Heavy Gear Assault – Getting Started

Overview

The following guide for Heavy Gear Assault should be enough to get you into the arena and blasting with the best of them, build on the foundations within this guide and of course practice makes perfect.NOTE: As Heavy Gear Assault is in early access and parts/mechanics are set to change this guide will be updated and added to as components and features come online. Check back often. Updates will go at the beginning of the guide for ease.

Welcome to Heavy Gear Assault

Welcome to Heavy Gear Assault, Duellist. You’ve entered the top tier sport on Terra Nova, if you want to earn fame and fortune pay attention to the tips in the guide and you’ll soon be sparring with the top duellists of Khayr ad-Din.

UPDATE – 06/06/2017 – New Landing Page UI

So you’ve been merrily playing away and today you login and you go “HOLY MOLY NEW UI…WHAT?”

Don’t panic!

Everything you knew and loved is still there just in different places. Lets start with the landing page shall we.

You can see the major changes here, very much a tidier and mature UI to navigate, options are now accessed via the cog icon in the top right, as is the quit button. You can clearly see your avatar, experience and money earned to the left of this. Staying on the top bar we have some new buttons, “Watch” and “Community”. Watch will take you to HGA twitch page where you can see any streams going on but links through to some of the other players twitch feeds and community button takes you through to the discord links with further plans to address community aspects within the UI. The big play now button is obvious, it’ll take you through to game mode selection screen and will also have an “all servers” button in that screen if you want to join a specific server.

The rest of the buttons are pretty self explanatory, chat and social is in the bottom right, and a new ticker is along the bottom strip.

Easy right 🙂 nothing to it and much easier to navigate. The only other screen I’m going to touch on is the Gear Store… check this out…

The details you get are more or less the same but the one thing I want to highlight to you (well two things actually) is the variant list along the bottom, this is new and quite exciting as fans of the TT game know each chassis has a fair list of variants that add further packages to your gear to fulfil certain roles and this kind of highlights that 1) roles are a thing, recon, support, tactical etc and 2) packages are coming down the line happy days.

The other thing is the “visuals” tab in the store, I’m not sure what kind of visuals they’re referring to but I’m hoping it’ll be things like “classic” armour pieces to make your gears look a bit closer to the TT equivalents and more recognisable for the diehard Heavy Gear TT fans out there.

Go have fun gear heads and discover new stuff, see you in the arena.

Blackfang out.

UPDATE: Front end landing page

Hi All, me again. Just a quick update to the guide to show the change in the landing page.

As you can see the main landing page now has a little list of game modes and you can click the one you fancy playing and takes you to the server with the details listed below the image. Makes it a bit easier to find a match.

If you want to browse the servers as per the older “browse servers” button just click the little button that says “All Servers” and it takes you through to the same screen.

If you want to navigate back to the landing page from the gearbay or options etc, then click the play now button, this is a change from the previous iteration that would launch you straight into a server.

The final addition is that the player lounge from the previous build as been moved into the landing page and you can chat with other players using the chat boxes below the server listings.

Apart from that enjoy the new Grizzly and Spitting Cobra gears that went in the latest patch.

Getting Started – The Menus and what they mean

When you first start Heavy Gear Assault you may be prompted to login or register, this is perfectly normal and is asking you to register an account with Heavy Gear Assaults main page system independently from Steam, this is important because it’ll track you, your stats and any leagues or tournaments you’re a part of (future features for site implementation – exciting stuff right).

Once you’ve logged in successfully you’ll be presented with the Main Menu as shown below. We’ll go through briefly and describe what each menu option means to you, the player.

Effectively launches you straight into the first server on the “browse servers” list whether there are any players in there or not (this function hasn’t been certified yet but the understanding is it should change to the most player populated server if there is one, otherwise default is top of the list)

Launches the tutorial that will go through the basics of movement, walking and secondary movement system (SMS from here on out), as well as the basics of jump jets on gears (pay attention to my tips on jump jets later on in the guide – the W key makes a massive difference)

Returns you to the main view of the menus from when you first login

Allows you to browse all available servers for Heavy Gear Assault, including different versions (if you tick the box). Most players, to find a match, should go here first

This one is critically important, it allows you to view and customise your stable of gears, from weapons and loadouts to armour packages and paint schemes.

Still in development but effectively you can buy equipment and gears with ingame TEC (Terra Novan Economic Credit), which is the ingame currency.

View and chat to all players who are online, unless they’re in a match.

Host your own servers and map cycles, note the port forwarding that needs to be raised to ensure proper host connectivity. Check out the separate guide to hosting created by Houruck. Click Here

As expected, this contains all graphics, audio, control, UI and gameplay options available to the player.

Logs you out to the login screen. Multiple accounts maybe?

Quits the game.

The Options Menu – Control Methods Explained

The options menu, a place we all know and love to make sure we have our game running as sweetly as our systems will allow. Everything here is pretty clear to the average gamer but I want to draw your attention to two very important things.

1. Gameplay tab
2. UI Tab

Aim control style is the most important factor here, if you’re comfortable with mech games and understand that the torso can point a totally different direction to the way in which your legs are moving then absolutely select Advanced mode. If you’d prefer a more FPS style setup then select Standard mode. I will stress that both modes are totally viable in an arena match but it would be wise to learn and understand Advanced mode as it can give you the edge when the combat gets fierce and you want to pull off some trickier manoeuvres whilst keeping your guns trained on target.

The tutorial will take you through basic movement controls but for ease and reference here they are again, ignoring the obvious spellcheck fail on the word “Turret” on advanced controls giggles

Colour blind people rejoice (I fall into this group of people, thanks Mum)!!! This tab allows us to change the colour and opacity of all our HUD and UI elements with more granularity than I care to explain, see screenshot for details.

The Gear Bay – Customisation for Everyone

The gear bay is the place where you’ll create loadouts and builds for all your gears and it’s split into three distinct sections described below, the grey bar at the top left allows you to select a gear for customisation from your stable, DON’T FORGET TO SAVE!!!!:

1. Build

   Under the build heading you can effectively mix and match all the external physical components of your gear, including armour, engine components and mechanics (legs and feet etc). Keep in mind that all these components have different default values (which can be viewed here: [link]). This gives the ultimate flexibility in creating a gear totally unique to yourself.
   

2. Paint

   As the name would suggest you can set up some unique colours AND material types for your gear, have a play around with it and see what you like, nothing his hidden from view here. You can in fact create multiple colour and texture schemes here that save independently from the gear. So remember to save the colour scheme first THEN save it to the gear.
   

3. Weapons

   Here you can create custom weapon loadouts for your gear, you’ll see small yellow circles appear all over your gear, those are your hardpoints where you can fit a variety of stuff. Guns held in the hand manipulators will go on the legs (for smaller guns and lasers) or the fuel tank storage (for a big gun like a snub cannon), your shoulders will have fixed mounts for bazookas and rocket packs, and your engine also has mounts for jumpjets and mortars. Keep in mind that the ‘weight’ system isn’t yet implemented so you can fully load your gear with as much as possible right now BUT when that system comes into play you may find you need to scale back the armament or increase the gear size.
   Selecting a hard point will show you in the list to the left what weapons can be placed there, just click the weapon system you want and it magically appears on your gear.
   

and finally DON’T FORGET TO SAVE!!! imperative that you smash that save button to ensure your gear loadouts are carried over to server for use in the arena, if you get stuck with default loads because you forgot to save don’t come crying to me.

Servers and Game Modes – Let’s go find someone to blow up!

The browse server menu option should be the first one you hit if you want to find a game with players, despite there being a “play now” button I’m not sure the functionality is all there and on occassion has put me into an empty server, browse servers will allow you to see all available servers, what map and game mode they’re running and how many players are on it.

A player can join their chosen server at any point by clicking on the one they wish to join. Simples…

You’ll notice there are several game modes spread over the servers available to the player. Lets make sure everyone knows what a brunesball is…

• Team Deathmatch – Pretty straight forward, two teams out to blow the bits off each other, points are scored for taking off components as well as straight up kills…EASY!
• Annexation – Two teams are out to capture several strategic generators on the map, points are scored for an immediate capture (for the player) as well as a cumulative score over time that the generator is held for. Press and hold the ‘F’ key (default) to capture an unclaimed generator, if the generator is claimed by the opposing team then shoot it first and then press and hold the F key.
• Brunesball – Capture the flag with a twist…the flag is a bomb…that explodes. Each team has a bomb on a pedestal, to make a capture bring the enemies bomb back to your pedestal. UNLOCK THE PEDESTAL FIRST!!! Press the F key on the pedestal to unlock it (you’ll see the clamps come down around the bomb) and then press the F key again on the bomb to snag it. Once you have the bomb you can even throw it at enemies or to your teammates if needed.
• Wave Survival – A player only team is set up against numerous waves of ever increasing difficulty AI bots…good luck after about wave 5 or 6 🙂

So now you know how to find a server with players in, time to join the fight…

Duking it out! – Select your gear and equip your guns

So you’ve built your gear, you’ve selected an arena and you’re loading in…Great. What comes next is VERY IMPORTANT. For ease I’ll list it:

1. Select your gear and click join! With me so far?
   
2. Step out of your gear bay and equip your guns. To do this you must first select the gun you wish to equip by pressing the 1(fuel tank), 2 (left leg) or 3(right leg) keys, then you click either the left mouse button (left hand) or right mouse button (right hand) to equip the selected gun to the chosen hand. Bit more complicated this one but pretty straight forward, yes?

   Here you can see I’ve selected my number 3 gun, take note of how the grey box changes and says click left or right to equip.
   Then after right clicking you can now see the weapon system has moved to the right hand identifier box and the weapon system is actually in my gears right hand…Happy days.
   Again, once weapons are equipped to hands you can fire these with the left or right mouse buttons (defaults)

   Should you wish to put these weapons away and pull out the big cannon strapped to your fuel storage (you did remember to bring your big gun right?), you can put handheld guns back to their hardpoints with the X key or drop them entirely by pressing ALT+X (don’t do this unless you intend to pick up a dead gears better gun he may have dropped or you shot out of his hands)

3. Fixed hardpoint weapon systems (shoulder or engine mounted). These are default fired with the middle mouse button, they are ALWAYS equipped. You can cycle the fixed systems with the T key or you can cycle firing modes with the ALT+T key combination, modes are single fire, sequential fire and fire all (lots of fun this one) this is pretty obvious I feel once you know what’s going on. Right in the middle of your HUD (slightly up from the reticle) it’ll either say MNT SEQ, MNT ALL or blank (for single fire mode)
   you can see in this shot my HUD says MNT ALL meaning I’ve selected all mounted weapons to fire at once on clicking the middle mouse button.

Ok that’s about it for basics of equipping and firing weapon systems, either handheld of fixed mountings. Let’s take a bit of time to understand the other information on the HUD and a couple of key combos that’ll help you out in a fight…
Here’s the view from in the gear, going clockwise starting in the top left…

• Damage indicator and resources – the little gear doll tells you how badly you’re getting shot up, the three bars indicate your amount of resources you’ve got left in terms of Hydraulics, electrics and fuel. If you’re hydraulics run out, you stop running and jumping; if you’re electrics run out, you stop skating (SMS mode); if you’re fuel runs out, you stop. Generally speaking in an average match you shouldn’t run out BUT things affect it, i.e. water in your engine will cause hydraulics and electrics to run out at a VERY increased rate, and having your fuel tank shot off means your fuel will run out much quicker.
• In the top middle is the Match Timer, team scores and more importantly your XP ticker. The XP ticker will notch up as you do things, destroy components, gears, capture objectives etc etc, this is directly relevant to your match earnings. If you want to know how well you’re doing check that bar out.
• top right, the scoreboard, no explanation necessary
• bottom right shows right side mounted fixed weapons and also what’s in your right hand, this is same for the bottom left.
• Bottom center shows the guns available in your hardpoints and a small map of the area.
• left middle shows the chat message area, you can chat in game by pressing the “enter” key and then typing a message and pressing enter again to transmit.

This is pretty easy to understand:

• The bars on the left and right hand sides show the pitch of your torso, i.e. how much you’re pointing up and down, pay attention to the green diamond as you move your torso up and down to look up and down.
• the bar along the bottom shows torso twist, again the green diamond shows you how far you’re twisted away from center
• the little “1x” above that bottom line shows how far you’re zoomed in
• kph is your speed
• the opposite number in metres is the distance from you to what’s under your targeting reticle which is the small circle of dots thing right in the centre
• the grey bars you see in the top right of this example is the ammo left in my shoulder mounted rocket launcher, but if you had a gun equipped to your hand the same thing would appear in either the bottom left or right of the reticle to show “at a glance” ammo states.

ALT+R – radar toggle – if it’s off they can’t see you but you can’t see them either unless through line of sight
T – select fixed mounted weapons
ALT+T – cycle fixed mounted fire modes
Left Shift – toggle SMS mode i.e. skating, press again to resume running
Left Ctrl – toggle walking/running
1,2,3 – select gun hardpoint for assigning to a hand
Left or Right click – fire left or right weapon, or if hand is empty assign selected hardpoint to hand
Middle mouse button – fire fixed weapon systems
Mouse wheel – zoom in/out
Spacebar – jump, press again to activate jump jets whilst in the air
Z – go prone, note movement is currently disabled whilst prone (to be patched back in again later)
M – If you get your engine or legs shot off and you go down but not dead, the M key will respawn you back to gear bay.

Tips and Tricks

Things I do to help me in battle (veterans please feel free to leave a comment with stuff you do that can help newer players make that first kill and I’ll add it to the list):

• When using jumpjets the W key matters, if you want more height in your jump, take your finger off that W key first before firing the jets. By holding the W key down when jumping you’ll get FAR more forward thrust than verticle
• When in SMS mode, take your finger off the W key and then press and hold either the A or D keys to turn your gear, at a certain point the legs flick round and you can then skate backwards without having lost momentum. Handy for escaping whilst putting fire down range.
• the C key and ALT+C keys change the camera view, sometimes handy for those awesome selfie shots in the cool maps
• When you go down, after having your legs shot off from under you, don’t immediately hit that M key to respawn, check your weapon systems, whilst on the ground flat on your back you become very hard to hit and with weapons equipped you’re still very dangerous. See if you can get off some last effort shots at the enemy team and help out your teammates a bit before respawning.
• It’s worth noting that if you collide with something at high speed (say a tree) your gear will fall over, do not panic, your gear’s onnet will take over and stand you back up automatically. No amount of key bashing is going to make this happen any faster and you will be vulnerable as you stand back up.
• As per THIS guide, cancelling a rocket salvo can be done by clicking the middle mouse button again (yes you will let loose a few rockets in the process, it’s your penalty for cancelling big explosions). No idea why you would want to do this and intentionally limit the ‘splosions, that’s just weird.

Feel free to leave questions and comments where relevant, if you feel anything needs changing let me know and if you spot a spelling or grammar error, it’s late so please let me off haha.

See you in the arena Gearheads!

Blackfang out.