Star Trek Fleet Operations

[Lavonda Busing]

StarTrek Armada II: Fleet Operations is a popular fan-made multiplayer-oriented total conversion modification for Star Trek Armada II. It includes polished graphics and deeper focus on the Star Trek movie athmosphere. It also contains gameplay changes recreating the predecessor game Star Trek Armada where it seemed appropriate: The warp-drive feature is removed to avoid arcade-style hit-and-run tactics and only two dimensions are used for ships and buildings. There is also a bigger focus on individual techtrees and building smaller specialized fleets to make multiplayer matches more challenging.

Fleet Operations also has an online guide which is designed to explain as much as possible about the unique universe in which Fleet Operations' storyline takes place, the gameplay of Fleet Ops, how to get online in the first place, how to make maps, and how to mod this total conversion.

In the past few years, Fleet Operations has strived to improve the capabilities of the Armada II engine to better mesh with new technologies for use in online gaming as well as modifications. With the introduction of Vista, it was no longer possible for many people to play online and it was difficult to even run Armada II on the new operating system. Release of several unofficial patches corrected these issues. Recently, the 2.0 GB RAM limit of 32-bit applications has been broken, allowing an enhanced Armada II engine to use up to 3.0 GB of RAM. Improvements to the engine have also resulted in increased compatibility with WINE. The integration of a new sound engine - FMOD Ex - has allowed an enhanced Armada II to bypass many issues related to sound cutoff, limited numbers of sounds playing at once, sound quality, and the previous lack of support for OGG and MP3. Recent years have also seen the D3D8 render rebuilt to compensate for software rendering (already outdated upon release of Armada II), and in the future there will be support for D3D9. An enhanced Armada II shows more efficient RAM usage and can handle higher polygon game objects due to streamlined coding.

Improvements have also extended the longevity of the gaming community. Although the online channels at GameSpy are still active for Armada II, the age of the service has led to increased connection problems, where players can't join or host games, despite all firewall and router settings being set up correctly. As a consequence, Tunngle, a new peer to peer VPN client, has been integrated into an enhanced Armada II engine to allow people to meet in a lobby based chat and start games over the internet much more easily. There has also been ongoing support in regard to removing exploits and bugs which have been around since the release of Armada II.

Fleet Operations is a popular skirmish and multiplayer orientated total conversion modification for Activision's real-time strategy game Star Trek Armada II. The project's goal was not only to create a simple "modification" but as total conversion to make Armada II a worthy successor to the second best selling Star Trek game Star Trek: Armada (behind Interplay's Star Trek: 25th Anniversary by a small, but fair margin).

The first public version of Fleet Operations was released in 2003. Today, version 3 includes a whole new user interface, an updated game and graphics engine, completely replaced ship models, 5 balanced races with totally new gameplay and tons of new possibilities making Armada II a real real-time strategy multiplayer game.

T his patch - most importantly - fixes the frequent, frustrating multiplayer out of sync (OOS) problems, some of which that have been present since the first 3.0.0 release. These issues made playing cooperative AI games online nearly impossible without resulting in a desync and eliminated the possibility to use wormhole-rich multiplayer maps.

We would like to thank everybody profusely who was involved in those long and tedious (but fruitful!) hours of out of sync testing.

The multiplayer Tunngle integration is also fixed, allowing you to immediately jump into the correct Fleet Operations lobby to play online games!

Although this is not the long awaited next version - rest assured, 4.0 is still well on track. These bug fixes are a direct result of work on our next version.

I cannot get this to work. Ive downloaded multiple online versions of Armada 2 as my original copy died a long time ago but nothing works. Even installing an apparent No Cd patch stops the game from even starting. When i loaded an apparent proper version of armada 2 and load fleet ops it wont play as "You need you own CD"

I doubt we will ever see this nx game they are making. I really like this mod but only a few maps are even fun to play on, resources are too scarce or far between in most of them if you want 4 players or more.

Your mod needs updating a lot cause of the ff:

1. Federation vessels are much weaker than the other races.

2. From the specs you've only included. There are a lot of federation arsenals. Such as 'Sovereign and excelsior class can fire photon torpedoes other than quantum torpedoes'.

3. Federation vessels have the ability to use their deflector dish to fire beams and resonance burst. At longer range since feds don't have artillery ships. How come this is not included in your mod?

4. There's a thing called 'refit' Which allows most federation vessels to upgrade their systems. Why only include officer rank upgrade?

FleetOps in this current iteration will no longer be developed. The team's current focus is creating a whole new engine (which they call NX for now) from which they will proceed further, and nobody on the team is doing anything Armada-related anymore.

Wow !

You guys are here ! This is amazing. I've been playing this since its early days.

How goes the progress ? You promised more races or something like the Noxter , the Iconians but all i found was updates and bug fixes and it's been quite a long time

Your comment action was successful. When a comment is deleted all replies to the comment will be removed as well. Because you are an admin, you can click the \"view deleted\" link above to view deleted comments in-case you wish to undelete them in the future. If this was a mistake, click the link again to reverse the change.

Each faction has an individual technology tree. In Armada II all factions had the same fundamental tech tree of stations and ships with very subtle deviation (for example the amount of ships differed in the small shipyards). The developers did not intend to stick with the Armada II layout of three research stations and two types of shipyards for each faction. As a consequence the team developed a unique technology tree for each faction, and in addition found a way to balance this in an appropriate way. Now, for example, Klingons have three shipyards while the Dominion has just two of them and the Dominion also has to build more expensive prototypes before building the corresponding cheaper "copies". Similarly, upon game startup, you have the choice to choose between one of two avatars, supporting your preferred tactics.

Research of technologies is linked with a unique system for each faction as well. A special offer you can witness in Fleet Operations 3.0 is the ability to trade technologies between factions which brings more depth and variety into gameplay.

Warp is a very good aspect if it supports the game. For example, in a game like Starfleet Command, or a first person shooter with a storyline, warp can be very interesting. For a Real Time Strategy game, however, it just doesn't fit. Thus, to allow more strategic accented game-play, only impulse speed is available. Experiences from Armada I showed the developers that this solution fits the game the best.

This category compares the graphical aspects of stock Armada II and Fleet Operations. Unlike the Fleet Operations Gallery, you can see how the look of Fleet Operations differs in relation to that of Armada II as similar scenes from both games are presented here. Keep in mind that to really get a feel for how explosions, disruptors, and quantum torpedoes shimmer and glow, you'll have to actually play the game - pictures just can't do them justice. On to the pretty images!

Nightshades first map pack converts many classic stock multiplayer maps across to Fleet Operations. I'm pretty sure this is solely comprised of Armada's timeless classics that have been played for 5+ years. Unfortunately, while these maps are firmly embedded as classics in Armada's community a lot of that has to do with planets. Without needing to gather metal and without having the warp inhibiting gravity wells some of these maps won't play anything like the originals.

Regardless, these maps are amongst the best ever created for Armada and i'm sure they will play extremely well regardless of the gameplay changes found in fleet operations.

Veterans of Armada multiplayer might recognise the maps more readily by the names they have carried for many years more readily.

Galaxy Wars version 1, is indeed a Fleet Operations varient of the classic 8 player map "Galaxy Wars by Tomahawk".

Galaxy Wars version 2 appears to be the classic "6Assualt" by Petzi

Galaxy Wars version 3 looks very much like "Evolutions Tears"

Galaxy Wars version 4 is probably 2vs2vs2vs2 by PrimaryDestroyer

Sacrifice of the Devil looks quite similar to the classic Sacrifice of Angels map, that's been played since around '04

Choas Control and Corridors are ports of the classic maps of the same name.

The venerable wassup series of maps is also represented with 2wasup. I suspect that this map will play radically differently to the original considering most of the gameplay dynamics are different.

- Freyr

In November 2154, when Doctor Phlox was kidnapped by Rigelians on Earth, Captain Jonathan Archer had Lieutenant Malcolm Reed check with Starfleet Operations to see if their satellites had picked up any transporter activity. (ENT: "Affliction")

3a8082e126