Starting Specialty cards - which ones to take?

@calza27 are you asking for the starter gear or the leveling up table skills? (my autism is making it hard to understand)

you can find the starter gear 2 ways

on the character card there's 2 lines of white text above the skills that lists their gear
on weapons, armor, gear etc in the top right corner the starter gear has a pic of the characters


as for the leveling up table for each character i have no idea as well as Ive yet to find it in the rules on the quick browse through ive done.

i hope that helps

 

hmmm might want to bring in @Koni into this conversation,

in regards for the skill card lists, this is CB response on KS

 

We have the chart now (in the latest kickstarter update), however I'm still unsure which are the starting specialty cards. Are we supposed to select a starting card from amongst the level 1 specialties available to our character?

 

how the old vids explaining living up you have to research all of the lvl 1s to unlock the versatile skill.
ill try to look for the exact vid.

edit:

 

I have not received the wave 1 yet, but looking back at the rule book that was made available for the Kickstarter campaign it has a page talking about the specialty cards. The way it is written seems to suggest that you begin the game without them and receive them once campaign missions are complete. Here is the quote from that rule book:

‘For example, when mission 3 is finished, each Character can acquire a level II Specialty or the third one from level I.’

because it says they get a third specialty when mission 3 is complete, it therefore means they began the game without a specialty.

For Qiang I imagine this means although he has Heavy Armour, he cannot equip it until he gets the specialty. Although I am sure an official response to this question would be much appreciated as rules may have changed since the kick starter rule book.

 

Further to this, I checked the rules for beginning a campaign in the Kickstarter rule book and it also says:

‘3. Each player is given the Specialty card of the chosen Character. The function of these cards is explained below (see “Specialty cards” table).‘

which contradicts with the idea that you begin without specialties.

 

Yeah, it's all a little confusing. Another concern I have is that Rahman and Trisha apparently don't join the party until a few missions in, which means they will be behind when it comes to specialties, unless they start with extra or are overall stronger in compensation or something.

 

So I'd like to echo OP's comments about the starting specialties for each character, it's very much not clear. @Koni any chance of getting a clarification on this? I played my first couple missions today and this was confusing for us.

 

The "Heavy Armour" is the category, so he has it by being him. There is no "Heavy Armor" card to unlock the armor, so he'd have it right away but cannot trade it off basically.

 

i don’t have the game as of yet, so am only going by the downloaded cards from the Kickstarter preview. The issue is that he has listed in his starter equipment ‘Heavy armour’. There is an equipment card for ‘Heavy Armour’ that requires the character to have the ‘HI combat’ skill. Does he have this skill at the beginning of the game, and if he doesn’t, can he equip this equipment card?

 

So reading it, information later in the section about Specialties implies that you actually *don't* start with any, and gain them after missions 1-8. If that's the case, perhaps "Starting Specialties" refers to the ability each character starts with that's on their card?

 

The armor says "Requirements: HI Combat". There is no specialty card for HI Combat, it is a category of specialties that start with Reinforced Armor, then Behind Me and so on. So, assuming that the armor requires Reinforced Armor seems off. I think the card just means that it can only be used by someone with access to the HI Combat Specialty Group, which is Qiang Gao. He has HI Combat, even if he doesn't have Reinforced Armor the specialty that is the first specialty of HI Combat.

 

I see where you are getting at. It took me a couple of rereads as again, I can only go by what was available at the beginning of the Kickstarter.

I can see that he would have access to the Heavy Armour as he has the HI Combat tree of skills. I think it is still unclear from the rules I have seen whether this skill tree is activated or not without having at least the first tier, if you see what I mean.

But thank you for sticking with me at giving an explanation, I see what you are getting at.

 

Originally each character was supposed to have their specialty chart on a separate card (as is the way of this sort of game: Don't put something in a book that you can print out on a card that can be redone or replaced independently of the rulebook.)

Something happened during production and instead we've got to make do with the foldout chart containing everyone's specialties together without the nice graphics you'd expect to see with the individual placemat card version.

 

The number of "somethings" is pretty concerning by now.