Heavy Gear RPG
Heavy Gear Blitz
While I enjoy playing Heavy Gear Blitz. I find that army construction rules are far too loose for a war game. The following are ideas I have had for new, tighter army construction rules with more defined construction for the combat groups.
Modified Northern Gear Cadre listings
Other changes
While the above links go to pages with more radical changes, the following are some ideas that I came up with on the forums and are here for archiving reasons.
DPGs
Currently, the Deployable Pack Gun (DPG) is essentially a weapon that never gets used, and is removed from the gears that carry it if it's possible as quickly as possible. The reason for this is that it is mainly a LAC (a weapon already considered useless despite being the mainstay weapon of the mainstay gears in the world), only with worse accuracy (-1 instead of 0). The idea I had is to basically change it from having the -1 ACC to having 0 ACC and the range bands of the FGC. This way it is actually useful in close to the enemy, both with the ability to hit at range, and as a melee weapon that does not get it's user killed.
2nd in commands
While the idea of having some squads contain a second model with leadership might seem like a good idea, the fact that such a model is only at leadership 1 and without access to any of the abilities the CGL gets (at least until the CGL dies that is), it actually makes taking a 2IC one of those things that doesn't happen normally since you're paying points for something that's only actually useful if you loose another, more valuable, unit.
The idea here to to have 2ICs act like the CGL in all respects, even if the CGL is already alive. This is something that would be of most benefit to squads of six units. The CGL and 2IC can designate targets for co-ordinated fire while the other four members work to have cross fire bonuses.
Another idea to help make 2ICs worth their cost, in addition to the above, is to allow squads with a 2IC to take advantage of the Subsquads rule. While a squad with a 2IC would not have to use the rule, a squad without a 2IC could not use it as there is no one to lead half the squad on the battlefield.
Utopia Drones, Utopia/Eden Golems
These are units that are so small, and so numerous, that they can quickly drive up the amount of time a person needs to play a single turn from the sheer requirement of using each model individually. Thankfully there are already rules in place to counter this, they just were not applied.
Make the Golems and Drones Combined models. While they are still vehicles (as they are not infantry), by being combined models one can have that many more of them in the game. In fact, the PPB that the Utopian Drones can do is essentially the same thing that occurs when combined models attack a target, each additional base (or drone in this case) adds 1 to the ROF of the attack instead of one dice to the skill level as it does currently. It would also reinforce the role that both of these units occupy, namely a niche between infantry and the larger combat walkers in use elsewhere (like the Gears) and roughly where the FLAILs are in the game. I would not suggest making them infantry however, just to maintain that difference between traditional infantry and what are essentially robotic infantry/powered armour troopers.
Doing this, the NAI matrix for the Utpoian Drones could be more easily figured out since you're counting the number of bases in the combined model, instead of trying to keep them all together while moving them all seperately.