A decent addition to the genre, held back by a few gameplay shortcomings and overall graphical appeal.
I have to say that Armada 2526 can only partly deliver on it's promise. You can fight battles with fleets that do rival the scale of those in the TW series, and the starmap control and atmosphere do remind me of MoO. I just got the game two days ago and I already had a nearly sleepless night playing it. The big picture is pretty generic actually. You start with a homeworld and send scouts and colony ships "Ark ships" to habitable planets. Get an economy going, build a fleet, research tech and fight your way through to the end. As soon as we look a bit deeper the uniqueness of it start to take shape. First of all, the 12 races get victory points for different things. One might get points for keeping their population happy, an other for winning battles or making large profits. This makes the game play differently for every species and obliges you to come up with new strategies each time. The finite range ships can travel from colonies gives an extra layer of strategy, since you can predict where the attack will come from, and you can be sure the enemy can't just skip over your defenses and fly right to your home planet. This way otherwise lifeless and uninteresting rocks can become places of vital importance solely because of their position.
One thing that doesn't feel right is the research screen. It's just boring to even look at it, and it's often not clear what you have to do to get something. For example I researched advanced mining but the information screen failed to tell me that I can't build it with my current infrastructure. So I spent quite a few minutes before I figured out which building to upgrade and then upgrade again before I could actually put to use what I researched. Also whenever I opened the research screen the same fast and monotonic music started playing that tore me out of that nice immersed state every time. I don't know why they had to put that soundtrack there but it wasn't a good idea.
By the way the music is one part where this game really shines. There are some incredibly well composed soundtracks that make you feel all alone in an unknown universe. I sometimes caught myself just listening to it, staring at the screen doing nothing.
The gameplay is right on track most of the time. Learning your way around the controls isn't difficult and the tutorial does a good job showing you the basics. The diplomacy does some strange things, like the trade partner offering a 1$ payment to sweeten the pot in a transaction about things worth a thousand times more, but everything seems to be functioning, plus I haven't run into any of that annoying MoO3 feature where an AI would declare war seemingly randomly. The panel is misleading sometimes. If you make a counter offer the wording gets switched up somehow and if you're not paying proper attention you might be striking a deal you don't want to. Other than that there are no more problems here, plus the ability to set how many turns you want a non-aggression pact to last is something I'd like to see in more games in the future.
On the down side: I know the 4X genre isn't known for it's aesthetic appeal, but at the end of 2009 we could really use some more eye candy. Though the starmap has some neat background art looking at it just get boring after a short while. Similar games nowadays have really spoiled us with stunning space panoramas, so this game feels like they didn't take enough time doing the visuals.
The mini-map is a joke. All you see are a myriad of one pixel sized dots representing the stars and I can guarantee you will never ever look at it. It would have been a much better solution to just let us zoom out more on the starmap. The windows you work with have no background so if you open one that's not full with information you'll be staring at a big black rectangle. The race diplomacy screens have videos that look like they were coded ten years ago, pixelated and hazy. The battles are viewed from above. You can pan and zoom, but you can't really do anything useful while doing it. What's a lot worse is that you have almost zero control over what happens in a battle. Of course you can order your ships around, but doing anything except a head on assault seems to work against you. Flanking and other such strategies aren't of much help eihter and the ships use their abilities whenever the hell they wish. Couple this with the lack of a pre-battle tactical placement phase and we have just went far enough from Total War.
I also feel that the 4X is really missing the first X in this game. There is not much entertainment in exploring new systems. Every star has somewhere between 0 and 1 planets. Yep. There is one planet waiting for you at every star. Other bodies in the background are just indicators of how rich or poor the system is. Not like there is much variety in that single planet. It's eithter earth like, green, yellow or dead. There are some icy and irradiated ones but that's about it. No size or gravity or artifacts or special modifiers.
After all the bad-mouthing I must say this game really sucks you in. Be prepared for some missed suppers. A must have for fans of the genre.