In this post we’ll discuss the change to Shields, Beam Sabers, Heat Hawks and Beam Rifles from the previous November draft. From our last post we talked a lot about trying to improve survivability for units without Shields as well as an improvement to Shields as well by changing their default ability from being strong against Machine Guns to being stronger against a variety of weapon types.
Unfortunately we made quite an oversight.
Continue reading “Design Goals – Shields VER9.2”
For me personally some of the most fun is when you have a favorite unit who is rolling really well and managing to evade a lot of attacks. From VER5 to VER7 Evade was in general pretty high, especially for the high mobility units, VER8 did a good job of flattening the shooting / evade range for most units so when you are playing with OYW units it was very rare you ran into a situation where a shooty unit didn’t have a reasonable chance to hit even a unit with high evade.
The most recent balance patch in October gave a nice improvement to the Battler, Interceptor and Firepower role, unfortunately it appears to have tipped the scales a bit too much onto the shooting side, especially compounded with the new Target Lock rules. In this post we’ll look at some options we considered before moving forward.
Continue reading “MechaStellar NOV23 – Shields & Evade Overhaul”
I noticed in the October update that a lot of G Gundam units don’t have a good reason to invest in Armor beyond level 3, so I was working on a HP tweak for Armor 4+ units. While working on that tweak I noticed a loophole on a Dom Variant where it could be built better and cheaper as a Frame 3 unit instead of a Frame 2 unit.
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, many of the points hikes in the last couple years have originated in someone on the team finding an edge case where you could build one unit cheaper and better as a higher frame unit.
When looking at this unit we went over a few ideas on how to fix it.
Continue reading “MechaStellar NOV23 – HP Overhaul”
Doing an overhaul of melee weapons meant having to update all of the current Mecha Unit Profiles. Whenever we have to do a pass over everything it’s also a good time to implement any other system wide changes. Today we will look at the update to the combat roles starting with the Attacker role.
Continue reading “MechaStellar VER9 – Combat Roles Update”
We’ve received a lot of feedback regarding GaoGaiGar and to a lesser extent Getter Dragon specifically regarding weapons that give 3 Hits on a Critical Hit. The chief complaint being that these units can often stack many hits to the point where it’s almost impossible to resist them in melee. As a result we’ve had to look over these units and this weapon type and consider solutions.
For those who exclusively play Gundam units the bottom line up front is that Beam Sabers and Heat Hawks are dropping down to 300 DMG per hit, Heat whips and Dragon Fangs are now a melee attack option. Units with high crit abilities such as Sandrock or Minaret Gundam are having their weapons reworked. For the Super Robot fans read on below the break.
Continue reading “October – Melee and Close Range Weapons Overhaul”
Today’s post we’ll explore some of the design goals that went into MechaStellar VER9.
Continue reading “MechaStellar VER9 Design Goals”
The King of Braves GaoGaiGar will release during the end of month May roster update. We will also be releasing MechaStellar VER 9 Core Combat Rules in May. VER 9 is the Super Robot update and like the last several updates to VER 8 is intended to cut down on mental math.
Continue reading “MechaStellar VER 9 Planned for May2023 Release”
Finishing Blow started off as a Melee experiment when we were working on solutions for what to do with units who were able to break past 20d10 Melee dice. At the time we were coming off with different ideas for what to do with those extra dice and what could be a good universal option that would applicable to a Real Robot as well as a Super Robot.
We eventually settled on “Glory” as our solution for units with high dice pools, thanks to a suggestion from one of our players but we kept Finishing Blow in a design notebook for use later. While we were prepping for the G Gundam release and working on VER 8.8, in particular the Focus action we decided to consider looking over the Finishing Blow system again.
Continue reading “MechaStellar VER 8.8 Design Goals – Finishing Blow”
This is the 2nd in-depth post looking at the changes made in VER 8.8, you can read the full VER 8.8 summary here and the design goals post on the weapon rebalance here.
With the update to VER 8.7 we upgraded several of the Pilot Traits to have 2 effects, a good number of these ended up giving a +1 Evade bonus. While this was a nice bonus, especially for several units who were middle of the road for Evasion, I personally got a lot of great feedback on these our players and other members of the team regarding that. Mainly that with VER 8.7’s goal of reducing mental math, adding a slew a +1 Evade bonuses runs counterproductive to that goal.
And that’s a great point! So in VER 8.8 we went about trying to scrub as much mental math as we could from the game. No longer will your gameplay halt every time a Skilled or Ace pilot comes up and you have to add in several steps of bonus accuracy and bonus evade, and “what was the target number again??”
Lesson learned! Let’s see what we can do instead.
Continue reading “MechaStellar VER 8.8 Design Goals – Mental Math & Focus”
This update kicked off with the complete reworking of the thrown weapons from last month. Our first new series added in 2023 is G Gundam, we began prototyping units in April and started playtesting in July of 2022, with G Gundam being the next release all forthcoming units receive heavy playtesting the two months leading up to release.
During the playtests for G Gundam models, one unit in particular stood out. Gundam Maxter almost exclusively uses short range weapons, with a pair of magnums and several different punches including a cyclonic, burning jet of fire, and semi-visible bursting machine gun punch. We were able to utilize existing weapon profiles to at least give each punch a different special effect but something was lacking. What we observed was that many of punches (and even the twin magnums) felt rather samey, and it didn’t feel like there was a good time to use one over the other.
Continue reading “MechaStellar VER 8.8 Design Goals – Short Range Weapons Update”
MechaStellar 