Wing Commander Armada - Something Of A Halfway House (July 16, 2012)

Dundradal

Dundradal

Frog Blast the Vent Core!
Another trip down memory lane as today we look at a review of Wing Commander Armada from the November 1994 PC Review. Armada reviews all tended to have a similar trend of mentioning TIE Fighter and what could be if only TIE Fighter had Armada's graphics. In his review, Paul Glancey, says that such an event would "have needed to invent new superlatives to do it justice, and if Wing Commander 3 can manage this level of detail in SVGA resolution, there'll be jaws on the floor throughout the kingdom." Overall, Glancey isn't too thrilled with Armada's gameplay. He makes the common compliant that the combat is repetitive and feels like a stationary turret firing at moving targets. Read his entire review below.




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Thanks to Pix's Origin Adventures for the scans.

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Original update published on July 16, 2012
 
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The problem with Armada is very similar to what he describes. There just didn't seem to be much of a sense of scale to the game. With other Wing Commander games you get into scraps with multiple capital ships at nav points. Waves of fighters coming against you again and again. Armada was usually much smaller skirmishes, and without storyline to hold it together there just wasn't the same drawcards as other games. That said though, the multiplayer action was fantastic and makes Armada a must-have WC game.
 
I'll agree with some points. Armada's combat does feel odd compared to other WC games. Instead of a stationary turret, I always thought of it more as constant AB slides. You always seem to be sliding away from your target.

I do have to say, one time when ChrisReid and I were playing, I let him get a fighter near my Evansville transport. I could have sworn they had 2 flak guns. Instead, they only had a reception port for Chris's torpedo that blasted the 'sport away. That was an unpleasant surprise.
 
I love Armada; it's one of my favorite games of the series. If I had any complaints about it, it's that there was too little of a variety of ships and you never really had to make a death-defying torpedo run. I did it a couple of times just for the hell of it; the flak on those Armada carriers is pretty damned fierce...like Battlestar Galactica fierce...
 
Dundradal said:
I'll agree with some points. Armada's combat does feel odd compared to other WC games. Instead of a stationary turret, I always thought of it more as constant AB slides. You always seem to be sliding away from your target.

I do have to say, one time when ChrisReid and I were playing, I let him get a fighter near my Evansville transport. I could have sworn they had 2 flak guns. Instead, they only had a reception port for Chris's torpedo that blasted the 'sport away. That was an unpleasant surprise.
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What a waste of a torpedo, he could have just sneezed in the general direction of the transport to much the same effect.
 
Dundradal said:
I'll agree with some points. Armada's combat does feel odd compared to other WC games. Instead of a stationary turret, I always thought of it more as constant AB slides. You always seem to be sliding away from your target.
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Yep. At least with AI-driven ships, the gameplay ain't too strong. It's one big experiment, basically - as if someone wanted to see what would happen if they took to extreme the ship speeds we saw appearing on the Wraith & Jrathek in Academy.

I like Armada for being so very different. It's nice to have a completely different experience in regards to gameplay. But I would utterly hate it if the entire series was like Armada.

As for the review, which I think nails Armada's good and bad sides perfectly, I wonder how Armada would have done if Proving Grounds had been released together with the game, instead of being an add-on (the... first ever free, digital-only add-on?!). Armada's multiplayer ordinarily adds a lot to the game, but... you know, it's still just head-to-head. But Proving Grounds was simply earth-shattering.
 
Mace said:
Sadly it was the only multiplayer installment in WC until Arena.
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No exactly accurate, HCl unlocked WCP's MP potential a number of years back. It's a simple deathmatch, but you get 4-5 pilots together it's pretty fun.
 
No exactly accurate, HCl unlocked WCP's MP potential a number of years back. It's a simple deathmatch, but you get 4-5 pilots together it's pretty fun.
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I believe the 'technically correct' award actually goes to the Gameboy Advance port of Wing Commander Prophecy, which included multiplayer dogfights for up to four people at once.

As for the review, which I think nails Armada's good and bad sides perfectly, I wonder how Armada would have done if Proving Grounds had been released together with the game, instead of being an add-on (the... first ever free, digital-only add-on?!). Armada's multiplayer ordinarily adds a lot to the game, but... you know, it's still just head-to-head. But Proving Grounds was simply earth-shattering.
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Honestly, probably not that much better. The infrastructure just wasn't there. It was a totally different time and people just didn't have personal networks to play Wing Commander Armada on and modem-based matchmaking relied on /knowing another person in your immediate area who had Armada and wanted to play/.

I know what you're thinking: what about DooM? The thing about DooM is that it was an incredibly simple pick-up-and-play game (five keys to play!) that people played at work or at school. It helped sell people on home networking rather than relying on it to move copies in the first place. Wing Commander Armada was a far more complex game that begged for the joystick you had at home and not the keyboard you had at the office. And of course it wasn't Shareware... you couldn't download Armada off a local BBS and install it on eight computers.
 
I have very fond memories of playing Armada on my old 486... but always wondered why anyone would ever use anything but a Banshee in that game. I use to stripmine a planet, make a base and then keep two or three bombers in orbit. Lather, rinse, repeat. One time I boxed a Kilrathi carrier down to three or four planets and had stripmined and starbase'd the rest of the system. Took me the better part of a day but that was fun!
 
Banshees were the rule if you played with the game's auto-combat system (or Gorans for the Cats). If you were flying against a Banshee/Goran, though, you could easily outmaneuver the thing with a lighter fighter. Hammer, hammer, hammer at it until it popped - in matchups between Arrows vs Gorans, with me flying the Arrow, I rarely lost. Main reason why I never liked Armada's auto-combat system; something I tried to rectify in the pnp version of the game I put together a few months back.

My personal favorite from Armada was the Phantom, a fighter that honest to God had no reason to ever be built in the game. It was my favorite precisely because it didn't have the speed of the Arrow, the leech missiles of the Wraith or the heavier armament of the Gladius and Banshee - in other words, it was a challenge to fly and be successful in one of those things.
 
Hey hopefully all this talk of armada will get a few of you to dust off your copies in the near future! :) A proving ground mach of 3-4 would be fantastic.
 
Wing Commander Armada was a far more complex game that begged for the joystick you had at home and not the keyboard you had at the office
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Actually me and some friends just took along our complete systems, with CRT monitors, so the joystick was not that much extra.. Setting up an IPX link was problematic at the time though, so we used null-modem links, but where DOOM(clones), Falcon 3.0, F15-III and others performed great this way, Armada performed very, very sluggish and slow, this on a 80Mhz 486DX2 linked with a 75Mhz Pentium, both machines way beyond Armada's required specs.
 
I really admit I love Wing Commander Armada. I found my favourite spaceship here. The Arrow. Perhaps it was the fastest ship in Wing Commander ever... at least when Armada came out. There might be faster ships later - and I don't mean the Wasp with the booster.

I have to admit I have not been able to play through Wing Commander Armada Gauntlet mode. I had some good runs but on the one or another mission I died. Then playing again from the beginning was very frustrating. I've heard that there was a possibility (a password?) or something like that in a later patch. So you could continue playing where you have died. I own an original Armada CD version at home. I've not played it for quite some time but perhaps I will plug in my old 486 again for it. If you could continue where you've died then this is easier than always starting again from mission 1. The version I had didn't had the password-function and I always started from mission 1.

I have - however played through the Gauntlet mode but I have to admit, that I used a cheat. No normal cheat but I've opened the DATA.TRE file using a hex editor. Then I found the areas, where the guns are listed. I experimented and changed some numbers and saved the file. I opened Armada and it crashed when I fired the guns. I did the same thing again and again until I found the parameters. I then changed the Confederation Guns. They had an refire rate too fast to see. It was just a complete line of fire. I had to change the energy usage too - otherwise the energy would be empty after 0.1 sec ... it was really some fun but it does not count. And it meant I had to kill my Confederation wingmen at once before they shot me accidantly and killed me :p...
This happened approx. 15 years ago and I really don't remember now what I have changed in the DATA.TRE. I'm afraid I didn't make a copy of it because HDD space was expensive. But I remember playing a battle against my friend and flying torwars him. He kept fireing with his normal Kilrathi weapons. Shortly before a collision I fired my turbo laser guns. He was dead immediately and his eyes were like: :eek: :eek:

Those were the good old golden days!

Killing a Goran with an Arrow was one of my favorite tasks. The Khor'lars were even easier due to the short range guns. I played campaign mode on difficult and only produced Arrows except for 1 or two heavy fighters to kill the enemy carrier. I've always loved the Gladius more but it was more difficult to destroy the carrier with a torpedo because of the weaker shields. Sometimes it just didn't work. The Banshee was better here but slow as a snail. Boy I hate slow ships.
The only frustrating part was the fact that even when I attacked 2-3 enemy heavy fighters with 20 Arrows and I didn't die then I lost lots of Arrows. The computer calculated the battle in the background while I was flying.
 
Checking notes......the Lamprey edged out the Armada Arrow by 5 kps according to my notes, which is strange because I could've sworn the Arrow could also do 800. On Afterburners.....the Wasp could do 3000 and the Squid could do 2400, but those are booster figures - I think the Arrow actually had the highest AB speed, edging out the Dralthi-III by 5 kps.
 
capi3101 said:
Checking notes......the Lamprey edged out the Armada Arrow by 5 kps according to my notes, which is strange because I could've sworn the Arrow could also do 800. On Afterburners.....the Wasp could do 3000 and the Squid could do 2400, but those are booster figures - I think the Arrow actually had the highest AB speed, edging out the Dralthi-III by 5 kps.
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It still remains a mystery. I could have sworn, too that the Armada Arrow was able to fly 800 kps. But this always seemed to be an angle problem in Wing Commander. Sometimes - if you had positioned your ship right it was able to reach 5 kps more. I've seen the same "effect" in Privateer were I was able to sometimes geht real 1000 kps out of a Centurion (not Righteous Fire).

The Armada Dralthi was not bad. It was 1 point cheaper 9 vs 10 in strategy mode and it was one of the best ships to kill an Arrow. I always tried to take Confederation but if my friend took it then I used Dralthis to drive him crazy... not to forget the Shok'lar :cool:

The worst ship in Armada by far remains the Kor'larh in my opinion. All in all if you compare the fighters 1 vs 1 then I would say:

Arrow tends to win against Dralthi (Arrow is faster has faster shield reload)
Phantom loses against Shok'lar (Shok'lar has Cloaking Device)
Wraith wins against Jrathek (Wraith has Leech bonus)
Gladius wins against Kor'larh (Gladius has long range Lasers)
Banshee tends to lose against Goran (Goran has Lasers)

Just my opinion...

By the way: Is there a GOG release of Armada planned? Does anybody know this?
 
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