Oooh, that looks worth investigating! Thanks for the heads up MV2000.

Oh damn, that looks so sweet ! Thanks MV !

Hi all. I was introduced to this mod a week ago and, Star Trek gaming nut that I am, have been playing it pretty much non-stop since!

i think I've played enough now to give a few impressions. Before I explain my thoughts, though, a little history...

Armada 3 is, of course, the mod-maker's vision of what this legendary game series would look like had it not been cruelly abandoned in (deep breaths, everybody...!) 2001. Armada's 1 & 2 were What's not so well-known is that the modding community have been modding the absolute heck out of Armada's 1 & 2 ever since those glory days. One of my favourite projects is Fleet Operations, a mod for Armada 2. Fleetops (as it likes to be known) did some amazing things, most notably updating the graphical fidelity of the game to a more modern standard. Fleetops is still in development, although starting look a touch aged and is straining so much against the confines of the original game's code that development is actually moving to building a stand-alone version of the mod in a new engine.

(ironic sidenote: Because of technological progress, Fleetops is now one of the only ways you can actually play vanilla (un-modded) Armada 2 on modern OSes in all its over-lit, low-poly, Patrick Stewart-voiced glory! Hurrah for modders!)

Armada 3 for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion (SoaSE:R) neatly side-steps both issues by adapting SoaSE's already formidably close gaming similarities - RTS with research options, planetary involvement, etc - to the Star Trek Universe, gaining all of Sins' improvements in the process (more on those in a moment). Armada 3 adheres very closely to Armada's 1 & 2 for models, ships, music and anything else that could be considered 'Armada'. For someone who has been playing Fleetops for many years now, playing Armada 3 is astonishingly familiar! Star Trek: Armada 3: exactly what it says on the box!

if you haven't played SoaSE:R, all you really have to know is it's an Real-Time Strategy that is very good at depicting large battles between different sizes and classes of warship. It also allows for very large maps, with dozens or even hundreds of worlds on offer for your voracious fleets to find and exploit/develop. Star Trek, therefore, drops into this environment as if Sins had been made specifically for the franchise. All race fleets have small scout ships zipping around, with cruisers and smaller frigates comprising the bulk of your fleets. Powerful capital ships can be built with several researchable combat or support abilities, and at the very top of the tree are the Titans - huge and terrifying weapons of destruction. My favourite has to the the inclusion of the Shinzon's monstrosity from Nemesis; the monster has the capability of scouring a planet clean of life with one shot, and the wings even animate correctly as they open to fire!

Armada 3 is stunningly attractive at times (just make sure you've got the effects turned up, bloom in particular!). Borg cubes glisten with green lights as their cutting beams slash at their prey. Federation ships look almost as real as on TV - the mod makers have even captured that great effect where the phaser strips charge from both ends before meeting in the middle to fire the beam - simply amazing to watch on a PC.

The fit is so good, and the visuals so visceral, that it makes it a pity when the mod's rough edges show, however. Several of the research options in diplomacy don't work, there are placeholder icons all over the place, combat A.I can be a bit dumb at times (although the strategic AI is fairly robust!) - ships tend to march directly at each other, stop, then clumsily turn away to repeat the tactic...but then this is only v1.0, with a huge new expansion on the way that will deliver the Cardassian/Dominion Union as a fifth playable race!

I've had terrific fun with this mod so far. While it restricts itself to 95% fleet combat, with a thin veneer of diplomacy available (if currently broken), I'd urge anyone interested in Star Trek to download this IMMEDIATELY!

Those screenshots are insanely beautiful! I know what I'll be doing when I have time to kill!

I need to buy the latest SotSE, haven't purchased any of these yet. But this mod looks really good, and being a huge ST fan helps too.  I loved playing the first Star Trek Armada game but they were not that great after the first one personally. Steam sales coming up soon so maybe I can pickup SotSE pretty cheap.

off-topic:

Those screenshots are insanely beautiful! I know what I'll be doing when I have time to kill!

Ummm MawhrinSkel your supposed to be coding no playtime for you <whip crack> hahaha 😀

Just thinking about the Star Trek mods that could be created in Shallow Space....

 

off-topic:

Ummm MawhrinSkel your supposed to be coding no playtime for you <whip crack> hahaha 😀

 

 

Just thinking about the Star Trek mods that could be created in Shallow Space....

Aha I'm coding, I'm coding jeeeeez 😛

Yeah I know it get's me excited also - I need to dig out a couple of cannon ST models and make a mock-up battle, shouldn't be too hard actually and I get the feeling it would claw in a royal metric ton of attention.

I had the Defiant in there a while ago when I was tweaking the banking and turns of the ships; I'm not going to lie it was erection material.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/star-trek-armada-3/news/star-trek-armada-3-four-days

Almost there.

It's out fellas, the full version

http://www.moddb.com/mods/star-trek-armada-3/downloads/sta3-a-call-to-arms-installer-version