From: Stuart Murray <smurray@a...>
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 1997 16:14:10 -0500
Subject: Earth Force Source Book Review
First a caveat: I only received this yesterday and have only played one game (solo) using the ship combat rules, plus I don't have the RPG book so possibly I'll miss things in the RPG section. Presentation. This is presented well, it is fully glossy paper with many illustrations throughout. Compaerd with the RPG it appears to have many more CGI images than the RPG, personally I favour these (the ships generally look great in the images) as some of the painted images are poor, if they were going to spend such time and effort on the image of the thing then it would have been worth their while to get some better illustrations. RPG Content. If I'd bought this for the RPG stuff I'd be very pissed off. Generic background of the Earthforce is interesting but very superficial, there is no definite time line of events (perhaps this is in the RPG book), however, it does set the scene reasonably for the ship game. Specific information about EF is (IMO) poor, there is a very short section giving an account of some (very limited) EF equipment. The equipment selection is (as is most of the book), to me, padding. I realize this is a RPG, but, surely the players don't have to make up every piece of kit they use, lets look at facts, military life is equipment intensive, yet the EF it appears use very few pieces of kit. There is no information about EF ground troops, there is mention of tanks, aircraft, however, there is no info about these. It seems to me the reason why there is no info about these is that the RPG only really wants to deal with shipboard/station board life. OK so the fleet may be the most glamourous, however, it seems that a great deal of time has been spent emphasising this at he expense of adding additional information which could have expanded the game. Here's a couple of questions I felt needed answering: If a ground forces commander can end up commanding a star ship how do they go about doing this? Where are the dedicated career paths? When a PC enlists how do they chose which service to enter? If a PC is in EF where will they be stationed, (there are no list of bases)? How long is a tour of duty on a ship? Do EF ships have Marines? and so on.... OK so you can tell I'm not impressed with this. Nice background fluff if you just want to read it, however, I feel it is not meaty enough for a RPG source book. Ship Combat System: The bit most of you are waiting for... Movement, so how does it compare with FT/FT adaptations ? Essentially it is VERY similar to FT (no surprise there), orders are given as usual. Differences appear with fighters, they move after ships and fire before them. Movement for most races is using the true vector system (which means you Hyperion will wallow around a lot), however, the more advanced races use gravitic drives and the 'old' FT system (meaning that pesky Sharlin will run rings round the EF ships). Without going into too much detail this difference in drives provides a decent technical gap/difference in playability between the older races and the younger ones. Fighters move very much quicker than FT (which I'm happy with, I always doubled the FT rates anyway). Fighters are also differentiated according to race/capability, some fighters move much faster than others which is a neat way of dividing them up without becoming too cumbersome. Fighter launch/recovery is very similar to FT. Combat Pulse weapons = beam weapons, well almost. Combat resolution with these is almost identical to FT. The only real difference is the incorporation of the re roll. If a weapon scores a '6' then if scores two damage AND gets to roll again, a simple mechanism, yet effective, to represent over penetration damage. Heavy beam weapons = pardon the British phrase, the dogs bollocks. These are excellent in other words. Now this is really what I expected from HBWs, they are truly capable of cutting a ship in half in one shot (especially if they Minbari!). Compared with the anaemic weapons in B5wars these truly kick ass (or can do, as last night proved sometimes they can also let you down really badly). I don't want to go into too much detail about these as I have no idea if these are/will be specific to B5, if they ever turn up in future FT then watch out for them (however, if they do turn up then I hope they take up stacks of mass to balance their capability). Other weapons. I've only experimented so far with EF ships, there are other species weapons listed but so far I've not tried them. Fighters. Fighters are very similar to FT, with one or two exceptions. Fighters move much faster here which vastly enhances their combat capabilities. Fighter/fighter combat is graphed out on a table, basically it show modifiers for each races fighters, for example Furies generally easily beat Raiders, however, they have a much harder time against Nials and so on. As with the differential movement this table does a decent job of differentiating between fighters in a simple manner which does not interfere with play. Races covered. As this is the EFSB the EF ships are covered in detail (some good illustrations of these). There are some new ships in there too (which I'm not totally convinced ever actually appeared in B5). Along with EF, ships for Minbari, Centauri and Narn are listed, along with some generic ships like freighters and passenger liner. Downsides. The era which the EFSB is set in is a little unclear, there is specific mention of B3 coming on line, yet the RPG is set in the B5 time. It would help if they were clearer with which ships were tied to which period. My opinions. So this is the even more subjective bit. If you want to play ship combat in the B5 universe then buy this. B5wars is not worth the cash, the combat system in B5wars is VERY cumbersome and not very cinematic, it MAY be more realistic, but hey, we want to play like they do on TV. The EFSB has an excellent basic ship combat system which I'm sure will be used to vastly expand the system. Things I would like to see: Fighter morale (lift from MT) EW (Mark's ideas are fine, possibly expanded specifically for B5) Other races Better delineated time line More ship types for all races However, all the things I feel are lacking are readily either directly lifted from FT/MT or can be readily put together from the home rules around on the net right now. In short, the EFSB, an excellent way to waste $18 if you are into the B5 universe.