Battlefleet Gothic: Armada

Never did get into the first game and gave up on it after about 5 hours. Will watch this one but I’m going to wait and see if it’s all they claim before buying.

Is there a replay camera? That’s all I wanted.

How about a real pause? Although I didn’t find the slo-mo setting bad, and it worked well enough in the first one, I really like to pause and look around. Especially when new to a game.

Being weak, I couldn’t help but pick up the sequel, even though I played very little of the first game. So far, I like it—more of the same, with a little less clunkiness. Ships feel like they move a little slower, and you can set them to autoengage.

Autoengage would usually be a liability, but you can select enemy ships, too, setting a target priority and a subsystem targeting setting for each one, and ships without direct orders will respect those priorities. That’s handy.

Downsides: graphically, the presentation seems a bit muddy, much more so than in the first entry in the series.

You’re in luck. There is a pause this time around, and you can issue orders while it’s active.

Wait, it’s out already?!

Preorder ‘beta’ released yesterday, with the prologue, the skirmish mode, and the first bits of the Imperium and Necron campaigns. Full release is still the 24th.

Oh, gotcha. Thanks!

THAT sounds fantastic. If the AI actually does its damned job, it can really help with avoiding too much micromanaging I reckon. Wonderful.

Yeah, that’s a problem I have nowadays with a lot of RTS kind of games. I don’t want to babysit every action, I want to manager the bigger picture. If I can delegate behavior to certain ships and only manually do things with them when I need to make adjustments, that would be ideal for someone like me. I have no interest in APM-focused gameplay.

How are the mission types this time around? Still has terribly balanced ones?

I haven’t gotten beyond the prologue, but I’ll report back when I do.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten, but the missions have been a lot of fun. According to the campaign trailer, it looks like the meta game will drive the missions, which could be really fun.

Not sure if anyone said for sure if they introduced a replay mechanic ala Warhammer Total War?

So I just finished the prelude campaign. Fantastic stuff. The auto controls for the ships are wonderful. Basically, tell them to command themselves, then give each enemy a priority and a specific target (weapons, deck, generator, etc) and it worked WONDERFULLY. This should really help with micromanaging.

Didn’t see anything about a replay though.

The prologue was fun. Couldn’t quite figure out what the background megastructure was in the space wolves tutorial, it dwarfed the planetkiller and space wolves barge, and the megastructures in fluff tend to be tens of miles across (barge is about 12 miles long iirc) , hundreds in some cases but that looked to be tens of thousands of mile big, nearer the equatorial rings/stations found on forge worlds. I will have to ask my fellow obsessives on one of the forums or Reddit.

So, I’ve been checking videos on Youtube, and also people reviewing the Beta, and it appears the AI can’t quite deal with the new point capture mode. Lots of spreading out the fleets and getting crushed piecemeal by the player’s smaller but closer together fleets.

Any truth to this?

I expect so. I only had that happen on one map in my play-through of what’s available of the Necron campaign, but it was the only time I was facing fairly substantial forces.

I enjoyed what I played quite a bit, though the campaign UI seems to be pretty clunky. For instance, I couldn’t tell if there was an option to shift ships between fleets in the same system or not.

It released today.

I strongly suggest doing the prologue campaign before diving into much. It teaches some of the UI elements while giving a nice lore primer. It is really short and I learned a lot of stuff that I was not really tracking on even after several skirmish matches and tons of steam viewing of the beta.

That was my experience. Really disheartening to see all the cool improvements since the last game, and it all comes to nought because the AI can’t manage the simple task of keeping its ships together.

-Tom