So to ward off boredom I generate characters with the character generator. Doing so I ended up with the following result from an event, “5 assets worth of liberated equipment from the Mercenary faction.” How does one determine what 5 assets are worth?
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That’s literally the the thing you get: 5 assets. Assets as in the assets as described on page 329 in the corebook. Assets are basically momentum for purchases.
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That… would make sense. 
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Mutant Chronicles has the same event thing, and our group discussed this for a long time, either it was an item in the lists worth 5 assets, or it was just 5 assets. We decided the later. 
Mutant Chronicles uses a different acquisition system, where you can pay for the cost of an item directly by spending Assets.
In Infinity, Assets are used as a Resource to gain more dice in a Lifestyle test for acquisition or to recover from Shortfalls if you suffered one from buying equipment.
I assume that the texts using the old MC3-type Asset statement are a copy&paste error from MC3. There are actually quite a few of those (and other MC3 relics) in the Infinity core rules.
If you got “5 assets worth of liberated equipment” that simply means you have 5 Assets to help you in your acquisition rolls or to recover from Shortfalls. In Infinity, there is no item cost/worth stated in number of Assets, only as “financial damage” code to be rolled against your Cashflow stress monitor.
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If you want those Assets to represent something tangible, then a way to do it is with an “average cost” system.
Reposting this from the Corvus Belli forums:
Nathan Dowdell on Facebook (and he’s reposted the same answer elsewhere, including the Modiphius forums).
He said:
For pre-game acquisitions, my inclination is for the GM to set aside a particular amount of game time as “pre-campaign prep time”, during which characters may attempt to acquire any extra items they want - this might be a few days, a week, or a month, at the GM’s discretion.
Heat generated, Cashflow lost, and Shortfalls suffered during this time carry over into the first session.
This has the advantage of not requiring an entirely separate set of acquisitions rules purely for character creation.
Alternately, you can try something a little more stratified with no rolling - though this is entirely off the top of my head:
A character may choose any number of items (or a finite number, set by the GM) to acquire pre-game. Each item costs a number of Assets based on the following factors - 1 per Restriction rating (so, Restriction 2 = 2 Assets), 1 if the Cost exceeds Earnings, and 1 per Shortfall the acquisition’s Cost would inflict (use an average of the Cost here, rounded to the nearest whole number: each combat die is 0.5, a die with Tariff 1 is 0.667 per die, a die with Tariff 2 is 0.833, a die with Tariff 3 is 1, so an item with a Cost of 2+4 dice, Tariff 1 is 4.667, rounded to 5).
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