Agreed. This game is REALLY broken for Windows 10 (Stand alone installer)

The only way that you can move around the menu is to click the menu then Ctrl-Shift-Esc then click the window and it will have advanced one step. Wash, rinse, repeat. If you actually get to the game, it seems to work up until you need to hit the game menu. However, every so often in between the switching, it will completely crash out.

Yes, various solutions have been tried, most of which result in a straight crash. (Even so, we pay GOG to make them work without using the heroic methods that we would if we downloaded the games off an abandonware site.)

Hopefully, a bug fix is coming because this is the first GOG game that doesn't work out of the box.

There is definitely something weird going on here because the game does work perfectly fine out of the box and even better after some tweaking on my Win 10 machine. The only major difference I can see is I used Galaxy for the install, but that really shouldn't matter since with or without Galaxy it runs the same exact install routine. All I did was install it and launch the game and it just works. I do have all my games installed to a non-standard directory (C:\Games) and I do use an admin user account, which sometimes makes a difference with older games, but I didn't have to jump through any hoops like installing old DX or changing compatibility settings to get it to work at all.

Unfortunately given the various combinations of hardware and software out there and factors at play, unfortunately GOG can never guarantee a game will work straight out of the box, it just isn't realistic to expect that.

Well, damn.

First, I didn't realize that I couldn't update my review. Otherwise I'd update it to a 4-star.

Second, so it works out of the box on Gog Galaxy (Hence the 4 star as I prefer to keep it to offline installers.).

So it seems, for me anyway, that the problem is centered around the offline installer.

I feel kinda bad now because I wouldn't have written the review if I had known that GOG Galaxy would work. It isn't ideal to have to use an installer but, at least, it works.

For the record I am installing via Galaxy and am seeing the previously mentioned issues.
Have since tried a 3rd machine this one gets to the menu also but the menus do not work still.

Can also confirm the findings of thepyrethatburns you can navigate the menus if you Alt-Tab out of Armada2 and back in to "refresh" the menu.
While this "works" it is far from ideal

Edit

Game runs fine once you bodge your way past the menus

2nd edit

Installing the unofficial patch from here resolves the menu issue for me.

http://armadafiles.com/files/armada-2/mods/patches/star-trek-armada-ii-patch-project-zip-125/details

Hope it helps someone else

I can confirm this patch fixed the game for me and I can now play it

Sadly for my machine that crashes after the splash screen, still no joy

incase this helps i got a1 and a2 to run by just playing with the compatibility tab under properties . for a2 i checked the boxes for compatibility mode chose win 7 for a1 i used xp service pack 2 , and checked boxes for run in 640 , disable full screen optimizations and run as admin.

was late when i got it running so only tested by starting an insta skirmish on both and everything seemed to work after than.

running these on a new pc build so windows 10 installation is pretty fresh.

Update on my machine that was refusing to launch.
Tried with the unofficial patch which didn't work on this machine, but it did give me an error message at least "Eaccess violation"

After a bit more digging I found that this error was most likely down to my display driver.

My HP laptop was using a "custom" Intel display driver from HP...... for "custom" read "Super out of date".

Had to manually update the driver ( because the automated installer refused to install because of the already installed custom driver #sigh ).

Since I have done that Armada 2 launches.

Tried it with the 1.25 patch (after removing the GOG galaxy version). Also got an EAccess violation. However, when I found it on Fleet Ops and read through the forum thread, the thread pretty much ended with "unresolved" back in 2012. Given that my drivers are up to date, it could be that the drivers have simply advanced too much.

One other note: While Armada 1 does run from the offline installer, it runs better on Galaxy. Between that and Armada 2 not running at all from the offline installer, I am inclined to believe that both Armadas are getting something, whether it is from the DX Wrapper or from Galaxy, that makes them work better/at all.

Either way, since it is not Unreal Tournament (which I use a lot of mods/custom maps with), I'm inclined to just let it go at "Armada 2 needs Galaxy to run."

Online playable via VPN. FleetOps community uses hamatchi, other tools like gameranger etc. could also do the trick. Sent me a message if you like to play. I am a decent gamer but not competetive.

Used the unoffical patch mentioned above and now working fine on the menus. I had hoped that when bringing back an old game they would have ensured it worked appropriately. Disappointing.

The old game with fixed issues would be great.

At least its now possible to use the gog version to install FleetOps roots and play without CD (even online). Which I consider cool. Especially since it starts no matter if Armada 2 starts for you :)

The issue seems to be the way your wrapper is handling the game menu's on some systems. I have no issues on my desktop with discrete graphics but on my Surface Pro 6 the menu has issues which seems to mirror the behavior others are reporting. You can get to the main menu without issue, but it stops rendering in real time. You can hear sounds working normally (music, mouse over effects, etc) but none of the menu animations work and if you click any button you have to alt+tab out and alt+tab back in to refresh. If you get all the way into an actual game/match, it works normally unless you try to bring up the menu.

If I replace your d3d8.dll and ddraw.dll with the latest DLL's from dgvoodoo, the main menu renders/animates properly but causes other issues.

I did open a support ticket on this.