For this month’s update we have the long awaited After War Gundam X, an Alternate Universe (AU) Gundam show with a post-apocalyptic setting. This AU is unique in that is essentially a “What if” story set in the Universal Century with all the technology and terminology mirroring the Universal Century. In this What if scenario it looks at what would happen to the Earth and the colonies had our Amuro-esque hero fail to stop the colony drop operation and Earth was turned into a wasteland. Our protagonists are Vultures who scavenge the wasteland while dealing with rival Vultures in a Mad Max style conflict.
Here’s a quick look at the monthly update schedule for MechaStellar. We like to do these after a poll closes. The winners of the last poll were Gundam X, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, and Combattler V & Voltes V.
In September & October we released the heroes of the Gurren Brigade. In November we’ll also include the Dai-Gurren battleship as well as the enemy battle ships of the four generals, their personal ganmen as well as Viral’s Enkidu, The Spiral Kings Lazengann and a few ganmen profiles. This should complete all the units pre-timeskip.
In November we will also release the first batch of units for Gundam X including the main cast. We’re also including a balance patch that will resolve a couple underlying issues as well overhaul the HP / Evade / Shield systems to make it a bit more forgiving for new players and grunt units.
In December we will have Combattler V and Voltes V.
Be sure to vote in the next poll too, we will be selecting the top 3 choices as winners. You can find the poll on the MechaStellar downloads page: https://mechastellar.com/game-downloads/
Alright the poll results are in our next three series will be Turn-A Gundam, another Braves (Yuusha) series and our first series about Stellar Warships, Captain Harlock: The Arcadia of my Youth movie.
The October Update is here and we have additional units from Gurren Lagann as well as a few requests from Mobile Suit Gundam including some terrestial warships such as the Gaw and Big Tray.
We also have a balance patch, the first one in four months. This affects a great number of weapons and units (including the fan favorite Big Zam) which you can find summarized after the break. If you want to read more in-depth check out these two posts.
For this month’s update we have long awaited Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann! This is a fondly remembered mecha show that became a phenomenon when it first released in 2007 being picked up by a large swath of the anime blogging community and soaring in popularity on various image message boards and forums being enjoyed by mecha fans and general viewers alike, it was later picked up for US Broadcast in 2008.
For this month’s roster update we have a long awaited update to the Stellar Warship roster for Mobile Suit Gundam. In addition to standard ship of the line units like the Magellan class battleship or the Chivvay heavy cruiser we’ve also expanded the roster to include heavy hitters like the Gwazine and the infamous White Base.
For this month’s update we are adding new units from Gundam Wing including some units requested by one of our all-star players that come from side story manga called Gundam Wing G-Unit, and was released in the US as Gundam Wing Last Outpost.
First up we have the upgraded version for most of the Gundam Wing pilots including Deathscythe Hell, Altron, Sandrock Custom and Heavy Arms Custom. We are using the Endless Waltz (EW) versions for imagery but we are keeping some of the original weaponry such as Sandrocks Beam Submachinegun and Altron’s Beam Stinger which were not present in the EW Movie. Heavy Arms however, we kept the greatly expanded loadout from EW because who doesn’t love 4x Gatling Guns.
In addition to that we’ve expanded the unit roster for Oz with the Taurus and Virgo units. While the Taurus is present in the Gundam 1/400 collection the Virgo unfortunately is not. You can however find SD versions of the Virgo which we have used in playtesting, it’s a little bigger and bulkier but at least the height is close enough to the 1/400 scale. These mobile dolls are powerful units and we’ve opted to try and make them as cheap as possible while maintaining their key abilities, this way your Gundam Wing pilots can mow them down by the dozens.
As a reminder you can always use proxy figures while playing, if you have a dozen 1/400 Rick Doms and want to use them as Virgo’s instead, go nuts! Some ingenious players will use standees to hold a printed out image of a Mobile Suit, similar to what you’d see in a lot of board games where a tiny plastic clip (standee) is holding up a cardstock image instead of a traditional miniature. And of course there are always virtual tabletops.
We’ve also included the Tallgeese II piloted by Treize Kushrenada, the Virgo II from White Fang, and the Mercurius and Vayeate used by Heero and Trowa while they fought off Quatre in the Wing Zero. (Wing Zero & Epyon along with Burning & Master Gundam are Tier 3 units and we’re holding off on those for a while longer).
Gundam Wing G-Unit / The Last Outpost is a sidestory taking place near the end of the TV series before White Fang is defeated. A colony that was developed Gundams comes into conflict with an Elite OZ unit, the Stardust Knights. We’ve included the custom Leos from the Stardust Knights as well as the variants for the Mecurius and Vayeate that appear in the sidestory. The principal protagonists and antagonists, the G-Units, Hydra Gundam and others will be released at a later date, they still need additional time for development and playtesting.
That’s all for this month, we have another Gundam update next month then after that we will have Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann!
For this month’s update we are adding additional units from The King of Braves: GaoGaiGar. This includes the massive King J-Der, upgraded forms of the original characters released last month, along with Gekiryujin and lastly the rock and roll robot Mic Saunders the 13th. We are also adding in our first Stellar Warships from a Super Robot series with the Amaterasu, the Izanagi and Susanoh.
King J-Der is the rival to our protagonist GaoGaiGar, he is an enemy of the 31 Machine Primevals and thus frequently finds himself fighting on the same side as GaoGaiGar. Gekiryujin is the younger counterpart to Chouryujin, who grows the most after watching the altruistic nature of Choryujin (formed by the two brothers HoRyu & EnRyu). Lastly, Mic Saunders the 13th is often the comic relief but also the more unique robot of the series, using different discs and harmonics to accomplish a wide variety of effects. You can also include his 12 brothers to form a brigade on the tabletop.
On the game downloads page we keep a poll to track user feedback on which mecha series they’d like to see added to the roster next. Normally we select the top two options of the poll which usually ends up being a Gundam show and a Super Robot show.
Thanks to a recent article by wargamer (https://www.wargamer.com/warhammer-40k-meets-gundam-mechastellar) we saw a huge spike in traffic for the month of May. As a result we also got a lot more votes in our poll for which series will be added to the roster next.
Before we got a huge surge in traffic, the top two choices were “The next Gundam AU” and “70s Super Robot Show” which was just barely beating TTGL and Dunbine. As you can see the results have changed quite a bit since then with TTGL taking a much larger share of votes.
To keep things fair, we are going to go with 3 choices winning this poll instead of 2. So in addition to the next Gundam AU (After War Gundam X) and TTGL, we are also going to do a 70s Super Robot Show since it was formerly the 2nd place finisher. For these we’ll do Combattler V & Voltes V.
Today we’re releasing MechaStellar VER9, thank you for all the feedback on the draft rules, profile and layout updates. Below you will find a summary of updates for VER9 as well as a roster rebalance to go along with the new layout. The VER9 Design Goal post covers several of these updates in detail.
MechaStellar 