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I was just wondering because I was thinking of starting a Scavvie gang.

I've played them in NCE, and they're very good. Load up your two scalies with two close combat weapons and tox-bombs, and get as many normal scavvys with autoguns as possible.

I started with a few scavvys built with mutations and close combat weapons, and they can be pretty fun in tag-teams with the scalies.

You'll outnumber pretty much every other gang, and even if you have to roll high to hit, you'll have so many more shots every turn, that you can just count on the weight of fire to do the job. Seal off areas with tox-bombs, and if anything comes close, grind them to bits with the scalies.

I <3 my scavvys!

The original rules could actually be abused pretty well. You need to feed your gang, but the bigger gangs were easier to feed because you could eat a member of the gang to feed everyone.

Have a big gang that can go scavenging and scrape together 30 creds and you just buy a new member, eat him, and avoid the starvation rules completely.

Led to very big gangs (had a campaign with a Scavvie gang at 18+ members, whereas the rest of us were at 10-14 at most) which made them very hard to fight against.

The old rules for Plague Zombies were the aboslute worst, because they weren't capped. In NCE it's 1D6 zombies, but in the original rules you could buy as many D6 as you wanted 60 plague zombies later, and you couldn't not win!

Eating hostages, or one of your own guys that took a bullet, is a good way to get fed.

I think my gang ended our campaign with around 15 members, which is quite a lot still, especially when the survivours are the ones with skills and better guns.

I've played both rule sets and found much the same with the original rules. The revised rules are great fun too. They keep some of the feel of what players would expect from the gang but help curb the obvious cheating.
They added a rule to curb huge gangs where people start to leave if your scavvy boss isn't a good enough leader.

Doesn't spoil the fun one big though. You can still eat people, call up plague zombies, smash stuff up with scalys and flood the board with junk-wielding untouchables.

Yes you can make some very broken combos with the original rules:

Scavvy with Autopistol and Club is 37 Credits,

Take 22 of them for 814 Credits
Add a leader with Autopistol for 112 Credits (926 total)
Add a 23rd Scavvy but minus the autopistol (this one is for dinner) takes you to 951 credits.
Spend 40 credits on plague zombies (getting you around 14) and you're bringing 38 models to your first game.

Expecting you landslide - the food Scavvy goes in the pot and feeds everyone. All other 22 scavvies go foraging and earn 77 credits meaning you can buy another food scavvy after each game and another 50 credits of plague zombies (getting you around 17 each game) - giving you around 41 models each game.

Well, that's the theory. I would love to play this once although it doesn't seem very kind on the other players in the campaign.

It really isn't very kind. I and another friend in my group have both gone down the Scavvie route and we intentionally didn't buy tons of Plague Zombies, even though we could have, because it just wasn't fair.

And yeah, as long as you Scavenged enough to buy a "food" Scavvie, it was too easy.

Yes, it seems the plague zombies need to be limited. What have you found are the upper limits you can bring before it turns into the Walking Dead mid-season finale?

Also if you were to play Scavvies like this full steam, I would imagine your gang rating would increase exponentially as you have so many more members getting the "D6 survives" after each battle.

Allowing the other gangs to run a "purge" on you once you get too unruly is probably a fun way to balance things out too.

Once the gang rating starts to climb, I'd be tempted to choose the Gunfighter scenario against that sort of thing. If I even bothered to play against it.