Double irony since Getter has a machine gun and Mazinkaizer SKL dual-wields pistols.
Gundams on the other hand get more than their share of kills in melee. Heck, the more recent gundam animes, Iron Blooded Orphans, Unicorn and Thunderbolt, all have their climatic battles end with "Drive me closer, I want to hit them with my sword/fist."
And the only recorded instance of a Zaku II (aka basic "evil grunt") defeating a Gundam was by a pilot managing to get close enough to hit them with their heat axe. Because the Zaku II's basic machine gun and even the rocket launcher never managed to do anything more than scratch a Gundam's paint even when wielded by named ace pilots.
I think the point is that you can't give Getter its machine gun, nor Mazinkaiser SKL its pistols, nor Dancouga any of its multitude of guns, etc....
But you can, just pick arsenal and take your picks. Sure they're not going to be boss-finishers, but that was never their purpose to begin with. Mazinkaiser/Getter/Dancounga use guns to either clear away mooks that aren't worth spending energy on or wear down bigger enemies at range before getting close enough for rip and tear.
And while sure, Gundams have some awesome melee....Unicorn's Beam Magnum is much stronger than any of its melee weapons, and the majority of lead gundams (barring Exia/00/Quan[T], Barbatos, and the GBF leads) are primarily ranged. Wing's Buster Rifle, Zeta's Hi Mega Launcher, Double Zeta's High Mega Cannon, F91's VSBRs, Nu's Fin Funnels (which are admittedly available), Freedom/Strike Freedom's absurd quantity of ranged weapons...
If anything, if you want to show those awesome Gundam finales, you should make ranged strong, and then make Sunder a powerful option, because that's what usually happens.
Remind me, what gundam series had the big bad finished by one of the supposedly super ranged weapons?
In the first gundam, Ray Amruro's biggest kill is that giant green mobile armor that is immune to a freaking full fleet of battleships, but goes down like a punk when the gundam gets close enough to stab it.
MAN-08 Elmeth was no match to the power of the beam saber either.
Char's MSN-02 Zeong exceptionally gets shot to bits... By the standard-issue mass-produced beam rifle, and was an half-done prototype hastily clobbered together, then Ray and Char end up duking it out in melee anyway.
Zeta Gundam just rams itself into the series big bad.
Gundam Blitz gets sliced in half by the Strike after over a dozen episodes of shrugging off all kinds of ranged weaponry.
The Aegis Gundam fails time and time again to shoot down the strike, until Athrun just get gets close and personal.
Providence isn't even scratched the Freedom guns. Upon which Kira just goes "Ok, looks like I need to start getting serious" and stabs the Providence to death while shrugging off its funnels.
Full Frontal's final machine basically shrugged off both the Unicorn's and Bashee's full ranged arsenal with its fancy force field, but was brutally ripped apart limb by limb in melee.
The Bashee does take down a couple named characters using guns, but they were suicidically depressed mentally broken people that pretty much wanted to die at those points and just let themselves be shot point-blank so I count those as mercy coup-de-graces.
Turn A and Turn X get a double melee KO.
Crossbone Gundam has the final big bad get ganked into melee as well as the titular mecha win by beam saber.
G-Gundam, where the main character and villain don't even bother bringing guns besides basic vulkans.
Gundam Wing's buster rifle is the closest thing, but even then fails to kill a single named character by the end of the series, being mostly used to blow up big structures. And its rival, the Gundam Epyon, was an almost pure melee machine. And the Gundam Wing could hold it off at close combat against the melee specialist Epyon pretty well. Not to mention the Talgeese vs Heavyarms duel where two supposedly ranged specialist mechas spend all their ammo against each other without dealing any significant damage and then just start to try stabbing each other. Heck, Trowa even went through the trouble of adding a beam saber to the Heavyarms because he knew the fight would end up a melee duel!
Main point is, even in the gundam series ranged weapons are mostly for clearing away nameless faceless mooks, while important enemies shrugg off all sorts of guns like a boss before getting stabbed about 99% of the time.
As for sundering, yes it's a common theme in giant robot shows, however from a gaming perspective, it would mean players pretty much need to go restock to a base after every battle to replace destroyed weapons. That's why I added the Disarming property, allowing you to remove weapons that can be easily replaced after the battle is over.
Although I'm all ears, how would such an "easy sunder" system work? First guy to win initiative blows up the other dude's biggest weapon and whoever goes second is left running a losing battle as both their damage potential and HP have been crippled and they can't recover their damage potential? Or just make ranged weapons super easy to sunder while melee ones are more durable?
Something I've just noticed. With the energy rework, you didn't change the cost on Funnels, so now it's even harder to use 'em effectively. I dunno if this is intentional or not.
Missed it, standardized to 5 energy per round, thanks!
About the Energy revamp
In case it wasn't meant to be, the multiclassing rules still grant increases to energy per class level.
The Einst Queen infiltrator has scaling energy as well (including its multiclassing options) along with the old energy recovery (though it'd be more limited in that department).
The Super Pilot still has energy increases with its super upgrades (though that may be supposed to be an alternative to Arsenal options).
Thanks as well, removed the multiclassing leftovers and updated Einst queen as well.
Super robot energy upgrade remaining is intended has supers usually have more energy. The bonus has been halved though.
In case that the Real Pilot and Super Pilot are meant to have energy increase options, the Ship Captain is then very limited in that department; I've a hard time imagining it doing much in a fight with its main cannon costing 50 energy and trying to use its maneuvers on top of it all. Along with flying around. It has enough arsenal space to have one reactor quality or more energy, but with the default recovery being at 5 per round a reactor is almost mandatory to do anything.
For the Main Cannon, maybe it'd be cool to have its energy cost be based on its number of base damage die, you could lower its damage for lower energy costs, which could lead to 'charging the lazzer' for a max-power shot.
Reduced energy beam cannon cost to 15. "Charging my lazzors" is something that's already represented by using either spirits/maneuvers or the super robot's upgrade.
The Main weapon now costing a whoopin' 10 energy per attack per pick of the upgrade suddenly makes it anything but a main weapon. It suddenly becomes the one you try to use the most sparingly since it empties your energy reserve. Except perhaps for a heavy weapon for maximum effect on multiple targets with a single attack. With 3 picks making it 30 energy per attack... I'll just note I didn't consider the second and third pick of Main to be worth their energy cost and now that the energy pool is reduced along with the energy increases, I'm not sure why anyone would consider them except perhaps to combine with a spirit/effect that guarantees a critical hit... M'yeah.
Reduced energy cost to 5 per increase.
Still, as pointed out earlier one of the purposes is to promote the use of different weapons. So a gundam uses their vulkans to clear away minor nuissances, the beam rifle to shoot down those half-decent zakus and pulls out the beam saber for big baddies. Sometimes he carried around his own rocket launcher or a hammer and sometimes he just tears stuff apart with its hands.
