The Auto-Assimilator of the game Star Trek: Armada drains the target ship of it's crew, by adding it to the inflicting ship or the player's crew pool. The attacking ship will at the same time continue to fire onto that ship, unless ordered to attack another one of set to green alert or positioned out of firing range. The Auto-Assimilator will continue to drain crew even when the casting ship's crew is full. The crew gain will then not simply expire but the gained crew will be added to the main crew pool. The Auto-Assimilator will only stop for one of the following four reasons:

• The weapons is turned off, either manually or by a deactivated weapons system.
• The crew of the target ship runs out.
• The special weapon energy runs out.
• The distance between Assimilator and target exceeds the range of the Auto-Assimilator.

It is researched at the Modification Center. The Auto-Assimilator looks like this:

The Auto-Assimilator can be used up to 25 seconds. It will take 5 crew per second from the targeted ship, so the energy-crew-conversion is 8:1.

An active Corbomite Reflector has no effect on this special weapon. Neither does the Shield Remodulation. An active Phase Cloak, however does prevent from using it.

There is a sound bug in Star Trek: Armada that let's the noise of the Auto-Assimilator continue indefinitely. In order to get rid of that sound simply open the main menu for a moment, and return to the match. Or pause the game for a moment. It will be gone afterwards.

Also on rare occasions the crew drain rate gets insanely high. This seems to happen sometimes, when the life support system of the target goes offline (e.g. suffering damage to it) and the crew dies by that fact. When draining crew with the Auto-Assimilator it has happened, that the crew drain is the same speed as the dying rate of the crew. It is, however not deterministically reproducible. This effect is specially intense when the target has a large amount of crew, e.g. Cubes or Starbases. As the dying of the crew is proportional to the absolute number of crew currently on the station or ship, bigger crew complements cause bigger rates.

In multi-plyer you can use the Auto-Assimilator on Ferengi Marauders as well. In doing so, you drain the crew until the ship is empty. As the Ferengi never tow their own ships from the map, the vacated ship will remain until someone beams a boarding party on board. Once that happens, the Ferengi continue their work. (The ship cannot be taken over in multi-player.)