More Upgrades!

I recently posted a preview of the Utility Upgrades page in the rulebook. It occurred to me (as I read the replies - thank you, we now have a "Combat Engineer" utility upgrade*) that you guys might like to see some more preview pages, given that most of you haven't seen the rulebook since I last posted beta rules.

Anyway, here's the Leadership Upgrade table.

Leadership and Command are absolutely central to the new rules. Rather than a default two orders per element, you get a number of orders based on your CHQ (usually eight), plus one for each command element in your battle group. You can then generate more orders by, well, spending orders. But, as you'll see, you have to take a command test to get those orders. So there's a risk that you'll activate an element to get more orders only to fail the test and get nothing. So now you have to decide whether to spend a second order to gain more orders or quit while you're only slightly behind.

Meanwhile, command specialisms give an extra twist to orders. When you generate orders, you allocate them immediately. And if the element that generated them (from a Command action, not at the start of the turn) has a specialism, they grant a bonus to the element that received the orders. I think you'll see immediately that granting something like Rapid or Dig In to an element that doesn't normally have those traits at just the right moment could be decisive!

Points values are still subject to last-minute changes (I've literally just changed the points values of every element in the game for, like, the fourth time while I adjust and balance them against each other). Everything else is firm.

*Given that we had this upgrade in the original rulebook, why it didn't occur to me before, I have no idea. ItalianMoose is, of course, already getting a free rulebook from having sent me a lovely selection of photographs of his minis. Erik W has certainly earned himself a free PDF. I will forget I said this, so feel free to poke me, Erik.