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Snagged a copy of the English rules, 39.99 USD. Initial impressions of the book is 'Wow'. full color, lavishly illustrated, and fairly clear rule explanations. 105 pages, more-or-less, of background to introduce the setting (oh, it includes the unit descriptions, too), an additional 'Do you want to know more...?' section to further explain some of the unit types and combat theories that the game is based around (somebody at Corvus Belli took the Task Force 21 briefs that the USArmy's put out and took them to the extreme edge of the envelope. seriously). Then there's about 60 pages of rules. And another 20 pages, more or less, of the actual army listings (the unit statlines proper). only a couple translation issues that I found (one cm-to-inches in a table (they didn't change the units to inches, just the header!), and a few odd phrasings that show the writers are not native English speakers, but no bad Spanglish.) In fact, I think they may have borrowed a couple Brits for the English version, that's the kind of translation oddities I mean.
Vehicle rules are a little fast&loose, because it's really an infantry skirmish, with some light, one-man Infantry Fighting Vehicles, called Tactical Armored Gear (broadly comparable to a Termy or a Crisis suit) for heavy support. Generally speaking, vehicles are treated as simply being multi-wound troopers.
Each of the factions has their own 'specialty'. PanOceania (which is a coalition of most of the south Pacific, and South America and India) specializes in TAGs, and could actually field an entire army of them (roughly 550-600 points in TAGs). Yu Jing, (greater China, including some of the historically conquered nations, and Japan) specializes in Heavy Infantry (powered armor wearers). Haqqislam has numbers of troops, including some of the 'rare' Mechanized infantry. The Nomads (similar in concept to the Romany 'Gypsies') are super-specialists (the best troop of whatever type it happens to be, even their remanfactured PanO TAGs, considered a generation out of date by PanO, are competitive with the Yu Jing, and close to the top-line PanO hardware).
The Combined Army (the alien forces) are a really different force. somewhere between the Tau and the Nids, they pick and choose the best race for the job. they also use really nasty weapons, which cause Final Death by frying the memory wetware of most of the Human (and alien, come to think about it) troops. While dead is dead, in the terms of the scenario, it makes a big difference in a campaign setting.
Then there's the Human mercs. A mixture of the usual 'hive of scum and villainy' and some very interesting Characters.
Yes, I said the C-Word. There are some unique characters in each faction, some of which are current-time characters, and some of them are 'Recreations' (yes, with a capital R) of historical personalities. The Christian Church is powerful in PanO, and they brought back Jeanne d'Arc to act as an inspiring leader. The Yu Jing wanted a brilliant strategist, and so they brought back Sun Tze. Then a media channel wanted some duelists for their Dueling show... Wild Bill makes an appearance in passing, but Miyamoto Musashi has a statline (he's one of the Mercenary characters you can get).
I should be able to get a game or two in Monday, trying to show the game to one of the guys at the gamestore, and I'll give you a better analysis after that...
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"For the Lion and the Emperor!"
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