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).
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 this segment let’s cover Balance Updates.
(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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
As mentioned in our previous post we’ve been testing out various ideas. In this post we’ll look as size modifiers and the recent change to defense dice.
In the latest roster update for the VER10 draft rules we’ve updated a lot of roles, renamed a couple, and even converted some of the special types (Assault, Heavy Arms, Indomitable) into combat roles as well. Below the break we’ll cover a brief history of combat roles and then the impetus for change.
I thought it might be worthwhile to share how some of the rules changes from VER9 to VER10 can speed up the game. Trying to keep the game fast and fun to play is an ever-present design goal for us, so here are some things we contemplate when making game changes.
Note: These time estimates are based on our games as well as our friends, many of whom are 40k veterans and used to fast dice.
MechaStellar 