Title     Armada 2526 Developer    Ntronium Games Publisher    Iceberg Interactive Platform    Windows PC Genre    4x strategy, hybrid turn-based & RTS Release Date    June 25th 2010

There is a small, niche corner of the PC gaming market that likes nothing better than to plot aggressive empire building and colonisation, political manoeuvres, industrial revolutions, and epic battles all on an intergalactic scale, and from the comfort of their computer desks. Not content to be mere armchair generals, or Earth-bound emperors, these would-be interstellar grand admirals spend months or even years of their lives playing the few games that cater to this obsession to death, whilst keeping one eye open for the possibility of fresh challenges off in the distance.

I count myself amongst their number, and have poured a good chunk of my free time into this sub-genre of strategy gaming. I know all too well how few and far between a really satisfying example can be, with arguably only Stardock Entertainment pushing the boat out and seeing what’s possible in recent years with their Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire, or Kerboros Productions with Sword of the Stars. When Armada 2526 first appeared on my radar therefore, it was something to eagerly look forwards to.

Armada first came out last November in the US, and has taken its sweet time making it across the Atlantic so that UK and European gamers can finally get a chance to put it through its paces. It wasn’t until as recently as March that Dutch publisher Iceberg Interactive signed on to publish Armada in the region, bizarrely, as 4x space strategy games are very popular by their own standards in Germany, the Netherlands, and here in the UK. Two major patches were released in the time it took to reach these shores, though, so arguably European gamers would be able to expect a more polished and solid build from the start.

First impressions took something of a nosedive however, when after a very easy and painless installation the game crashed the first two times I tried to run it, despite having rebooted the system after installing the game. I’m still not sure why the executable failed, as it finally loaded on the third attempt without any modification (though it would then fail when I tried to set up a custom game and wanted to change the number of players). These would be the start of a series of crashes, with frequent return trips to my desktop wallpaper, accompanied with a great deal of frustrated invective. The system the game was installed to far exceeds the recommended specs on the game case, and disconnecting from the internet and disabling the antivirus protection didn’t seem to make much difference either.

If you can get the game to run, and stay running, there are some very solid ideas here, and the potential for a good game, albeit with some considerable design flaws. The game is split into two layers, akin to other entries to the genre, with the grand strategy and running of your empire and its economy presented on a turn-based zoom-enabled overview of the entire region of space within your game, which then moves to a more localised and tactical interface during ship battles and planetary invasion/defence.

The galactic overview shows the various stars dotted around the galaxy, and moving your mouse over one of these results in a tooltip popping up with a brief description of the system, including how many planets are in orbit around the star and their suitability for colonisation. You also, in a nice touch, get a small window in the lower right of the screen that shows an animated visual representation of the solar system in question. The top right corner has a mini-map that you can use to look across the galaxy without having to scroll. What is also nice is the variety of star types included in the game. In Galactic Civilizations, for example, all stars are much the same, with only cosmetic differences in appearance; planetary conditions are arbitrarily set at random with no reference to the star or other planets in the system. Armada however has a multitude of star classifications taken from astronomical physics, ranging from differently sized but otherwise quite usual stars like the various dwarfs and giants, to the more outlandish binary stars, neutron stars, and so on. Unfortunately for those players who like charting the unknown and exploring the universe one new star at a time, there is no fog of war, and all stars are visible from the beginning of the game with your ability to reach them limited only by the range of your ships.

Irritatingly, the movement range is hexagonal. This means that sometimes with two systems equal distance away from your starting position, one will be accessible, and the other is not, depending on the angle they are relative to your homeworld. The circular movement range used in other games makes a great deal more sense, with every point equidistant from your launch point. The range is expanded by colonising or capturing other systems already within your reach, as is standard in these games, but you find yourself being forced to select stars you would otherwise pass over in favour of more suitable ones, not because of their distance, but because of their vector. Also irritatingly, you can only move between stars and wormholes initially, and have to research the ability to send ships out to points between with no celestial body present… this seems an unnecessary obfuscation, and a waste of research time and resources, as there’s no real justification given for why this isn’t immediately available. It effectively works as a limiter, preventing you from staging attacks from anywhere other than one of your own worlds, or from blockading enemy ships from approaching your systems.

Individual systems can have various facilities built within them, including manufacturing plants, shipyards, research laboratories, etc. Which ones you build and how many thereof impact on your monetary income and how effectively they perform their unique functions depends on the system they are constructed in. In an attempt at minimising some of the micromanagement that frequently occurs in the natural course of running an empire, the developers have included an option to automate planetary governance, freeing you up more for planning expansion or waging wars. Personally I don’t see the point, as I quite enjoy the management side of these games, adding as it does to the level of depth and the feeling of actually being at the helm of a mighty civilisation. Considering the developers have themselves said that they would rather design a game aimed at a niche audience and do it properly, rather than dilute it for non-core demographic users, it seems a bit of an odd inclusion. More importantly, it doesn’t always work very well, with the system building redundant facilities and duplicate ships and occasionally quite badly mismanaging your resources without you knowing about it until your economy is starting to run into trouble forcing you to go looking for the problem system by system.

Trade and diplomacy plays a part in your interactions with other civilisations and empires, and here the game has done a very good job. You can use your diplomatic ability or military might to gain the advantage in trading technology and treaties, with the options to employ bribery or extortion, or to simply strong-arm more reluctant potential allies by issuing threats of war or other ultimatums. It’s an unusually sophisticated alternative approach to just marching into someone’s territory and taking their stuff by force, and it would be all the more impressive if I hadn’t already seen it done in Galactic Civilizations II.

In combat situations, as I mentioned before, the game transfers to a more tactically minded interface. Unlike in most other examples of these games, which remain turn-based but zoom down to the battlefield (think X-COM: Enemy Unknown) or even just simply simulate a result based on the variables present in each force taking part in the engagement, battles in Armada switch to a more action-orientated real-time strategy mode. It’s not entirely original, with Lucasarts notably doing the same with Star Wars: Supremacy (titled Rebellion in the US and Canada) for space engagements and in Star Wars: Empire at War for both space and land battles. Those to the side it is still refreshingly different to the norm, and could have been a great addition to the gameplay.

Unfortunately, both the overview and tactical interfaces are often obstinate, awkward, and damn right froward. It is absurdly difficult to move ships and fleets about until you get used to the way the game wants you to deploy, and as the developers have included the economic automation they’ve neglected to bother to make it intuitive or even sensible for players who try to choose to manage things manually. This is especially apparent when the automation AI starts to make a cock of things and requires you to either compensate for it or clean up the mess yourself. Vital information is frequently withheld from the player, in the name of simplifying system summary windows. When researching new technologies, despite the numerous races present in the game, they all share the exact same tech tree and progression… making their differences entirely cosmetic and having no effect on the way the game plays out, unlike the genuinely varied and differently orientated races in Galactic Civilizations II.

In combat, rather than select units by dragging the mouse over them, you can only select individual task groups… drag selecting has been vital in RTS games since their inception, so this particular quirk is utterly baffling. It makes it impossible to combine and direct certain elements of your fleets at the same time, making control of your fleets cumbersome and resulting often in the loss of ships where you’re unable to direct more than one group to withdraw when they get into trouble. In fact, large fleet battles in Armada are typified by a complete sensation of having no or limited control over proceedings and the end result often seems random as a result. I haven’t seen a more shockingly bad control scheme in supposedly real-time strategy combat since Star Wars: Supremacy, which also had much the same problems and hit and miss nature. The difference however, is that game was released in 1998, not 2009/2010, and its spiritual successor Empire at War has shown how it should be done already, with traditional RTS controls and gameplay. Added to this control problem is a time limit to battles, so you can be right on the cusp of a massive victory and the timer will run out with a single small enemy ship left, resulting in a screen telling you the battle was inconclusive! I rage-quit the game altogether the first time that happened, because it is so frustrating, especially given the limited direction you have.

Graphically and audibly, the production quality is just about passable. The strategic overview looks very lovely, with the little spinning stars on their background of nebulae and distant galaxies, but the simplicity of it hardly leaves much space for error. Ships on the other hand look quite cartoonish up close, due to how basic they are. If you zoom out far enough in battles, it replaces all of the individually coloured textures on all of the ships present, friendly and enemy, with a uniform garish pink… why I have no idea, as the basic nature of the ship textures and weapons effects can’t be that taxing on system resources anyway unless you’re trying to run the game on a truly aging clunker of a PC. Visual representation of the various races during game set-up and diplomacy is similarly cheap and simple; you get shown a still image of the race’s leader sitting staring at you, and occasionally the still is replaced by a fuzzy, much lower resolution movie file that’s supposed to show some animation of the character shrugging or something. Impressive it is not; more laughably bad.

The sound scheme follows the same basic approach, doing just enough to be acceptable. Battle noises, interface beeps, ship engines and so on sound like their most basic sci-fi archetypes, all sounds that you will have heard in countless space games, whether strategy or otherwise. The music for the game varies wildly, with some quite atmospheric and satisfying tracks, and then others, like the main menu theme, which sound like they were orchestrated on a MIDI sequencer 15 years ago in somebody’s bedroom.

Whilst setting up games in the first place the cracks start to show. Menus stutter when selected. Sometimes selecting a drop-down selection box will crash the entire game. There is no selection available for screen resolution in the graphics set-up, so I can only presume that there are two or three standard resolutions in each aspect ratio that are then stretched clumsily to fill all monitors. This is particularly prone to causing problems on higher resolution computers, and I suspect half the problem I’ve had with the game crashing. There’s a good selection of options to tweak the game to make it different each time and to alter the variables of victory, your opponents, or even how long the game is, and fascinatingly there is even a selector to turn on hot-seating, allowing more than one human player to multiplay on a single computer… probably the one truly unique thing I’ve seen in this entire game. But… if you can’t click on them to change their state without a good chance of the game crashing in the process, that makes them akin to the torment of Tantalus; seemingly readily available, but with far too high a potential cost and too much of an obstacle to getting at them, placing them agonisingly just out of reach.

Pros

• Cherry picks all the best features from other games in the genre, and brings them together.
• A new franchise in a sparsely populated and niche genre.
• The diplomacy function is very good.
• That option to hot-seat.

Cons

• Technically unreliable, to the point of often being unplayable.
• All of the features present already exist in other older and overall better games. Which are actually still available for a lower price, even with the discount range pricing of this game?! Bad value for money.
• Basic, “that’ll do” quality to the visuals and audio design.
• A control scheme that isn’t only unintuitive, but actively removes control of the game from the player.
• No single-player story campaign.
• All of the in-game races and technologies are the same apart from cosmetic differences.
• Still this bad despite receiving two major patches on route to the European market.
• Hard to believe this was created by the same guy behind the iconic Total War series.
• Had so much potential to be brilliant, but let down by how cheap the overall production is.

Summary

Whilst I was waiting for the review copy of this game to arrive, I occupied myself for half an hour looking to see which retailers were offering it, how much it was being sold for, and what people were saying in comments. Basic research I’m sure you’ll all agree for someone interested in an upcoming game. GAME had sold it... for less than a week, and then removed it from their site. ShopTo, Zavvi, Play.com and HMV never listed it at all. The only site offering it at the time was Amazon, for £17, or you could get it via several digital distribution services. At the time this stunned me, because I was genuinely excited about the game. Now though, having spent time with it, it is hardly surprising.

This game is a massive, bitter lemon, promising much and looking appetising from a distance but leaving a waxy and bitter, dissatisfying taste in your mouth once you bite into it. All of the features in it are present in other games, with the possible exception of hot-seating, which I have yet to encounter elsewhere in this particular kind of game (the closest example I can think of, at all related to grand strategy, if I really stretch myself, is RISK II), and those other games do them better. The best application of an idea in Armada, which also actually works better than in most other comparable titles, is in the diplomacy system. But even there it fails to excel all the competition, with the diplomacy feature in Galactic Civilizations II being just as strong.

When a game is actually more painful and frustrating to play than Star Wars: Supremacy, itself a bitter disappointment when it came out 12 years ago... it’s not worth the headache. Go and play something else instead. Any of the other games I’ve mentioned in comparison during this review will prove more satisfying and entertaining.

I shudder to think of the players who will stumble across this and think it a true indication of what is usually one of the deepest and most intellectually satisfying and challenging genres in gaming.

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