MechaStellar VER 8.8 Design Goals – Mental Math & Focus

Kou Uraki face 0083 — Wait what was your shooting accuracy again?

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.

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MechaStellar VER 8.8 Design Goals – Short Range Weapons Update

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.

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MechaStellar VER 8.7 Design Goals – Unit Profile Sheets

Here’s an indepth look at some of the design decisions that went into the MechaStellar VER 8.7 Unit Profile Sheets Update. For your convenience I have included the relevant summary line item list for each of those categories from the main update post as well.

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MechaStellar VER 8.7 Design Goals – Weapons Update

Closing out the VER 8.7 update here’s an indepth look at some of the design decisions that went into the Weapons update. For your convenience I have included the relevant summary line item list for each of those categories from the previous post as well.

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MechaStellar VER 8.7 Design Goals – Balance Patch

Super Robot Wars by Dorasu – https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/3141725

Here’s an indepth look at some of the design decisions that went into the Balance Patch, Unit Profile adjustments and Weapon adjustments. For your convenience I have included the relevant summary line item list for each of those categories from the previous post as well.

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MechaStellar VER 8.7 Design Goals – Stellar Warfare

Here’s an indepth look at some of the design decisions that went into the MechaStellar VER 8.7 Stellar Warefare Update. For your convenience I have included the relevant summary line item list for each of those categories from the previous post as well.

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MechaStellar VER 8.7 Design Goals – Core Rules Updates

Here’s an indepth look at some of the design decisions that went into the VER 8.7 Core Rules Update for MechaStellar.. For your convenience I have included the relevant summary line item list for each of those categories from the previous post as well.

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MechaStellar December 2022 Unit Roster Update

A lot of our folks will be on travel for December so we’re pushing the roster update out early this month. The major update for this month is the new “Supreme Robot Warfare” module that is intended for smaller games of say 2vs2 or 3vs3 which many of our players have been gravitating towards. Since this is a major update to the core rules we’re updating the VER to 8.6. The Design Goal for this module was to enhance the mobility of Real Robots (MS) and enhance the durability and knockout power of Super Robots (Titans).

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MechaStellar VER 8.3 Released – Stellar Warship Update

For August’s update we putting the Stellar back into MechaStellar. Our Stellar Warship rules for VER 8 have been in testing for a close to a year now, and we are now satisfied with where they are at to start releasing them this month. This month we release the Musai and Salamis from Mobile Suit Gundam. In the future we’ll release additional Stellar Warships from Gundam as well as other Mecha series such as the J-Ark from GaoGaiGar. Below we’ll talk about our Design Goals and the mecha tactics to employ.

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[MS] Unit Upgrades for Matchmaking

The upgrade system was created as a way to take favorite units and upgrade them to compete with higher performance units. We’ve also included several options you can purchase to help you match points with your opponent without using additional units.

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