B5 wars-the battle that wasn't-with pics

[mughi3]

A group of us at our local store have been playing B5 wars for nearly 10 years now and even though the game is officially out of production it is still great fun to play in all its various forms.

http://b5warsvault.wikidot.com/

I got challenged to a game and i usually only play Earth Alliance or the Narn Regieme.

This time out since i was facing a beatdown from the vorlons i decided to break out my narns with an added hitch.
since i had never used it i figured it was as good a time as any to throw in the Ka'Bin'Tak narn advanced dreadnought. a ship that was actually not built until after the vorlons left utalising the technology sharing of the interstellar alliance.

My froces we as follows
.Ka'Bin'Tak advanced dreadnought-fleet command
.G'Quonth attack cruiser
.Var'Nic destroyer
.G'Karith patrol cruiser
.18 frazi fighters
.6 torpedo equiped gorith fighters.



His froces
.X3 vorlon heavy destroyers
.X1 vorlong fighter defense destroyer






My intention was to pincer him and alpha strike to do as much damage as i could before he adapted his armor to my weapons, unfortunately when we rolled random starting speed my 2 big ships were going balls out, and the 2 supposed forward ships were going really slow.

I acclerated to meet him and bring my big ships around, he did something a bit suprsing and pushed forward himself. he managed to hit my Var'nic with a long range shot taking off my front end and taking out my largest weapon.

I closed with him to point blank range on the next turn, unfortunately taking into account his shields and adaptive armor i only managed to do minor damage to one of his destroyers. his return fire destroyed the Var'Nic and nearly tore the nose off the G'Karith. the good news was that my big ships had cleared the gas nebula and opened up on his anti-fighter destroyer. nailing it with 7 of 8 heavy laser cannons. tearing it apart.

My G'Karith and fighters were effectively out of the game while his shields were up with his armor adapting to my weapons i could not actually damage him. so they broke away to try and bide some time and catch wounded targets.. my main guns were recharging so my G'Quonth broke right whike my dreadnought gave chase to his rearmost ship. i missed the shot with 3 of my heavy pulse cannons but i nailed him with my mag acclerator tearing a good hole in his aft section.

I then broke right as well to rejoin my G'quonth. with the minimal amount of damage he was doing to my dreadnought he decided not to make another pass at my capitol ships when all my weapons were up to full charge.. the vorlons jumped away into hyperspace to lick their wounds. i lost a 580 point ship and took some damage to my dreadnought and G'karith. he lost a 1,300 point destroyer and took minor damage to 2 others.

[Ben]

I used to love this game, and wrote a couple of supplements for it (Showdowns 6, edited variants 4, submitted chunks of other stuff).

Great to see people still playing it.

[emperorpenguin]

As a long time B5 fan I love the models but I never liked B5 Wars. I played B5 Full Thrust, B5 BFG and A Call To Arms.
The table looks wrong though, looks like your ships are flying over fields and hills!

[Ben]

B5Wars was great, but compared to modern wargames, very detailed. Certainly everything you listed will play at least five times quicker.

There's still a Trek conversion of the system out there I did a couple of dozen ships for. That was great fun as well.

[BobtheInquisitor]

I love seeing those ships back in action! Is there anyone still supplying or selling them?

[mughi3]

Yep i play that as well, star trek fits well with B5 wars second edition since it is a skirmish level game and trek combat where every player gets a single ship to control works out great....although i wish they had more of the "starfleet command" game ships, i want a B11K dammit!

[Ben]

Tyrel was doing the TV series/movie ones, and some of the game ones. I converted over almost all the SFB designs available in order to flesh out the TOS era ships (starting with the Klingons). About 22 of the Klingon ships I did to fill out the gaps, including all the SFB conversions. It's been almost ten years since I designed a B5Wars ship, and also about four hard drives ago, so I don't have any of my design stuff (I used to have various Adobe Illustrator files of weapons and icons so I could do a new ship sheet in half an hour or less) anymore.

Unless Tyrel is willing to go back and do more than that's all you're getting I'm afraid. Tyrel mainly went by the series and the old FASA game. I added maybe 30 ships in total and a good portion of them were SFB designs to fill gaps in the Klingon and Romulan order of battle for various periods.

Here's the website. http://planetside.firenebula.com

Lots of the small ships (Birds of Prey, Snipes, etc) are LCVs and you can easily have a couple of squadrons of those around with a handful of capital ships for a challenging battle. The LCV basically replaces fighters in B5W Star Trek.

[Slartibartfast]

snip
The table looks wrong though, looks like your ships are flying over fields and hills!

Did you not realize that space is green? Not even in an Ork way? Reminds me of playing BFG at out local bunker years ago. Looks like nice ships. Buddy of mine got a set of the rules on Ebay recently. I found the kitchen sink set. Look forward trying it out.

[mughi3]

Sweet!
thanks for the link Ben it gives us some expanded classes especially for the dominion.

still no B11K though
saddness
wish you had kept those files so i could have an easier time of making the SCS myself lol.

[Ben]

I also did a bunch of the cardassians.

Tyrel started doing his Star Trek project and I sort of chipped in some extras. To be fair even if I'd done 50 more things like the B11k, a conjectural ship in the SFB background, wouldn't have topped my list to add.

If you've got copies of Adobe Illustrator 7 and 9 you can recreate my quick design sheets (I basically did a weapons sheet, with all the weapons icons, data boxes, and location icon and text) so I could copy and paste from the quick design sheet to the SCS I was doing.

I completely changed the weapons loadouts from SFB though, using disruptors to substitute for phasers, and photons as heavy weapons. So it isn't a straight conversion.

With the Federation Dreadnought being the biggest ship the Feds have in that era, the C8 is easily a match for it. It has less rear guns, less shields and less EW, but it packs a hell of a bigger punch, with heavy photons instead of photons and 5 forward medium disruptors. It also has a bunch of light disruptors, that can fire every turn. Weapons that fire every turn is something the Federation Class Dreadnought is sorely lacking.

Of course you can now get some rather nice models for some of these ships. I'm too busy to do any more conversions (and too sick at the moment) but there may be people on the B5W bulletin board who could help you.

And to be fair if I did do some more to add to the available ships, I'd start with the SFB ships there are miniatures for, particularly the ones that have just come out (as I have a ton of them).

[mughi3]

Well i have always been a fan of the classic warrior race TOS/movie era klingons. the B11K is like their version warrior prowess given physical form. granted it is only a slight bit larger than the newer designs like the soveriegn and lacks all the newer weapons but it is still a thing of beauty to klingon eyes.

[Ben]

The B11K, if it is the SFB one, would still be smaller than the Neg'var and possibly the Vor'cha. It might even be smaller than the Excelsior (which in 1/3100 scale is twice the length of a Constitution in the same scale, people just don't realise how long the engines are).