As we’ve alluded to in previous posts, Pilots bring in a lot of advantages to your forces, but also carry some risks when it comes to Morale and Victory Points. Pilot Skills, usable by any unit have also been overhauled and every turn you will likely feel the need to spend 1 or more Momentum. Balancing the ebb and flow of Momentum will be the key to victory.
Continue reading “MechaStellar VER10 Preview – Pilots and Pilot Skills”
Momentum has been a core part of the rules for a very long time and has undergone several transformations, both in how it can be used, how many you can have, and how you are able to generate it. In this post we’ll look at how it’s changed in VER10.
Continue reading “MechaStellar VER10 Preview – Momentum”
The most common question we have gotten in MechaStellar for years has been “Why are shooting and melee so different.”
MechaStellar VER9 has been on a stable chassis first built in VER5 and refined with every version update since, with most Version updates being an overhaul to the melee system to make it either more dynamic, more balanced or simply more fun to play with.
During those years, we’ve been contemplating ways to have Shooting and Melee work the same mechanically and we finally have a way that works well and has good balance approaching the previous system.
Naturally after getting that question so often, we’ve been looking for ways to unify the combat mechanic. In VER10 both in Shooting and Melee you will roll d10s, every 5+ is a Hit and every 10 is a Crit Hit. Shooting, Melee and Evade will still continue to receive bonuses based on your Frame, Performance and Combat Role.
But first a quick history lesson.
Continue reading “MechaStellar VER10 Preview – Core Attack Mechanic”MechaStellar VER10 has some revamped and new mechanics and it necessitated an update to the unit profiles. We’ve gotten some feedback from players (as well some strong nudging from another Dev on the team) to rethink unit profiles and only include information that will be relevant to gameplay. In other words, all of a units Build stats (Armor+, Speed+ etc.) aren’t relevant to combat and often lead to confusion. So off they go!
The new and improved VER10 profile only shows you relevant combat stats, while the remaining build stats shown in the top heading are maintained solely because they tie into gameplay or Victory Points in some manner.
This line is intentionally smaller font since the stats shown here come up rarely during gameplay.
This has many familiar items like Pilot type, Sensors, Move and HP (now renamed to Armor HP). You’ll notice that Movement is a much smaller number now, that is because all units get to make 2 move actions per turn.
There are two other stats here. Boost, is a placeholder to be a Mobile Suit equivalent or Power for Super Robots and Havoc for Kaiju. It won’t be very common but you will see it on some 0083 MS in the future.
Morale has gone through many, many iterations. The most recent version has it as a mechanic for Morale generation. We’ll talk about this in a future post.
This is new territory and we’ll talk more about this in the Attack core mechanic post. For right now this first section involves a mechs defenses both for Ranged and Evade. Then below that we have weapons as normal, although we’ve split up the headings so there’s no confusion on what is a shooting weapon and what is a melee weapon. Since we have split heading the “Close Combat” header can be renamed to Rapid Fire on shooting and Special on melee.
While we were rethinking unit profiles, one of the Devs had a great idea to include all the relevant combat information for a weapon (or defense) in the same row. This way you won’t need to look at the weapon, then refer to a section above that, it’s all in one line for easy reference.
A mech’s combat performance is primarily derived from it’s Role, Performance and Frame and is split into Shooting, Evade, Melee ATK, and Melee DEF. So the Shooting stat, is now added to every shooting weapons profile, likewise for Melee attack.
In the above example, The Shooting bonus is +4 Hits, while the Melee bonus is +5 Hits. Likewise for Defenses, Evade and Melee Defense have their bonuses included on the same line with an Evade bonus of +2 DEF and a Melee Defense bonus of +3 DEF.
When it comes to different weapon loadouts, if weapons are shown for multiple units with different Shooting / Melee attack bonuses it will tell you to keep the bonus listed on your profile as seen in the above image. For units that all have the same modifiers, the alternate weapons will list those bonuses on here, so instead of an * it would show +4 Hits for example.
Last but not least, the Armor Save modified has been eliminated. For one it cuts down on mental math and makes gameplay faster. More importantly, some units were able to trivialize beam weapons, to the point where you were at an extreme disadvantage for bringing them. Beam Weapons are back to being deadly again. Some units, however, like Mazinger and Big O will retain an Armor Save benefit but not as strong as before.
You may also have noticed a new term under weapons. Overwatch has been eliminated to cut down on dice rolls (Warship fans can rejoince since it still exists as a reaction for them). In it’s place these weapons have a Support Attack or Support Defense quality. We’ll talk more about this later, but it’s a fun mechanic that promotes moving your units together in squadrons.
MechaStellar 