A Call to Arms: Babylon 5 Space Combat Review.
A Call to Arms: Babylon 5 Space Combat was released by Mongoose Games in 2004. There were numerous expansions and a second edition followed in 2007. Mongoose discontinued miniature support for the game in 2008 and all support in 2009 after deciding not to renew the licence and shortly after the last publication, Powers and Principalities. You can still find the rules on the Babylon 5 Wars Vault (go and have a look if you don't know about it), there are also original miniatures still available online, and a growing selection of 3D printable STL's you can acquire for free or for a small sum. Most of the ships from the Babylon 5 universe Alpha canon are available if you can find them and lots from beta canon and also some really stunning fanon ships.
Mongoose games reused the core rules for their Noble Armada: A Call to Arms crossover released in 2011, with the majority of the second edition rules being present with a few small(ish) changes.
The game is reasonably simple to learn and the detail of the rules allows you to play games involving a dozen ships in a couple of hours with there being no real upper limit to the size of forces, aside from time.
The turn structure isn't quite alternating activation, where one player moves a unit and then attacks with it before the opponent does the same, instead the game is divided into 2 main phases, the movement phase and then the combat phase where first you alternate movement, and then you alternate attacks.
This keeps both players involved in the game at all times, and allows you to adjust your strategy on the fly as more information becomes available as the turn progresses.
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| The Narn Regime have the best looking ships but they are one of the weaker factions |
Combat is simple, with ship having a number of attacks that they can use against any enemy ships in range, and you simply roll against the enemy ships armour value, which will usually be from 4-6 with the majority of ships having a target number of 5. There are modifiers to this increasing or decreasing the target value, for each successful die your opponent may get a save, and if unsuccessful, you can deal damage.
So far, so simple, but this is where issues start to appear. Ships have 2 seperate damage tracks, on for the ships stucture, and another for the ships crew, and these are tracked seperately and they have to be because of critical hits. One a hit has been scored you roll to see if damage is done by rolling a d6, on a 1 the damage is reduced or negated by a bulkhead hit, and on a 6 you have scored a critical hit that will either just do additional damage to the ships structure, crew or both, or additionally will reduce the ships effectiveness. Some of the hits can also result in a ship exploding from a single hit. For a game at a smaller scale this can add interest to the game, but when you have large numbers of ships the extra book keeping can really slow the game down.
The most important factor though, is that outside of a few select ships, there are no shields to stop damage so shooting your opponent with any weapon, at any range has the chance to deal damage and that allows you to feel like you are achieving something even when you are on the back foot. And, there is always the chance the enemy will just blow up from that single hail mary shot.
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| Top Tier v Bottom Tier, the Drazi don't stand a chance |
In addition to ships, you can, and usually will, bring fighters and other smaller craft to the game, usually deployed from your capital ships. The various races have fighters of differing quality and this can manifest in either the ability to engage and destroy enemy fighters in dogfights, or the ability to threaten larger ships. Dogfights are another aspect, in addition to the criticals, that really slow the game down, fighters have a dogfight value representing how good they are at engaging enemy fighters, and when they fight each other, each flight of fighters, represented by a token or base of fighters, rolls a d6, adds their dogfight value, with the winner eliminating their opponent. Each dogfight is a seperate roll, and when there are numerous fighters on each side, resolving the dogfights can be very time consuming as you have to consider modifers such as supporting flights and so forth. It does, however, allow you to have really distinctive fighters for the various races and set their fighters apart from each other. In a lot of other games fighters and bombers are counted as tokens and have no real distinctive features.
Fleet selection is very easy, and the various factions are varied and have their own character. The Centauri are fast, deadly and fragile, the Narn slow and tough and the Earth Alliance have no real strengths or weaknesses. Each race has their own set of special rules which help define them and they vary from the incredibly powerful to the downright debilitating. The factions in the game are not equal and neither are the ships they field. Usually this would be represented by a granular points system with better ships being more points, and worse ships being fewer.
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| The Big ships are almost universally not worth it |
In A Call to Arms you instead use a priority system, with this system determining the size of games as well as the size of your ships. A 5 point Skirmish game allows you to bring 5 skirmish level ships, for example. Ships in each fleet are graded according to their priority, the levels being, from smallest to largest, Patrol, Skirmish, Raid, Battle, War and Armageddon. You can break down and combine the points as you go giving you some flexibility. Instead of 1 skirmish ship, for example, you can take 2 patrol level ships or you can take 1 raid level ship instead of 2 Skirmish ships, or 1 battle level ship instead of 4 skirmish ships.
A skirmish level ship in one force costs the same as in any other. This is a problem since not only are ships of the same priority in each fleet not equal with each other, they are not equal in power to the ships you can take in other fleets. The Centauri Vorchan and the Brakiri Haltana are 2 standouts in this regard and are vastly overpowered compared to the ships other races can take.
Compounding this is that ships of a higher priority are intended to be twice as powerful as those of a lower priority, there is no inbetween, so there is a massive power spike in ship power as you increase your game size. This leads to ships being weaker or stronger than you would expect as they are forced into a very narrow band. There are no skirmish and a half level ships, for example.
Ship balance totally breaks down as you get to War level where ships like the Warlock and Sharlin appear and they are not, by any stretch of the imagination, balanced. The sweet spot is around the Raid and Battle levels where you can take large ships. Unsuprisingly, in Noble Armada (2011) a points based system was used
All that said, fleet selection is simple and fast, and as long asyou approach the game from a more beer and prezels angle rather than a competitive one the relative strengths most of the races don't make too much of a difference provided you are aware of them. There are some fleets to avoid though unless you are absolutely set on playing them. The pak'ma'ra and Drazi are both terrible and underpowered, for example.
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| The Drazi are one of the weakest fleets in the game, they look awesome on the tabletop |
The special rules ships and weapons are generally well balanced although there are some cases where the wording is as unclear and ambiguous as anything Games Workshop could dream of writing.
The Vorlons and Shadows, for example, are completely immune to any critical hits that effect crew (and have no crew themselces. RAW this means that only the 2 results (out of 29) that don't deal crew damage affect them, but RAI its probably only immunity to the Crew section of the critical damage table, which means they are affected by 23 of the 29 total critical results.
There are also a couple of 'what were they thinking?' special rules, most egregious of all is stealth. Mechanically it works. In order to shoot a ship with stealth you need to roll a d6 and equal or beat its stealth value. You need to declare what weapons you are shooting at a target with stealth, make the roll to beat stealth and if you succeed, then all is good, nothing changes. If you fail, you can't shoot, and you can't decide to target anything else. This isn't so bad when only a handful of ships on each side have it but when applied to a faction as a whole, it ruins the fun. Minbari ships, for example, all have stealth, and you will usually need to roll a 5 or 6 to beat it, meaning usually your shooting phase against minbari will be incredibly frustrating. Mechanically it works, its just anti-fun.
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| My Favourite fleet, The Brakiri Syndicracy |
Most of the issues I've outlined are irritating, but not a dealbreaker. The turn structure keeps you engaged, combat is usually fast and simple once you have the hang of it. The races are distinctive and flavourful and rules ambiguities can, as with any game, be resolved by a conversation with your opponent. You can quickly pick a fleet, roll a scenario and then get playing and most importantly, it actually feels like Babylon 5. I Like it
Next Time:
The Witch-class carrier. A variant of the Warlock-class destroyer for your Crusade Era Earth Alliance fleets.
Following that, I've been working on my own set of rules, mainly because I wanted to find out how easy or hard it is. I'll go over my experience of how easy and hard it is.
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