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Babylon 5: Call to Arms

Started by Celisasu, February 28, 2005, 05:53:49 PM

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Celisasu

This one is a tabletop strategy game in the same genre as Warhammer 40k, Battlefleet Gothic, etc.   As I'm a fan of Babylon 5 and a fan of tabletop strategy games...well I couldn't resist.  


Anyways lets get down the basics.


Rule Complexity: For the core game(there are apparently two books of optional rule suppliments which I'll get eventually) the rules are actually fairly simple.  There are a lot of things to keep track of but it's still far less than your average P&P RPG.  If you've played Battlefleet Gothic you'll find the switch to Call to Arms to be pretty easy.  

Cost: Either real cheap or real expensive depending on the player.  The game itself comes with cardboard counters you can use to represent the ships.  These are tournament legal and completely useable.  And as a result you can potentially have an extremely cheap fleet just off the box.  Of course if you want your fleet to look nice you're going to get miniatures and these can get costly.  They're cheaper than GW miniatures but from what I've seen the quality varies wildly.  Some look really really nice, others are kind of "eh".  It looks like all the miniatures are metal and I hear plastic isn't a consideration until next year.  

Rules Clarifications: Mongoose(the company that makes the game) has an online forum that they are actually quite active on.  They listen to the players and answer them.  I have to salute them for that.  You should be able to get answers to anything you ask there.  

Play Balance: Like all miniature games play balance is an ongoing issue.  At the start the Narn were vastly weaker than the other races.  This gap has closed since then I hear although there is still a small gap.  Also some races just cause havoc for other races.  For example Centauri lasers apparently devistate the Narn, Narn E-Mines cause havoc for Mimbari stealth(E-Mines apparently ignore stealth, dodge, and intercepters, and have an area effect attack, but with low attack power but Mimbari ships have low armor making it nasty against them), and Mimbari stealth drives Earth Alliance ships batty while EA fighter squads drive everyone nuts.  Still it seems with each rules suppliment things are getting fixed.  Right now they seem to be trying to tone down fighters as some players are seriously abusing fighter rules combined with the Earth Alliance.  Still from what I'm seeing overall balance is getting closer with each expansion.  

Other stuff: This is just a little quibble I have with the game.  Others probably won't care.  Call to Arms uses a priority system for determining ship levels instead of a point system.  This means a raid level ship equals another raid level ship no matter what that raid ship is.  This can feel weird as it means that an EA Omega is on equal footing with a Shadow Scout even though we've seen Shadow Scouts slaughter Omegas in the series.  I kind of wish they used a point system instead so more advanced races could have more powerful but fewer ships.  But it's a matter of taste.


Overall I think this game looks extremely promising and I'm expecting to have a lot of fun with it.

Dracos

Nice review.   Admittingly, I haven't seen heads or tails of a table top strategy game in ages though =)

Dracos
Well, Goodbye.