So far we’ve talked about two of the three main components of creating a unit. Frame and Performance. Now we’ll talk about the third leg of the triad, Pilot Skill which allows you to take an outdated machine and keep it competitive.
Category: Mecha
MechaStellar: Equipment Slots 1-F
In this post we’ll have some additional examples of equipment slots using Federation suits. You can read more about equipment slots in this post here. As Gundam is my personal favorite real robot show, that will be most of the examples you see, but you can still use the system to model your favorite mech show whether it’s Macross, Votoms, Full Metal Panic etc. Western style heavy mechs will be covered in a separate series of rules, where they trade evasion and mobility for more HP and equipment slots.
For these examples we’ll tackle the GM, originally known as Gundam Mass Produced, the mainstay of Federation forces for early UC, slowly being phased out in the CCA era to F91. We’ll look at some of the very earliest GM models, specifically the fragile Frame Level 1 varieties.
When designing mobile suits think about whether or not a suit can survive a direct hit from a powerful weapon like a beam rifle or bazooka (DMG 400-500), if it is then it’s probably a Frame LVL 3 suit (HP 600). The GMs we’re looking at can be easily destroyed by machine gun fire so we consider them Frame Level 1, which is excellent for horde armies as Frame Level is the biggest driver of a suits cost when building your army but we’ll cover that later.
MechaStellar: Equipment Slots 1-Z
This time let’s talk about Equipment (EQ) slots which are used to build and customize your suit. Every suit has a Frame Level and Performance Level to start, for example Frame 3 Performance 4, this establishes their baseline combat statistics. Two suits with identical Frame and Performance level will have identical stats, so Equipment is how we differentiate our Mechs from one another. We’ll look at a couple examples in this post and talk about Weight as well.
MechaStellar: Melee Combat
Melee is an especially dangerous affair. Watching your favorite shows you know that once it comes down to melee combat there can be only one victor and it’s often a sudden and explosive finish. To that end we’ve tried to replicate that feeling in Mechastellar. Below are the rules for Melee combat in Mechastellar Ver. 1.0
MechaStellar: Performance Stats In-Depth
Performance Stats are quite a bit faster to cover than Frame level stats as they are all combat driven. So we have Ranged Attack, Melee Attack, Evade and Movement.
Movement describes how far you can move in a round. Movement 7 means you can move 7″. If you ever need to back up, pop out of a building then pop back into cover, or make a sharp turn exceeding 90 degrees you pay a 2″ penalty once (and only once) for the turn. After paying the penalty you are free to execute as many maneuvers as you want. The reason for only paying it once is for speed of play and to avoid being overly punishing for certain slow units such as our favorite Guncannon.
MechaStellar: Frame Stats In-Depth
While some previous posts have touched on stats and mechanics let’s devote this post to a more in-depth look with the latest and greatest. It’s been another year in development and lots of fun playtesting so we’ve been sharpening our mechanics in the meantime. Alright time for some stats.
As you recall from this post Frame Level controls the following: Hull Points (HP), Equipment Slots (EQ), Output (Action Points), Armor Save (ARM Sv), and Sensors. Let’s explore those.
MechaStellar: Mobile Suit Types Update
Aloha! Sorry for the delay in posting, internet and blogging is not necessarily and easy thing on deployment. Now it’s time for some design updates and playtest reports. As soon as I finish them I’ll begin posting them so look forward to that.
In the last post we talked about Suit types to be used in Mechastellar. Mechastellar is a Mech game to be used as either a tabletop war game or a tabletop RPG depending on your groups preferences. The RPG / War Game system can be used to simulate your favorite mech series such as Mobile Suit Gundam or Mech Warrior.
MechaStellar 