Armada

Fatcat

Swabbie
Banned
I'm considering buying it, found a good deal on ebay. I wanted to know though, what is Armada? Is it a FP flight sim like the other Wing Commander games, or a 3rd person straegy-style game, etc, and if it is any good?
 
Armada is a very interesting Wing Commander experience. It has no real in-game plot but rather focuses on building fighters and moving your fleet (which is basically just your carrier and its fighters) around on a system map. You can station fighters to guard worlds you have colonized or keep them all with your carrier. Your goal is to hunt down the Kilrathi carrier and destroy it. When any of the Kilrathi elements (carrier, fighters) meets up with any of your elements, an in-game battle using pretty much the same engine as WC3 engages. You fly a fighter and have wingmen against whatever Kilrathi elements attacked you. When either side is completely destroyed you go back to the system map and keep going.
 
Armada does in fact have a plot, though not many people seem to have experienced it... and I'm guessing it has something to do with how bloody difficult it was.
If you choose the "gauntlet" mode of play you go through the campaign as Armada's unnamed protagonist, a pilot flying missions off of the TCS Lexington. There's also some supplemental material in the Voices of War book that came with Armada that explores the character a little more. Not only that, but you can do the whole thing again on the side of the Kilrathi, which was very cool.
 
And if you're through with the main game, you can get the "Proving Grounds" addon that Origin gave away for free (I assume there are no legal issues, since it's on the WCN ftp server).
 
There's not really anything that you can do with proving grounds though, unless you've got more than one old WC machine... not yet anyway.
 
The Proving Grounds addon was released freely online -- in fact, that was the only way to get it.

If you can find someone to pair up with for a few games, it's really interesting... it has the coolest asteroids in any Wing Commander game!
 
How so? I've never managed (bothered) to get Proving Grounds set up at home, even though I have more than one PC which can run DOS-era WCs...
 
It had these scenarios with a regular WC1/2 style asteroid field, but also there were several "giant" asteroids in the middle. The giant asteroids showed up on your sensors as grey dots... and you could actually hide behind the giant asteroids on your opponent's radar by flying your ship up close to them.
 
Personally, I'd avoid Armada unless you have human opponents to play against or don't mind "expending" the game, so to speak. I say that because the AI is terrible.

The gameplay concept works quite well. It's a territory-based strategy game, which always makes for better strategic play than a unit-rush based strategy game. The different fighters are quite well balanced in terms of the ratios of power to resource cost to build time. And I always appreciate being able to fly Kilrathi fighters for a change.

The problem is, as I said, the AI is terrible. It doesn't appear to have any strategy at all other than build a string of mines and churn out fighters - no heavy defense of chokepoints, no apparent differences in what it sends against you other than "whatever it has on hand". Worse, increasing the difficulty doesn't make it play any smarter; it just biases the combat in favour of their pilots (if you've set it to fight battles automatically rather than inflight, or if the battle is big enough, (some of) the results get calculated and you get told what fighters were lost). I'm fairly sure it makes the computer cheat, too; even with stripmining (produces resources twice as fast but depletes them four times faster than normal) I'm certain it's not possible to field the number of fighters the computer does.

It's also a little disapointing that the inflight combat is always only ever four fighters at any one time - two of yours and two of theirs. Any more than that and the other craft are considered to be engaging each other out of view, and if a fighter is lost in your battle another will replace it from "elsewhere". The result is that most battles are straight two-on-two fights (or two-on-two gauntlets, if you're battling enough enemies), which gets stale after long enough. I can't quite pin down why, but the dogfighting itself seems to be more repetitive than usual (could be just me).

Anyway, for me games always seem to end with my overwhelming strike force encountering a handful of scattered light fighters and an undefended carrier (the enemy having depleted their resources in an ineffective trickle of fighters all game long), or the enemy carrier suicidally rushing my systems.

So, like I said: find someone to play with if you're going to get this game. Although it is fun while it lasts.
 
I've got Armada, but never played it (couldn't get it to work on my system), but hey I only paid £1 for it, which is like $0.50 :D
 
TopGun said:
I've got Armada, but never played it (couldn't get it to work on my system), but hey I only paid £1 for it, which is like $0.50 :D
It fine runs under DOSBox on my machine. Well, actually the joystick isn't working but other than that...

Remember to set ems=false in dosbox.conf if you decide to use it.
 
For all its faults, Armada is the only multi-player WC game, besides WCP GBA. And it's a different gameplay style to the other games, so it's worth picking up, if only to add to the collection. :)
 
Perhaps, but it depends if you want a WC1/2/3/4/P/SO/Academy/Priv/P2/Armada-complete collection or a LOAF-style, every-single-possible-version-in-existence type of complete collection. ;)
 
wasnt the story explained a bit in WC3's Victory Streak? or was it a different mission all together?

*2669*

Following the attack on Earth, the Terran Intelligence Agency deploys a top-secret, tactical search party through a previously uncharted kilrathi jump point. A heavy carrier (name unknown for security purposes) is equipped with self-sustaining recycling systems, mining apparatus, and a 62-person Special Operations team. This unit leaves Goddard Transfer Station on 2669.011 and passes through a newly discovered jump point. Its mission - to search out and destroy Kilrathi forces, sector by sector. To date, no known communications have been received from this special mission.

Vermin
 
Yeah, Loaf does LOVE WC

I myself have (in my mind) a good Collection

Wing Commander I (PC and Amiga (Not sure if Amiga version works anymore))
Wing Commander II - The Vengence of the Kilrathi (PC - Disk Version and Deluxe CD-Rom Version)
Wing Commander III - The Heart of the Tiger (PSX)
Wing Commander IV - The Price of Freedom (PSX)
Wing Commander - Prophecy (PC version, but may get my Little Brother the GameBoy Advanced, but off course I'll play on it aswell :D)
Wing Commander - Armada

Going to get WC Movie on DVD soon
 
my collection is growing :)

i have:

WC I & both addons
WC II & both addons
WC III - classic box
WC IV - double sided DVD :D i got that the other day from ebay
WC Prophecy - classic box
WC Secret Ops - on a magazine cover disk full episodes and speech pack :D
WC Armada - diskettes

i did have Academy but i cant find it :S
and i need the privateers, i really like the look of priv 2 but i dont even think i can make it run on my pc the demo wont work...

hmm i dont think there are any more WC games so i only need 3 to complete it i think.

Vermin
 
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