Call to Arms vs Fleet Action and B5Wars
- Thread starter Taran
- Start date
Locutus9956
Mongoose
thatcash said:
Aye they were mean but if you never faced a squadron of Demos in B5 Wars you dont know the MEANING of pain from the Centauri
They zip into your blind spots and tear you to shreds in an abosolute torrrent of heavy array shots (and you take a pasting from Balistic Torpedoes on their way in too!).Happily Demos seem to have reclaimed their roles as 'terror of the space lanes' now in ACTA too
Call To Arms personally feels like a generic space combat system, it does not feel like B5 at all to me, never has. Its supported and gets new stuff, so thats nice, but I've always been a big fan and still play B5 Wars...
B5wars had much more technical and faithful adaptation to the show, the developers worked very hand in hand with the fandom to keep things faithful......thankfully ton of material was made for that game and almost all the major ships/races got finished.
I remember how B5 was still on the air when b5 wars was out, and how they consistently would update their game to match the show, or fix things if something contradicted something. I remember the discussions we had on that stupid scene from In the Beginning when a Vorchan takes out a Q'Quan cruiser with like 2 shots.... (hehe plasma shot, critical on reactor, etc, etc)..... but it was fun and they were some of the best developers who would work with the games community.
B5wars had much more technical and faithful adaptation to the show, the developers worked very hand in hand with the fandom to keep things faithful......thankfully ton of material was made for that game and almost all the major ships/races got finished.
I remember how B5 was still on the air when b5 wars was out, and how they consistently would update their game to match the show, or fix things if something contradicted something. I remember the discussions we had on that stupid scene from In the Beginning when a Vorchan takes out a Q'Quan cruiser with like 2 shots.... (hehe plasma shot, critical on reactor, etc, etc)..... but it was fun and they were some of the best developers who would work with the games community.
Locutus9956 said:
I just have to take issue with this statement.
A Call To Arms and 3rdSpace were quite good, plotwise. The problems B5 movies faced were entirely centered on the fact that they were "Made for TV"
The writing was never final-proofed the way it would have been with a full-on Production and they had a tendency to run out of budget for some of the SFX. Everything was rushed, from the writing, to the production, to the actions in the movies.
I was just watching A Call To Arms this evening and noted that what was several times mentioned in the show as a Multi-day hyperspace journey was accomplished in a matter of moments and there is no sense of time spent trying to get there. And when Sheridan gets ahold of the Station, he says he is about 3 hours ahead of the Drakh assault fleet, and he has already made a comment about being faster than them, and yet, at the end of this supposedly week(?) long trip, he is mere seconds ahead.
Oh yeah, and where were the White Stars in the ISA fleet for that battle?
That's the sort of problem the movies had nearly every time.
And as for the episodes, well, I argue it away being that not every day in anyone's life is going to be movie material. Some days are going to suck and fel like they were written by a 2nd-rate hack, as far as plot goes. Other days will be momentous and important and written by David Weber. Babylon 5 did a good job of showing this and it helped keep the show feeling "real".
Lord David the Denied
Mongoose
Weber wrote some B5 scripts?! :shock:
JMS did not release tech specs or anything solid to go on with regards to specific details of ships to degree of acccuracy some people seem to require.
Its all very well that certain things are considered inaccurate but when you look at the range of information (tech) on ships there is not much to go on. I always appreciated that B5 was not always babbling on about techy stuff like other shows.
As ship stats are then largely based on snippets of info which lets face it, were always driven by plot rather than following rigid ship schematics/tech details, they are never going to be 100% accurate because a clear base line was never established.
However, I find this annoying, ship descriptions/inservice dates that contradict each other or dont make sense.
Its all very well that certain things are considered inaccurate but when you look at the range of information (tech) on ships there is not much to go on. I always appreciated that B5 was not always babbling on about techy stuff like other shows.
As ship stats are then largely based on snippets of info which lets face it, were always driven by plot rather than following rigid ship schematics/tech details, they are never going to be 100% accurate because a clear base line was never established.
However, I find this annoying, ship descriptions/inservice dates that contradict each other or dont make sense.
PLord David the Denied
Mongoose
I believe it's called Saganami Island Tactical Simulator, and uses models on stands with varying heights to simulate movement in the third dimension. Apparently it's extremely detailed and faithful to the source material.
Locutus9956
Mongoose
Taran said:
You misunderstand me I think. Im not saying the movies were diabolical. Call to Arms wasnt bad and Thirdspace would have been a decent enough episode (personally Id say it was NOT movie material). But my point really was some people seem to be of the slightly zealotish oppinion that 'JMS can do no wrong' and if he said something ever, it couldnt possibly be wrong
Taran said:
And again, I wasnt saying that the episodes without the major battles and the like were the bad ones. Indeed some of my favourite episodes ARE the everyday life ones. That doesnt negate the fact that there were SOME epsisodes that were just plain bad
Might want to wait for a bit - SITS is head-achingly hard to figure out, by all accounts!
Ad Astra (the company who make SITS) are working on a more cinematic game engine called Squadron Strike, and in theory they may do an Honorverse adaptation of it (SITS is based on a game called Attack Vector: Tactical).
No confirmation either way on that account.
(They do seem to have some cool fleet sourcebooks for the Manticorans and the PLN, though!)
Ad Astra (the company who make SITS) are working on a more cinematic game engine called Squadron Strike, and in theory they may do an Honorverse adaptation of it (SITS is based on a game called Attack Vector: Tactical).
No confirmation either way on that account.
(They do seem to have some cool fleet sourcebooks for the Manticorans and the PLN, though!)
The folks at AOG did do some excellent research into their ship designs when they could..... they always went back and forth trying to keep with stuff folks would find in the show, random technical details from various published b5 sources that were available back in the day, and best of all was that some of AOG's folks were able to view the actual ship models used in the show which they studies to determine proper weapon/hull placement as well as to help count numbers of weapons..... course lot of ships in the show just never had visible gun ports and stuff seemed to just fly out of nowhere sometimes.
Lord David the Denied
Mongoose
Taran said:
It probably needs an astrophysics degree to understand properly, but it would be cool. Of course, I'd want the GSN if I played it...
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