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.