A comparison of figures with front to back being 1/400, 1/300, 1/200, 1/170, 1/144 scale for Gundam 00 Raiser and Guncannon
While the MechaStellar wargame is often played using small scale figures such as the 1/400 Gundam range or various Super Robot Wars gashapon (capsule toys) you can also play it using your favorite large figures and model kits. While our other post focused on small scale minis that are 1.5 to 4 inches in height this post will look at all the larger figures including Gunpla, Robot Spirits (Robot Damashii), Mobile Suit in Action (MSIA) and G-Frame.
We’ll examine the pros and cons of each Gundam mini collection and at the end we’ll have a number of comparison shots showing the different ranges side by side.
The primary purpose of this guide is to let you see the size of various Gundam models. That way if you decide to start collecting and want to mix and match you know which ranges work well together and which figures you want to battle it out on the tabletop.
When playing MechaStellar as a SRW style game with mecha from different franchises we advise you to pick either a Versus movie scale (all figures are roughly the same height) or an approximate scale where some very large robots (i.e. 100+ meter robots like Daitarn 3 or Ideon) are represented by larger figures while everything else is around the same height. You can read more about the recommended size and scale here.
This MechaStellar Battle Report involves a 3vs3 match using the Supreme Robot Warfare (SRW) module. On one side we have three AU Gundam’s including Shining, Wing and the GX Divider piloted by Domon Kasshu, Heero Yuy and Garrod Ran. On the other side we have Armageddon Getter Robo, Eva Unit 01 and Gurren Lagann piloted by Ryoma, Shinji, Kamina & Simon.
Narrative
For this SRW game we reasoned that the Gundam Pilots were being forced to fight against their will, possibly Relena, Rain and Tiffa were being held hostage by the Romfeller Foundation or New UNE. Meanwhile, NERV has become the last bastion for the resistance following the 7th Space War, they have a rag tag team of robots and pilots to resist the New UNEs far superior resources.
Below the break we’ll have a Round by Round battle report with plenty of photos of tabletop mecha action.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Here’s a link to our current social media pages. We setup our Facebook page last week, I haven’t used Facebook in about 10 years so it’s very different from what I remember, let me know if there are any issues with the page.
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.
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 the Federation move heavily into Sniper type units while Zeon had a relatively balanced force with a powerful Gelgoog Jager as their powerful sniper. To make things even more fun, the GP04 Gerbera was the Commander for the Federation and the Gerbera Tetra was the Commander for Zeon.
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.
Here’s a collection of photos for one of the test games using the Low Gravs variant of the Stellar Warfare rules. For this series of games we have two Salamasis cruiser and two Musai cruisers each with a sizeable number of Mobile Suits onboard duking it out on the moon. Below you’ll see a very brief battle report to go with it, out of the 10 test games Zeon won 6 and the Federation won 4.
MechaStellar 