Twilight Imperium: Armada is Fantasy Flight Games' disk-based starship combat game. It makes use of their Twilight Imperium setting, which has also taken shape as a board game and a roleplaying game setting. I have been led to believe that it is similar to the Star Trek Red Alert game, which FFG published while they had a Star Trek license. Not having played Red Alert, I can't comment on any similarities or differences between the rules. Some more information about the game can be found at the
Twilight Imperium: Armada homepage.
As I rather admire FFG's Diskwars game, I was eager to try Twilight Imperium: Armada, and when I saw it on the shelves of a game store I visited recently, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to snatch up several sets. Specifically, I purchased two starter sets (Federation of Sol and Barony of Letnev) and two expansion packs. I would like to point out that, while I labeled this review a Capsule review, I have played several games, I just don't feel that I've explored the game's potential to any real extent as of yet.
Contents:
Following the general pattern established with Diskwars, Twilight Imperium: Armada (which I shall henceforth refer to as TI:A)is sold in the form of starter sets for each faction (of four factions currently released) and generic expansion packs. Each pack contains several 'flats', or cardboard sheets with pre-cut counters which you merely need to punch out to use. The expansion packs contain 4 random flats. Unfortunately, my... partner opened up the starter sets and started punching disks out willy nilly before I could count the contents, but each starter set contains the rules, some utility disks, disks specific to the faction, and some random disks.
The rulebook for TI:A is a fairly slim 32 page volume. While not great quality as rulebooks go, it's a lot more professional than the large fold-out sheets of Diskwars, possibly an indication that FFG is moving onwards and upwards as a company. It's actually more of a 16 page rulebook because the first half is the rules in English, and the second half are the same rules reprinted in German.
The disks are a mixture of computer graphics for the ship disks, and the standard FFG artwork for crew, with icons and backgrounds for the technology. This is where I started to have a few problems with the product.
Problem 1: Aesthetics. I don't dislike computer graphics, in fact I dabble in them as a hobby (I've been known to do ship graphics for the Macintosh game Escape Velocity, by Ambrosia Software). However, I've got some objections to the computer graphics used for artwork here.
Objection 1: Design aesthetics. It is customary in visual sci-fi media for ships of a faction to share a common design aesthetic, which serves to immediately identify the ship as belong to a given group. The best example of this would probably be from Star Trek, where Federation, Klingon, Romulan, and Borg vessels are immediately identifiable as such just from the way they are designed, regardless of class, function, or size. The ships in TI:A don't seem to have much personality. If you put them in a lineup, it would be difficult to assign ships to a faction by appearance.
Objection 2: Graphics Quality. Very simply, the ships of TI:A resemble ships you might see in a computer game. This is not a compliment. While the quality of 3D modelling has improved greatly, ships in games are all built as a balance of visual interest and required computer hardware. In order to reduce the amount of work the computer has to do to render the images during the game, the CGI artists will reduce the polygon counts of their models, resulting in things like hexagonal gun barrels, etc. On the other hand, when doing computer modelling for art, your computer doesn't have to be able to draw the model ninety times a second... you can afford to add detail and render it more slowly. The ships of TI:A are clearly composed of simple polygons, giving them a very artificial, very angular appearance. If this was a design aesthetic for a single race, it might be acceptable, but not for every faction.
Problem 2: Icons. In order to quickly convey information in the small space available on a disk, FFG has reduced many rules to a list of icons. You look at the disk, see the icon, and look it up in a big list. The problem is, the icons are very small, very complex, and figuring out what an icon means can be rather time-consuming. I found this to be a problem in my first games. While I'm sure that it will become less difficult over time, I'm concerned that the icon system could drive away new players.
Rules:
The rules are available as free downloads from the Fantasy Flight Games homepage, but I shall describe them briefly.
The basic setup is pretty logical. You pick a scenario, decide on a point value, and build a fleet using those points. 30 points, the default value for the most basic scenario, will get you one small ship, probably underequipped. A tooled up top-of-the-line ship may cost over 60 points.
For every ship in your army, you need a control panel. This is a semi-circular piece of cardboard, with a small hole in the middle for a ship marker disk. I should note that every ship has two disks... a large disk used on the table that is flattened at the top and bottom, and a smaller circular representative marker piece that is placed in the control panel. The control panel also has a Shield, Hull, and Speed marker, and three Order markers.
Ships themselves have basic characteristics reflecting their hull, shield, beam strength, and torpedo capacity. They may be augmented by purchasing Crew and Technology disks, which provide them with additional abilities. Ships also have three sizes, Small, Medium, and Large, indicated by the size of the ship disk. This affects the movement rate of the ship, with smaller ships moving faster (flipped more often) than large ships.
Once your forces have been set up, you begin by determining initiative. This involves mixing up numbered counters (included with the starter set flats) and having each player draw a counter for each ship they have. Wait for it... the initiative phase doesn't really take off until Command values are determined (below).
Next, each player determines their orders. Each ship can carry out three orders during the game, chosen from Change Speed, Change Heading, Activate Shields, Attack, and Activate Crew. The player determines what orders and in what order they will be performed for each of his ships, and indicates this by placing Order counters face down on his Control Panel.
Finally, you total up Command values for each ship. Command values are determined by adding the Command value of certain crew members. In case of ties, other ways of determining precedence exist. After Command values are determined, going from highest to lowest Command value, the players place their drawn initiative counters on different ships. They can place these counters on either their own vessels, or enemy vessels, allowing a side with a high Command value to control the progress of a turn. After that, ships proceed in initiative order through each of the three order phases.
During each phase, play proceeds in three segments. First, Squadrons are moved. Squadrons are groups of fighters or bombers which may perform their own movements and attacks. Then, ships carry out their orders. Finally, any torpedoes fired during the previous ship order segment are moved. Finishing out a round, boarding actions are fought, then counters are readied for the next turn.
Critique:
The biggest problem I had with the game owed to the fact that I only had two starter sets. With two starter sets, it is only possible to field two ships. If you're playing against another person, that means you only get one ship apiece. I'm afraid that a one-on-one ship duel is virtually unplayable with TI:A. Why? Because of a combination of factors.
First, the command initiative system. In a two-ship game, there are only two possible initiative states: first and last. Unless both ships have the same Command rating, one player is going to be able to determine who moves when, a very powerful advantage.
Second, the shield system. The Change Shields command allows a player to raise or lower his ship shields by any amount, up to the maximum. This is important in the game because a ship's shield status plays a role in teleporting crew members aboard ship for boarding operations. Note that you can either teleport crew aboard enemy ships as a hostile act, or teleport crew aboard friendly ships as reinforcements. However, because the shields are the first line of defense of a ship, it would be possible for a ship to simply assign Change Shields often enough that it never starts to take actual hull damage.
Finally, the Critical Hit system. Helping to speed things up in the game is a critical hit system. Whenever you inflict 3 hits in one attack on shields, or 1 hit in one attack on the hull of an enemy vessel, you have a chance to inflict a critical hit. This is either a 1 in 5 or 2 in 5 chance, depending on whether you are hitting shields or hull. When a critical is inflicted, the damage is really severe. Criticals either completely kill off all command crew, destroy all advanced technology, destroy the beam weapons, destroy shields, or prevent crew members from being activated. Several of these results can effectively end a ship's participation in the game. This makes larger games playable, but for a one-one-one duel to end with a single lucky roll makes for disappointing games.
This is really the most important difference between TI:A and Diskwars. A single Diskwars starter set can easily provide enough disks to field an effective small army, an army which is perfectly playable against other starter set armies. A game of TI:A is not really playable at the same level of investment. You would really need to field at least 2 or better, 3 ships per player in order to have a good game, which is a substantial investment of money. Now, it would be easy to apply some special rules to duels to make them playable, but I don't think you should have to start making rules changes to a game in order to get it to work. FFG should either have suggested their own 'duel' rules in the rulebook, or clearly indicated that the game is not playable with a single starter set each.
Overall, I was disappointed with this game. I was hoping for something that would be as playable and fun as Diskwars with minimal investment. Instead, I got something which may be fun, but only if I invest more than I really want to in it. I still believe it would be fun with around 3 ships per player, but with what I have, it would be difficult to enjoy a game.
My ratings were given with the following thinking:
Style - General quality is good, especially with a real rules booklet, but the important icons were difficult to interpret, and the ship art was kind of blah. Thus, an average rating.
Substance - I think this game could be entertaining with somewhat larger fleets on each side. However, a one-on-one duel would be difficult to enjoy. Also, the game's Star Trek roots are clear to see, with 'beams' and teleportation. It would be possible to adapt the system to other settings, but not without a fair amount of work.
I'm somewhat torn between giving it an Average and a Sparse rating, but I think I'm going to have to go with Sparse, to reflect my general disappointment with the product.
Other thoughts:
Something I found both pleasing and irritating was that, in the disks I have, I actually have a good selection from all four factions, with at least 2 ships from each side, and as many as 5. It would be possible to run a multi-ship game, *if* you were willing to cheat the manufacturers a bit. You could simply make cheap photocopies or scans of the control panel and attendant disks. This would allow you to run several ships without paying the cost of buying whole new starter packs. In fact, I wish I'd thought of doing this before playing my first couple of games.
I believe that as games grow larger, they would grow more complex and less predictable. Among other reasons are the special powers available to many of the Crew disks. Some of these disks, upon activation, allow the ship to carry out several different orders. These can even be chained up. The best example of this among the disks I own is the following: With the Federation of Sol, you can use an Activate Crew order to activate Admiral DeLouis. One of the options available to Admiral DeLouis is to perform a Heading Change and activate another Crew. Admiral DeLouis could activate Captain McGreggor, who could launch an attack and activate another Crew herself. The last Crew in the chain could be Commander Lukas, who can launch an attack and change the ship's speed. In this way, a single ship could perform four different actions in one order phase.
Supposedly, each faction in TI:A has different capacities. So far, I'm not sure what the differences really are. Here's what I've noticed among the disks I have.
Sol Federation seems to have the best Command Crew that I've seen, and fast but low-yield torpedoes. Their ships seem a bit overpriced for their basic performance, though.
The Emirates of Hakan appear to have fairly decent ships and balanced torpedoes.
The Barony of Letnev has the best Squadrons I've seen and slow, but high yield torpedoes.
The Sardakk N'orr have fairly weak Squadrons, but the strongest Boarding Parties.
Other than that, I don't really have a grasp of the faction strengths and weaknesses.
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