Armada 2526 Gold Edition

It's old but it's alright.

Don't let the hours fool you. I had to use compatibility shortcut so playtime doesn't reflect. It's probably hundreds of hours, including playing from years ago back in the day.

This 4X game is a bit of an acquired taste. At glance, it looks "MOO2"-like but doesn't "feel" like that or other 4X conquer-the-galaxy games. It looks/feels clunky at times, like sort of mish-mashed together, like it was put through heck just to get it to work. Overall, the game has serious fun to be had, and with serious flaws that requiring sucking it up to accept.

For starters, most of the screenshots show all sorts of "3D" ships, stations, ground forces battling. It's not even like that or that type of game. This is no Sins of a Solar Empire or Sword of the Stars, not even close! Rather, this is much closer the type of 4X like MOO2 (Master of Orion 2, for the uninitiated), Interstellar Genesis, or Stars in Shadow are. You'll spend 95% of the gameplay on the 2D map of space. I think there is only 1 screenshot that really shows that.

Now while you have the traditional 4X galactic map, you don't see your "ships" on them. Rather, you see a side-ways "Dorito" type icon that represents you have a ship or ships at a system. You click on the system, go to the Fleet tab, to see the ships you have and a picture of them, and how many of each type. Click on the destination system, then select which ships/count of, you wish to send. Easy.

From there, another "Dorito" will spawn, with a pathway laid out with dots marking how far it will go each turn, then starts flying through space with a vapor trail behind it, each turn. When it gets there, it spends about a turn "slowing down" just to enter orbit. But easy.

Interaction with the rest of the map is unconventional in that you can't just click on a system to "see what's in it". Rather, you hover your mouse over it and a small screen pops-up with text and some animation showing information, like its Habitability rating, does it have an asteroid belt, or Oort cloud, what star type, any unique features. Even flying to this has no such screen. Baffling. But if you colonize or build something there, then it will show a screen with more graphics and information, like how many plots there are to build structures on (similar to Galactic Civilizations I but far less eye-candy). Most of the system are not whole solar systems but just 1 planet. Kind of disappointing.

Managing building structures I found quite easy and addicting. As your colony grows, the options open up to build more things. If something is ready to upgrade, it has a blue arrow pointing up. Cool! Click on it. You'll find yourself cycling through your planets looking for new things to "upgrade" and then "upgrade even more!". Something about the design works really well, it's like one of those games that throws rewards at you. If you don't want to bother with any of that though, you can set it to "Auto-Manage" and forget about it.

A few cool things are you can ZOOM IN/OUT though. So if you want a closer look, just zoom in. Your mouse cursor acts like a magnifying class, and you'll notice comets, asteroids, or ships flying around (you'll realize it's not a "Dorito" but just a generic 2D craft as an 'icon', not your actual ship(s) ), you can opt to say zoomed out and a the pop-up will show a "zoomed in" version with the star system fully animated and full of activity. Nice touch.

One might be concerned about lag for all that popping-up but it's extremely fast, no waiting, it seems hard-coded to be that way so no lag or anything. It's super-instant. There's lots of sound FX bleeping/blooping.

The space map can be HUUUGE with the ability to exceed the largest size of 250x250. It's massive. You'll think "could this be larger than the actual Milky Way?". Just hundreds of stars. I played this game probably hundreds of hours before getting the Steam version (using Win7 compatibility). I had a massive galactic empire with hundreds of ships, several dozens of worlds, and still barely dented exploring the galaxy. The galaxy is full of various anomalies, wormholes, unique places some you can build and receive bonuses at. For example, if you settle a planet around a Neutron Star you can build powerful "Neutronium" warships.

There's a wide array of ships. They're not customizable though. Still, there's everything from explorers, destroyers, carriers, speciality ships, missile cruisers, plague ships, planet bombarders, arks, and world destroyers, all of different types too. They're pretty wild. The "Mother Ark" is like your "Homeworld" type mothership, that acts as it's own travelling colony, like a mobile base extending your fleet range, and able to colonizing any planet without being "used up" doing so. The "X Brain" is a ship built around a large brain that protects your ships from psychic attack. The "Roid Roller" rolls asteroids into planets. The "Plaguewinger" launches plagues and poisons at a planet. It goes on.

Combat has an auto-resolve or you can opt to have it play out in a 3D "scene". It's similar to Galactic Civilizations 2 where there is minimum input from the player (more than GalCiv 2 at least), and then everything just flies at each other blasting away. It's brainless. Notably, it's laggy too. The graphics are too "over-baked". For example, some ships have a "metallic sheen" or "reflective" graphics but it's extreme to the point it looks bad and runs bad. It's just brainless chaos, makes no sense, takes too long to load, too long to play out, too laggy, janky.

You'll reach a point where it's too much of a pain to deal with trying to manage what everything is doing, or trying to do, and just start using auto-resolve from the 2D map.
Separately, the game has a "skirimish" mode just for creating 3D battles.

Tons of tech to research, but flawed. While the different sectors of tech reminds me of Birth of the Federation 4X game, where you can research different things simultaneously and allocate resources, similarly, it takes FOREVER to research anything. The game can be played with drop-down seleting limited number of turns which I think the drop-down max is 250 or some laughably small amount (minimum is 10 lol) but you can make it whatever. I play with 99999 turns cap.

The game has a broken economy, copying from bad 4X games, where the economy seems set to a "negative income" rate by default. There's almost nothing for you to adjust to control spending. You basically have to stay on your planet and never build anything. lol! Huge flaw in my opinion. Building 1 ship will bankrupt your measly fledgling empire. You really have to be in for "the long haul" or just use the in-game console codes to "add money" (look it up)...

This is how it should be: you make money. As your empire grows, your wealth grows, allowing you to build more and increase that wealth. Expanding means growing your population that pays taxes that cover expenses. Who says the cost of growth would outweigh the income? Given in a sci-fi setting where technologies are intended to "improve" QoL, being leveraged to create more efficient materials, miracle ones, and all that, QoL should constantly be improving without imaginary costs applied keeping ppl down in a 20th or 21st Century mindset.

MOO2 did a great job in that as your empire grew and became more advanced, so did your wealth also grow - to where you were raking in so much gold, you could stop worry about it. Armada 2526 and some other 4X games, seem to think a "Type I" or "Type II" on the Kardashev scale, would be mired in 19th Century robber-baron or rampant early 20th Century economics where "The Great Depression" never ended.

Starting a new game you pick your race, I like how there's different "versions" of each, lots of alien races, diplomacy, and animations. Befriend them, trade, negotiate, or wipe them out. Your call. And listen to a decent soundtrack while doing so, with some songs very soundrack-y to Enigma-like mellow at times.

For space buffs and 4x game lovers, this one is a hidden gem. An older game that never really made it big, which is too bad. I keep a copy of this on my older systems and laptops as well because I can play it out and about without stressing the machine at all. One of those games you just have to have and play.

This game's awfully bad. It crashes because it runs out of memory, the font is super small and can't be adjusted (neither can the resolution). The game doesn't explain anything, so if you can't place spies or whatever, you're left guessing why. The user interface is very odd and unintuitive and somewhat frustrating.
According to the Steam store this was released in 2013, but it is missing features I've seen in Stars (90s), Civ 4+ (00's). I think if someone made a unity version with a proper user interface it could become a decent release, but as it is, can't recommend it even at 3€

Great 4X game.It looks ugly but it sure plays well.

We need 2527.These gameplay concepts with better visuals.

I've played a lot of 4X Space games over the years, and Armada 2526 is still one of my favorites. I even ended up purchasing it a second time on Steam when I couldn't find my original copy. $/hour it has been well worth the price and I'm happy to support the developers for bringing us games like this.

- General:
A typical game of 200 turns can be completed in an evening. This gives it accessibility and the ability to be played casually if desired.
Tech:
- The tech tree is deep and lets you specialize. Its really hard to get everything, especially in a 200 turn game so your specializations matter and need to support your race.

Combat:
- Auto combat does a decent job and works for many fights.
- It is very hard to control everything in a large fight, but in some ways that is more realistic than having infinite control over combat.
- You have to be careful with certain units and against certain units. Timing can be critical, and sending your ground forces in unsupported can be devastating.
- Depending on the units/tech you have combat can have a lot of significant choices, thought there is not a lot of diversity to combat due to race.
- Some combats get a long, and I wish there was a way to auto-resolve mid fight. The Fast forward and end combat buttons in combat are not great and make you wait way to long for resolution.
- Some techs are really hard to fight (Sun Beams) forcing you to completely change tactics or give up attacking a specific planet all together.

Races:
- The races play differently. The win conditions of races are often very diverse, and mastering those differences is key. Some differences are subtle. Own race population vs total population translates to wipe out the planet and start over vs conquer.
- Some races make you search the galaxy different planet types from everyone else lending to more diplomatic games. While others aggressively and take the fight to the enemy from almost the beginning of the game.
- There is even a pirate race that is spot on. You can’t dig in and play them like any other race, but try swiftly conquering planets and selling them back to the highest bidder and you are on your way to victory.
- Dealing with races opposed to you also adds variation to the game. Some races spread like crazy and need to be attacked before they gain too much reach. And sometimes the best way to out-score a race is not to fight them at all, but to make friends with them and sell them tech.

Sorry for the long review, this is a great game with a lot of depth, that plays in an evening. Highly recommended!

This is a great light game. Fun to play. Set it on Sparse, 7 opponents, 40 x 40 grid and you can play a game in just over an hour. This is great game if you have a little time to kill. I also like to play it while listening to an audible Book.

Only five hours in, but I am enjoying the learning curve, which is something, it doesn't take much of a game to overwhelm me.
I have started a few game on easy, with only one alien race, so there are a lot of parts of the game I haven't touched yet, but the learning is the point of this review, and I find it very smooth.
There are a lot of ways to sort information, and pluck out what you want to know. Not perfect, of course, but darn good.
I have read that the economy gets very tough around turn 100, so I am focusing on fighting that.
But my goal was to find a simple space exploration game that I found approachable, and I think this one is. It's not for the Leets looking for the most sophisticated game out there, but for anyone like me, looking for a a near entry level 4X game, I think this is the one for you.

4X Depends on whether you are playing solo or against other human players!!!!

Solo- not very challenging Multiplayer very interesting

Further analysis:
Solo - this is a "builder" / "researcher" game not a fighter game. The AI is very passive and tends to just
build Enormous defensive forces which are challenging to overwhelm in late game. But "winning" depends more on accumulating "racial specific" points rather than killing off the AI opponents (which is not even necessary unless you want to make that an absolute "winning" requirement).

So, even though the game comes with the usual varying standard races the variation in actual "winning" requirements does not vary that much--with one notable exception The Unn Pirates which are a non colonizing space living civilization= worthy of challenging the most experienced 4x player.

Multiplayer- truth in lending moment- I play solo- but it is evident that with a reasonably large universe and with different races having different strengths a multiplayer game can be "tactically" on a grand strategic scale= do I defend? do I attack? do I make multiplayer alliances? does my opponent have PSI powers?

PS For you 4X old timers (I am 73), I would not call this Armada 2526 Gold. I played and enjoyed Armada 2525 back in the day but that game was more simplistic to the extent that this game simply reflects, somewhat, an update to the usual 4X fare. I see no particular Armada in this version.

PPS Be aware that there are really 17 races not just the "12". I mention this because the extra 5 are the more interesting to play.

Warning: This game comes with an annoying "adviser" who desperately wants to advise you even on the custom games. Why the developers did not turn off the adviser after the tutorial is beyond me, but as best I can tell the only way to get rid of this XX#EE# adviser is to go into the game files and delete that folder.

I've played this game since 2009 when it was released by Matrix. I really love the space map as it's easy to navigate, great to look at and shows everything you need to know. One of the biggest difference to other 4x games is that each race has it's own goals. So it's not so much about conquer everyone but to achieve your own objectives (happiness etc.). The game is really complete with very different races to play with. While the combat could still be better, i really like it because you can lead many ships as well as ground troops on a single screen. This game is a classic and any 4x player should have it in it's Library.

Some special key aspects:

- This game works great on Windows tablets (surface etc) without any touchpad or mouse. Perfect to play it on the go (train etc.)
- The game scales really well on any screen sizes i've played it on.
- Multiplayer by pbem is easy and great.

This game is much better than I expected. Having played a lot of hours of it I continue to be impressed by the gameplay. I've played a lot of 4X games and although many of them have some excellent features they tend to be a massive grind. I've found that to be a problem, mid-game they become less space! and more spreadsheet. I'm impressed by this game because it has a strong strategic component, it is very well designed and a lot of fun.
Pros. Gameplay is much better than I expected. Movement is unusual but excellent and the simple but effective flight range mechanic turns this into a proper strategy game. It has sufficient 4X meat on its bones to stay interesting. The alien species are numerous and sufficiently different to give replayability. There is actual strategy in this game compared to many more recent 4X games which can be simply economy sims or CIV inspired. This game loads and processes action extremely quickly on a modern PC. This is also cheap which makes it a low cost to try.
Cons. This is an old game. Graphics are not what you would get in a 2016 release. There is no vessel design system (ship classes and upgrades only). It lacks the bells and whistles of a modern release.
This is very much of the vintage of the original "Masters of Orion" but it is also a bit of a lost classic in the 4X genre. It is rare for me to find a 4x game that is better than I expected, this one is definitely better IMHO than many much more expensive alternatives. Try it!

For those times when you want to just play, not think or plan too much. Galactic Civilization (1&2) is the best 4X space I have seen so far, then Space Empire V then Armada 2526. I can envision playing Armada before Gal Civ when I don't feel like committing too much time. It is challenging because opponents advance fast and pile on, just have to be aggressive.

A good stratagy game with staightforword diplomacy, economy and, plantary mangement.
I have logged about 30+ hours and see no reason not to play. Game has a good variety of races and is pretty well made overall. Pretty easy to learn and for the sale price I completely enjoyed my purchase.
The major dowmside is if you leave the game via alt tab or other form of minimizing you haved to restart the game but the games autosaves after every turn minimize the impavct of this.

I played the game here and then I purchaed the gold edition on Gamer's Gate before it was available on Steam. The game is fun to play and moddable. However once you hit turn 200 or colonize 20 planets (this is RAM dependent I found out(16gb, at 32gb you can colonize upto 30-50 planets maybe)) the game has a dramatic slow down in game play. At this point you'll mostly be waiting on the Resource or Population Manager, often times 20 mins plus for your turn to come up. At turn 200, I was just getting into the game and having fun. So I checked if there was a fix for this. No fix. Per the developers, the game is not designed to be played for long periods or for you to colonize every planet in sight. I usually won the game after 30-45 minutes of game play, often winning before I ever met another race, having gotten bored with that, I modded the victory conditions for more time. What's the point of having a universe with hundreds of planets, but if you colonize more then 20 planets, the game becomes unplayable with long periods (many minutes waiting on the AI to complete processing your turn) between turns. Eventually you'll get tired of waiting and hit crl+alt+del, kill the game and go play something else.

The other thing is that diplomacy is a joke. The ai will attack you, make peace, agree not to attack you for 20 turns, 5 turns later will attack you again, make peace, make you an ally, attack someone else, you'll attack the enemy of your ally, they'll make peace, you won't even know they made peace, etc. Or you can attack another race, make peace, attack them again, make peace, etc. If a planet has too amny defesnses, buy the planet, the ai will sell any planet they have except their home base. Hey, there's an invasion fleet at your planet, just buy their ships if you have the cash.

If you manage to wipe out a race, they'll become friendly and start asking you for tech, even though they don't have any ships or planets and you've completely wiped them out.

I've never been able to get thru all the techs in the game, just takes to long to research them and playing with the default game without modding, you'll just barely scratch the surface. Once you've researched every tech in a particular catagory, it would have been nice to get a messages about it, but you don't so you have to keep checking and then remember to go thru every planet and delete that type of research facility. I have noticed from conquered planets that the ai does not have the same limitations as you do when it comes to building research facilities. So the top tier reseach facility, you can only build 1 for your empire, where as the ai can build 4 per planet. And on top of that, the ai will always be willing to sell you any tech that you don't have and they've researched.

There really isn't much difference between the standard game and the gold edition. This game stil lhas all the bugs it did in the original, all they did was add about 2 buildings as far as I can tell.

When I bought the gold version on Steam, I was hoping that the bugs and gameplay had been fixed, but I came to find out nothing has changed. Luckly i got it for around $4 so it's no that big of a loss, definitively not worth $20.

So all in all the game is fun in the beginning, is moddable, but has too many issues to keep you inteserested for any length of time.

Update:
I'd like to note that most of my playtime is watching TV and waiting for my turn

7/23/2016 Update: Still works on windows 10.
7/26/2018: 2 years later I install it, get to turn 350, it hangs on Population Manager, I quit and delete it.

Armada 2526, is a fairly old game. There's alot of the UI where that shows, such as ending turns in multiplayer games, ending your turn completely and being unable to act.

Unit diversity could be a touch better as well in early game.

That all aside, the game is deep...shockingly deep. There is a whole lot to fiddle with, and experiment here, from varying techs, planet and star system setups, even setting up migrations of population from one star system to another. Somewhere in the 50th turn I realized I was completely hooked, and my fledling 9 world empire (this is TINY compared to the total number of stars available, even in a "medium" sized map.) was just now barley starting to come out of the red and into the black.

The sheer distance between stars, also makes you feel the sheer vastness of your empire, even when you have 9 inhabited systems (you end up with far far far more) it takes a very long time to get to your new planets. In early game, when your colonizable planets are far flung, you are gambling. it's inevitable really. Do you go so far out that reinforcements will be a LONG time in coming? Or do you take the risk for higher inhabited worlds to come up quicker, and be self sufficient before another empire decides to take them?

There is depth in a great many facets of the game on initial impression, and the sheer scale involved is daunting. Highly recommend, especially as this game is more often than not onsale, 50 to 75 percent off.

it is fun, if your into that kinda thing fun, my only real problem was the ai loading inbetween turns can take up to 20mins on the biggest galaxy setting with 9 races, maybe its my computer, idk. ill always come back for more but its really annoying when i got a thought out plan on what to do on my next turn only to forget what i was going to do due to the fact the turns take forever with pop up messages with deals that are of no use to me anyhow, which then causes me to get annoyed and annihalate a single race due to the fact the game designers made them that way i would say a must play if you loved gal civ but hated the fleet restrictions. great setup but you can win with missle cruisers, fleet carriers and roid rollers. all the other ships have their uses but if a massive wave of missles wipe everything they have and fighters go into mop it up becomes repetitive, ill be back for more but the game designers might want to considers some changes next time.

I bought this game when it was for sale, so I spent around five bucks, and at first I hated it. I believed it to be an absolute bore.

However with some time and imagination, I loved it and found myself playing it quite frequently.

I really wish I could recommend this game. Most of the reviews I've read aren't even aware that this is an unpdate of a game so old is pre-dates MOO and MOO2. So to compare this with the MOO games isn't really fair, since it's just as likely MOO took ideas from the old Armada 2525.

There are some great features to the game. In particular, the events notifications after each turn allows itself to be used as a sort of checklist when resolving issues, in a way that not even the new Civ games do. However, there are several tedious features. Moving population around planets is necessary, and it just takes a little too long to issue each transport command. The issues are minor, such as having to move the mouse far across the screen, instead of having common commands set right next to each other. So it isn't awful, just a little tiring to me after some hours of play.

Alien races keep spamming me with requests and deal offers, and there is no way to stop them. Unfortunately, most of the offers just aren't that important. I finally declared war on one race to stop their nagging, which reduced communications to a series of offers for peace. The aliens will also sometimes park on your planets, doing no harm, but causing the game to prompt you to declare war every single turn, which also gets tedious.

This is basically a good, relatively simple sci fi 4x game that probably has some good strategy. But the polish isn't there, for me. The pace of play tends to tire me rather than energize me. So I recommend avoiding it, although it might be enjoyable if you are really interested in 4x sci fi games, of which there are not enough.

I have only played the Gold edition. Based on the new features list, I would avoid the regular edition and only buy the gold, if you do buy it. It adds quite a lot.

Update: Okay, I changed my mind. But with some caveats. The game is funny, quirky, and easy to mod. If you like exploring a game to see what makes it tick, and if you don't take it too seriously, this might be a good buy. The problems I mentioned lessen as the game progresses, and there are many ways to win. Myself, I have made small changes to the random planet generation to reduce the number of useless planets. It appears to have been made by one person, which I find quite admirable. It isn't really polished, but it has a good heart.

It is enjoyable but not a great replacement for Games like Masters Of Orion or Galactic Civilizations. Those are much better games than this.

I have owned this game for over two years and i bought two seperate editions for each computer when (if i remember correctly) i bought the basic Armada 2526 and the expansion Supernova at $20 a pop. Twice, once for each computer. So now i have bought it on Steam and i have laid out $100.


Now i can play it on either computer without porting problems.

The game is by far more interesting to me as my years of playing it go on.

Yes, it needs some creative tinkering to make it an even better game in forms of management. I would love to be able to find just the planets that have reserch staions that have become obsolete so i can both remove them and replace them without going through hundreds of planets,

But if you like broad expansive strategy as well as figuring out how to make an economy work I think you will like this "game of chess with few limits."

Its a wonderful strategy game! Witha plethora of starships to choose from Armada2526 GE allows for limitless in battle strategies. While at the same time allowing for dictator like control over all that goes on in your empire. If for one reason or another micromanaging becomes a pain, several features allow you to hand different aspects of control to the AI. Alothough there are only 18 different alien races, there are several other factions with differnt perks than the main branch of that race. The map designer enpowers you to create just about any galaxy you heart desires and choose the riches at each planet. The only down falls to this game may be that the game can become a little monotonous after 200 turns if you don't set new goals for your-self and time between turns can be long if you are playing with a lot of races. Above all the game provides a wide variety of stratagies to conqur the galaxy.