YMMV / Star Trek: Armada

• Demonic Spiders: The Species 9341 organisms you encounter in the Borg campaign of the first game. They're highly resistant to conventional weapons, they can't be assimilated, and their weapons? Psychic blasts that ignore your shields and armor and instantly wipe out a percentage of your crew every time they hit you. The only truly efficient way to kill them is to use the Diamond's Ultritium Burst ability, which requires a lot of time and resources to deploy in decent enough numbers. To make it worse, there are several 'Mother' entities that crank out the smaller creatures at a rapid pace. Said mothers are also effectively indestructible to conventional weapons.
• Fridge Horror:
  • If you've played these games before reading this Trope page, you probably didn't realize how little value people's lives have in them.
  • Viewers of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine will probably notice one of the possible names for a Galaxy Class ship is USS Odyssey. "Boomer2k6 Gaming" has fun with this when he assimilates a Galaxy Class as the Borg.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Borg fusion cube/tactical fusion cube are seriously overpowered. There's only one constructed and fought in the main story, but once you have access to it, you can pretty much guarantee a victory. In the main campaign, it's only available for the final Borg mission of the game, but one is sufficient to kill the Final Boss solo with sufficient upgrades.
    
    There's an attempt at balancing it out by having the crew on board be fairly easily killed off, but they have crews of 4800 and 5400 respectively, so by the time it really begins to make a difference, you've probably already finished off the majority of enemy ships and what's left can be dealt with by the other ships at your disposal. Adding insult to injury, Diamond science ships can cast the game-breaking "Shield Remodulation" on any Fusion Cube to make it temporarily invulnerable.
    • Appropriately, the Federation have some of the best counters to them in high-level play, downplaying this trope. The Sovereign Class ships can turn on their Corbomite Reflector to prevent the cubes' devastating torpedo damage, the Steamrunner can disable their engines so the cubes can't move, the Temporal Stasis Field (superweapon) can render a group of them completely helpless to the Federation fleet, and the Nebula Class can completely remove their shields. This helps curtail the Fusion Cubes' power to a degree, but facing them head-on without sufficient abilities and planning is a suicidal proposition due to their absurd firepower and durability and a few mistakes can still spell defeat.
  • Also Borg Transwarp gate+Romulan Subspace rift ship. Bypasses the weakness of the Romulan weapon and clears a nice foothold for your fleet.
  • The Klingon Frigate, the Koloth Class, can qualify as well. Combine a couple with some Science Ships for the "Death Chant" buff and a fleet of Negh'Var &/or Qeh'Rel battleships and watch your fleet tear through the enemy's fleet and base. The fleet is not as durable as the Fusion Cubes but still delivers rivaled mass destruction.
  • The Species 8472 Battleship is a formidable ship. While not as overtly powerful as Fusion Cubes, they can still be massed to devastating effect. They also possess the researchable ability Psionic Insanity which is essentially a temporary mind control spell. Sail your Battleships into the enemy fleet, leveraging their considerably durability (comparable to Tactical Cubes) and you can force an enemy fleet to fight one another, while your Battleships destroy the helpless ships. Not even Fusion Cubes are immune to this spell.
• Goddamned Bats: The Borg during the Federation campaign in Armada II. During most missions you are likely to be always under attack by parties of at least several Deflectors and Interceptors, draining your resources early in missions.
  • Along the Neutral Zone is particularly nasty, especially if you don't explore the map to see that the enemy base is behind a wall of turrets. And that's before the Enterprise flies in demanding repair ships situated behind the wall.
  • Most later missions actively start with you having to chase Borg ships away from your base if you want to build anything, rarely ever giving you a moment to breathe.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The first game, released in 2000, has the Borg decide that, in the name of capturing an Omega molecule, they require "an independent mind," leading to their assimilation of a Dominion cloning outpost, creating a clone of Jean-Luc Picard in order to recreate Locutus. Two years later, Star Trek: Nemesis says that the Romulan Empire had enacted the same plan for their own reasons.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Premonition is one of the last remaining ships from a future where almost everybody, including most likely all of the major characters from the series set in the TNG era, are now mutilated, cadaveresque, cybernetic Borg drones, trapped within their own minds for the rest of their existance until they're disposed of like meat and used batteries.
• Obvious Beta: The first game suffered a really bad case of this on its initial release, and the 1.1 patch didn't do a whole lot to help things. Worse still, Activision cut off support for the game only a couple of months after its initial release, leaving incoming Armada II developers Mad Doc Software to create a 1.2 patch that finally fixed all the major problems with the game. Armada II itself suffered a few bugs on its initial release, including one very obvious problem in that ship explosions weren't implemented properly, but was nowhere near as bad as the first game.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The requirement for officers to build any structure or ship. Players used to StarCraft — which this series emulates to an extent — may be surprised that structures cut into their "supply limit" which means choosing a good ratio of base defenses & structures to your mobile fleet. While this is supposedly meant to prevent players from spamming base defenses with their spare resources, it means that you need to decomission extraneous buildings to free up supply if you need a larger fleet. On the plus side, warp speed in Armada II helps you zoom home if you need to defend.
• Sequelitis: Armada II isn't bad enough to cross into The Problem with Licensed Games territory, but it's widely seen as an inferior sequel due to poor game balance, the 3-D battlefield being mostly superfluous, and a less interesting story for the single-player campaign.

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