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Hey all ive been looking at the B5 minis game for some time and really want to get into it. I know Iron Wind now produces the minis and the books are available for purchase, 2nd ED i think it is. Im just curious as how well it plays thnx.

Sadly it's kidn of winding down... The contract expires ina few months and Mongoose is dropping the whole line.

It's not a bad game, although I had some problems with it. The base rules have been compared somewhat to BFG: Weapons tend to be massed into loads of D6s, ships move in a very simplified method more like cinematic WWII ships than any sort of 'realistic' space combat, and there are 'special orders' very similar to the BFG concept. Minimal record keeping, and the rules do have a nifty looking campaign system.

The bad side (besides the contract ending) is that the game never (for me) quite got the feel from the show right in a few key areas. Fighters were one: they see-sawed back and forth from version to version, never quite getting to the right place. Additionally the game suffered from favoring hordes. Big ships could be rendered useless from enough little ships nibbling away and scoring criticals that disabled the big ship's weapons and such. This was part of another major problem, which is that the classic B5 ships were often big ships and were not particularly practical choices. As such, it was often not a good idea to take Omegas, Sharlins, or similar when smaller ships were available in better numbers that provided more redundancy and flexibility.

Some of these may have been resolved with the most recent edition, but I skipped it because it just didn't catch on.

The minis were a mixed bag, and I was hoping IWM would do a good job. I believe they did with the couple they redid, but they're a small shop and had limited resources. One common complain from when Mongoose was running the miniatures side was that the new 'Armageddon' class minis were massive for no reason. The game (like most space games) is somewhat abstract such that the actual game effects are centered on a point in space, so making gigantic (and, unfortunately, mostly ugly) big minis didn't go over well with a lot of people.

So Iron winds metals will no longer be producing minis for this line?? I know Moongoose was planing on cutting it all together thats why im trying to get into now. I luved the show and have been thinking for quite sometime of getting into the game but have postponed doing it due to other game systems i play. Now that its going under i feel the desire to try and blow lots of money before its gone forever!! Ive read that the revamped fighter rules work better then in earlier versions and they've done some revisions in the space combat system as well. Im doing 2nd ed because i might as well have the most updated rule set.

I've heard IWM's contract expires when everything else does. Sadly, since there's no B5 projects in the works it's kind of a dead license at the moment.

I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts on the most recent edition, though. As you say, gihters were tweaked again, althoguh that's about the time I dropped out of the ACTA community.

Pick up the basic books and make ship counters out of GW plastic bases.
It's well worth it.
It's my favorite 'light' space combat game this side of Battlespace and SFB.

I think ill just get the books for now, maybe some minis right before they're taken off the market for closeout prices.

Don't they sell the cardboard cut out packs any more. I used to have the ships, but some of them seemed out of scale with the others, so I just reverted to the counters from the pack and sold all my ships.

Of course I prefer the original game with the hundreds of damage pts and data fax type sheets per ship, but it took forever.

ACTA is pretty good as a space combat game though.

Morathi's Darkest Sin wrote:Don't they sell the cardboard cut out packs any more. I used to have the ships, but some of them seemed out of scale with the others, so I just reverted to the counters from the pack and sold all my ships.

They were out of scale, but then again the CGI in the series got sloppy on scale and details a few times anyway :( It hink they mentioned there were essentially a few 'subscales' of ships within the Fleet Scale minis used for ACTA... essentially Ships A, B, and C would be internally consistent, but X, Y, and Z were only consistent to each other... And, frustratingly, A, X, and T would all be in the same fleet list.

I wonder if a Minbari fleet would make a good proxy for an Eldar fleet in Battle Fleet Gothic.

What would a Centauri fleet be a good proxy for in BFG, if anything?

George Spiggott wrote:What would a Centauri fleet be a good proxy for in BFG, if anything?

The curvy-shapes look kind of Necron-ish, while the ostentations ornamentation is almost Imperial...

Chaos?