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Star Trek®: Armada II Readme
This Readme file contains last minute information regarding Star Trek: Armada II.
Note for Windows® 95 users: In order to view the full Star Trek: Armada II Help file system, you
must have a web browser installed.
November 5th, 2001
Table of Contents
1. Minimum System Requirements
2. Addendum to Manual
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B.
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D.
E.
Multiplayer/Internet Connectivity
Game Functionality
Tutorial
Single Player
Other
1. Minimum System Requirements
MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
• Pentium® II 300 MHz or Athlon® processor or higher
• Windows® 95/98/2000/ME operating system
• 64 MB of RAM
• 900MB of uncompressed free hard drive space plus 100 MB for the Windows swap file
• A 100% Windows 95/98/2000/ME-compatible computer system including:
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DirectX 8.0a (included)
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100% DirectX 8.0a-compliant true 16 bit sound card and drivers
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100% DirectX 8.0a-compliant 8 MB video card and drivers*
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100% Windows 95/98/2000/ME-compatible mouse and drivers
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100% Windows 95/98/2000/ME-compatible keyboard
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100% Windows 95/98/2000/ME-compatible quad speed (600 K/sec sustained transfer
rate) CD-ROM drive and drivers
REQUIRED FOR MULTIPLAYER MODE
• Pentium® II 450 MHz or Athlon® processor or higher
• 128 MB of RAM
• Internet (TCP/IP) and LAN (TCP/IP) play supported
• Internet play requires a 100% Windows 95/98/2000/ME-compatible 28.8 Kbps (or faster)
modem and drivers
• LAN play (and high-speed Internet play over DSL and cable modems) requires a 100%
Windows 95/98/2000/ME-compatible network interface card and drivers.
*3D Accelerator Card Required
A 100% DirectX 8.0a or higher compliant 8MB or higher 3D video card and driver is required
to play Star Trek: Armada 2. Some 3D accelerator card brands may not be compatible with
the 3D acceleration features utilized by Star Trek: Armada 2. Please check with the card’s
manufacturer to ensure DirectX 8.0a compatibility.
Important Note: This product uses DirectX 8.0a technology, which requires your system to
have the latest Windows 95/98/2000/ME drivers (for CD-ROM, video card, sound card and
input devices) that fully support DirectX 8.0a.
SUPPORTED CHIPSETS FOR WINDOWS® 95/98**
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3dfx™ Voodoo 3, 4, and 5
Matrox™ G550
Kyro® I and II
Trident Blade XP™
nVidia™ Riva TNT, TNT2, and TNT2 Ultra
All nVidia™ GeForce Chips
ATI® Radeon
**Some but not all of the cards with the chipsets listed above have been tested on Windows®
2000, ME, and XP. For Windows® 2000, ME, and XP 3-D support, please refer to your
hardware manufacturer for 100% DirectX 8.0a compliant drivers.
2. Addendum to Manual
A. Multiplayer/Internet Connectivity –
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To use GameSpy Arcade you are required to have Internet Explorer 4.0 or a
newer version installed. The Winsock 2.0 update is also required, however it
is included on the Star Trek: Armada II CD-ROM and will be installed as part
of the game installation if you don’t already have the update.
In rare circumstances you may experience Out Of Sync errors in multiplayer
games. Your game is no longer capable of maintaining synchronization
between the players in the game. The game will not re-synchronize later. It
is recommended to discontinue playing your game at this point and launch a
new multiplayer game. Out Of Sync errors can occur on all Internet
connection types.
If you want to connect to another player directly without going through
GameSpy you can connect to them by entering their IP address manually
using the Manual IP connection type. On Manual IP games you will not be
able to chat after connecting to the host machine. However after a game is
hosted you will be able to chat within the game.
There are no 3, 5, or 7 player maps. If you want to play a game with this
many players you will need to select a map that supports additional players.
On minimum specification machines, if playing on a machine with high
memory fragmentation, it might take longer for the game to show the
Admirals Log after the completion of a multiplayer game. This occurs when
the game is freeing up available ram after exiting the multiplayer game. It is
recommended that you defragment your hard drive to improve performance
of virtual memory.
Playing from behind a firewall for GameSpy is supported, however you will
need to expose specific ports on your network to do this. Please review the
HELP screen from within the multiplayer menu or view the supplied
nethelp.txt file that is located in the game folder for a listing of the specific
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ports that will need to be opened.
When playing games via GameSpy or LAN you will have the option of
aborting the connection between those machines by using the CANCEL
button. If your game doesn’t resolve the connection you can press the
CANCEL button to abort the connection attempt and return to the multiplayer
menu. If you press the CANCEL button it may take up to two minutes to
resolve the connection and return to the menu.
If you have Norton Personal Firewall installed it is recommended you set
your security and privacy settings to Medium or Low or temporarily disable
your firewall during internet play. Leaving the security and privacy settings
on High may cause the firewall to prompt the user numerous times during the
GameSpy login process, and interfere with the users ability to connect.
Please review your Norton Personal Firewall documentation for instructions
on modifying these settings and what security issues might arise from doing
so.
In multiplayer games it is recommended that you don’t play with Officer Limit
set to More/MAX or infinite resources enabled when playing with machines
that are at or near the minimum system requirement. These multiplayer
modes should only be enabled when all machines in the game are high
performance systems as the performance of the game will be limited to the
performance of the slowest machine in the multiplayer game.
Increasing the game speed in multiplayer games will have the potential of
adding additional lag or create performance issues rather then increase
game speed. Typically this will happen when playing with machine at or near
the minimum system specification.
B. Game Functionality –
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Only Battleship type vessels can attack planets. Each of the six races
includes a vessel that is capable of assaulting planets.
If you use the Borg Nanite attack against the AI this will render them unable
to use their special weapons for a short duration.
When the players vessels capture enemy stations or ships they will add
additional officers to control the new captured station or ship. If this causes
the player to equal or exceed their officer cap then they will need to
decommission ships or stations to be able to build additional units. In the
case of the Borg they will add additional power nodes rather then officers and
that will impact their power nodes cap in the same way.
If an enemy player successfully places a Romulan Spy aboard a vessel or
station you can remove the spy by repairing the vessel with either a shipyard
or repair ship.
Special weapons use different amounts of special energy. Some special
weapons can fire multiple times before you will need to recharge your special
energy. Special weapons energy will recharge over time.
Building multiple versions of the same research station allows you to spread
out your researched items or improvements among multiple stations. You
are also capable of building the same upgrades for each station. This offers
you the advantage of having a backup in case one station is eliminated.
In multiplayer Assault-type games. The starting position of each player
determines who is assaulting and who is defending in the match. Also the
starting position determines the race you will be playing. If you don’t select a
starting location a starting location will be assigned to you.
The Klingon Vor’cha-class special weapon Polaron Torpedo is most effective
against ships or stations with multiple underlying systems. They are less
effective against turrets.
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In green alert ships under attack will not default to flee as listed in the manual
and Tutorial.
New units added to an existing fleet will retain their current autonomy setting.
It is recommended that you update the autonomy setting for the fleet as you
add additional units to maintain your autonomy settings for the group.
Species 8472 does not have the ability to repair or recrew their vessels.
They do however have natural regeneration for their units.
The AI menu for starbases will define the default AI settings for all new ships
constructed in those facilities.
The Sovereign-class vessels’ Corbomite Reflector special weapon will not
reflect pulse phaser-type weapons damage.
Under certain circumstances you may not be able to detect warp suppression
fields near planets.
Mining facilities do not need to be placed near Latinum clouds to mine
resources as the freighters deliver the collected materials to your starbase.
When assigning waypoints you can only plot a path through space. You will
not be able to define different heights for the waypoints.
Polaron Torpedoes will disable all the other sub-systems on a ship or station,
but they will not affect the shield generators.
You can build planetary shields on planets to help protect your colonists. It is
also recommended to protect your planets with turrets or combat vessels.
The Admirals log does not list derelict ships, ships destroyed in nebulae, or
decommissioned ships as being lost in the included tally. The lost field
shows only ships lost to combat.
The ALT-G command can be used to show or hide the zero grid. There are
three unique states. Each time you press ALT-G it will cycle between those
states. You can have the grid shown, grid shown with height indicators in the
z-axis for ships that are currently selected, or completely off.
For ships with the Transport Attack function you will only be able to use this
attack method with ships, stations, or planets that have an existing crew. If
the crew has already been eliminated the you can transport normally.
Ships, Stations, or other in-game objects can’t be attacked when they are
covered by fog. You will either need to use forward ships to spot a location
for artillery, or move ships in till a ship can see the target to fire.
It is not recommended in instant action games to play with the maximum
number of AI players with Unlimited Resources, Speed set to 6, or Officers
set to Max when using a machine at or near the minimum system
requirement.
C. Tutorial –
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There are several references to pressing the [ENTER] key on your keyboard.
For each of these instances you will need to press the normal [ENTER] key
and not the one located on your [NUMPAD]. Also on some older keyboards
the [ENTER] key is labeled [RETURN] instead.
Saving games within the tutorials is not permitted (under most conditions).
In the Species 8472 tutorial it is necessary to allow for adequate space when
evolving the following objects from a passive embryo: Enhancer, Biogenesis
Core, Metogenesis Core, and Fluidic Gate.
In the Romulan tutorial it mentions that you can research the Veles-class
special weapon at the Tal Shiar facility, but in fact you research it at the
Covert-Ops station.
D. Single Player –
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In several of the single player missions the player is capable of taking over
enemy construction vessels, research stations, starbases, and shipyards.
For gameplay reasons creating new vessels or additional research is not
allowed. However, in the multiplayer or instant action portions of the game
this is allowed.
In the single player game not all enhancements, ships, stations, or weapons
are available in all missions. Typically as missions progress through the
campaign more technology will be made available to the player.
It is recommended that the player use the search or search and destroy
command to scout out the map areas and uncover potential enemies.
E. Other –
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The 3DFx Voodoo 2 cards will not function properly with the included editor.
Due to the method being used to support bump mapping you will not be able
to enable bump mapping on Matrox G400/G500 cards.
In some instances increasing hardware anti-aliasing to 4x or higher may
cause minor graphical artifacts on some of the interface elements.
It is recommended to not have a screen saver or standby/sleep mode active
while playing the game. You may experience graphics corruption if the
screen saver or standby/sleep mode activates during gameplay.
Users may experience poor performance when attempting to play an IPX
game over a LAN that connects both Windows 95/98/ME and Windows 2000
systems. It is recommended that users playing over such a LAN environment
choose TCP/IP instead.
It is recommended that you have a minimum of twice the amount of free
virtual memory for your existing memory size. If you have 64MB of ram then
you should have 128MB or more of virtual memory configured in windows. If
you have 128MB of memory then you should have 256MB or more of virtual
memory.
On original Windows 95 machines (non OSR1/OSR2) you may experience
scrolling problems within the game if you have your Windows task bar set to
“Always On Top”. For best in-game performance adjust this so that the
functionality is disabled.
We have experienced issues with the latest version of Netscape 6.1 in which
some of the links on the start menu and links within the Technical help file do
not work properly. This is unique to Netscape 6.1 and should not effect
users of Internet Explorer or earlier versions of Netscape.
For Windows 95 systems that currently don’t have either Internet Explorer 4
or higher installed, or Netscape 3 or higher you will need to install DCOM
prior to installing the game or you will need to update your machine to the
newer Internet Explorer or Netscape versions. If you would like to download
DCOM separately you can download it from the following link:
http://www.microsoft.com/com/dcom/dcom95/dcom1_3.asp
------------------------------------------------TM, ®, © 2001 Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved. Star Trek and related marks are trademarks of Paramount
Pictures. © 2001 Activision, Inc. Activision is a registered trademark of Activision, Inc. All other trademarks and trade
names are the properties of their respective owners. The ratings icon is a trademark of the Interactive Digital Software
Association. Uses Bink Video. Copyright © 1997-2001 by RAD Game Tools, Inc. This product is intended solely for
private home use. Public performance or other use is expressly prohibited.