They told you it would be easy, farming on the planet Scelor. All you'd have to do is direct the agribots to plant the seeds in he spring and harvest the valuable crop in the autumn. There are no aliens within hundreds of light years, they said. As the shuttle pilot dropped you off, she wished you good luck.

You're going to need good luck.

The day after you landed, the aliens came. First the mothership, which apparently opened up a space warp from another dimension. Then, row after row of menacing droids. Thinking quickly, you equipped each of your robots with a laser to send the invaders back to their own dimension.

The droids don't actually attack you; they simply hover in the sky, waiting to land. But they drop smartbombs, which are impervious to lasers. Your only defense is to move out of the way. The mothership also releases birds that home in on your robots. As the birds descend, they drop slow-moving bombs. Fortunately, you can shoot the birds and their bombs. Your ultimate goal in "Alien Armada" is to get to the source of the invading aliens: the ominous mothership. If you can hit it with a single laser shot, you'll send it (and the droids) back to its own dimension. But it's not an easy task. You must first eliminate the droids who guard the mothership. Each changes three times before being sent back home.

The article for this game can be found on page 46 of Issue 23 (May 1985): https://archive.org/details/1985-05-computegazette/page/n47/mode/2up

As usual, my continuation of TASing games from my all-time favorite magazine, Compute's Gazette. This makes my 8th TAS from this series.

This time, I didn't TAS this game because I liked it, but more because I hate it. This game really irritated me when it came to the advanced alien attack. There wasn't a moments rest. You can never relax or you're toast. I only played this on the lower levels, but never could get anywhere on the highest...Level 9. So...this is the ultimate reason, because I wanted to see what this game could do.

Previous Compute's Gazette submissions include (In order of submission):

In this TAS, I choose the hardest difficulty of level 9. There is no time loss in selecting this, and makes for the best and fastest TAS possible.

As for the ending, the article states of a final attack maneuver that is added after achieving 10,000 points. Its at this time, the armada gets angry and starts to send aliens on a suicide mission. This is pretty much it for the game...which is achieved on the 3rd armada. I had originally thought that a 4th armada was necessary...but it continues looping with the last new content visible on the 3rd round.

There wasn't too much to figuring all this out, but there was one point that I think should be noted:

There are enemies that "home" in on your location. This causes a problem for optimization, since your missiles/laser can be detonated on them, rather than speedily getting to the mothership. So the only strategy that I used...was to lure them away from my attack position, so that when I return...they will not be in the way.

I've become very appreciative of the YouTube channel, "Lost 8-Bit Caverns". Once again, this player had a video of game-play for Alien Aramada. It appears that the difficulty used, for this run, was on Level 0.

feos: Claiming for judging.

feos: Yeah the highest difficulty loop looks completely unplayable. Great job. Accepting.

despoa: Processing...