single target. Firing off a shoulder missile pod to corner your target before firing your Kurosawa rifle, using a pulse gun to keep the enemy at bay while strafing around. Of course we also see this in Gundam, especially for units with lots of weapons like a Full Armor Gundam. So the updated Support ATK / DEF system is meant to evoke that feel.

The new Support ATK / DEF system lets you set your Support Weapons into Support Mode and give yourself that support bonus. This also coincides with changes to Zeal, which limits the number of attacks on a single target to two attacks (any combination of Shooting or Melee). This limit actually harkens back to VER3, the simplest system which gave every unit one shooting and one melee attack (a big departure from the action point system of the previous VER2). VER10 building off this simplicity but gives you more flexibility so you can do two shooting attacks, or two melee attacks, or Zeal to make 2 Attacks against several targets.

That said, we removed Support ATK/DEF from many weapons and upgraded them. Instead we wanted Support ATK/DEF to be more rare, like a shoulder mounted minigun, or to be reserved for missiles.

While Support ATK / DEF is in a different niche, we needed a new mechanic to let your grunts function great on the tabletop. The Tactician trait was updated to let you give a Support Bonus to another unit. And next we have the Squad system we’ll cover in the next post.

MechaStellar Design Goals – Finishing Blow

Finishing Blow has gotten several important reworks in VER10. The most recent revision allowed for it to be more commonly activated while preserving the potential massive damage it had in its original incarnation. This version gave you automatic +1000 DMG for every die above 10d10 when you strike a Finishing Blow. It was working really well for Super Robots, like GaoGaiGar and Gurren Lagann, but…we were having issues on the Real Robot side.

The problem though, was that High Rate of Fire weapons became exceedingly good at striking a Finishing Blow. While this can be a really cool moment and something you’d see in Getter Robo Armageddon, Macross, Votoms and the more grounded Gundam series, the problem is how often should this be happening. And furthermore, how deadly should this be.

To reference a recent battle report from one of our all-star players. They were using the “Build Fighters” rules to make a custom unit reflecting the VOTOMs franchise, and his opponent brought the fan favorite 08th MS Team. While in this battle they had a lot of fun with a highly agile unit vs a slow and steady team. Finishing Blow was a friction point for the game, with the lighter Votoms unit racking up Finisher after Finisher for thousands of damage. While fun, it didn’t feel very accurate for a unit to get obliterated from a common machine gun. And what’s worse is that the machine gun was significantly better at dealing Finishing Blows than say a Giga Drill Breaker or Shining Finger.

There were a couple ways to approach this and solve the issue. Some earlier attempts worked decently but were a little complicated or math heavy. Then we had a curve ball with a weapons rebalance that was ongoing with changes to the Support ATK / DEF system. We needed a way to give machine guns a bonus to compensate for losing Support ATK (we’ll discuss this more in the next post). The solution was to remove the cap on Attack of 10d10, since the core rules turns those bonus dice into bonus Hits (or DEF). We were also testing out Size-1 units like Dunbine and some other fan requested prototypes, and the very small machine guns needed to be over 10d10 at DMG 100 in order to be balanced against their 10d10 DMG 200 counterparts.

So with all that in mind we had to rework Finishing Blow many time. What we settled on was to keep some of the benefit of rolling above 10d10, so if you get 11+ d10 on Finisher Saves, it increases the target number by 1 (and this also stacks with the level 2 Pilot Trait – Burning Passion). This keeps a strong desire to get above 10d10 while not being overbearing with a machine gun dishing out 7000 DMG.

We also needed provide another avenue for those bonus dice above 10d10, that way it matters whether you have 11d10 Finisher saves or 21d10 Finisher Saves. One Dev had a very unique idea of turning those bonus dice into Victory Points. There was already a mechanic in place for gaining VP if you scored 10,000 DMG, so we thought it would be fun to allow for Finishing Blow to score Victory Points as well. So those bonus dice give +10VP each, and gives you a chance to win the game with an ultimate attack, instead of by sheer attrition.

While it seems like a simple change, we went through a couple months of playtesting various kinds of Finishing Blows, and honestly we were pretty relieved to find one that’s still powerful but not too powerful. Hope you enjoy!

MechaStellar Design Goals – SEP25 Update – QoL Adjustments

The latest update has quite a bit of changes both to the Core Rules, Wargaming supplement and the Unit Profile sheets. In this post we’ll cover a brief overview. Which we’ve broken into three segments. Some of these we will cover more in depth in follow-up posts. For the first segment let’s cover Quality of Life QoL updates.

HexaStellar Update

The forthcoming Gundam Assemble will introduce Gundam wargaming on a hex scale to the world. We’re really excited for it! We also wanted to make MechaStellar compatible with Hexes (and also square grids) for people who don’t like using tape measures. We’ve made all ranges divisible by 4 for Sensors, Movement, and Weapon ranges. In general, around half of all units ended up receiving a movement boost, so you should have some more mobility in your games. We’ve also updated facing rules to be easier to use with hexes where turning 90 degrees is not as easy.

Challenge Update

We got some feedback from a regular player that Challenge had a big loophole where if you are down to a 1-on-1 game, the player going second wouldn’t be able to challenge and thus it would invalidate a lot of the challenge focused pilot traits if they lost initiative. We’ve fixed this and now allow for Challenge to be declared before any unit activates.

Pilot Traits

Recently we’ve got some playtest feedback that some of the Pilot Traits were getting a little too lethal. Previously Reaper (+2 Hits, +2 Crits vs Challenge) and Ruthless (+4 Hits on Counter / IDF / AOE) were so powerful on a turn by turn basis, that even relatively nimble mobile suits were still getting one shot even when maxing out defense bonuses. We haven’t done an overhaul on pilot traits for a while, so we took our old notes along with the new feedback. Overall, we ended up consolidating a lot of pilot traits to having a shared Level 1 origin, that branches out to a stronger or more varied Level II effect. A lot of the insta-picks like the level 1 version of Reaper, are now Level 2 only for that reason. Overall, we’re happy with pilot traits becoming a little simpler and easier to remember while taking away some of the lethality there.

Oh and as a bonus you can now take a 2nd Level II trait in the upgrade rules. Look forward to this on the Captain Harlock sheets. (Do note, Warship rebalances are taking a long time, so they likely won’t be ready for another couple weeks).

MechaStellar Design Goals – SEP25 Update – Balance Update

(Also, Super Robots have been updated on the game downloads page)

Points Update

We’ll start off with the upgrade options for available for your units. A few new ones were added, a few were updated, and VP in general was streamlined where +50pts now equals +5VP, with the exception being Performance the biggest driver of VP increases.

The most commonly picked upgrades for Playtesters were one of the ‘Free Skill’ upgrades such as Superior Instincts (Flash), Overzealous (Zeal), Fearless (Valor) and Persist (Iron Wall). And there’s a reason for that, at the time 50pts for a [M-3] free skill was a steal, especially so when Momentum was always critically low for aggressive players.

We confirmed this on the Dev team where a very cheap 250pt unit and a partner unit with a wealth of upgrades including free skills ended up hammering a 1000pt Freedom and Justice over and over again. (Battle Report forthcoming). The free skills were the driving victory factor here, after bumping up the point cost the gameplay became more fair. We tries several adjustments in this test series but eventually settled on +100pts per level which we find to be a bit more fair, while also making other options more viable for their points cost.

As a silver lining, we’ve removed the type restrictions on Flash / Iron Wall. We’ve also raised the cap by 50pts on Unit Upgrades (although the Free Skill upgrades are exempt from that).

Elite Bonuses

These have been reworked a bit mostly on the melee side, since one option was proving to be much better than the other. Now both have an equivalent with Bullseye/Barrage, and a bonus effect like making it harder to counter or easier to disengage. Similarly, the upgradable bonuses you can give your pilots, have been split on the Melee side similar to Bullseye and Barrage.

Speaking of Barrage, we’re also rolling back changes for ‘Auto-Hit’ effects. Barrage no longer gives auto-hits on +Hit weapons, instead it’s limited to giving auto-hits only if you go over 10dice of attack. AOE weapons were proving to be too potent, blasting through cover with enough auto-hit effects to wipe out virtually any unit. Now Heero Yuy has to try a little before vaporizing the target. Fortunately, all machine gun types weapons were rebalanced and for the most part are all stock 10d10 on attack, so barrage remains the best (and most thematic) choice.

Weapons Update

As mentioned above there were big changes to AOE weapons and machine gun type weapons. We also did a big overhaul of high damage weapons. We noticed that some of the melee weapons were remarkably high damage and it only took a couple hits to cleave through heroic type units. We’ve since adjusted how much damages boosts are worth and you’ll see a lot more reasonable damage numbers on melee weapons, bazookas and cannons.

Similarly, beam weapons are now generally -100 DMG but +1 PEN across the board to further differentiate their feel from conventional kinetic weapons. Weapons with a [Free Attack] special clause went up again in points costs, and so were rebalanced to be weaker at their same price, or significantly higher in points which affects units like the Gouf series for instance.

Lastly, but certainly not least the points weighting for attack dice has increased again with this primarily affecting DMG 300+ or PEN 5+ weapons. Many of these weapons either went down in dice to around 6-7d10, or they went up in points costs as you’ll notice in the unit profiles.

Unit Update

Doing a complete overhaul of all weapons and shields necessitated a rebalance of all units. So you’ll see a lot of points adjustments, or some units stayed the same points costs but had to be adjusted elsewhere such as lowering their HP or sensors. HP went through another overhaul, some reoccurring feedback we’ve gotten is that the heroic type Frame 4+ units like Gundam’s, often feel too fragile compared to a grunt suit. We’ve adjusted the HP formulas (and VP formulas) such that higher Frame units have consistently higher HP while also trying to maintain the lethality where the average grunt can still and will be destroyed by a well placed beam rifle shot.

On top of that, a lot of our more rare units got a lot of care and attention on their rebalance. G Gundam as a whole has moved up to 1000pts each, representing how they are the finest machines their country put out. Likewise, the Wing units has a good boost to better represent their grunt killing prowess.

Super Robots also received considerable glow ups, as the Gundam sheets have been overall increasing in costs it’s time to make some of the iconic Super Robots significantly more expensive, and thus more powerful as well. Some classic favorites will retain their cheap 250pt version, while others are getting bumped up to 750-1000pt options. Do note, that even a cheap unit with a bouquet of unit upgrades can still menace significantly more expensive units if you play them right. That’s one of the fun options we’re happy to keep designing around in MechaStellar.

MechaStellar Design Goals – SEP25 Update – Finisher

In a previous post we talked about several items in the MechaStellar SEP 2025 roster update. In this post we’ll cover Finishing Blow, now named Finisher, in-depth.

Finishing Blow has often been a little anemic or too insanely strong dealing enormous amounts of damage. While the second one is perfect for your average episode Super Robot Anime, it’s not always great for game balance but does make for some awesome moments if you pull it off in Round 5. We wanted to capture that feeling and make it more likely, more useful, and more deadly without being too overbearing. Here’s what we came up with.

The last update to Finishing Blow was as follows:

If you have enough hits (i.e. 7+) then roll a d10 for each unblocked hit, every 10 is a Finishing Blow worth 1000 DMG.

There were various effects that lowered the number of hits required like Hot Blooded, and a few effects that made Finishing Blow deal even more damage. Before this, Finishing blow was further limited, requiring “Finisher” type weapons.

It was a good distinction at the time, but we opened it up over time and recently we had machine guns kicking off finishing blows luckily. Nice if you want to replicate the opening scene of Mobile Suit Gundam 0080, but sometimes got a little too common and didn’t quite feel right when Machine Guns were dealing 7000 damage on an exceptionally lucky roll.

For the current iteration of Finishing Blow, now simply titled Finisher. It’s still open to all weapons as long as you’re lucky enough to get 10 unblocked Hits. Or, it’s an automatic chance anytime your weapons has Finisher+X.

What’s more, Hot Blooded (and a few other traits which have been absorbed into the fold) now give Finisher+1 on all weapons. So Ryoma in Getter 1, is dealing Finishing blows with a Getter Gatling or Getter Machine guns.

The Finisher+X system remains the same, giving bonus dice to roll. The major difference now, being that if you wind up with more than 10 Finisher dice, the remaining are automatic successes. So if you had 13 Finisher dice, there are 10 to roll and 3 that are automatic (+3000 DMG).

Speaking of Finisher Dice, we moved these over for the Defender to roll. One is for consistency, that way they are rolling Armor Saves and Finisher Saves so there’s less back and forth. At one point, we were considering putting Armor Saves and Finisher on the same dice roll, but we opted against that.

Lastly, the formula for Finisher now includes the Current Round. This is a mechanic we like a lot and has shown up in a few other places. And it represents how battles become more pitched and deadly as time wears on. With this, as Round 5 comes on for your Super Robot Showdown and you bring out your strongest weapon, the odds of getting lots of unblocked hits and a massive Finishing Blow increases (and an even better chance of cracking 10k damage, piercing the heavens and scoring +100VP).

More importantly, the Round mechanic actually provides an incentive to wait a little before going all out on effects like Valor or limited use abilities / events. Because in later Rounds you have better odds of striking that ultimate blow. Hopefully, this will further adjust playstyles to avoid alpha strikes.

MechaStellar Design Goals – SEP25 Update – Starting Momentum

In the previous post we talked about several items in the MechaStellar SEP 2025 roster update. In this post we’ll cover Starting Momentum in-depth.

Momentum is one MechaStellar’s defining features, and has been for quite a few years now. It’s a game system we’re really proud of, momentum represents the collective skill, luck, morale of your forces will ebb and flow during battle. In the switch to VER10 Momentum could start at a flat 10, which was greatly in the early drafts, but with some major overhauls to the pilot system, starting Momentum was also much lower. We’ve been experimenting with several options and finally came up with a winner we’re happy with and play testers are happy with, some are even overjoyed.

We went through a lot of different experiments of starting Momentum, perhaps too many haha. One we tried to stick with was to quantify, Battle-Tested / Skilled / Ace units, and how much Momentum they would drain. We eventually settled on -1/2 (round up), -1 and -2 starting Momentum. This was fine, but we still ran into problems where, let’s say you wanted to run a Gundam SEED Le Creuset team, and you’re starting off with M-6 still (4 Skilled and 1 Ace).

While it was relatively fair, when comparing teams, we still wound up with very low starting Momentum overall. This was also in a time period where playtesters discovered some good turn 1 Alpha Strikes, and the need for higher starting Momentum become very apparent.

We eventually solved this by retaining the current comparison method, but now there’s a chance both players will start with M=10 or M=8, where historically it was often M=6 vs M=4. This comparison method has both players count up their “Elite Units”. The person with less Elite points, starts with M=10, the other players starts with the difference.

For example let’s say we have Kira and Mwu (2x Ace = 4) vs the Le Creuset Team (4x Skill + Ace = 6), a difference of 2. Kira and Mwu start with 10, while the Le Creuset team start with the difference (10-2=8). This gave A LOT more flexibility for people who like running thematic forces with lots of Elite units on both sides. You can also still field a grunt force vs an elite force and have a huge gap in Momentum.

Overall, we kept the same feel of the current Momentum system while overall massively improving the amount of starting Momentum. This is both good for balance and QoL in our opinion. Hope you all enjoy!

MechaStellar Design Goals – SEP25 Update – Lethality

The latest update has quite a bit of changes both to the Core Rules, Wargaming supplement and the Unit Profile sheets. In this post we’ll cover a brief overview. Which we’ve broken into three segments. Some of these we will cover more in depth in followup posts. For the first segment let’s cover Lethality.

Lethality Update

One of MechaStellar’s claim to fame is having a level of lethality that emulates the world of Mobile Suit Gundam, where grunts, and even heroic Aces can meet their untimely demise from a well placed bazooka shoot or a beam vaporizing the cockpit. And while we’re very proud of that, it also means living on the knifes edge both for gameplay and designing game balance. But it’s also an incredibly fun challenge, and why we’ve continued to work on this game for the last, gosh, I guess we’re going on 9 years now.

MechaStellar has gone through many versions since then, each with it’s own version of lethality, with earlier versions leaning hard into the “instant-death” effects and the last few versions making failed armor saves (and now Finisher saves) being deadly but not always a guaranteed dead unit. Some of these we’ve been working on heavily the last two months and others (like Battle Damage) have had intermittent tests since the switch from VER9 to VER10. Lethality has been adjusted in the current update to MechaStellar VER10 in the following ways.

Armor Saves reduced from Max 5 Saves to Max 3 Saves.

This is how it was in VER9 as well, but we’ve found beam weapons have had a little too much potential energy loaded in them, and dropping it down to 3 still keeps them lethal while not being overbearing against an HP sponge Super Robot that happened to roll five 1s.

To balance that out, beam weapons have also been adjusted, in general going down -100 DMG, but going up +1 PEN, so they are more likely to have a deadly vaporizing hit compared to before. This also has the added benefit of less times where a robot is destroyed from base beam damage without even needing to roll armor saves (which always felt a little odd).

HP Rebalance

The HP formula has been on the operating table a lot the last 6 months now, although it’s not always apparent since we try to ensure that after we tweak it, most units stay roughly the same, while some outliers are brought in. With the change to Armor Saves, we also want to make sure that grunts like a Zaku will still die when hit by a beam rifle, so if there’s several hits and 3 armor saves there should be a very sizeable change that Zaku is dead. (Leo’s, of course are made out of explodium)

Shield Update

Shield bloat was cut down for the forthcoming Battle Damage update. But another casualty of that, was all the GMs which had cheap shields, now had much more expensive shields. This is a problem, because we try our best to make sure grunts mechs on both factions are equal points, and we also make the most of their equipment slots. In order to ‘pay for’ these expensive shields we’d have to either drop GM HP sharply, or keep it the same and raise everyone else’s HP. And I don’t think the world was ready for 4000 HP Zaku’s just yet. Fortunately we found a compromise, by looking for another avenue to make Shields cheaper, while dropping GM HP but not as sharply. We struck a good balance here, and Shield enthusiasts are overall happy.

Battle Damage

Speak of Shield breaks, we are bringing back Battle Damage from VER9 over to VER10 and this time it’s now a part of the Core Rules. However, we’re able to keep the ‘optional module’ flavor by limiting this only to Elite Units. Since Battle Damage can be a bit of pain to track, limiting it to Elite units helps A LOT. Just don’t setup a game with 10 elite GMs and 10 elite different colored GMs.

Battle Damage is a fun system to let you simulate all the times we see beam rifles shot and explode, arms cut off, thrusters hit, and the rare MAIN KA-MI-RA being disabled. Right now, the system is still a little too fiddly so we will likely pare it down to just a couple options that are easier to remember in the future based on playtester feedback. Overall, we’re happy that it works and it provides another avenue to keep your named pilots alive for longer.

Starting Momentum

Speaking of named pilots, the rules for Starting Momentum have changed and now in general you will be starting with much higher amounts of Momentum. We’ll cover this in detail in another post.

Similarly, Flash and Iron Wall now have super version that all but guarantee you to survive a heavy hit (if you’ve got a surplus of Momentum). Likewise, Valor is now limited to Round 2+ to prevent Round 1 Alpha Strikes which were becoming a problem again.

Finishing Blow

Last but not least we have Finishing Blow which received a major update. We’ll cover this in detail in the next post. The important thing to note, is that the target now rolls Finishing Blow (just like Armor Saves) and the numbers are now reversed being a 1 instead of a 10.

MechaStellar VER10 – Stress Test – Warships

Stellar Warships have come a long way since VER8. They’ve gone through several different styles of gameplay until eventually have their turns plays out the same as any of mecha unit in the game. VER10 continues to streamline Warships by having their profiles mirror those of the Kaiju with very high HP but poor evasion and the special Havoc stat that lets them blow apart cover.

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MechaStellar VER10 – Full Power! – Energy cost update

MechaStellar VER10 has done a lot to rework the Momentum system based on feedback from VER9 especially. In this post we’ll look at how weapons that used to drain Momentum have been updated.

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