Books like Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare

I have had a long love for Star Wars' essential guides, as they offer so much worldbuilding and bring together the many stories of the Star Wars films and their Expanded Universe. As someone who has at one time or another owned every essential guide, I've seen how the guides have gradually evolved over the many years of the fandom, and The Essential Guide to Warfare, coming out just before the split between Disney and Legends, stands at the pinnacle of the guides.I greatly enjoyed reading about the many different aspects of warfare in the Star Wars galaxy and the many different events, people, places, and technologies involved in the war efforts. The sheer level of details keeps bringing me back for rereads, and the content is presented in a wide range of different ways to mix things up, from basic summaries to personal memoirs to individual scenes playing out. I learned a whole lot that I hadn't known about the Star Wars universe before this book, and I am amazed at the love and effort put into every page of the masterpiece.That said, I should point out a few issues I had with the book. The first problem is that the book is shorter than it could have been, and not for lack of forethought on the writers' part. I appreciate that the authors compiled the extra content for online viewing, but I would have loved to have seen some of their scrapped plans, like the talk about the Celestials and Rakata (and fun reactions from Motti and Lemelisk), the Metalorn callback to some of the early comics, and the Coruscant Wars memoir. It didn't help that I felt that after the heavy focus on the main movie years of the Galactic Civil War, the coverage in the book kind of petered off. The following sections, which still cover decades of various battles and wars, seem rather short in comparison. A lot more could have been added. For starters, as someone who loved the Rogue Squadron books for bringing highly engaging war stories to the franchise, I was rather miffed that the book just lists Red Squadron (Yavin) and Rogue Squadron as of the Battle of Hoth; I wanted to see the post-Endor list of Rogue Squadron aces, plus, some mention of the crazy and awesome commando/trickster/fighter pilot maniacs in Wraith Squadron.Number two, I feel most of the content focuses on the strategic side of warfare rather than the tactical side. Most of the information is about long-term strategies deployed in warfare. This is very interesting, but it leaves out the tactics of individual battles. I was kind of hoping to see some individual articles about specific battles from the series, complete with diagrams on the formations and movements. We get told about the Gungan Grand Army and how it fared in the Battle of Naboo, for instance, but we don't actually get a summary, much less maps, of how the actual battle played out.Third, tying in with my first point, I felt that sometimes important maps were left out. I think that this could be partially due to the book's predecessor, The Essential Atlas, having detailed maps of key wars such as the Clone Wars, the post-Endor New Republic campaigns, and the Yuuzhan Vong War. I can understand why the authors might not have wanted to repeat the same maps, but their absence makes it harder to understand some of the war movements without access to the previous book. Plus, even leaving out the maps already done for the Atlas, there were some other maps I was hoping to see, such as a map of how sector groups were arranged under the Empire and a map of the various Imperial warlord territories. I appreciated the maps that were present such as the ones on the Orinda campaign and the Imperial Remnant, but I can't help but feel that the book missed some good opportunities.Number four, the book has a serious issue in regard to organization. This is actually a problem that started with The Essential Atlas, where the authors began to insert a diverse range of little extra features to complement the traditional main focuses of the books. I'm not saying that this choice was bad; a lot of the earlier books, while still fun to read, were fairly straightforward with categorized lists, so it was a blast to have everything from opera brochures to a spacer's ramblings about inspection regulations accompanying the standard list of key planets/moons. However, this extra content is a double-bladed lightsaber in that it makes it a whole lot harder to keep track of where everything is in the book. The Essential Atlas at least limited the problem by splitting things into three major sections: a slew of introductory info on the political/geographic set-up of the galaxy as a whole, the standard list of important worlds, and finally a semi-chronology of the galaxy. The Essential Guide to Warfare, on the other hand, does not have as easy splits, and is basically set up as a combination of the introductory materials and the semi-chronology. Hence, remembering where some of the side articles are placed in the book is very difficult, especially when the placement is sometimes in spots you'd least expect. Why, for example, is the discussion of hyperspace interdictor technology right before the Ruusan Reformation, when the article clearly states that they didn't become especially prominent until the Empire?Then there's one more issue, something that stands out from previous essential guides and may be the book's greatest weakness: lack of context. Part of the hallmark for the essential guides was its audience-friendly nature. Even if you weren't familiar with every part of the Star Wars universe, things were set up in a way that an average reader could still understand and find enjoyment in. In contrast, The Essential Guide to Warfare often seems to make the presumption that you already know certain details and does not work to make it understandable to an outsider. A prominent example of the problem can be found in the side-story with Boba Fett and the Assembler discussing the backstory of D'haran. Now, as someone who's read the Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy, I could make sense of what was going on. Problem is, anyone who has not read those three books is going to be blinking in confusion, wondering what the context of that story is and why it matters. The side picture and caption, simply stating that you are seeing D'haran fighting Shell Hutts ('what's a Shell Hutt?' someone is bound to ask), does little to clarify matters at all. If the preceding material had been discussing the Arkanian Revolution and other relatively minor side-wars that revealed the growing weakness of the Republic, then the side-story would make some sense in the overall flow of things, but that is not the case. My point is, while much of the book is still understandable to someone unfamiliar with Star Wars, the lack of clarified context will hinder their experience.Still, with the rich trove of information and the diversified nature of the content, I am absolutely in love with this book. This was the last big guide before Disney's split with Legends ended the dream of unified guides to the galaxy, but Sithspit, if it didn't go out with a bang! With The Essential Guide to Warfare, the past EU went into Legends with a blaze of glory like none before it.