The original Star Trek: Armada was an above average RTS title that featured many of the popular ship designs and technologies from the Next Generation/DS9 universe. Though hampered by minor gameplay/AI issues the title found a home with many PC gamers as, while not the best RTS ever, it certainly did a good job when compared to Trek titles in general. Star Trek: Armada II picks up right where the last one left off. The Borg and Romulans had been chased away, but the Borg end up returning with new ships that can assimilate entire planets. The campaigns are structured in the same manner as the original as is the method of narration. While the Borg have returned for another starring role in STA2, the Romulans have not. The game is split up into a series of Federation, Klingon, and Borg missions.

Unlike the single-player game, there are many races available in the multiplayer section of the game and this might appeal to the Trek fans most of all, as many popular races from the Star Trek universe make appearances with their own fleet of ships. The balancing of these races still seems pretty off, with the Borg dominating in my experiences. Yet strangely balancing doesn’t matter as much as one might figure. This is because:

Capital ships are too inexpensive!

In my opinion, ‘fleet-based combat’ isn’t about building the biggest ship over and over again and throwing them towards the enemy, and this is essentially what Armada has become. This isn’t to say this is entirely Mad Doc’s fault. Hints of this problem could be seen in the original, but as a sequel this issue should have been addressed. A fleet is a group of ships made up of many different classes that all serve practical functions in combat. Had they raised the price to an amount that insured that the ‘best strat’ wouldn’t be to race to the top of the tech tree for the sole purpose of making capital ships, the gameplay would have probably utilized the other ships more often.

Effort was made to try and expand the titles gameplay beyond what it was in other areas, but it really didn’t pan out. The addition of ‘warp’ speed doesn’t affect gameplay that much, other than the fact that your huge mass of capital ships can move that much faster to pulverize someone. Planets can now be colonized and are also the source of the new resource, ‘metal’. The addition of this fourth resource, and the fact that it is localized to planets, creates some strategic resource points on a map for players to focus their attention. New additions to the fleet of each race have also been made, but in general they are superficial. Since the gameplay revolves around the biggest ships, the smaller ships often spend time as cannon-fodder early game.

To Mad Doc’s credit, they fixed the AI’s inability to move through maps without getting stuck, which is a big plus. In the previous title it wouldn’t be rare to find half of your fleet stuck against an asteroid belt. Textures were also improved, and unlike the first release version of the original, Armada II worked wonderfully with my NVIDIA graphics card. Unfortunately while the visual quality of the title was improved, it doesn’t run any smoother or look any nicer at low resolutions. This is definitely not a beautiful title by today’s standards, but what is there is pretty practical and works well even without the polish.

Having been given the green light to build upon an above-average RPG with a modest fan-base, STA2 wasn’t under as much pressure as WarCraft 3 is. Unfortunately it looks as if the folks at Mad Doc got a little too comfortable with this situation. A lot of the ‘new’ ships had been previously added to the original through user-developed MOD packs, and a few of the other changes in STA2 are reminiscent of past player-based creations. Ultimately it is the lack of polish found pretty much everywhere in the game that makes it feel like less of a sequel and more like a pricey Star Trek: Armada MOD.