Continuing from our previous post on Elite units and pilots now we’re going to briefly touch on Pilot Skills. In making VER11 we’ve kept the same pilot skills from VER10 and revamped them for the current system. We’ll deep dive on the pilot skills in later posts. Next post will be on Momentum and Morale Points.

In VER10 we had the following pilot skills

• [M-3] Valor = Gain +5 HITS
• [M-3] Flash = Gain +5 DEF
• [M-X] Zeal = Gain bonus actions

Early on MechaStellar VER10 we had a very tight balance between bonus Hits and bonus DEF.  That common units when they were attacking each other would average 0-2 Unblocked Hits, which meant that damage was relatively small.  Often Zeal was never a worthwhile choice unless you were a much stronger unit attacking grunts. 

Typically if you wanted to Hit you would go with Valor which your target could trump by using Flash to reset field.  Balance wise it worked extremely well, but +5 Hits vs +5 DEF sometimes felt rather underwhelming for some players.  And if one player could secure a lot of Momentum they could quickly wipe out more powerful enemies which hurt the experience.

However, as MechaStellar continued that finely tuned balanced started to fall off.  Unit roles had further expanded combat bonuses, starting with a range of +0 to +2, then later +0 to +3, then +1 to +4 for roles like Sniper, Battler, Versatile etc. 

With these the average number of unblocked hits kept creeping up, and eventually Zeal supplanted Valor as the best way to attack multiple units, or to completely obliterate a single unit, not to mention wiping out the target’s momentum pool by forcing multiple Flashes.  The Iron Wall skill was updated to counter Zeal by providing a defense bonus for the full turn but for some matchups Zeal would be the better choice than Valor.

After over a year of trying to keep balance in check, new features were added like the Support and Squad system it soon became impossible to keep game balance.  Certain units could stack bonuses, along with pilot traits to completely tear through the system launching huge amounts of hits on attack and counterattack while avoiding all but the most severe reprisals from the enemy. 

Obviously something had to change.

VER11 had the big task to fix this issue.  Weapon Triggers which we’ll discuss later, replaced Rapid Fire and gave other outlets for growth on small unit weapons you’d see on Votoms, Dunbine or Code Geass.  Pilot traits which we discussed previously, switched over to smaller passive bonuses rather than traits you could stack for potentially tremendous benefit.  Pilot skills would also need to be changed.

We’ll go into the pilot skill evolution in a separate post but in general we wound up with this frame work.  Additionally, as we mentioned before ship Captains could now use all but one of the pilot skills making gameplay more universal and easier to remember.

• Focus – Cheap but powerful offense skill
• Flash – Potential large bonus for DEF based on your die roll.  Not usable by Warships or Kaiju
• Alert – Warship / Kaiju only.  Bonus to DEF and Counterattack chance. 
• Iron Wall – A chance to nullify the damage or effects of a failed save
• Valor – An expensive but powerful offense skill that also integrates Finishing Blow
• Zeal – Bonus actions with a hard cap to prevent abuse.

One of our primary goals in making VER11 a simpler and easier to teach improvement over VER10 was to cut down on the number of “oh I forgot about this ability” on a mech’s profile sheet.  Early in VER11 development the first thing we did was remove pilot bonuses, formerly Barrage, Bullseye, Dodge, Guard, etc.  Instead, they were replaced with a Flat +1 bonus to HIT or DEF or both depending on the level of the pilot.

As we continued developing VER11 we got rid of bonus +HITs and +DEF and instead just used dice pools.  As mentioned in our previous post on the Core Mechanic Update, we were considering how to handle Elite pilots whether or not they should include a mechs combat dice pool or improving their TN to Hit or DEF.  Eventually we settled on having a unit improve Target Number (TNs) for Attack, Defense and Morale.

Pilot progression has existed in Mecha Stellar for years, and for the most part it has always worked. Ordinary pilots eventually became Elite veterans, then Skilled pilots, and finally legendary Aces. As Version 11 continues simplifying the core game, however, pilot progression became one of the last major systems worth re-examining. The original progression for VER 11 was straightforward.

Ordinary Pilot

• HIT 5+ / DEF 5+
• Morale 7+

↓

Elite

• HIT 4+ / DEF 4+

↓

Skilled

• HIT 4+ / DEF 4+
• Morale 6+

↓

Ace

• HIT 3+ / DEF 3+
• Morale 5+

There was nothing inherently wrong with this system. In fact, it had one enormous advantage.

The Biggest Strength of the Original VER11 System

Elite pilots required almost no bookkeeping. Imagine deciding before a battle that every Zaku in your force was crewed by Elite veterans. Nothing on the printed profile needed to change.

You simply remembered:

“These Zakus HIT and DEF on 4+.”

Likewise, campaign progression was incredibly simple. A surviving pilot became Elite without requiring players to edit their profile. I considered this one of the system’s greatest strengths.

As Version 11 evolved, another issue slowly became apparent. The new version removes passive HIT and DEF bonuses from weapons entirely, in it’s place we now placed the units TN to Hit or DEF (i.e. 5+, 4+ or 3+ on the profile). So now if you change a characters elite level you would need to scratch those out potentially. Then another problem arose.

The Character Problem

In the above progression, all battle-tested, skilled and ace units wind up with the same bonuses. But that’s not really how we view our characters. Consider a few Gundam examples.

• Late One Year War Amuro might naturally become both incredibly accurate and almost impossible to hit.
• Kamille, on the other hand, feels much more like a pilot who continually invests in overwhelming offensive ability.
• Quattro often feels calmer and more defensive than his younger self.
• Emma Sheen represents professionalism and composure more than reckless aggression.

Those characters shouldn’t necessarily end up with the same statistical progression. They should tell different stories.

So we decided to let elite units choose where to spend their elite passive upgrades, splitting options into ATK+, DEF+, Morale+. A Battle Tested unit might be Morale 5+, or Hit 4+ or DEF 4+. A skilled pilot would choose 2 of those, or perhaps only have ATK 3+. It worked great, but the more we played the more we felt it didn’t represent the full breadth of characters present in Mecha fiction. For example, Amuro might be an all rounder, while Kamille favors shooting over melee, similarly we might see Quattro more reserved and defensive than the aggressive Red Comet.

We realized that it would be a lot better to further split up ATK and DEF into Shooting / Melee ATK and Evade / Melee DEF.  Each level of elite unit, whether it be Battle Tested, Skilled or Ace, will have points available to improve these target numbers giving us a lot more variety in types of pilots.  Consider the following:

• Basic pilot – Morale 7+, ATK / DEF 5+
• Char – Morale 5+, Shooting 4+, Melee 4+,  Evade 3+
• Ramba Ral – Morale 6+, Melee 3+, Evade 3+, Melee DEF 4+
• Black Tri Stars – Morale 6+, Shooting 3+, Melee 3+, Evade 4+

Now let’s consider some pilots with very similar archetypes, we now have a lot of flexibility to make them feel different

• Might Gaine with Maito Senpuji – Morale 5+, Shooting 3+, Melee ATK 4+, Melee DEF 4+
• GaoGaiGar with Guy Shishioh – Morale 3+, Melee DEF 4+, Melee ATK 4+
• Gurren Lagann with Kamina & Simon – Morale 3+, Melee ATK 3+

Campaigns And Scenarios

Perhaps my favorite aspect of the new system is that campaign progression and historical scenarios now use exactly the same language. A rookie pilot surviving battle after battle simply chooses upgrades as they earn promotions. Likewise, historical characters can simply begin at different stages of that exact progression and you can use the optional upgrade system to take a base profile and make it the best version of that pilot. The system naturally supports both.

One realization kept resurfacing throughout the discussion. Version 11 is increasingly moving away from making every veteran mathematically better at everything. Instead, it encourages players to ask:

“What kind of pilot did this character become?”

• Did they become gods of melee?
• Did they become impossible to hit?
• Did they develop legendary marksmanship?
• Did they simply become one of the calmest, most reliable commanders on the battlefield?
• Those answers should not all be the same.

Hopefully, the new pilot progression finally allows legendary characters to feel legendary in different ways. Campaigns, however, tell a different story.

Pilots earn promotions through surviving battles and achieving victories, slowly investing in ATK, DEF, or Morale as their experience grows. Reaching 3+/3+/3+/3+ should feel like the culmination of an extraordinary career, being the best pilot to ever live and having your final battle as Axis is falling towards Earth or right before Genesis fires on Earth.

Elite units now provide passive bonuses fully built into your unit profile, you no longer need to refer down to their pilot trait or need to remember what it does.  Fear not though, for the previous pilot traits of VER10 still exist, but now become upgrade options for any given unit.

Likewise, we are making Elite Captains play just like an Elite Pilot using almost all of the same pilot skills (with 1 exception) and have the same passive pilot abilities.  Captain’s orders and mission commander orders are also still in the game but they will also be relegated to upgrade options.

We’re still experimenting on whether or not we want elite units to also improve, Weapon Trigger TN, Save TN, or DMG, so were looking for feedback from you, on whether that would be AWESOME or TERRIBLE for game balance.

In making VER11 we wanted to improve on the Core Mechanic from VER10. VER10’s biggest change from 5-9 was to change the core mechanic from “Attacker declares target, and defender rolls” to “Both attacker and defender rolls”, something we hadn’t done since VER2.  This core mechanic remarkably streamlined the game, having both Shooting and Melee use the exact same mechanic and gave us a lot more design space to use, since now a unit could have improved attack of defense, each rolling their own dice pools, whereas previously we only had 1d10 of Evade per shot meaning we were constrained on a units Shooting and Evade bonus.

It was a big success and made the game significantly easier to teach resolving our #1 FAQ of “Why can’t I roll dice to attack”.  That said, keeping units balanced against each other and allowing higher performance units to dominate meant giving bonus +HITs and +DEF.  While not a huge burden, it did introduce additional mental math to the game. 

One of the guiding philosophies behind Version 11 has been deceptively simple:

Can we remove one more calculation from every attack?

Over the past several versions, Mecha Stellar has steadily moved away from passive bookkeeping and towards active decision making. Momentum generation has been simplified. Weapon abilities have become more distinct.

What if passive HIT and DEF bonuses simply disappeared?

It Started With A New Playtester. Interestingly, this discussion didn’t begin with mathematics. It began with language. One of our newest playtesters, who is bilingual in Japanese and English, repeatedly stumbled over mechanics that experienced wargamers barely think about. When they saw:

Beam Rifle

• ATK 5d10
• +3 HIT
• HIT on 5+
• CRIT 10+

They continually expected the +3 to modify the dice rather than the final result. Experienced players perform these calculations almost automatically, but new players don’t have years of wargaming habits to fall back on.

VER10 Attack process

Resolving the attack requires players to:

1. Roll attack dice.
2. Count successful HITs.
3. Add passive HIT bonuses.
4. Roll defense dice.
5. Count successful DEFs.
6. Add passive DEF bonuses.
7. Add Shield and Cover.
8. Compare the totals.

None of these steps are individually difficult. However, they occur during every single attack. That raised a simple question.

Why Are Players Doing This Math At All?

The profile generator already calculates:

• Weapon bonuses
• Role bonuses
• Performance bonuses
• Frame bonuses
• Pilot bonuses

Players never actually perform that arithmetic themselves. So why are we still asking players to perform the final arithmetic every single time they attack?

One of VER11’s design principles was “what can we change to make this game the faster and easiest to teach”.  So we started experimenting with removing bonus +HITs and +DEF entirely.

VER11 Dice Pool Development

First we had to decide how we would get rid of these bonuses. Were we going to roll them into the attack dice pool, have them affect your target number (TN) to hit, or something else entirely. For a quick thought exercise we ran a game and just took every +HIT or +DEF and turned it into bonus dice instead just to feel how swingy the variance would be. Instead of:

Instead of Beam Rifle

• ATK 5d10
• +3 HIT

Simply put: ATK 8d10

Likewise, instead of: Evade 7d10 +3 DEF

Simply print: Evade 10d10

It was a super simple idea to implement but unfortunately…several problems immediately appeared.

Concern #1 – Reliability

One of the biggest arguments against removing passive bonuses was consistency. Flat bonuses make advanced machines feel reliable. A veteran rifle currently attacking with:

5d10 +3 HIT is remarkably dependable.

Changing that to: 8d10

Creates roughly similar averages…but noticeably more variance. Elite machines would occasionally roll poorly. Initially, I wasn’t convinced that was acceptable.

Concern #2 – Weapon Identity

Another concern quickly followed. If every passive bonus simply becomes more dice…would rifles and machine guns begin feeling too similar? Fortunately this was resolved as we were developing the weapon trigger system which created Barrage weapons (machine guns), crit weapons (rifles), siege weapons (bazookas), etc

Dice Pool Warfare

The initial model worked well, but we weren’t sure exactly how we wanted to build the dice pools for each unit. We had to develop a system where the WEAPON, PERFORMANCE, MECH COMBAT ROLE, PILOT all influenced this dice pool.  Of course, we had to keep this within the 10d10 dice cap, since exceeding that cap proved disastrous for late stage VER10.

We wanted a system where units started off around 4-6 d10 and could max out at 10d10.  With 4 inputs of Weapon, Performance, Mech Combat Role and Pilot, it was going to be very hard to keep this within the 4-10d10 limit.

The first step was to flatten performance, initially 1-4, with One Year War = 1-2, Zeta = 2-3, CCA+ (F91, G-Reco, etc.) = 4, which roughly corresponded to dividing all current performance by 2.  Later when dice were at  a premium it was further collapsed into 1-3, with 1 = OYW, 2 = Zeta, 3 = CCA+.  We also flatted Frames to 1 (grunt) 2 (superior unit) and kept the high Frame units provide a performance boost, this way original RX-78-2 Gundam (Frame 2, Performance 1) was on the same playing field as the average Zeta grunt like the Hizack (Frame 1, Performance 2.) 

While flattening performance does take away a lot of the nuance we had before on building mobile suit profiles and making each one very distinct, MechaStellar still has a lot of levers we can pull with both combat role and equipment loadout that we can still make the dozens of GM, and Zaku variants / descendants feel different from one another.  The tremendous upside is that people can much more easily field older models vs newer models, using their favorite models without having to dive deep into an upgrade system.  With our goal of making it easier and more fun to teach newer players this was a huge boon.

With Frame & Performance providing a bonus of 1-4, that limits what space we have avaialble if we want to keep all weapons around 4-10d10.  Now we only have 6d10 left to play with on our maximum limit.  And we still have to factor in the Weapon’s base dice, Combat Role (Sniper, Battler, etc.), & Pilot.  And also consider if there will be any other bonuses, like Target Lock gaining +1d10 ATK.

Mech Combat Roles & Pilot

This became a really challenging problem for the design team with essentially two camps.  We know we couldn’t have both pilot and mech role provide the same exact bonus because we had a limit of 10d10 and not much space left.  Earlier in the development of VER11, when we still had +HITs and +DEF, pilots gave a bonus +1 Hit and +1 DEF, with those gone we would have to decide what to do.

CAMP #1 (including this author)

• Pilots should improve the number of dice rolled
• Mech Combat Roles should improve your chance to Hit (Sniper Shoots on a 3+, Battler melees on a 3+, versatile Shoots and Melees on a 4+ etc.)

CAMP #2

• Mech Combat Roles should improve the number of dice rolled
• Pilots should improve your chance to hit (Sniper pilots shoot on a 3+, Brawler pilots melee on a 3+, versatile pilots hits and shoot and evade on a 4+ etc.)

Both camps had good reason for how this fit the verisimilitude of piloting a mech.   We went back and forth on this a lot and prototyped two different types of profiles for VER11, which was quite a burden on our layout editor but we’re grateful for them doing double the work.  While neither camp was wrong, and both options worked well we eventually decided on Camp #2 since it felt more correct that the pilot was improving the odds, while the machine was providing the ceiling.  In essence, only a true pilot could bring out the full potential (DEF on a 3+) for the Tallgeese (DEF on a 3+ with a huge defense dice pool) or a Gundam Dynames (Shoot 3+ with a huge def dice pool).

We had rebalanced all combat roles at the start of VER11, in VER10 a role would have a bonus ranging from +0 to +4, while in VER11 it ranged from +0 to +2 shortening the variance.    So before a Sniper might be +4, a firepower unit Shooting+3, a Raid unit Shooting +2 etc; this has all been collapsed down to a max of +2 on Shooting or Melee.  This meant we could do either +2d10 dice, or improve target number (TN) to hit like 5+ to 3+. 

But on the pilot side of things, we had simplified everything that Elite pilots HIT and DEF on a 4+, while an Ace unit HITs and DEF on a 3+.  But later on, we had the idea to further expand this.  Since one of VER11s goals was to reduce the number of “oh I forgot I have this ability” we ended up moving all previous pilot traits to optional upgrades, while all pilot bonuses became passive bonuses, allowing a unit to improve their TN for shooting, melee attack, melee defense, evade or morale.  We found it a lot better to have pilots modify TNs for both attack, defense and morale keeping it all one unified mechanic, rather than pilots improve Morale TN but provide bonus dice to combat.

Finalizing Weapons Dice

So with our goal of 4d10 – 10d10 on the dice pool we have the following.

• Frame & Performance 1-4
• Mech Combat Role 0-2
• Pilot 0 (but improves your TN to Hit or DEF)

With a cap of 10d10 that leaves us with (-4d10 Frame / Performance, -2d10 Mech Combat Role) = Weapons can at most be 4d10.

So we set the majority of weapons with attack dice of 2d10 to 4d10.  Weapons will be further differentiated by their Triggers which we’ll cover later.

Likewise for Defense, a mobile suit would be 3d10 Evade and 1d10 Melee DEF plus similar bonuses on Frame, Performance, and Combat Roles.  Super Robots would often be 2d10 Evade 2d10 Melee DEF with flexibility there for the slower Big O or Ideon types and the more agile Daitarn or Raideen types.