There are only two Restoration Upgrades in BCZ and they come with a sidebar that explains their function: They're mostly meant for Combiner Subpilots. Combiners in BCG were already very powerful, but the Subpilots of the 3rd Component and beyond didn't have many options to use. The lead would attack, one of the subs would Maneuver, and everyone else would, like, maybe Boost or use a Support? It wasn't an exciting job to have. Now they have two more options which, while not particularly powerful, do succeed at making them more versatile.
G-Charger
The G-Charger was originally either a Restoration in the core book or a Support Upgrade, I forget which, and it was extremely niche. Cranking up your Energy output is, as I've pointed out last time, very exploitable. The part that wasn't good at all about the G-Charger was that it used up your Turn to do so, making it largely useless to anyone except Subpilots. Worse, it was confusing, people would pick it and expect to get an Energy boost for one Turn, then be disappointed when they learned that wasn't the case and scratch their heads or fume at what a waste of points this thing was. I brought it back for the expansion because A) Extremely niche and potentially confusing abilities are the expansion's thing. B) I realized I could write sidebars to explain the purpose of particularly quirky things. Anyway, the G-Charger is ok. It's not amazing, because there aren't that many ways to abuse having tons of Energy, but it's very handy with Boost Powers and against Energy debuffs.
Reload
The Resupply Upgrade used to be cheaper, had a Range of 1 and only spent one use at a time. Much like G-Charger, that wasn't very good. Though at least it did something for single-pilot Units, unlike G-Charger. When Resupply was made more powerful (and also more expensive), I figured that the expansion could have a weaker Resupply exclusively for Subpilots that had the old functionality. Like G-Charger, this is the kind of ability that was saved by the expansion being much more okay with extremely niche abilities that need their own sidebar to explain them. Again, like G-Charger, it's not super duper good or anything, but it is almost always better than Resupply for the purposes of a Combiner and that's all it needs to be.
And that's all for today! A part of me wanted to have more Restoration Upgrades in BCZ, but there wasn't a lot of design space left for them (G-Charger is already pushing it, to be honest) and if I was only going to come up with mediocre abilities then I figured it would be better to not force more into the game at all.
Next: A similar story for Mobility Upgrades!
Gimmick Out.
Players in my group have used reload for non-combiner mechs a couple of times. It's a useful low-cost alternative to resupply for low level mechs that only want to reload a single one-shot weapon.
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