In making VER11 we had a lot of new and interesting design challenges to improve the game.  Our overall goal to take VER10 and make it faster, more fun and easier to teach.  Weapon Triggers definitely fulfill the more fun part and so far its been fun to teach new playtesters that “yes you can blow up cover with your first attack then fire on the exposed target with your next attack”.  Bombard and Siege went through a lot of revisions, one eventually being removed while the other was heavily modified until it reached it’s final form which we’ll discuss in this post.

At the start of VER11 development Bombard and Siege had the following abilities:

• Bombard
  • If the target has no Cover, each Trigger is a Critical Hit. 
  • Bombard was priced cheaper than Crit, a CRIT 9+ weapon is the equivalent of a Bombard 8+ weapon.
  • Typically used on Cannon types and some missiles
• Siege
  • Each Trigger rolled blows up 1 level of Cover, i.e. reducing Level 3 to Level 2 Cover or Level 1 to Level 0.
  • If you attack Cover directly the weapon trigger becomes Siege, if it was already siege, improve your Trigger TN by 2, i.e. Siege 9+ to 7+
  • Typically given to Bazookas, some missiles and some melee weapons

We went through several variations of each trait, trying to preserve the combined arms combination where Siege weapons benefit bombard weapons.  Siege was a tricky beast, we were experimenting with Siege also destroying or weakening Shields / Armor as well as Cover.  Triggers could blow up Cover, or lower a targets shield or armor level by 1.  Whether it was permanent or temporary was still up in there.  Here’s one DEV conversation

I think I figured out how to fix sequencing on Siege

and make the rules text shorter

so each Siege trigger lowers Cover or Shield bonus by 1.  Cover is permanently lowered, Shield is for the rest of the round (synergy by activating bazooka unit first).  The iron wall skill reactivates the shield bonus

To permanently break shields, we’ll have to rely on Finisher weapons

so finisher needs to be common either on common weapons like a beam saber

or maybe on everyone’s generic close combat [cc] attack

At the time of this discussion, Finisher weapons were updated to cause a “Battle Damage” save which could blow up a shield first and foremost, and if target had no shield then it might cause system shock like severe damage to a (weapon), leg (propulsion) or head (main camera).  This eventually morphed into “Break Saves [BR6+]” and “System Shock” Saves which we’ll discuss later.  Likewise, we’ll talk about the Finisher Trigger in the next post.

While we made headway with the shield breaking philosophy moving into Break Saves, Siege continued to be a difficult Trigger to work with, if we wanted to have Siege affect a targets Shields, Armor, or Defense in addition to blowing up cover. Sequencing in particular for the attack action (dice rolls -> triggers -> skills -> bonuses like Cover and Shields -> Defender skills) and Siege was quite messy since the Trigger would occur before the Defender could use Skills, so having a Skill that would prevent your shield from blowing up got messy in the sequencing.

So Amuro would use either Flash or Iron Wall depending on who he’s fighting, so we could have Flash or Iron Wall skills prevent your Shield from being reduced or broken

Yeah, but right now defender doesn’t choose skills until after attacker has resolved attack and triggers which means Siege triggers can reduce the Shield to 0 before the defender even chooses skills

right..well, we could have the skill restore the shield bonus, like if you used Iron Wall this turn, restore your Shield bonus

it feels like we’re just making this more complicated than it needs to be

Likewise, we run into problems if we give Siege a passive bonus like +1d10 ATK if target has no shield. Does that activate if the target started with a shield, but then your triggers blow up the shield, at that points do you add the extra die. All that spawned this DEV conversation.

I don’t like Siege being deadspace if target has no shield or cover

Run through several ideas, best thematic one is that Siege provides system shock saves (Battle Damage) if target has no shield or cover bonus. 

However, for sequencing the cleanest way to do this is to make sure this trigger only happens if you start the attack and target has no Cover / Shield bonus.  Basically attack 1 needs to annihilate that shield bonus, while attack 2 can cause battle damage.

Our VER11 Design Goal was to make things fast and fun without being overly complicated. Obviously these weren’t working so we tried a few more ideas. We also briefly considered Siege Triggers creating a “DEF penalty” like so

• If target has Level 0 Cover each additional Trigger is -1 DEF bonus on this ATK only
  • DEF Bonus includes Shields / Barriers / Armor etc and is Min. +0 DEF.
  • i.e. Level 3 Cover, 5 Triggers, Level 0 Cover and target has DEF-2 (Min 0)
• Problem of course being, -DEF is the same as +HIT, so it’s mathematically about the same as CRIT but with a limit that DEF can’t go below 0.  This idea went belly up as well.

We considered Siege Trigger = +100 DMG if target has no shield bonus.  But that stepped on the toes of Finisher, and also became a self-feeding ability since Siege also weakened shields.  Not to mention the sequencing issues of does this apply during an attack when the shield is destroyed or not?

Eventually we moved on to just allow for Siege and Bombard weapons to have deadspace, times when the triggers won’t happen, but give them an always on passive instead.  And so we got:

• Bombard (Passive): If target has a Shield gain +1d10 attack
• Siege (Passive): If target has no Shield gain +1d10 attack

Shields were much cheaper at this point of development, because Break Saves could wipe them out.  And so we added these passives that way if your opponent had an all shield army, you were incentivized to bring Bombard weapons.   This was okay for a bit but felt kind of gamey.  While we were going through another pass on the rules to trim things that felt excessive, complicated or redundant, we eventually we got rid of Bombard, since Bullseye was taking over the no-cover Trait. 

So then what do we do with Siege?

Siege was a fan favorite ability, and we held onto this Trigger until the final week.  It was so popular that we even included  a gameplay example in the core rules to reenact a favorite tactic of Justice Gundam which was to throw it’s beam boomerang and try to destroy a piece of cover.  If they lucked out on the die roll and sliced through that building, they then used its cannons against the exposed target (Bombard weapons gave a Crit vs targets without Cover).  The player who discovered that combo still thinks they are a genius =)

That said, Siege did eventually change.  Not because of that combo, no in fact we loved it and everyone loved the “Trigger = Blow up that many levels of Cover”.  The problem became that, if there was no Cover then Siege did nothing.  And late in development 50% of Combo triggers were Siege + another ability.  So having 1/2 of your combo trigger be useless if the target had no cover felt rather underwhelming. 

One of the goals of the recent combat redesign has been making every weapon trigger feel both intuitive and exciting.

Siege triggers destroyed Cover was awesome! It produced some spectacular moments where a lucky roll could flatten an entire defensive position, but it also had a few downsides:

• The trigger was only useful when Cover was present.
• Occasionally you would roll 0 Triggers and not interact with Cover at all.
• Siege didn’t combine well with other trigger abilities.
• It limited the design space for Super Robot finisher weapons.

The new direction is to separate the battlefield role from the trigger effect.

Siege Passive

• Reduce the target’s Cover Level by 1.

Instead of hoping to roll enough triggers to demolish terrain, Siege weapons now always accomplish their primary purpose—they weaken enemy fortifications.  This makes Siege more reliable while reducing swingy outcomes where one lucky attack completely erased multiple terrain features.  With Cover removal moved to a passive ability, Siege triggers are free to become something universally useful.  The current direction is:

Trigger

• Generate +1 additional Save.

This creates a clear distinction between the defensive-breaking roles.

• Critical = More Hits
• Pierce = Harder Saves
• Siege = More Saves

Rather than punching through armor like Pierce, Siege represents overwhelming structural damage—more systems failing, more secondary explosions, and more catastrophic impacts.

This also opens the door to much more interesting combination triggers. Previously, many Super Robot finisher attacks defaulted to Breaker, because it was the only melee combination that consistently felt rewarding.  With Siege becoming a universally useful trigger, there is now room for another powerful melee archetype, Overkill.

Breaker

Critical + Pierce

Each Trigger becomes:

• +1 Hit
• +1 Save TN

This represents concentrated penetration—drills, lances and radiation attacks designed to punch through or lethally bypass heavy armor.

Overkill

Critical + Siege

Each Trigger becomes:

• +1 Hit
• +1 Save

Rather than piercing, these attacks simply overwhelm the target through sheer destructive force.

This is a much better thematic fit for weapons such as giant hammers, rocket punches, pile bunkers, and other crushing finishers.

In making MechaStellar VER11 we had a lot of new and interesting design challenges to improve the game.  Our overall goal to take VER10 and make it faster, more fun and easier to teach.  Weapon Triggers definitely fulfill the more fun part and so far its been fun to teach new playtesters that “yes you do get to roll another bucket of dice” and see their smiles in response.  Since Barrage was the genesis of weapon triggers, and also the one that experienced the most changes we wanted to write about it first.

For Reference here’s how the Barrage discussion started

Enfilading fire = We could make Barrage an anti-squad weapon.  But then it would only be useful against squads and not useful every game.

Sustained fire option = We could have barrage convert failed failed hits into hits, low power, not too exciting, and doesn’t keep parity with other weapons

Triple Crit option = Maybe Barrage triggers could be worth 3 Hits instead of Crit which is 2 Hits.  Fun and definitely a hail of gunfire.

Dakkadakka option = threshold hits generate extra dice.  Very fun, but we now we have an issue of weird mental math with dice overflow.  Like start adding dice to your pool, but then if it goes over 10d10 then it’s extra hits.  It’s not too strong but it’s not smooth at all.

SuperDakka option = What about an option where you reroll the trigger dice.  And keep reroll trigger dice until you stop rolling triggers?  This was max. fun, but then one playtester demonstrated how annoying it can be when you “pick up, and drop a die” and magically it keeps landing on the same number. 

From there we settled on the following:

• Barrage 8+
  • Every 8+ is an exploding hit, after counting Hits & Triggers.  Reroll all your Trigger dice for bonus Hits.  This reroll is considered a separate roll and does not count against the 10d10 dice cap.

Now we had to sanity check this in a couple games to see how powerful this is compared to Crit weapons.  As mentioned in a previous post, we decided against all weapons have CRIT on 10s and instead CRIT would only be for certain Triggers like CRIT or BULLSEYE.  

So rolling a 10 on Barrage was just a regular hit (that you got to roll again).  Barrage has been the most fun ability, but statistically it’s slightly weaker overall than Crit, but it does have a higher chance of getting at least 1+ (albeit lower DMG) hits through.

The DEV Discussion looked like this:

We need to explain how to pick up dice in quick dice section.  First remove the 1s and 2s.  Then pick up all hits that are not threshold, i.e. Barrage 8+, pick up 3-7 as hits, and count your hits.  Then pick up the threshold and count (don’t forget crits) and reroll them, then final count.

Actually maybe we should remove crits.

Definitely remove crits

Okay so if Focus moves back to +1 Hit and Hit on a 3+, then we need to make barrrage always hit on a 3+ otherwise we have a massive sequencing pitfall where players might scoop dice before focusing then forget how many 3+ they had.

At the time we were developing Barrage, some of the pilot skills were getting Overhauled.  Focus would no longer be the “Hit on 3+” skill because now elite pilots were already hitting on 4+ or 3+.  Later, one of the in development pilot skills would let you hit on a 2+.  With all that in mind, we realized we would have sequencing issues with barrage. 

If you wait for the reroll to declare skills, do you then have to go back in time and count those dice with the better Hit Target Number?  What if you declare it before the reroll, but then it didn’t matter because all your reroll dice were Hits anyways. 

• From that discussion we decided that:
  • Barrage (Passive): This weapon always hits on a 3+. 
  • [Anti Squad] Elite Pilots get +1 Hit per Model, Ace Pilots also get +2 Hits per model in enemy unit.

Eventually, the “Anti-squad” effect got moved into an upgrade ability. 

We were also considering a combined arms ability where Barrage causes a Suppression effect if the target is <50% HP they must make a Morale Save or lose a Move Action.  This would combo with Bullseye which Crits against crippled targets that have only one move action.  Ultimately, this train of thought let to “Mobility Saves [MB6+]” which we’ll discuss in the Saving Throw post.

Since Trigger and Skills were in parallel development paths, we had to keep updating Barrage as well.  When the “Hit on a 2+ Skill” went through testing, Barrage instead turned into

• Barrage (Passive): The Hit on a 2+ Skill is [M-0] for Barrage weapons, however,  you may not use the Zeal skill.

Eventually that skill was removed entirely (who knows, it may reappear one day), so Barrage just reverted back to

• Every 8+ is an exploding hit, after counting Hits & Triggers.  Reroll all your Trigger dice for bonus Hits.  This reroll is considered a separate roll and does not count against the 10d10 dice cap.

But it doesn’t end there.  In the last week of VER11 development we came to a breakthrough.  The other Triggers had hit roughly even parity, but Barrage still lagged a bit behind, a fun trigger but mathematically slightly weaker than all the others.  While we were doing the very last round of testing, one DEV asked:

Is there any reason why we only reroll the triggers?  What if we rerolled all Hits instead?

The reasoning was that we didn’t allow for rerolls to spawn Triggers.  The reason was, back then, before we developed the Save system, we didn’t want any more triggers or saving throws because that could cause an insane tidal wave of damage.  If they reroll all those dice, players might mistakenly assume they could hit and trigger again.

However, since the Save system also finished its parallel developed, the number of saves was drastically reduced per attack action, and Barrage weapons all had 1/2 DMG saves we realized there was no longer a reason to prevent additional Triggers or Saves.  And we so we come to final barrage.

• Barrage
  • After counting up Hits & Triggers, remove all Misses then reroll the remaining dice one additional time adding any new Hits or Triggers to the original total.

First Count your Triggers (especially for Barrage) – Place a different color die showing the number of Triggers. This marker reminds you how many saves it will cause later.  Pictured above the unit hits on a 5+ and will Barrage on 8+.  They placed a different color d10 showing the number of triggers [3].  The player then removes any misses like the [1&2] then sifts through the Hits [6] and Triggers [8,8,9]. 

Barrage – At this point the player says to their opponent “OK, 4 Hits and 3 Triggers”.  Then the attacker  picks up successful (TN 5+) dice [6,8,8,8] and rerolls them into [5,5,10,10] = +4 Hits and +2 Triggers.  “Ok, 8 Hits and 5 Triggers, your turn for Defense”. 

Next post we’ll talk about the evolution of Siege & Bombard.