One of the hallmarks of MechaStellar is combat with a backdrop against the stars. In this post we’ll look at a quick way to create asteroid terrain for your space battles. You will need some lava rock which you can find at garden or home improvement store or even Amazon as well as some clear acrylic flying stands and lastly a drill to put some holes into the rock. Below you’ll some photos of the asteroids and Gundam figures of various scales.
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.
You can play MechaStellar with figures and model kits big and small. For players who prefer to use larger scale figures and models for Gundam and various other Mecha series you will also want to use larger terrain. In this post we’ll look at N Scale buildings and a few different scales of Gundam figures.
While doing some test games for some adjustments to Snipers and long range skills we put together a pair of games taking some extreme army lists. For this game we had a match between two Federation forces with one heavily skewed towards Snipers and while heavily skewed towards Firepower units.
You can find the game rules and the mecha unit profiles on the MechaStellar downloads page. The miniatures used for this matchup came from the Gundam Standart and Ultimate Operation collection. You can read more about them here.
The Firepower forces decided to build a castle in the far corner to protect their units with lower Melee. The Commanders were the GP04 Gerbera and Full Armor Gundam Type B who both used the Unyielding trait.
You can find the game rules and the mecha unit profiles on the MechaStellar downloads page. The miniatures used for this matchup came from the Gundam Standart and Ultimate Operation collection. You can read more about them here.
This is the 2nd in-depth post looking at the changes made in VER 8.8, you can read the full VER 8.8 summary here and the design goals post on the weapon rebalance here.
With the update to VER 8.7 we upgraded several of the Pilot Traits to have 2 effects, a good number of these ended up giving a +1 Evade bonus. While this was a nice bonus, especially for several units who were middle of the road for Evasion, I personally got a lot of great feedback on these our players and other members of the team regarding that. Mainly that with VER 8.7’s goal of reducing mental math, adding a slew a +1 Evade bonuses runs counterproductive to that goal.
And that’s a great point! So in VER 8.8 we went about trying to scrub as much mental math as we could from the game. No longer will your gameplay halt every time a Skilled or Ace pilot comes up and you have to add in several steps of bonus accuracy and bonus evade, and “what was the target number again??”
This update kicked off with the complete reworking of the thrown weapons from last month. Our first new series added in 2023 is G Gundam, we began prototyping units in April and started playtesting in July of 2022, with G Gundam being the next release all forthcoming units receive heavy playtesting the two months leading up to release.
During the playtests for G Gundam models, one unit in particular stood out. Gundam Maxter almost exclusively uses short range weapons, with a pair of magnums and several different punches including a cyclonic, burning jet of fire, and semi-visible bursting machine gun punch. We were able to utilize existing weapon profiles to at least give each punch a different special effect but something was lacking. What we observed was that many of punches (and even the twin magnums) felt rather samey, and it didn’t feel like there was a good time to use one over the other.
For this February’s update we are updating the Core Rules to VER 8.8 with a renewed focus on trimming down Mental Math we’ve updated several Pilot Traits and the Focus action. We’ve also updated the short range weapons (16″) including beam boomerangs, heat rods and the infamous Rocket Punch as well as Machine Guns and Gatling Guns. Lastly, “Finishing Blow” has been added to add some more variety to Melee combats when it comes to assigning ATK and DEF dice.
We’ll have two in-depth posts exploring the weapons update and the focus/pilot traits update, here’s the first one focusing on short range weapons and machineguns. We’ve also updated the VER 8 Example of Play to match the rules update. Below the break you’ll see the summary list of updates for MechaStellar VER 8.8
Closing out the VER 8.7 update here’s an indepth look at some of the design decisions that went into the Weapons update. For your convenience I have included the relevant summary line item list for each of those categories from the previous post as well.
Here’s an indepth look at some of the design decisions that went into the Balance Patch, Unit Profile adjustments and Weapon adjustments. For your convenience I have included the relevant summary line item list for each of those categories from the previous post as well.
MechaStellar 