"Babylon 5, what system to use." Topic

I own a copy of ACTA, have downloaded FT and am looking at purchasing "The Babylon Project Earthforce Sourcebook".

What I am looking for is a system built around a small number of ships on each side. Either single ships, small groups or a squadron at most. I am looking for a decent level of detail.

ACTA is not bad but is really built for large numbers of ships. Lots of need stuff. The system seems fine but the lask of SSD's, the generic damage etc put me off (a bit).

FT seems to be more what I am looking for. Uses a bit more detail wihtout going over board. Uses Fire Control, weapons have actual arcs. the system is to general and lacks much of the B5 specific details.

B5 Source book. I owned this when it first came out and from memeory was decent enough. Would I be correct is saying it is a spin off of FT? A more simple version?

I also had B5 wars but never really liked it. It felt clunky, seemed to lack any B5 feel to it.

What do other people do?

Has any one done much B5 specific gaming based on any of the above systems?

If yes what do like / recomend?

I suspect I will need to combine all the 3 main ones. Pick what I like best using FT as the base and adding to that.

Any other suggestions?

Starmada: Admiralty Edition might do very well. Very flexible system with Tech levels and build-your-own weapon systems.

I have only used FT, so I can not compare it to any other system for you. I use it for all space ship gaming including the FT univrese, star trek, star wars, galactica and B5 and find it pretty good fun. I have been able to convert most ships to FT without too much bother. There are quite a few such conversions on the web – start with star-ranger dot com or the FT yahoo groups.

I will try to dig up my B5 cobversion stuff for you if you like, but half the fun is doing it yourself your own way.

I have heard good things about Voidstriker but have not personally played it and dont know how B5 would work. You might want to ask your question on the Starship Combat News website. That bunch are very well informed though many of them can also be found here.

Al

Sounds like you should look up the old Babylon 5 Wars game. It works best with a small amount of ships and is very detailed with fighter action. It's been OOP for years but rulebooks and starter sets show up on eBay quite often.

The nice thing is that almost all the ships that ACTA had came from from B5Wars.

theres stacks of B5 conversions about.. I'm actually backing up/mirroring a lot of it off geocities before it closes. Brendan Robertson's conversion riules are quite good.

ACTA/B5Wars seemed a bit SFBlike to me.. brrr, but at least you can use their material to convert designs to FT :)

So I got an EFSB off Ebay recently. the tuffley written B5 rules.

also there is an unofficial EFSB expansion in PDF form hosted on Jerry Han's website; this also has ship control forms for EFSB in the back of it .

that will give you an excellent idea how EFSB works.
the beam capacitor idea is GREAT fun.
dotn worry too much about the arcs you'll enjoy it immensely

Starmada: Admiralty Edition might do very well. Very flexible system with Tech levels and build-your-own weapon systems.

Urrp ..that reminds me, I have a copy of Starmada at my local FLGS that they have been waiting for me to pick up for over a week.

I dug out my fleet of Klingon ships that are waiting to be painted. The pics of your ships OnlyWarlock were an inspiration.

Dave

I've played the version from the Sourcebook and it plays very well.

Darren,

If you like Full Thrust then have a look at this site, it has lots of systems that are genre specific.

link

If we aren't using ACTA we use many of the additions shown here for our FT games.

The Babylon Project Earthforce Sourcebook, is just a Full Thrust write-up of the ships. It uses FT2 as it's source and is a stand alone system but it does modify the rules some. It also doesn't cover all the ships that were producted by AoG and Mongoose. If I remember correctly it's only ships that regularly appeared on screen in the series and even some of them may have been missed. My memory on the ships is not so good.

Yeah, only the main ships seen on screen were rated up in the book. Beams worked differently in the EFSB than in FT. Much more representative of the show.

I think Starmada handles B5 exceptionally well. Pretty much every ship has been rated up. I have played in dozens of Starmada B5 games. Great stuff. Low learning curve and well designed points system.

Thanks,

John

Hey Dave! Francisco is already working up a conversion table to use Starmada for B 5. We're looking at Fleet Action scale but there are still lots of the big boys around. Looking at 2nd Sunday in Nov.

Hey Dave! Francisco is already working up a conversion table to use Starmada for B 5. We're looking at Fleet Action scale but there are still lots of the big boys around. Looking at 2nd Sunday in Nov.

I don't have any fleet action scale but I have a decent size Abbai and Centauri fleet in the ACTA scale mini's. I'd love to have an excuse to drag them out again.

By the by, either Rob or William at GHG was telling me you guys were working on a variant for our Aeronef fleets. If true, I would love to give that a try as well.

Dave

Shaggy (Lance) and Francisco were playing the Aeronef yesterday. I think they played two scenarios of Argentinians versus Brits over the Falklands (er, Malvinas). They seem to be getting a warm reception.

Rob

Babylon 5 Wars is a nice game if you don't mind hexes and has a lot of the things the original poster was looking for. Admittedly I cut my space gaming teeth on SFB so I don't mind a bit of complexity even though most of my starship combat has involved Full Thrust over the past few years.

David S.

Shaggy (Lance) and Francisco were playing the Aeronef yesterday. I think they played two scenarios of Argentinians versus Brits over the Falklands (er, Malvinas). They seem to be getting a warm reception.

Rob

Coolness, its been a long time since my Turkish Aeronef fleet took to the skies. Plus I have a ton of unpainted 2mm terrain from Irregular Miniatures that I would love to get inspired to paint up.

@ Werewolf

That looks great. Thanks a lot.

@ everyone who suggested Starmarda

Never seen the system but it sees, quite popular. Might have to check it out. What level of detail does it use?

@everyone who suggested B5Wars

I use to own a copy but never liked it. I used to play SFB and loved it but found B5Wars to be a poor copy.

Thanks everyone, for all the responses

Well, the other question is *which version* of B5Wars you had. I have both the First Edition (concentrating on fighter actions) and the Second (concentrating on cap-ship engagements).

I thought that the first edition did a great job of feeling like the first season-and-a-half of Bab5, but once you put Capital Ships on the table it didn't work very well.

The second edition handled small numbers of capital ships pretty well (not more than about 4 per side), but bogged in massive fleet engagements like the Battle of the Line.

I have two customers who are busy converting their B5Wars ship stats over to Squadron Strike; they say it's more or less become their engine of choice for this setting.

@Lion in the Stars

I could not tell you which version we used, it is a long time ago. I know it had fighters and ships both.

I agreee the system could handle a couple of ships a side, it was more a case of I did not like the mechanics. Intercepters were nothing more then a -2 to hit, or somthing like that. Every weapon used different dice, whats that about? Damages was handled poorly for the scale being used, or so it felt to me.

@AdAstraGames

Never heard of Squadron Strike. Any more details on how it plays?