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.

Stuart.

Stuart Murray

Department Of Molecular Genetics
Albert Einstein College Of Medicine
1300 Morris Park Avenue
Bronx
New York 10461

Tel: (718) 430 4289
smurray@aecom.yu.edu