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I am not one to “game” much. What I mean by that is, computer game. I have a Playstation 2 I haven’t seen in over a year because my little girl insists on having it in her room, and I have some games for that that I have been trying to play (Splinter Cell comes leaping to mind; Sam Fisher fans will get the pun).

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I have a computer that is powerful enough to play pretty much anything I can throw at it, save Doom 3 or Halflife 2. I did get Halo One because that is the PC game to have and I want to try my hands at Crimson Skies, just because it seems so cool. I am also trying to get to the end of Star Wars: Battlefront II, the most frustrating PC game in history.

Anyway, I picked up a copy of Star Trek Armada 2 and I am having a good time. Since this is my second Trek game (I have a PS1 copy of Star Trek: Invasion that I have yet to finish) and I had fun with that, I thought this would be cool to try out. Gamers tend to rate most Star Trek games as mediocre to downright bad. The exception, I think, was Star Trek: Bridge Commander because it was, for all intents and purposes, a starship bridge simulator.

This, of course, is probably proportionate to what a gamer thinks he should get out of a Trek game as opposed to what a Trek fan wants to get out of a Trek game. Since I am not a gamer per se, but more of a Trek fan, I will take the latter.

Armada 2 is what they call real time strategy. It takes place in the 24th Century of Star Trek: The Next Generation in between the movie Star Trek: First Contact and before the final episode of Star Trek: Voyager. The Borg, those machines that get off on assimilating whole cultures and their technology are threatening the Alpha Quadrant–again. You are an admiral in charge of armadas, groups of ships that go off and patrol, explore, build colonies and bases, mine moons and nebulae for basic material and defend the United Federation of Planets.

If this sounds like Warcraft or Command and Conquer, it is, except it has a Star Trek look and feel to it. They managed to voice cast Patrick Stewart (Capt. Jean Luc Picard) and Michael Dorn (Lt. Cmdr. Worf) for this and the U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701-E plays a pivotal role in the game. The cut scenes, the ones that bridge you from mission to mission, are very well done. They should probably think about doing an Animated Star Trek series in CGI for Saturday mornings.

Armada is objective based. I have played two missions at the medium setting and won both. The main idea is to meet each objective while balancing your resources. You get an admiral’s rating at the end of each mission whether you win or lose. What are the objectives like? Here is a sample from the first mission:

1. Build a dilithium mining station near a dilithium moon.
2. Build an orbital processing station to gather metal from a nearby planet.
3. Colonize a class L/M planet.
   
4. Build a shipyard and a research station so you can build Akira and Defiant class starships.
5. Find and destroy all Borg installations, bases and their colony world in the sector.
6. The Enterprise-E must not be destroyed.

All the while, you are trying to defend against Borg incursions that happen all too frequently. The Borg field powerful ships that can be, at their low end, defeated rather easily by your Akira and Defiant class ships. The high end is another story that I will get to in a moment. Since I am learning without a net (I have no manual and have not downloaded a strategy guide yet) I did not know that there are nebulae that you can mine to get latinum (the precious metal upon which commerce in the 24th century is based) to upgrade your research facilities so you can outfit your ships with special weapons. I did this in the second mission, in which a supply mission to another starbase at the other end of the sector is crucial to winning.

Game play is fairly easy once you get the hang of the interface. Since your job is to manage resources overall, there is not a lot of niggling you have to do ship to ship or base to base. The AI (artificial intelligence) takes care of that. It is the actual management of those resources that takes time to master. You could do everything right up to step 4 and still make a mistake in step 5.

Some things, as a Star Trek fan, don’t make sense to me. The Enterprise-E, for example, the flagship of The UFP, is the weakest ship in the game, like the king in chess. Even though it has a special corbomite shield (an energy reflector), it is only good for short bursts and can’t be invoked by the AI; you must do it. I tend to hold it back when it is needed, such as in the case of planetary bombardments, which only capital ships like Sovereign or Galaxy classes can do, and only after your frigates have mopped up. Otherwise, it is fair game and easy prey if you let it be. In fact, I was given a Galaxy class in the first mission and it performed admirably. It survived 3/4 of the game and was the number 1 ship on the admiral’s rating.

As I said before, the low end Borg ships are easy to dispatch with a couple of yours. However, in order to destroy their larger facilities, I had to, literally, throw ships at them in order to beat them. This is not roughly equivalent to the Wolf 359 scenario (40 ships), this was roughly 180 Akira, Defiant and Sabre class corvettes sent in echelons of 20 or 30 a piece, pummeling away until the Borg were beaten. Since you have to balance resources, this is a pretty pathetic waste of men and material. In the second mission, I didn’t have to destroy the Borg as a condition of victory. Instead, I let them go and just cleared a corridor where I could get relatively free passage between bases.

As to other more esoteric complaints, it would really be nice to be able to set up a formation so you could protect ships that you are trying to get from point a, thru a hot zone, to point b. You have formations, but they are really only for like ship types (read warp capable vs. non-warp capable). For example, in order to get an Akira class to escort a flotilla of cargo ships, you have to have one cargo ship take point, order the Akira to guard that ship, order the flotilla as a group to their destination, and the Akira will protect the lead ship by taking point itself. Why can’t I just select the flotilla and frigate, give the command escort, click on my destination, and have them form up and do what they need to do so I can mine latinum?

One of the things that really make me crazy about the game is that your ships, in the middle of repairing themselves, but immobile because of engine failure, can be salvaged at anytime, crew and all, by the Ferengi. This was funny the first couple of times but I wish that other ships in the area would put up a fight or protect the hapless ship from being taken. The Ferengi Marauder class is fast at impulse and the corvettes you build do NOT have tractor beams (?!?), so there is no way to tow them to a shipyard for repairs. You could dispatch a construction ship out to pick up the ship, but they are slow at impulse and the Ferengi would probably damage it to get to the corvette.

None of these problems will be fixed either. Activision, the author of Armada 2, had a falling out with Paramount (now CBS) and they will not be doing Star Trek games for a while. Despite the problems, as a Trek fan, it is a satisfying game and a good way to get your Trek on, even if only in CGI.

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Filed under: Software, Star Trek