Working on a larger post so here’s a few quick photos for some playtesting games this past week. The above was a mock battle between Gigas class Mechs (Evangelions in this case) and MS class mechs (a handful of Amphibious Mechs that were used in a previous game).
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post we’d like to talk a little bit more about how sizing will affect the game. Since MechaStellar is intended to allow you to recreate a Super Robot Wars style tabletop skirmish that means we need to have someway to differentiate Mecha that are much larger than others.
In MechaStellar we have two types of Mecha, a Mobile Skeleton or MS Class and a Titan Class. While the MS class is principally there to represent high mobility units like you’d see in Mobile Suit Gundam, Aura Battler Dunbine, Votoms or Zone of the Enders, the Titan class was envisioned to capture Mechs that tend to lack aerial mobility but offer considerably more durable and often with significantly more weapons. Titan class mechs can run the gamut of Mobile Armors, Getter Machines, Guy Melefs, Jaegers or even Evangelions. As we’ve been doing more Titan-only playtests recently this would be a good time to discuss this class of Mechs.
Here are some quick playtest photos of this past weekend. The first one shows units from Pacific Rim, giant robots called Jaegers built to defend humanity from giant monsters named Kaiju. Fantastic first movie, highly recommend if you haven’t gotten a chance to see it. Jaegers and Kaiju use the rules for ‘Gigas’ a slower but more durable type of Mech and in this case giant monster. It’s also been fun testing out a new ‘Defend the City’ game type we hope to release soon.
This week’s update is a large one. We’ve got the iconic Gelgoog series making its debut as well the RX78NT-1 Gundam ‘Alex’ and the Kampfer by request. Let’s start with the Gelgoog series.
The Gelgoogs present an interesting design problem. They are one of the few mobile suits to deploy with their shields consistently on their backs while most units have their shields pointed to the front. How best to represent that on the tabletop?
Below you’ll find some playtest photos of a recent game and memorable game using 0080 units. While it seemed one sided for most of it, the Federation came very close to victory near the end, and in a rematch game a change in Tactics resulted in a clean sweep for the Federation.
Gundam Wing was the first Gundam show to arrive in America and was an immensely popular hit when it landed. It also had some very distinctly stylized and memorable Gundams. Units from Gundam Wing will be the first AU that get added to the supplemental roster for MechaStellar. Normally we see these Gundams destroying Leos, Aries, Taurus and Virgos en masse, for this test we were comparing their relatively power against one another. Below are some photos for a 3 on 3 Gundam battle while I was still unpacking the house.
We discovered in testing a few edge cases that necessitated a change to how Pilot works. Not a major one, but it is a rollback on the current power. Previously Pilot granted free Hits equal to your Pilot Level, so if you attack in melee, roll 4 Hits and were a Level 2 Pilot you’d have 6 Hits total. We ran into issues when it came to high damage weapons and cheap units.