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So you finally got my heavy gear 2player starter kit in the mail and was wondering what rule book to focys on first. The field guide or locked and loaded?


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also i was wondering if anyone knew what box sets come with datacards for the gears.

Field Manual has the most up to date rules.

I have a Utopia army starter, and it did not come with data cards. It is my understanding that the blisters come with data cards.

There are datacards for almost all of the units in the back of the field manual. The only ones that are missing are items that were released after the manual was printed.

The L&L book contains point values for many different armies. This being said, some of the points values are not up to date. The latest issue of Gearup (which is free) has some updated points costs.

The datacards in the boxes are likely not up to date either and iirc they stopped including them in the last few years. The best bet is to download the gear garage FREE program (basically an army builder for heavy gear) and print out your custom cards with that (see their forum for the download links). The cards you used to get had all the options for that mini on there and were a bit busy because of that; the ones from gear garage have only the upgrades/options you're actually using. If you can't or don't want to go that route, they do keep the cards up to date on their website as well.

As stated above, Field Manual is the current rulebook whereas L&L is only for army list building at this point. As for models, I'd recommend not buying too many general purpose (GP) squads with the stock hunter/jager/warrior. If you're coming from a game like 40k where troops do stuff like claiming that no other category can do, you'd think that "core" squads would have some similar benefit but they in fact do not. In addition, most people tend to play elite games (if the various battle reports are any indication) of PL3 or 4 since there is almost no downside anymore with the field manual rules to taking a higher PL (it used to be that you got less objectives to accomplish but now you only win on ties). The core general gears just do the job less efficiently and for more points for their value compared with more elite ones.

Gutstuf Ugfang wrote:So you finally got my heavy gear 2player starter kit in the mail and was wondering what rule book to focys on first. The field guide or locked and loaded?

Automatically Appended Next Post:
also i was wondering if anyone knew what box sets come with datacards for the gears.

You didn't realize that all starter sets came with the mini size Field Manual rulebook? This is all you need. You do not need any data cards. They can be downloaded. Besides, when the beta testing of GU5 TV values is done, all will be out of date. The only book that you may like to buy is the one for NuCoal. The rest, if you want, purchase them in pdf files.