We ran a large number of playtests with five shot weapons to evaluate if we could include this suggested change without breaking game balance. You can read more about it in this previous post here.
In this series we had some asymmetric warfare with two 500pt units (Eva-01 and Big O) vs 1000pts of Zeon grunts (Zaku II, Dom and Gelgoog) with a few skileld pilots mixed in.
The extra shot made the game very dangerous for the two 500pt units. Big O was eventually take down by bazookas and great positioning in most games, while Eva 01 usually survived but once Berserk had a hard time chewing through most of Zeon’s forces.
In this series we had a cross era game with the same force from Zeon vs the Titans from Zeta Gundam fielding the Hizack,Marasai and Asshimar.
For some highlights, in the top left photo a Skilled Asshimar pilot with Barrage made 8 shot within Sensors range and landed 6 out of 8 critical hits, annihilating the Dom before it got to take a turn.
In the bottom photos we have an Asshimar jet forward while transformed as a UFO causing some havoc then transforming and punching a Gelgoog next Round before ultimately being cut in half. On the bottom right is a Hizack who managed to survive 2 rounds while surrounded.
This playtest series used units from Mazinger Z as well as a streamlined version of the Defend the City rules to spice things up. These are the Go Nagai Robot Collection figures.
With base 5 shots on most weapons things got very deadly with all the firepower units on the field. The Doublas M2 in particular were pushing out high volumes of shots as well as Venus A in return. Most of these games ended up being bloodbaths.
The highlight was when Boss Borot stole a weapon, which was Garada K7s horns and then proceeded to destroy him with them.
This game series with our Mobile Suit in Action (MSIA) figures had Mudrock and a basic Guncannon vs Char’s Zaku and a skilled Dom pilot.
The 5 shots were nice with Indirect Fire, but the enemy team had a high enough movement that they could get within shooting range rather quickly. Over a few games Mudrock folded pretty quickly after pressure was applied by Char’s Zaku, the extra shot with bazookas is extremely powerful.
Closing Thoughts
While all of these games using base 5 shot weapons were fun, we can’t deny that they have become remarkably more lethal with more games being over by Round 2 or Round 3 which is a bit premature. For about 2/3 of these games we also played with a draft revision with a nice bump up in HP but that still was not enough to slow the destruction going on in each game.
While it was a good suggestion I think if we want to implement this suggestion we would have to rework a number of weapon profiles to be considerably lower damage and/or further increase HP on unit. Something to think about.
MechaStellar 