The new edition of Kill Team has been designed to give you a huge amount of strategic freedom when it comes to fighting your skirmish battles, and this is easy to see in the ability to customise your operatives’ equipment before battle.
A Kill Team can never be wholly prepared for the enemy they face, as their opponents are also elite warriors accustomed to the desperate, often scrappy warfare special operations demand. Veteran commanders, therefore, know the value of a flexible cache of specialist equipment and can adapt to the mission and foes they face.
In both matched and narrative play, you have the opportunity to equip individual operatives with extra pieces of gear during setup, although the way you do so in each format is a little bit different.While setting up for a matched play game, after determining the mission and selecting your kill team,* you receive 10 points to spend on assigning gear to your soldiers. Each faction has their own list of equipment to choose from, including iconic gear like T’au markerlights and Tyranid feeder tendrils. Choosing the right equipment can mean the difference between life and death, especially when it gives you powerful defensive bonuses like the Death Korps of Krieg’s legendary trench shovel.
In fact, many of the extra detail parts included in each kill team have in-game rules to go with them, so plenty of the grenades, maps, chronometers, smoke bombs, and more featured on your miniatures function just as much as their weapons do.
Meanwhile, kill teams embarked on narrative Spec Ops campaigns don’t get free reign to choose what they want before each mission. Instead, they have to earn pieces of equipment that get added to their stash first as part of their after-action rewards. On the plus side, their ongoing adventures give them potential access to even more powerful artifacts called rare equipment, which can have drastic effects on their abilities in battle.
Many pieces of rare equipment directly enhance one of the bearer’s weapons – finding an archeotech auto-loader, for instance, can turn a very brave operative’s plasma gun into a fully automatic death dealer.
It’s not just restricted to ranged weapons, either. The buzzing power klaw of an intrepid Kommando Nob can suddenly become a crackling coil of raw lightning with the simple addition of an arc unit – just what you need when diving into the brutal melee of close combat.
Whole treasure troves of equipment are waiting to be found, so make sure to set forth on your Spec Ops campaign as soon as your troops are mustered and write the story of the galaxy’s newest spec ops heroes (or villains, we won’t judge).
Customising your squad is one of the defining features of Kill Team, and the new equipment rules give you plentiful reasons to add a bit of extra flair to your miniatures. After all, why not add the thermal scope Sniper Jenkins just picked up onto the model’s lasgun? Make sure to show us the operatives you’ve already converted on Facebook and Instagram, and not just because we’d like to see who we’re up against before Kill Team: Octarius arrives for pre-order this month.
* And, crucially, seeing your opponent’s kill team.