[Retro Review] Battlefleet Gothic: Armada (1 & 2)

This week, I have mostly been playing Battlefleet Gothic: Armada.

Oddly for a gamer of my vintage, I don't really have a history with Battlefleet Gothic. It was there all the way through that golden age that coincidentally aligns with my teenage years. I certainly had my hands in a box at some point. I have no recollection of actually playing it, though, and I suspect I didn't have the patience for void warfare at the time. I've spent the intervening years believing I don't, at least, and as such a Battlefleet Gothic vidjagame might seem like a counter-intuitive choice for me.

But then again...

Thing is, Armada 2 has Necrons in it, and at time of writing costs the hallowed "'bout tree fiddy" in British Pounds Sterling. £3.59, if you must know. I played enough of the Imperial campaign to reassure myself that no, I don't like torpedo-heavy fleets that rely on a game sense I struggled to develop in the course of the tutorial engagement, and then swapped into my beloved "this spaceship is a croissant with a pyramid stuck on top" ancient death robots, and at some point about three days later I surfaced, blinking, and realised I'd been talked around.

It transpires that blipping across the void with inertialess drives, being able to leave my frigates and destroyers as turrets for the most part while I wrangle the larger vessels, and unleashing a wombo combo of Lightning Arcs (Dispersed), Starpulses (Generated) and Scarabs (Swarming) at everything in close range is exactly what I needed to persuade me that space is, in fact, the place. Enthused, I put down another £1.80 to see what the original game had to offer, making this a retro review inside a retro review.

The first Battlefleet Gothic: Armada is, no surprises here, don't hold your breath, set in the Gothic War proper. As the hon. Captain Spire, your routine patrol encounters a massive Chaos fleet en route into the Gothic sector: post Inquisitorial screening, you are promoted to Admiral, given a rapidly-expanding battlegroup of your own to command, and dispatched on a series of missions by the stern Lord Admiral Ravensberg. I haven't gone too deep into this one, but it brings up a nice slice of late-Nineties early-Noughties fluff (the Hand of Darkness and the Eye of Night both get a mention) and seems to preserve many of the scenarios from the tabletop game. The last one I played was a Convoy mission, escorting a trio of unarmed civilian vessels under attack from Ork pirates, and two out of three civvies made it out of the battlespace. It's a kind of victory!

In between deployments, one can return to Port Maw using the helpfully highlighted "Go to Port Maw" button and micro-manage one's fleet, adding additional vessels as one's Renown grows and micromanaging system upgrades and crew training to customise the cruisers further. (I say "cruisers" because no Cobra class destroyer under my command has survived its first deployment.) Naturally, I picked the Gothic class as my first, and that's now Spire's flagship, supported by a brace of Dauntless packing torpedoes and augur probes, and whatever escorts can be squeezed into the fleet engagement points abstraction. My original Dauntless, with its extremely overclocked shield systems, is in reserve should I need a cheaper command vessel at some point.

Some point may take some time arriving, though, because my heart belongs to the second game. Firstly, because it has Necrons in it, and I am not very good at commanding the Imperial fleet. Secondly, because the battles take place in high or low orbit around planets and are much prettier to look at than the fairly bland deep space with some gas clouds in that the first game has offered me. It's enough to overlook the somewhat maddening UX issue of translucent overlaid features that sometimes look exactly like the space-terrain on offer but aren't actually there, leading to a few embarrassing "this time the asteroids are real and the radar readout's an illusion!" incidents in my early engagements. Rest assured that Navigation Officer First Class Rimmer, A. Judas, has been busted back to Technician status for his failure to uphold the dignity of the Emperor's Navy, and has been assigned the blue chair.

There are a few of other things about the second game that madden me, and feel like backsliding in a sequel. In the first, you have an established pool of ships from which you draw your choice at the start of each engagement; in the second, you form squadrons to a points limit, and if more than one squadron is present in a battlespace, what you have to deploy is semi-random, with the bulk of your assets in reserve. (Note that the enemy fleets don't seem to have to put up with this). 

In the second, the breadth of OG scenarios is reduced to Cruiser Clash (generic "line up and shoot") and Domination (arbitrarily placed divots must be controlled for progressive scoring, and believe me when I say these divots be arbitrary). It's a little lacking in variety, and while there are more factions present than there were in the first game, you'll be lucky to encounter more than two of them until you're well into the game. I'm getting a tiny bit sick of Hellebore Light Cruisers now, y'know? 

And for a third point, while I'm kvetching, the structure by which fleets are expanded (as your Renown increases, you become able to requisition vessels of larger classes - full cruiser, battlecruiser, grand cruiser and battleship) was clearly designed with the Imperium and Chaos in mind, and creaks somewhat when you're playing a faction that simply doesn't have that many ship designs available to it. Hand on heart, if it wasn't for a particular skill available to fleet commanders, I wouldn't know or care what's different about the four variants of Scythe class vessel on offer.

The Scourge grand cruiser looks a bit funky, though.

That said, it's held my attention for about a week now. What it sacrifices in variety of missions and depth of customisation (only your fleet commanders have any, and there are only five slots to consider rather than about eighteen per vessel), it gains in breadth of aesthetics and sense of scale. Armada 2 takes us into the Thirteenth Black Crusade, which gives me some extremely pleasant flashbacks to the Eye of Terror global campaign that played out when Battlefleet Gothic was still on the shelves. Fighting over the likes of Scelus and Lelithar again gave me warm glowy sensations in my energy core, and I visibly smiled when arriving in the Skare-uz Sektor to encounter the Green Kroosade again. (Ork players; you had your shit together twenty-plus years ago and you deserved the W there, well played lads.)

Unlike the first game, where we were taking our mission deployment orders straight from high command, this one has a lot more openness: the missions still come down from on high, or are suggested by your advisor (mine is a somewhat deadpan Cryptek who's possibly the only one of the dynasty with their head screwed on), but you pursue them in an order and along a strategic route of your choosing. Conflict occurs across multiple sectors at once, and you'll be managing multiple battlegroups while upgrading key systems and installing planetary defences to keep your logistical base intact. Pursuing an objective means cracking open a new sector and working out the best route to your target system, while the other factions pursue their own agendas of squabbling with each other, and external invasion forces are forecast for a few turns ahead. It's a much more satisfying strategic experience and I'm more than happy to give up some RPG elements to make that happen.

Due to a non-responsive Steam screenshot function (that Linux compatibility daemon again),
visual handholds for the hard of reading and "pics for interest" have been jacked from Lexicanum.
I'll replace them if I can.

It is, as yer man says, a game of two halves. The first Armada has a tighter story, broader mission variety, deeper ship-level customisation, and a marginally more intuitive UI, but if you're not into the Imperial fleet or that one font that I last saw all over Rites of War in 1999 it has less to offer. The second broadens its focus and lets you get your hands on more factions, has a much deeper and lovelier aesthetic when you're actually fighting the space battles, and is more open to player decisions on the strategic level, but it's a bit fussier to play, and the decision to keep Chaos as a DLC pack is personally quite irritating, since I think I'd like them more than the Imperial variety show.

I'm still going to buy it, mind. The whole package comes for comfortably under a tenner. I'll probably be skipping the Tau and Space Marine packs for the original game, but those are certainly also things that exist.

Both games, and their DLC packs, are on Steam sale until yer actual third of February.