Star Trek: Armada III begins with the first stirrings of the Dominion War and allows players to take command of five unique factions, the United Federation of Planets. Welcome to ArmadaFiles! A new home for Star Trek: Armada and Star Trek: Armada II patches, maps, mods and downloads. Everything is still a little rough around the edges. We are still in beta! Would buy Star Trek Armada 1 and Star Trek Armada 2 in a heartbeat if they become available here (and I own the CDs for both), Armada 1 in particular is very difficult to get running on Win 10 so GoG making that compatible would be great.

Star Trek: Armada

4.52 / 5 - 42 votes

Description of Star Trek: Armada

Star Trek: Armada is a real-time strategy video game for Microsoft Windows developed and published in 2000 by Activision.The game's look and feel is based primarily on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and features a few of its main characters and ships. Star Trek: Armada The biggest collection of ships, stations, maps, mods and more for the Activision's first epic Star Trek RTS game, available from our fast, free download servers.

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Eeeevil

When it comes to space operas like Star Trek or Babylon 5 you can have all the square-jawed heroes, but what you really need to give a show that extra edge is some really nasty baddies. Bablyon 5 pulled this off well, featuring the evil Shadows, with their jet black ships and sneaky plots. And the entertainingly off-kilter Lexx 's central antagonist was a strange shadowy lifeform who initially ruled a rather macabre universe dominating empire (which Star Wars' Imperial Empire had nothing on) and later became a sort of half machine creature who succeeded in destroying the entire universe piece by piece.

But the creators of Star Trek: The Next Generation must claim the prize for creating the best evil baddies ever - the Borg. The Borg are half human, half mechanical and uglier than the Daleks ever were. Except that is, for Voyager's Seven of Nine who has been shorn of most of her robotic appendages and appears to be the only member of the Voyager crew with a with access to unlimited supplies of lycra and special Borg 'implants' which probably contravene every Starfleet clothing regulation. Still, she's more a blip than an emerging trend amongst the Borg, and the rest of the Borg remain thoroughly nasty, their nastiness rating boosted by the fact that they spend most of their free time mercilessly assimilating all species they come across, turning them into Borg drones and stripping them of their individuality.

And if that wasn't worrying enough, they're virtually unstoppable. They're so nasty, in fact, that I suspect at least half of all the people who bought Star Trek: Armada bought it just for the chance to play as the Borg. After all, everyone knows that the when it comes to lethal weaponry and bottom-kicking ships, bad is best.

Powered down

Unfortunately, those looking forward to assimilating the universe in one fell swoop may be a little disappointed upon picking up Star Trek: Armada, for a couple of reasons. The first of the reasons is that the Borg campaigns, like those of the other races, slot neatly into the storyline. This is an interesting approach in itself but does have the downside that you can't do anything that would alter the storyline. You can't assimilate the Enterprise for example, or assimilate the Earth and rule the galaxy (on a permanent basis, at least). Having the bad guys win is apparently not on the cards - the Federation always manage to save the day. Secondly, as David Finn points out in his pretty comprehensive review, the Borg in Armada are rather weak compared to their counterparts in the Star Trek: First Contact movie and the ST:NG.

In the series, the Borg cube dwarfed the Enterprise and the only way the Federation could defeat the Borg was by running around like headless chickens for 40 minutes and then coming up with some techo-gibberish to miraculously disable and or destroy them. In Star Trek: Armada however, each cube is about the same size as the Enterprise and about as strong. The series and movie Borg ships also had the ability to remodulate their shields thereby negating any phaser damage they may have received - this too has been taken out of the game, despite the fact that the Borg ships, when ordered to move, often say 'remodulating shields'. 'Resistance is futile?' - resistance is too flipping easy, more like. Oh, how cruel it is to have your plans for galactic domination crushed...

Kidnapped

On the plus side, you do still get a variety of Borg weaponry that you can use against your foes, such as the combined holding beam and assimilator attached to the Borg Cube that can grab and assimilate the crew of any ship, even if their shields are up. Other races can take over ships too, but they have to wait till their opponents' shields are low - but it's still worth doing as there's something ego-boosting, especially in multiplayer mode, about nicking your enemy's ships and then using them to take out their own. It's one of the rather nice touches that makes Star Trek Armada such a promising game when you first pick it up.

Other nice (or 'neat' if you're an American) touches include the multiplayer game which features a skirmish mode so you can take on AI opponents in lieu of kicking arse on-line and getting some practice in. Plus, should you go about setting up your own multiplayer game you can customise pretty much everything in the game - including whether or not the Ferengi put in an appearance. When this race is in the game they'll fly around the game area and nick any crewless derelicts, hauling them away before you can re-crew and rescue them.

At least in theory that's the way it's supposed to happen - in truth, I witnessed a rather monumental Ferengi bug not once but twice while playing Star Trek: Armada. Not only did a Ferengi ship manage to capture one of my ships that was fully crewed with Borg, having recently been assimilated, but on traversing an asteroid belt the Ferengi ship cleared the belt okay but my ship got stuck behind an asteroid, so the Ferengi's blue tractor beam stretched, and stretched, and stretched. Until, no - my ship didn't escape, the ship was mysteriously pulled through a solid asteroid and taken off the map.

Buggy of Borg

Star Trek Armada 4

And the above bug wasn't the only one I ran into either - even with the Beta Patch installed I ran into a number of others, some minor, some major. The worst one was on the fourth Federation mission - after destroying all the Borg vessels and bases I found myself unable to complete the mission as there was one green dot on the map. This dot turned out to be nothing at all - not a ship, not a Borg base, just a strange dot that could not be destroyed, so I ended up skipping the mission as have dozens and even hundreds of people if the strategic newsgroups are anything to go by. Shipping a product with this many bugs just isn't on and it's especially annoying as Star Trek: Armada had the potential to be a real corker.

In strategic terms too, Armada is a little under par - it could have done with a little more unit tweaking and unit variety. Granted, the differing special abilities of the ships do add some variety to the game but they don't disguise the fact that each side has pretty much the same basic types of ships and units. In Total Annihilation - a comparison that's especially valid since Armada is just a 2D strategy game in space - no single unit could kick the electronic cack out of every other one. You could blitz Big Bertha guns with aircraft, manufacture anti-aircraft units that could take out flying vehicles and use smaller craft to take out the giant stomping robots and tanks.

But in Star Trek: Armada - even when you have the 'director's cut' mode turned on which means ships turn and zoom around in combat - you need only to manufacture six or so of the big units such as the large Enterprise starships or the Borg Cubes to be able to take out pretty much everything