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.
We’re working on VER10 with a planned release around November or December. Our number one question has always been why are dice rolls for Shooting and Melee so different so the goal for this update is to have Shooting and Melee use the same attack mechanic. Likewise for Evade and Melee Defense.
So when you shoot you will roll d10s, every 5+ is a Hit and every 10 is a Crit. The defender then rolls Evade and every 5+ is a successful Defense. Melee is also getting updated to be faster. The current Shooting / Melee / Evade stats are being updated to provide bonuses, for example, you might have a Shooting bonus of +4 Hits, a Melee of +5 Hits and an Evade of +2 DEF.
There are some other updates going on as well, including an update to the Mech Profiles so that will take a lot of time to update.
In the meantime we’re going to get some playtest rules ready for Version 10.
Leave a comment below, shoot us an email or contact us on social media with your favorite series (from the current roster) and two favorite units so we can work on getting those updated with the new layout.
Example 1 Favorite series Gundam 0080. Favorite units: Alex and Kampfer.
Example 2 Favorite series Great Mazinger. Favorite units Great Mazinger and the Great General of Darkness.
Hello everyone,
Another quick month has gone by, hope everyone is enjoying their summer. For this month we are adding another Braves series to the roster, The Brave Express Might Gaine. This is the 4th show in the Braves (Yuusha) series and this one set the blueprint for the ever popular GaoGaiGar. You can read more about Might Gaine and the remaining Braves Series in our “Where to start” post here.
Might Gaine has a very broad and often wacky Rogues Gallery, while you can find kits for Might Gaine, Hiryuu and Gouryuu for some of the other models you’ll have to be creative and use a Samurai for Shogun Mifune, or a Penguin for Louise Vuitton’s Snooby. We’ve also included the Black Noir army from the end of the series, the X model shares a similar silhouette to the humble Zaku II when it comes to using a proxy.
We’re also continuing to do updates to the Gundam Roster. This month adds another 16 units to the Zeta / ZZ / Gundam Sentinel roster. Next month we’ll have the Ex-S Gundam as well as the New Desides, splinter faction of the Titans.
Summary of Updates
For this month’s MechaStellar update we are finally adding in Turn A Gundam. Turn A Gundam was released in 1999, 25 years after the original Mobile Suit Gundam and it’s one of Yoshiyuki Tomino’s finest works. You can read more about Turn A Gundam here.
Turn A Gundam itself is a radical redesign of a Gundam by legendary concept artist Syd Mead. The Turn A is an unusual design that completely breaks from the mold, it is often known as the “Mustache Gundam” by those with a passing familiarity usually from various Gundam crossover media such as the Gundam Vs or Dynasty Warriors series. While I myself did not like the design when I originally encountered it, I really grew to warm to it after I watched the series and read the background material on Turn A Gundam. It’s a phenomenally unique design, and given how the Turn A (and Turn X) are meant to represent mobile suit technology from an astonishingly distant future it makes sense they look so foreign compared to what we’re used to.
As for that astonishing futuristic technology both the Turn A and the Turn X will be our first Performance 10 Tier 3 units released in MechaStellar. They boast impressive stats, powerful weapons and an array of traits that provide good utility and exceptional destructive potential. The two are also 1000pt units meaning they are meant to be strong enough to take on two 500pt units. Time will tell if we locked in the balance on that.
The rest of Turn A Gundam includes references to various Gundam media that came before it, with names suitably altered to keep the user guessing as to their origin. You have the iconic Zaku II named Borjanon here, and the Capule renamed to Kapool. The Muttowooo is a stylized and rebuilt Baund Doc while the Zssan is still recognizable as a modified Zssa. These were interesting to design trying to keep the chassis from their original units while upgrading them to Tier 3 (Performance 8+) and tweaking them slightly.
Turn A Gundam incorporated concepts from many other Gundam shows (there’s even a quick schematic of the one and only Windmill Gundam), the Mahiroo have the mobile trace system from G Gundam, the Bandit and Zssan have the Flash system from Gundam X, and the Turn X itself is equipped with a version of the psycommu at mentioned in the closing episodes. The Almyra Turtle ships, which make frequent appearances as tough battleships in the Super Robot Wars series, have a ship-wide I-Field first seen in Victory Gundam.
All in all we had a fun time working on these, and we hope to get out a battle report featuring The Turn A Gundam using a Mobile Suit in Action MSIA) figure in the near future. Right after we get the AEUG battle report and a few others finished.
You can find the updated unit profiles on the game downloads page: https://mechastellar.com/game-downloads/
This was a busy month leading up to a busy summer so here’s a short update summary. Updated Mecha Profiles for the Braves series and Gundam can be found on the MechaStellar game downloads page: https://mechastellar.com/game-downloads/
This month we’ll be fulfilling one of our previous polls by adding in more units from the Braves series. Going in production order we have The Brave of the Sun Figh Bird as the 2nd series and The Brave of Legend Da Garn as the 3rd series representative along with their respective villains.
Da Garn also has Seven Changer a rival who is getting an impressive release by moderoid. Next month we’ll have additional units from Might Gaine, one of the more well known Brave series 2nd only to GaoGaiGar.
In addition to that we’ve also been been slowly but surely adding more units from Zeta Gundam and ZZ Gundam to the roster which you can find on the downloads page. We’re hoping to get to Gundam Sentinel by July.
Next month’s big release will be Turn A Gundam as well as drafts for Gundam SEED.
Update Summary
For this month’s update we are delivering the 2nd half of the Zeta Gundam update by including all the mobile suits in seen in the second half of the show for both the Titans and New Zeon factions. We’ve also added in a decent chunk of the Zeta Mobile Suit Variations (Z-MSV) and will continue to add in those and other side stories in the future.
Continue reading “MechaStellar Monthly Roster Update March 2024”
MechaStellar 