Battlefleet Gothic: Armada

[Dog Pants]

Why does every naval game have to have the word Armada in in these days? Anyway, I bought this the other day and here are my first impressions.

I wasn't convinced at first.

It looks quite DoWII in the main strategic screen, and kind of plays that way too. Skipping about between threatened or conquered systems and fighting mostly randomised battles against the four included races. Initially it's quite story driven, and I failed a lot. That second bit came down to my handling of the tactical game though.

The tactical battles feel quite nice to handle, with a space-to-pause function that merely slows the game down. I didn't use this much at first because there didn't seem to be much need for it. I was also struggling to win battles, probably losing two out of three. If there seems to be an obvious causation there it's because there is, but it's not quite so obvious to a new player.

This comes down to the special abilities and relative tactics of the races. At first I was right-click-attacking enemy ships, focus firing until one died and staying at my optimum range. Wait for it to die, repeat. This is wrong.

Now I'm enjoying it a lot more.

The strategic layer has opened up more. It's still not Crusader Kings (nor would it benefit from being), but it gives you the vaguest of incentives to choose your missions. Some worlds lost will cost you a percentage of your currency after a battle, while others will cost you additional time or resources to repair. These are only single figures, but as you can probably imagine it adds up. Also the different races become more aggressive as they capture more planets, so there's an element of whack-a-mole to stopping any one of them getting too uppety.

Inside the strategic layer is a little persistence. You can spend your currency on your ships and crew when they level up, giving them abilities, skills and bonuses. These are tangible, although some more than others, and will influence how that ship is used in battle. There's also a direct link between some strategic choices and another buff type - assisting one of the four internal factions (Navy, Inquisition, Space Marines, Mechanicus) will give you rep with them, which unlocks useful faction bonuses.

The tactical game is much more complex than I initially suspected. All those little abilities come in useful, unlike most games. Imperial ships are particularly reliant on them to shift their game in response to the enemy - my mistake was to try to play my own game, when Imperial should be exploiting the enemy weakness. So my range-focused fleet worked great against Orks, who unsurprisingly like to get up close and brawl, but I was getting hammered every battle by the powerful long-ranged Chaos ships. Now I've realised this I'm winning much more.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHgu_fBlSjk[/youtube]
Incidentally, they got Orks spot on.

That slow-down becomes essential then, when you start micromanaging your ships. And that's what this game is about. That slow function seems almost to be a pause at first, but once you start trying to coordinate three or four ships to skill-shot torpedoes at once in order to overwhelm an enemy's defence turrets it seems a lot quicker. Monitoring two separate engagements to spot bombs winding up so you can boost your ships out of the way, or manoeuvring to cut off fleeing Eldar and Chaos before they get to their happy range. I think it was merely a design decision that the normal mode wasn't put in as a 2x speed button so that people didn't feel reluctant to use it.

Thrown into those delicate battles are objectives which are nicely varied. I particularly like Intelligence missions, in which you have to board enemy ships (a useful tactic to cause critical hits on systems anyway) and steal data. It can turn into a game of tag as it gets boarded back and forth, and the AI loves to do it with a ship that's just about to jump to warp, leaving you scrambling to steal it back with seconds before it fucks off.

So yeah, it's a little bit of an acquired taste, but it's pretty good. Kind of like those square cheese snacks you get in tubs at Christmas. A bit bland at first, but before long you can't stop eating them and you end up with an empty tub and cheese all over your face.