Tag: Gundam

MechaStellar VER11 Design Goals – Barrage Trigger Evolution

In making MechaStellar VER11 we had a lot of new and interesting design challenges to improve the game.  Our overall goal to take VER10 and make it faster, more fun and easier to teach.  Weapon Triggers definitely fulfill the more fun part and so far its been fun to teach new playtesters that “yes you do get to roll another bucket of dice” and see their smiles in response.  Since Barrage was the genesis of weapon triggers, and also the one that experienced the most changes we wanted to write about it first.

For Reference here’s how the Barrage discussion started

Enfilading fire = We could make Barrage an anti-squad weapon.  But then it would only be useful against squads and not useful every game.

Sustained fire option = We could have barrage convert failed failed hits into hits, low power, not too exciting, and doesn’t keep parity with other weapons

Triple Crit option = Maybe Barrage triggers could be worth 3 Hits instead of Crit which is 2 Hits.  Fun and definitely a hail of gunfire.

Dakkadakka option = threshold hits generate extra dice.  Very fun, but we now we have an issue of weird mental math with dice overflow.  Like start adding dice to your pool, but then if it goes over 10d10 then it’s extra hits.  It’s not too strong but it’s not smooth at all.

SuperDakka option = What about an option where you reroll the trigger dice.  And keep reroll trigger dice until you stop rolling triggers?  This was max. fun, but then one playtester demonstrated how annoying it can be when you “pick up, and drop a die” and magically it keeps landing on the same number. 

Indeed, even Buzzsaws will have the Barrage trait

From there we settled on the following:

  • Barrage 8+
    • Every 8+ is an exploding hit, after counting Hits & Triggers.  Reroll all your Trigger dice for bonus Hits.  This reroll is considered a separate roll and does not count against the 10d10 dice cap.

Now we had to sanity check this in a couple games to see how powerful this is compared to Crit weapons.  As mentioned in a previous post, we decided against all weapons have CRIT on 10s and instead CRIT would only be for certain Triggers like CRIT or BULLSEYE.  

So rolling a 10 on Barrage was just a regular hit (that you got to roll again).  Barrage has been the most fun ability, but statistically it’s slightly weaker overall than Crit, but it does have a higher chance of getting at least 1+ (albeit lower DMG) hits through.

The DEV Discussion looked like this:

We need to explain how to pick up dice in quick dice section.  First remove the 1s and 2s.  Then pick up all hits that are not threshold, i.e. Barrage 8+, pick up 3-7 as hits, and count your hits.  Then pick up the threshold and count (don’t forget crits) and reroll them, then final count.

Actually maybe we should remove crits.

Definitely remove crits

Okay so if Focus moves back to +1 Hit and Hit on a 3+, then we need to make barrrage always hit on a 3+ otherwise we have a massive sequencing pitfall where players might scoop dice before focusing then forget how many 3+ they had.

At the time we were developing Barrage, some of the pilot skills were getting Overhauled.  Focus would no longer be the “Hit on 3+” skill because now elite pilots were already hitting on 4+ or 3+.  Later, one of the in development pilot skills would let you hit on a 2+.  With all that in mind, we realized we would have sequencing issues with barrage. 

If you wait for the reroll to declare skills, do you then have to go back in time and count those dice with the better Hit Target Number?  What if you declare it before the reroll, but then it didn’t matter because all your reroll dice were Hits anyways. 

  • From that discussion we decided that:
    • Barrage (Passive): This weapon always hits on a 3+. 
    • [Anti Squad] Elite Pilots get +1 Hit per Model, Ace Pilots also get +2 Hits per model in enemy unit.

Eventually, the “Anti-squad” effect got moved into an upgrade ability. 

We were also considering a combined arms ability where Barrage causes a Suppression effect if the target is <50% HP they must make a Morale Save or lose a Move Action.  This would combo with Bullseye which Crits against crippled targets that have only one move action.  Ultimately, this train of thought let to “Mobility Saves [MB6+]” which we’ll discuss in the Saving Throw post.

Since Trigger and Skills were in parallel development paths, we had to keep updating Barrage as well.  When the “Hit on a 2+ Skill” went through testing, Barrage instead turned into

  • Barrage (Passive): The Hit on a 2+ Skill is [M-0] for Barrage weapons, however,  you may not use the Zeal skill.

Eventually that skill was removed entirely (who knows, it may reappear one day), so Barrage just reverted back to

  • Every 8+ is an exploding hit, after counting Hits & Triggers.  Reroll all your Trigger dice for bonus Hits.  This reroll is considered a separate roll and does not count against the 10d10 dice cap.
But it did end here….

But it doesn’t end there.  In the last week of VER11 development we came to a breakthrough.  The other Triggers had hit roughly even parity, but Barrage still lagged a bit behind, a fun trigger but mathematically slightly weaker than all the others.  While we were doing the very last round of testing, one DEV asked:

Is there any reason why we only reroll the triggers?  What if we rerolled all Hits instead?

The reasoning was that we didn’t allow for rerolls to spawn Triggers.  The reason was, back then, before we developed the Save system, we didn’t want any more triggers or saving throws because that could cause an insane tidal wave of damage.  If they reroll all those dice, players might mistakenly assume they could hit and trigger again.

However, since the Save system also finished its parallel developed, the number of saves was drastically reduced per attack action, and Barrage weapons all had 1/2 DMG saves we realized there was no longer a reason to prevent additional Triggers or Saves.  And we so we come to final barrage.

  • Barrage
    • After counting up Hits & Triggers, remove all Misses then reroll the remaining dice one additional time adding any new Hits or Triggers to the original total.

First Count your Triggers (especially for Barrage) – Place a different color die showing the number of Triggers. This marker reminds you how many saves it will cause later.  Pictured above the unit hits on a 5+ and will Barrage on 8+.  They placed a different color d10 showing the number of triggers [3].  The player then removes any misses like the [1&2] then sifts through the Hits [6] and Triggers [8,8,9]. 

Barrage – At this point the player says to their opponent “OK, 4 Hits and 3 Triggers”.  Then the attacker  picks up successful (TN 5+) dice [6,8,8,8] and rerolls them into [5,5,10,10] = +4 Hits and +2 Triggers.  “Ok, 8 Hits and 5 Triggers, your turn for Defense”. 

Next post we’ll talk about the evolution of Siege & Bombard.

MechaStellar VER11 Design Goals – Sensors + Target Lock

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In making MechaStellar VER11 one of our design goals was to repurpose existing stats to accomplish some heavy lifting on core mechanics instead of having to rely on specific traits or abilities.  Like the Morale stat before it, Sensors became part of this paradigm shift, becoming an invaluable stat to boost your weapon Triggers.

In VER10 we debuted Dual Sensors profiles for Snipers and Firepower types, to represent how they had advanced sensors for long range combat whether it be sniping or long range bombardment / indirect fire, while the second value referred to their regular Sensor value.  We also upgraded sensors to let it be both offensive and defensive, giving you a bonus d10 to ATK or DEF if the target was in your sensors range.  It was a good idea on paper, but was often forgotten until later leading to many times where an attack was finished and one player went “WAIT, I forgot I got +1d10 to DEF because you’re in my Sensors range”.  We wanted to avoid that situation in the future.

Still, we had to come up with an idea that would make Sensors valuable, not just for shooting characters.  Something that would benefit melee centric characters.  We experimented with a few mechanical ideas, but actually one of the Dev’s had a great idea about Sensors as a utility instead of a combat stat.  And so we have the “Sensors Sweep” action.

Sensors Sweep

Designer’s Note: This is a mission-oriented action to earn VP. Create a narrative or use one of these examples: “Locate a missing scientist”, “map the battlefield”, “find the asteroid demolition charges”, “New Mech telemetry”, or “Analyzing Reactor Signatures”.

  • VER11 Scan a Control Point (CP) or enemy unit within Close Range Sensors, neither of which have been scanned before. Gain VP = 10x [Your Frame + Performance Level].
    • If you are able to capture that CP, do so immediately.

The idea for this action was pulled from the VER10 Wargame rules for “Actions on Objective” which said:

It can represent searching for a missing pilot / scientist, secret cache of equipment, or top–secret design information.  It can also represent performing necessary actions to complete the mission like setting demolition charges to break apart an asteroid or destroying the power conduits in a colony laser.

Now it’s integrated into the MechaStellar base game as a fun and useful utility to earn VP while playing the game.  It’s a great way to simulate the various mecha shows, both real robots and super robots like Dancouga pictured above where each mission (or episode) isn’t centered around fighting but instead a very specific plotline like locating a missing person, making contact with rebel forces, finding the enemy mind control machine etc.

We briefly considered letting it generate Morale Points (Momentum) but decided against it.  However, it has become an extremely useful ability to capture a CP without having to end your turn on top of the CP.  Giving players one more action to use instead of burning 100% of your actions attacking the enemy.  Also very valuable for our strategists with a cheap low performance rear echelon unit.

Long Range and Close Range Sensors

That said we still wanted that second sensors value to have more meaning, and we knew that Sensors = Defense bonus would not be returning.  So we took some inspiration from Armored Core and now we have a Long Range Fire Control System (FCS) and Close Range FCS.  So a Sniper might be Long Range Sensors 24″ and Close Range Sensors 0″, meanwhile a Battler is 0″/8″ and a Versatile unit is 8″/8″ which gave a really strong unit combat role identity.

The Long Range sensors would improve shooting attack while close range sensors would improve melee attack.  Initially we were hesitant to give melee a boost, since in VER10 every unit had a “Close range stat” of 8″, but then we decided to make that melee or versatile types only, so now those units would get a bonus with beam sabers while snipers and firepower types would not.  Likewise, your melee monster isn’t getting a shooting bonus. 

From there we also adjusted which weapons would count as melee, making the cutoff roughly 20″+ = Shooting and <20″ = Melee, so Vulcans moved into the melee category, and considering how many melee monstrosities rely on vulcans it actually worked out pretty well.  But unfortunately, added about 6 hours of work for our layout editor.  Sorry….

Last but not least, we are bringing back “Sensors = Starting Deployment range” from previous editions, but this time only for Close Range sensors.  This way you’re melee and front line versatile units can start further away from the table edge, and also allowed us to drastically simplify deployment rules.

As for bonuses, as we mentioned in the Elite unit post, we were trying to eliminate bonus dice abilities to give us more range to work with when developing weapon dice and combat roles, so Target Lock instead provides an extremely powerful “Improve Trigger Target Number by 1”.  So if you normally Crit on a 9+, if you get within sensors range you can now Crit on an 8+. 

Very powerful and very worthwhile, so for those of you worried about Rapid Fire being removed meant we would go back to castling, there is still a very powerful incentive for getting closer or for upgrading your Sensors with the Unit Upgrade rules.  We’re also experimenting with making sensors boost a freebie for advanced grunts to make grunt units cheaper across the board.  We’ll see how that works out!

In the next post we’ll start the deep dive on weapon triggers.

MechaStellar VER11 Design Goals – The Genesis of Weapon Triggers

While making MechaStellar VER11 we had to fix some core balance problems that arose at the end of VER10, in doing so we’ve created an entirely new weapon system called “Triggers” that we’re really proud of, and we’re sure you will enjoy on the tabletop.  Read on for a discussion on how we got here and the genesis of “Weapon Triggers”.

At the end of VER10 we were doing some heavy testing on Warships as well as small size units like Aura Battler Dunbine, VOTOMS, and soon to be Code Geass by popular request.  At the end of VER10, power creep led to Machine guns having a base 10d10 attack dice, and were capped at DMG 200.  So for a small size machine gun you would see on a Knightmare Frame or Armored Trooper, if we lowered DMG to 100 we’d have to raise one of the other stats. 

One option was to raise the rapid fire stat, say from +2 Hits in Rapid Fire range to +5 Hits in rapid fire range.  Another option was to increase the attack above 10d10, with those dice being auto hits.  So a 15d10 machine gun rolled 10d10 with +5 auto-hits.  While the damage wasn’t very high by default, it was a bit demoralizing having so many auto-hits coming at you and having no realistic way to completely dodge the attack. 

Then once you toss in pilot upgrades, a legendary soldier like Chirico could be pumping out high volumes of hits on attack and counterattack while also racking up Finishing Blows. Finishing Blow proved to be a very troublesome system, that was awesome for super robots but absolutely busted for any machine gun units, especially small units.  We’ll deep dive on Finisher in a separate post.

Still you might be asking?  “Well if this is a big problem for small size units, why not just get rid of small size units and make them use the same weapons as everybody else?”

And that’s a valid point!

  •   Problem #1   For people who like versimilitude the 2m mech having the same damage profile as the 18m mech doesn’t feel great.
    • Still it’s an abstraction so we can make do.  
    • But then we also have these two problems.
  • Problem #2 – Unfortunately problems were popping up on normal sized units too, especially when you add Squads into the mix.  
    • Plus machine guns + rapid fire was either overkill or unsatisfying.
  • Problem #3 – Rapid Fire heavily encouraged, getting super close, all the time, and sometimes felt like a punishment for rifles and bazookas who were heavily balanced around 1-2 unblocked hits, where rapid fire range feeling like a requirement to attack any evasive units.   Something had to change.
    • For Warships Rapid Fire range was essential to making them functional

So the DEV Team started working on “Barrage” as a trait that machine guns have, that let them feel like machine guns.    Barrage was going to be a DakkaDakka type trait where rolling 10s were exploding dice that could be rolled again.  This way, the small machine gun could be DMG 100, but have a bigger Barrage trait, i.e. [Barrage 8+].  Then the question came up, well does Barrage and CRIT stack?  So 10s are worth double but also explode into more dice?   If it’s Barrage 8+ are those also Crits?  Generally, the Devs felt it should be Crit and Barrage because it might get complicated.

So the DEV Team asked a simple question.  “What if we got rid of rapid fire?”

“What if you got rid of rapid fire?  Replace with battlefield roles like Barrage, Bullseye, Counter, Finisher, etc.”

Now that’s a novel idea.

Getting rid of rapid fire meant we no longer had to worry about going over 10d10, we didn’t have to worry about machine guns spiking up to incredible number by virtue of being 12″ closer, we didn’t have to worry about some weapons being ineffective until you get closer forcing you to always move in for our staple weapons of rifles and machine guns, and especially Warship guns.  We wouldn’t have to worry about writing rules to benefit or not benefit machine guns, i.e. DMG<300 or ATK>7d10, we could just say “This bonus applies to Barrage weapons”, and it make it way easier to calculate weapon points without half a dozen nested if statements.  This would solve a lot of problem we have had over the years.

Suddenly we would open up a whole new design space for each weapon type, giving them all a Battle Field Role, where rolling this number or better would trigger a special effect; thus the name “Weapon Trigger” was born.   Here’s a copy paste from the Dev notes doc, that shows our initial brainstormed ideas from that day for triggers and even a few melee weapon ideas. 

Weapon Trigger Brainstorming

  • Crit 10+ = Crit on a 10 like usual
  • Counter 7+ = Only these weapons can Counter, but during Counterattack they instead hit on a 7+
    • We can combo this with the Intuition Skill  – Gain Counter 9+, if you already had counter then improve the number by +2
    • To avoid this becoming super long we should not let the attacker get a counterdefense, but you can still use shields, cover, etc. to block.
  • Barrage 8+ Exploding dice on 8+, each 8 means rolling extra dice. This will be a separate dice pool so we don’t have to worry about the 10d10 cap.
    • Because there’s a lot of sequencing issues with pilot skills, this weapon should probably Auto Hit on a 3+, Elite units instead gain bonus Hits per model in the squad making it a great anti-squad weapon
  • Bullseye 8+ These weapons Crit on a 8+ vs a unit on a CP or a unit with <2 Move Actions (crippled).
    • Can target any unit, elite units gain a +HIT bonus
    • Can cause System shock saves to cripple legs
  • Bombard – Crit on Targets without Cover.  Trait for cannons, will combo well with Bazookas (Siege)
  • Siege 10+  Rolling this number blows up one piece of cover.
    • Define cover by levels like 1-3, which gives +1-3 DEF.  Each time a piece of cover is blown up lower the level by 1. 
    • Maybe Siege should also blow up Shields which was really common in 0079
    • Simplest might be blow up shield instead of weakening, so if it’s a level 2 S2 Shield, then you need 2 triggers to blow it up, 1 trigger doesn’t hurt it, which would ease the bookeeping burden.
    • Maybe using the Iron wall skill means your shield can no longer be broken that Turn, but then we run into a weird timing issues for the attack action…
  • Finisher 8+ =  8s are crits when target is below 50% HP

What about Combination Triggers?

  • AOE = Barrage (Anti Squad) + Siege (Anti Cover)
  • Breaker = Pierce + Finisher
  • CIWS = Barrage + Counter
  • Dominate (Warship) = Bullseye + Finisher?
  • IDF = Siege + Bombard?  
  • Overkill = Crit + Finisher?

Weapon Type Brainstorming

  • Drill = Pierce
  • Scythe = Finisher
  • Saber = Crit or Counter?
  • Axe = Crit
  • Hammer = Siege
  • [CC] =  Bombard or Counter?

A lot has changed since then, some triggers like Barrage have merged, others like AOE and IDF have become separate bonus Traits, but overall many Triggers are still very similar to their original incarnation. Before we start the deep dive on Weapon Triggers for Barrage / Bullseye, Bombard / Siege, and Finisher we’re going to take a small detour for Sensors and Target Lock which instead of bonus attack dice will instead modify a units Trigger value.

MechaStellar July Update – VER11 Playtest Photos

Hello everyone, we are going to postpone July’s update while we continue to finalize the core rules and mech profiles for MechaStellar VER11 currently targeting for August release. In this post we’re sharing some recent playtest photos for MechaStellar VER11.

We’ve had some major improvements on Squads, Warships, Momentum Generation and Lethality. In the most recent Gundam focused playtest we had only 50% casualties in a grunt game at Round 5. We think you’ll enjoy VER11 which will be a more streamlined form of VER10, with units surviving longer, better integrated morale & mechanics, weapons each embracing a specific battlefield role, and a more strategic feel to spending Momentum.

In the meantime we will continue doing VER11 Profile Previews once or twice a week.

And we plan on doing about 10 or so Design Goals posts leading up to the VER11 release in August. Stay tuned!

MechaStellar – Monthly Roster Update May 2026 – CCA Jagd Doga

May’s update is a light one. Based on playtester feedback we are busy working on a balance patch, an update to Finishing Blow and a major core rules overhaul that will streamline a number of items to cut down on the amount of decision making on each turn or combat action. This will be a very big update for the game and we are hoping it will make overall gameplay much, much faster; turning a 1 hour game into a 40 minute game. Look forward to June!

MechaStellar – Monthly Roster Update April 2026 – Nu Gundam and Sazabi

For this month’s update we have the long awaited public release of Nu Gundam and Sazabi.  As well as two other fan favorite mobile suits.  Nu and Sazabi were first used by the Devs all the way back in VER4 and hit closed playtesting in VER6. 

Since then Nu and Sazabi became a favorite pair from one of our all-star playtesters who proceeded to dominate his FLGS all the way back in 2021, if you’ve ever wondered why there were so many updates to Funnels despite very few funnel units (back then), now you know. Nu and Sazabi across many version had their profiles revised a total of 67 times.

Nu and Sazabi are very iconic mobile suits so we’ve put a lot of care into building them and rebuilding them for each version of MechaStellar for our playtesters, and now for the open public.  Of the holy trinity of Super Robot Wars there is Mazinger, Getter Robo and Gundam.  Typically with their final forms being Mazinkaiser, Shin Getter Robo and Nu or Hi-Nu Gundam.

We also included an optional ability for Nu to represent how in crossover games like SRW or Dynasty Warriors, Amuro and the Psycoframe have been able to do incredible things like turning off the Moonlight Butterfly of the Turn-A Gundam. Hope you all enjoy.

While SRW tends to treat Hi-Nu Gundam as a straight upgrade to Nu (and likewise the Nightingale as an upgrade to Sazabi) we prefer to treat them as a side-grade unit which is very similar in armaments but with a slightly different playstyle and unit stats.  After all, Nu and Hi-Nu are meant to be the same unit but different incarnations.

Here’s a synopsis on the origin of Hi-Nu from legendary Gundam expert Mark Simmons

In Beltorchika’s Children, the Nu Gundam is still called the Nu Gundam, even though it does use a mega bazooka launcher at one point. That’s why the cover shows the standard anime Nu Gundam – it’s supposed to be the same thing.

Aside from the Newtype magazine illo that balofo posted, the original source of images for these guys is in the mecha profile section at the beginning of the Beltorchika’s Children novel. The Psyco Doga isn’t pictured in this section, and aside from the Nightingale, all the mecha are listed with the same names and specs and model numbers as the movie versions. (At this point, the movie specs had smaller head heights. That’s why everyone says the Hi-Nu is 20 meters; the book just listed the standard specs for the Nu Gundam, and at that point they were saying the Nu was 20 meters tall.)

So if the Nu Gundam is just called the Nu Gundam in Beltorchika’s Children, and they listed the standard Nu specs and description, where the heck does the “Hi-Nu” come from?

Well, in the book’s mecha section, designer Yutaka Izubuchi took some liberties with his designs and drew them all a bit differently. What we now call the Hi-Nu started out as, simply, “that cool version of the Nu Gundam that Izubuchi drew in the mecha section of Beltorchika’s Children.” It was only later that this cool doodle got its own name and back story and was recognized as a distinct mobile suit. The “Hi” prefix, confusingly, seems to be an homage to the original Hi-Streamer novels. 🙂

Of all these guys, the only one that was reasonably fully depicted and clearly identified as a unique machine was the Nightingale. It’s named that way in the Beltorchika’s Children novel (unlike the Hi-Nu), it’s depicted in the mecha profile section (unlike the Psyco Doga), and Izubuchi drew nice pictures of it for Newtype and B-CLUB magazines. The one thing it didn’t have in the mecha section, unlike the other features machines, was a model number.

Whew! That’s pretty long and detailed, but I’ve seen people getting this mixed up for decades, and I keep hoping that if I explain it one more time it’ll stick.

— Mark

For this April we are releasing Nu Gundam, Sazabi, Hi-Nu Gundam and the Nightingale.  We hope you enjoy these Tier 3 Juggernauts and look forward to more in the future. Pictured above is the Nightingale from the “Gundam Artifact” collection which is slightly larger than 1/400 scale minis but still fits in nicely.

One last note, there have been some minor tweaks to a few of the weapons on the GBF rules.

MechaStellar – Monthly Roster Update – March 2026 – Dangaioh + Zeorymer

With the core rules update and recent balance patch for MechaStellar from the Jan/Feb update we are still doing some final adjustments on Nu Gundam and Sazabi for the Char’s Counterattack release. We also want to give them some more time to playtest with the new rules before getting a release. While we still work on that here’s an update for not one but two Super Robot OVAs, Hyper Combat Unit Dangaioh and Hades Project Zeorymer.

Dangaioh is this author’s first mecha anime OVA, found on the shelves of blockbuster one day many years ago. I remember the incredible flashy action and the names of the characters but not much besides that. I went looking for this series about 10 years ago, and thankfully the character names are unique enough that finding the name of the series was very easy. Dangaioh is a very short OVA by studio AIC and also extremely high budget in it’s initial episode. The opening song is done by two anime song legends Mitsuko Horie and Ichiro Mizuki (Aniki) and the Mecha designs were done by Obari. Dangaioh was at one point going to be a Mazinger OVA, but disputes between AIC and Toei caused it to become an original robot, with very similar attacks instead. To be honest, I absolutely love the design of Dangaioh, and the OVA in general. The only problem is there isn’t more of it.

Dangaioh episode 3 somewhat ends on a cliffhanger. Many years later a Great Dangaioh TV series airs, which only slightly touches the plot of the original Dangaioh and when it does so it’s at the very end of the show and ends on another cliffhanger. While the OVA is rather bittersweet the ending itself is still satisfying enough and lets your imagination provide it’s own final ending, the TV series does not add to that or improve it. I’d recommend skipping the TV series for that reason.

For SRW, Dangaioh debuted in Super Robot Wars Compact 2 Part 1: Earth Crisis

Our next series is Zeorymer. Another OVA with incredible mecha animation. The series is known for being rather violent and with a main character, whose, for lack of a better term, split personality is remarkably evil. It’s a short and enjoyable OVA with some really unique designs.

For SRW, Zeorymer debuted in Super Robot Wars MX

MechaStellar Design Goals – Squad System

In our previous post we talked about changes to Support ATK / DEF, and how in this update we needed a new mechanic to represent the old gameplay of letting your grunts support each other and become more deadly.  With this we created a Squad system with the goal of making it as simple and easy to use as possible.  We took some inspiration from the Official Gundam 1/400 Tactical Battles rules which also features a Squad System (complete with base-to-base mechanics) and tried to streamline that idea as much as we could into MechaStellar.

For Squads we wanted a very simple way to boost their effectiveness.  The old Support ATK system was perhaps too generous, since it allowed you to gain bonus  hits on any attack.  Thus you would  often see a pair of machine guns supporting a bazooka unit (I know, I’ve certainly done it a lot myself), allowing for the weapon machine guns to get +2 hits on the very high damage bazooka.  It was a very effective combo.  Unfortunately it didn’t just apply to grunts, but also your overpowered units like a Gundam or Mazinger.

The Squad system wanted to provide a simple attack bonus to your grunts, without providing a massive attack bonus to your already powerful units.  Afterall, the intent is to improve you grunts, and let them fight against tougher opponents and help break through their defenses.

So for squads we allow you to pair up similar units, and you get bonus attack dice from your squad members when using the same weapon.  I.e. +2 machine guns from your squad mates gives your Squad Leader +2d10 attack dice, 1 bazooka and 2 machine guns does not give you bonus dice.

This ended up being a simple and easy to follow system, but we had to build in some limits so you weren’t pairing up Leos with Wing Gundam or Heavy Arms to immediately give them a huge attack bonus for a relatively cheap cost of +2 Leo units.  So to pair up similar units they would have to have the same Role and the same performance.  This lets you pair up various kinds of Zaku variants, it also lets you pair up Mass produced units, for example in the future you might have a Nu Gundam + MP Nu’s in a squad.

Lastly, we needed a way to make this worthwhile for Ace units.  We had a lot of success using the squad system with Battle-Tested pilots like the Cosmo Falcons / Tigers from Space Battleship Yamato, but overall, the system was not great for Ace Pilots like the Black Tri Stars.  The simplest fix to that, was to let Elite units gain a Defense bonus, so your Black Tri-Stars were getting +2d10 on Attack dice, but also on Defense dice, massively improving their survivability.

We also updated the Coordinated Attack event for the Black Tri-Stars, and we updated Tandem Fighter to be support focused, while also making it powerful if you lose one of your three Aces.  So the Black-Tri Stars with Tandem Fighter still fight very effectively when they are down to only 2 members.

We really enjoy the new squad system but there are likely still some wording loopholes we missed.  If you notice any, or just break the game in general, please let us know.  You can shoot us an email or contact us on social media.

MechaStellar Design Goals – Support Weapons

Support Weapons were a big update at the very start of VER10, they were one of the last big design changes before VER10 moved from closed playtest to open playtest.  Support Weapons replaced the previous “Overwatch” trait on weapons like Machine Guns and Beam Pistols with Machine Guns gaining Support Attack to represent firing on the enemy while Pistols got Support DEF to represent them being a last ditch sidearm when the enemy closes in.

Time has certainly flown since then, and with many revisions as well, we are currently at REV 121 of the Core Rules.  This last update had some major changes to Support Weapons and also added in a related Squad system which we’ll tackle in the next Design Goals post.

Support Weapons were a fun mechanic and allowed for your grunts units like Zakus and Leos to support one another, allowing for your cheapest and most common units to get a few bonus hits for themselves and allies.  Occasionally we would get feedback that it’s not the same as the Support ATK/DEF system present in Super Robot Wars, but that system if implemented in MechaStellar would be remarkably too powerful, essentially allowing for two units to completely unload on an enemy (or allow two units to defend against one). 

Recently, and by recent I mean in the last year, we have gotten feedback pretty consistently that Support ATK / DEF while fun and helpful, is also slowing the game down pretty dramatically.  The reason for this comes down to measuring.  For those who do virtual tabletops it might be no problem since you can instantly measure with an electronic tool, but on physical tabletops having to measure (and often pre-measure) to make sure your units are within each other Support ATK / DEF range was causing turns to take very long times.

This was a very big impact on large model count games (10-30 modes).  Since large model count games was what MechaStellar was originally built for, we are very sympathetic to the woes of those players.  So we decided to revise Support ATK / DEF.

The new model is more closer to Armored Core style gameplay, where you utilize your various weapons against a single target.  Firing off a shoulder missile pod to corner your target before firing your Kurosawa rifle, using a pulse gun to keep the enemy at bay while strafing around.  Of course we also see this in Gundam, especially for units with lots of weapons like a Full Armor Gundam.  So the updated Support ATK / DEF system is meant to evoke that feel.

The new Support ATK / DEF system lets you set your Support Weapons into Support Mode and give yourself that support bonus.  This also coincides with changes to Zeal, which limits the number of attacks on a single target to two attacks (any combination of Shooting or Melee).  This limit actually harkens back to VER3, the simplest system which gave every unit one shooting and one melee attack (a big departure from the action point system of the previous VER2).  VER10 building off this simplicity but gives you more flexibility so you can do two shooting attacks, or two melee attacks, or Zeal to make 2 Attacks against several targets. 

That said, we removed Support ATK/DEF from many weapons and upgraded them.  Instead we wanted Support ATK/DEF to be more rare, like a shoulder mounted minigun, or to be reserved for missiles.

While Support ATK / DEF is in a different niche, we needed a new mechanic to let your grunts function great on the tabletop.  The Tactician trait was updated to let you give a Support Bonus to another unit.  And next we have the Squad system we’ll cover in the next post.