In this MechaStellar battle report we are keeping the fabulous teamup between the suit wearing Roger Smith (Big O) and the king/queen aesthetics of the J9-II team (Baxingar) face off against Zeon Remnants. Since we’re using a lot of amphibious units, we reasoned it was an abandoned and half submerged city which fits well with some of Big O’s environments.

This game series we were heavily testing our the “Reinforcements” mechanic which would take the Ambusher traits (and event) and turn it into an easy to use core rule. Thanks to this series we managed to avoid a lot of missteps with reinforcements out the gate, but our playtesters found several more loopholes we had to patch within 2 months of release.

While Big O and Baxingar both were able to Ambush, you do need to put at least one unit on the field so in this case Baxingar (in their Cosmo Bike form and thus hard to target) was first.

On Zeon’s side we also had some Musai’s taking part, because we really wanted to laydown the fire support. This was hot off the heels of a QoL update for Warships and they were a lot more fun to use and lot more worthwhile on the battlefield.

In universe, we reasoned that since Big O’s world is very….well, to avoid spoilers, full of mysteries, having space ships appear in the city wouldn’t be out of the ordinary. Who knows, maybe the movie was set in a colony all along.

A Hy-Gogg captures a CP, then Baxingar takes it’s turn firing an Antiship missile to obliterate a Musai and then laser’ing the Hy-Gogg off the field. A powerful turn (and due to this and other games we later realized that Valor should be a Round 2+ only skill.)

The other Musai gets LOS to support it’s allies and begin blasting. Baxingar is an absolutely glass cannon of a unit, but fortunately with the updated Momentum system it had enough Momentum to use Flash several times and dodge some painful hits.

The Black Tri-Stars are the Aces on this side and they start blasting. (We were also briefly tested a squad system in this game, to see how valuable it would be for Ace units; normally it was only for nameless grunts. It was fairly successful, but we found that individually the Black Tri-Stars were more formidable. More to come on the squad system!)

BIG O!! IT’S SHOWTIME!!!

Big O reinforces, in this series we realize that reinforcing units should have either limited movement, limited actions, or both. So we test out this idea several times and come to a reasonable solution that doesn’t allow for Reinforcing units to show up, blindside nuke a unit, then capture a CP all in one go.

Speaking of Blindside. Some Goggs reinforced on the enemy side last Round, as a limiting factor we let them attack if they used Zeal. Which they were happy to launch megaparticles supported by torpedos pods into Baxingars backside.

Round 2 Big O pulverizes that Z’Gok and captures the point.

Baxingar clears out the home CP by destroying both Goggs. We were testing out the “Tear through the Ranks” as a melee option instead of an event here, which we really enjoyed so it made it back into the Core Rules.

A Hy-Gogg on the Hy-Ground with an antiship missile. Who should send that into? The agile but glass cannon Baxingar, or the slow moving heavily armored Big O?? Hmmm

Big O withstands the blast then we proceed to beat down the Hy-Gogg. It’s at this moment we realize we should add something in the core rules to mention that very tall units can melee units on the high ground because…well look at this picture lmao

Two of the Black Tri-Stars move into position to Blindside Big O later.

The third Tri-Star gets a lucky critical and blows Baxingar off the board. While we made several of the aquatic units Elite to punch above their weightclass, the Black Tri-Stars ended up carrying the game.

Time to Chrome Buster and blow up the terrain and the Tri-Stars

Big O managed to take down 2 of them, but alas the third one got a blinside attack and then won initiative in the final round for another blindside attack. The ground shakes as the giant crashes down into the earth.

After Action Report

We ended up tweaking several of the aquatic units after this, since they didn’t feel as durable (or as cheap) as they could have been. Big O went through several revisions and one of our outspoken players, really loves this unit so we wanted to get it right. Eventually Big O went up a size tier (to reflect it’s weight, rather than it’s official height) which gave it a considerable HP boost and more slots.

This game we also tested out the squad systems for regular units as well as for elite units. We had tested it out a little before but this version felt a lot more stable and less likely to be all or nothing.

We also had a lot of fun with the Zeon team and ended up using them again versus a remarkably different force. Space Battleship Yamato complete with Cosmo Tiger squadrons. Stay tuned for more!