July 27, 2005
B5 Files Update
Here's the new updated campaign roster file to reflect the situation after turn 2A.
I've also found a new site with some cooler looking ship rosters in pdf format here.
Posted by msoong at 10:43 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Battle of the Agrarian Planet (B5 Call to Arms campaign, Turn 2)
We had two battles last night, a centauri attack to capture a settled planet, followed by a turn 2 Centauri attack across an astroid belt.
The battle over the settled planet is a "Space Superiority" scenario. This means that you get points not just killing the enemy, but for being the only side present in one of six sectors of the board. The randomly generated scenario size is "Patrol" (i.e. small, too small for most Minbari ships), so what we have is two Minbari ships taking on three Centaurii Vorchans.
Here's the Centaurii fleet out of the starting gate.
Here's the Minbaris.
The Minbari overpowers the Centauris in terms of long range weapon, plus the Vorchans only have frontal weapons whereas the Minbarii ships can both fire all around.
The plan is for Jeff's Vershantan to speed through to the rear arc of the Vorchans, and for my Tinashi to sandwich the target and pound it to a pulp. Of course my Tinashi got targeted by two Vorchans, which if you play the odds I should be able to survive. See below for the situation at that point...
Of couse my luck being what they are, they rolled a critical hit, then rolled a 66, so my ship promptly blew up. (At this time there are muttering about how the crit table being too deadly. I am normally for decisive results so I don't mind the roll 66 on 2D6 for a kill result, but for a campaign this does throw a monkey wrench into the works, as Minbaris are short on ship to begin with).
My think now is that given a deadly crit hit table, it's much more efficient to have more crappy ships than a few good ship. In out limited experience most ship die from crit hits, and not from steady accumulation of damage...
Since this one was over so soon, we decided to proceed to the next campaign turn. This time the randomly generated scenario is a "Annihilation" scenario, where there are no time limit, and last side standing wins the fight. The scenario size is still "patrol", so we ended up with 1 Minbari ship vs 2x Vorchans. This scenario also introduced some terrain instead if the usual blank space. We came up with some high density astorid field right in the middle of the board (if you fly through them, roll a crew quality check, if you fail, take number of hits equal to distance travelled this turn as triple damage(!) attack).
The Centauris are out gunned, so they decided to open a jump point and bail at the first oppertunity. Victory is ours! (After our string of defeat, some good news would be needed back home)...
Posted by msoong at 10:16 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
July 13, 2005
B5 Call To Arms Rules Questions
We had our first encounter for our Centauri-Minbari campaign last night (a writeup will be coming shortly, right after the court marshall in the Grey Council to explain how an out-gunned light Centauri force could've destroyed a Battle level ship, but I digress...)
We had some questions as to how the different planet type (i.e. jump gate, spacedock, etc.) affect the campaign. Fot the life of us we could not find it in the rules last night. Today I found the book 1 errata on the Mongoose site, and it seems to have more info. (i.e. Spacedock lets you void the 5RR premium repairing a crippled ship, and owning a jumpgate let you reduce the cost of all reinforcement by 1RR, etc.).
Mongoose rules in general are pretty "loose", and there are a lot of diging through the rulebook in order to find stuff. Hopefully these issues will be address when they released their consolidated rules next month...
Posted by msoong at 04:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 01, 2005
B5 Call to Arms Campaign Game kickoff
The B5 Call to Arms miniature game rules came with a simple (but interesting) campaign system. It's a mapless campaign where two sides fights over a star system containing anywhere from 6~8 planets. Each campaign turn players decide to go after different planets (and the other side can then decide to defend, thus generating a battle). Different planet type gives different advantages to the side that controls it. For Example, if you control a planet that has a spacedock on it, then you get a bonus when repairing your battle damaged ships, etc.) Campaign is over when one side controlls all planets in the system, or destroys the other fleet.
I've completed the planet makeup and the initial force pool of both sides. See attached spreadsheet. Our first game is next tuesday, so look for a writeup shortly thereafter.
Download Campaign Spreadsheet file
Posted by msoong at 10:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 08, 2005
B5 A Call to Arms Miniature game review
First here are some cool pix of my Babylon 5 minaitures taken by Kim Farrell.
Navel game (regardless of age, be it sail or trireme) is never my thing, (or more specifically, manuevering distinct objects around a 2D surface while trying to destroy other objects is not really my thing). By extension I never really had an affinity for tactical air game or spaceship games as well. All that begin to change after getting into the Babylon 5 TV series (watching the entire 4 seasons worth of DVD in about a month ought to do that to a person). So after Mongoose announced their licensed B5 spaceship game, there's stiring in the group about starting to collect/play these suckers.
There has been a long history of spaceship games based on the B5 property (since the setting is ideal for spaceship battle game: 1) The TV series is packed with "war-like" episodes (none of your wimpy peacenik Star-Trek stuff here, and 2) there are multiple combatants in the show and each have their distainct characteristics. The most famous ruleset is probably the B5 Wars rules from Agents of Gaming. I've never played with these but I hear it is slow and involved, more in the mold of the old Star Fleet Battles.
AoG also came out with a set of quick play rules called Fleet Action. It's suppose to be fast moving and designed for playing with lots of miniatures. It's something that fit's my rules preference but sadly the rules are out of print (plus it's designed to be used with a "smaller" sized miniature played on a hex-grid, much LESS my thing...)
When Mongoose announced their A Call to Arms game (ACTA) they described it as "much faster paced" than the old B5 Wars, yet designed to be played with larger ships (i.e the same sized ship manufactured by AoG). The system is designed to be simple with little bookkeeping.
The rules is alternate IGO-UGO movement (i.e. You move a ship, then I move a ship, continue until all ships have moved), followed by IFIRE-UFIRE combat. At the end there's an end phase where damaged ship can attempt to repair critical damage. That's pretty much it.
Movement is sort of a simplified vector movement. Everyship is rated for speed (i.e. 8" meaning you can move up to 8 inches a turn), and maneuverability (i.e. 2/45, meaning you can make 2 45 degree turns during a turn/bound). A ship must first move stright forward at least 1/2 of their speed before they can make their first turn, and then they must move 2" more before they can make their 2nd turn (if they even have a 2nd turn ability).
One key facet of the rules (and in my mind what made it special) is the "special actions" (SA). Basically each turn a ship can perform a special action that let the ship gain a variety of benefits while incurring some penalty. An SA might let you move further, at the expense of not being able to turn, or an action might let you increase your firepower, but you can not manuever and must precommit to your target during the movement phase, etc. It's a nice and simple rule that adds decision and flavor to your games without adding too much complexity (there are only about 12 different SA to choose from). It's also a feature that can be easily adapted to other space combat games.
Now we get to my least favorite part of the game: Combat. Mongoose have decided that the Games Workshop standard combat (i.e. roll to hit, roll to damage) is the way to go, and then they've added different "traits" to distinguish the different weapons. So you might have a "twin-linked" weapon, which let you reroll any misses on the to hit dieroll, or a Bean weapon, which if you hit, can roll to hit again, etc. All these weapon systems with their distinct characteristics sounds flavorful on paper, but extremely tedious in practice, since once you declare an attack there aren't any more choices to be made, but then there are long and laborious dierolling sequence to resolve said combat.
Here's an example: A centaurii declares an attack with his "Battle laser" against the Minbari ship. The following rolls have to be made:
1) Roll to see if weapon can lock on (Since Minbari have "Stealth" trait the weapons might not be even able to attempt to hit).
2) Assume that it locks on, it then rolls 4D6 and attempt to hit.
3) Any dice that hits can roll again (and again) with a -1 DRM since this is a "beam" weapon.
4) Now that we have a total of X hits, now roll damage for each hit (oh ya, I forgot to mention that a damage roll is rolled with 2D6, so you can't even pick up a bucket of dice to roll at once, but have to roll then one after another, look up on a chart, and then note the result. Possible results ranges from no effect to 1 hit on crew/ship, all the way to critical hit.
5) If it's a critical hit, then roll another 2D6 on the Critical Hit table to find out the result.
Now all that is for ONE weapon system. The Centauri Primus for example has 5 different weapon systems, and if there are enemy in all of the covered arcs, they could all fire that turn. That's a LOT of dice rolling. (When I ran this game for Chris and Tristan, this excessive dierolling is what killed the game for Chris).
Thankfully I am not the only one out there complaining about this. Someone came up with a website that let you click on the firer ship type and click on a target, then resolve all that dice rolling for you. This made the game bearable, and we finished a game in less than an hour. You can find the program here.
The game came with many different scenarios (ranging from standard line them up and have at it to more interesting games like "Flee to the jump gate!" where a smaller force has to escape through a jump gate while a larger enemy force is materializing out of hyperspace attempting to cut it off. This is what we played last night, a fun experience even though we lost...) There are also "historical" scenarios you can play which is straight out of the TV show. A simple (but interesting) campaign system is also included with the rules.
All in all, a nice and fast system if you use the combat program to speed up attack resolution. We had enough fun that my next project is to run a campaign where the Centauri and the Minbari is fighting for the control of a star system. Stay tuned...
Posted by msoong at 07:53 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 22, 2004
B5 Call to Arms, First Impression
I have never been a fan of naval warfare games (regardless what period it it, be it triemes, Age of Sail, WW2, what have you). The concept of distinct entities maneuvering around a 2D plane blasting each other is suspect at best, the fact that most rules for these kinds of games are "roll-dice-then-cross-off-boxes" doesn't help either.
I normally put Space Combat games into the same category as naval games since they are basically ships in space, with fantastical weaponry of course. The one game I did play before and liked was Full Thrust, which had a simple yet elegant movement system that did take care of momentum in moving, as well as a relatively quick combat resolution system.
The release of Mongoose's B5-Call To Arms (B5CTA) kinda got our group jazzed since many in our gaming group are fanss of the series. Since Jeff already had a bunch of miniatures collected (from the old Agents of Gaming line), I decided to pick up the rules and give it a whirl.
The rules are very simple, and has many element of a GW/Wizkid feel to it (how the scenario design is presented, and how the special actions worked). I had a good buzz after reading through it (yes it does have rows of boxes to cross off, but only one set for crew and one set for hull, none of this each weapon system/facing having its own rows of boxes stuff..)
The game sequence is very Sword and Flame like (that means first players alternate moving one ship at a time, then players alternate firing one ship at a time) This kinda mechanism simply makes it an exercise of trying to get your critical moves in as late as possible (so your potential target commits its position first, then you can line up for a good shot). Not my fav part of the game.
Shooting is your typical GW roll high on a D6 to hit variety, with a plethora of special abilities that injects exceptions to the rules (i.e. let you re-roll misses, or let you keep on rolling for additional damage, etc.) Once you hit you then roll for damage, with a chance of rolling a critical hit.
Now Critical hits happens on about a 1 in 6 chance, and it's the key way to take out a ship IMO. Most ships have enough damages so that it takes a long time to reduce it to 0. Most (if not all) casualties we witnessed last night are from some kinda critical hit.
The die rolling can get tiresome, since there are a LOT of rolling, and most of the time there aren't much decision to be made once the dice starts flying. I can see some downsizing here so multiple dice rolling can be reduced into maybe a percentile roll on a chart to arrive at the desired results.
The game we did (a raid? level scenario between Centarii and Narn) took nearly the same amount of time as the War of the RIng game, and I couldn't even stay till the finish. By the time I left us Narns has taken out 2~3 Centarii ships (two of them due to a lucky 66 roll on the critical hits table).
Final thought? Too early to tell, definitely not a "let's sink some money into lead RIGHT NOW" game, but I am willing to play again. There are other scenario format (besides the straight up head on fight) that might be more interesting. I do hate the long drawn out dicefest but that can probably be fixed. The manuever system is simple and elegant, and I think it's pretty good for a naval game...
Posted by msoong at 06:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack