Has anyone tried Ultimate General: Gettysburg? -

[Karl der Grosse]

It's no Sid Meier's Gettysburg, that's for sure. The AI's wonky, the controls are pretty rudimentary, Even the graphics are pretty basic and unimpressive, though I do like seeing the field covered in tiny blue-wearing bodies. I was hoping for a lot more. Anyone else tried this?

 

[millais]

It's much inferior to the sequel title, Ultimate General: Civil War, which is hands down the best real-time linear battle tactics game I have played. They learned a lot of lessons from UG: Gettysburg to the point that UG:Gettysburg feels like it was just the proof of concept or early access version of UG: Civil War.

They made the units much easier to control on the field of battle compared to UG: Gettysburg. For example, you can shuffle brigades over to the left and right without having them wheel and expose flank whenever you want to dress the gap in your line or extend your line, and they made it so artillery battery can shoot over the heads of infantry and cavalry. They made it so a brigade doesn't have to be fully halted to start delivering a volley, and generally made the unit behavior much less rigid and more flexible and natural to simulate how the lines of battle were a little sloppier, more practical, and not like a strict parade ground formation in combat

They also added a whole lot of good mechanics, on and off the field of battle, that really help to get immersion and realism stronger. They added different condition states for morale and physical exertion of units (ie a unit that has been "blown" from running at the double quick to get to the frontline will behave differently from a "whipped" but otherwise fresh unit) that are easily readable, they added ammo supply for all units that can run low in battle if not resupplied. Instead of just having a binary state of "whipped to the point of uncontrollably fleeing the field" and "responsive", they have varying states of cohesion and morale for units. A unit can be responding to your movement and firing orders but struggling to coordinate volley fire, a unit can be responding to orders but inefficiently, a unit can be phasing in and out of responsiveness while still not breaking, etc. You can detach skirmisher companies from the main body of troops, to more accurately simulate the standard practice of throwing out a picket line to recon forward of the main body in an advance or to serve as a tripwire for the main line of resistance in defence.

They added a bunch of new soft and hard cover/concealment types to the battlefield terrains, and even added entrenchments and field/siege fortifications that take greater prominence in the late war campaigns. The addition of entrenchments and fortifications really changes the way the game plays in the late war campaigns because it shifts away from the clean linear, set pieces battles of the early war to the bloody grind of trench warfare and high-casualty close infantry assaults like how it was at Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, etc.

But they also modified the entire scope of the game. Instead of just being a "division" level simulation, where you are pushing brigades around the map, they made it so that it is kind of like an "army" level simulation, where you are leading the same multi-corps army through all the major Western and Eastern Theatre campaigns of the War. You get to name, create, reorganize, or disband the various infantry/cavalry/skirmisher brigades and artillery batteries in your army, choose which small arms and guns they get from your arsenal supply, and choose which officers will command them, then transfer the brigades and batteries between divisions and corps to optimize their synergy on the field. The fact that the different brigades and batteries develop veterancy status from their combat performance in past battles does a good deal towards making it feel like a much more individualized and personalized army, as you will inevitably end up developing some high-morale elite "assault" brigades that are hardened veterans of many battles and some less reliable second line units that will break more quickly due to suffering heavy losses in previous engagements. As you can change the names of your different units and review their past combat performance on a battle-by-battle basis (who was the commanding officer, what weapon were the men armed with, how many men did they field, how many did they lose, how many did they kill, etc), it is very easy to get attached to your elite units and feel a kind of loss when they get savaged in a bad engagement or sacrificed to shore up a collapsing flank.

A lot of those role-playing elements really make it feel like a much better overall campaign simulator. The types, quantity, and availability of different types of weapons and replacement troops will change over the course of the war for both Confederate and Union armies, and they are also directly affected by your performance in the preceding battles and campaigns. You can expand your artillery and infantry arsenal by capturing or killing enemy artillery and infantry/cavalry/skirmishers, which "drop" a percentage of battlefield salvageable arms, modified by whether the enemy units were captured whole or killed piecemeal and whether you hold the field at the end of the battle. While fighting the big linear setpiece battle, you (or the enemy AI for that matter) can even send cavalry or skirmishers behind enemy lines to capture their ammo supply train, if it's not sufficiently guarded, and bring it back to your own lines for your troops to use or just to save it towards the next campaign. The opposing nations' armies have a set manpower pool that they can draw from for constituting their brigades and divisions and corps, and you can tangibly bleed down the AI opponent's "national" manpower pool by inflicting high casualties among their veteran units during battles so that they have to fill their ranks with green conscripts, which will limit their units' effectiveness in future battles.

So for example, in a successful Union campaign, by 1865 you should be facing severely undersized Confederate brigades comprised of scarecrow veterans because you've killed off the cream of the Southern armies and they have no more reserves to draw on. While in a successful Confederate campaign, by 1865 you should be facing a vast host of regular or oversized Union brigades manned by inexperienced green recruits because you've killed off the Union veterans of the early war period, but in a panic, Lincoln has pulled out all the stops on conscription and called up 100,000s more of green draftees.

But it's easy to get overwhelmed with all the non-combat army management features, so they also have a kind of "skirmish" option where they let you play through the main historical battles with the fixed, historical orders of battle for the opposing armies instead of your custom campaign army and the AI's custom campaign army. But for sure, the replay value in the game is to be found in the campaign mode.

The single area where UG: Civil War falls short of UG: Gettysburg is in some of the terrain art assets for the Gettysburg map in particular. In UG: Gettsyburg, they had a lot of custom art assets to accurately portray the various distinctive battlefield landmarks like the Seminary campus, the Cemetery, Gettysburg town, the railroad cutting, etc, which were replaced in UG: Civil War by historically-appropriate but generic art assets not specific to the actual buildings and landmarks at Gettysburg. So instead of the distinctive Seminary building with the rotunda, they just have a generic 1860s brick mansion kind of building, instead of headstones at the Cemetery Hill, they just have boulders, etc.

 

[Pop-Tart]

>See title
>Knowing without even looking that millais or confederateirishman are gonna be in this thread
Like clockwork

Its on Da List™. It is a very distinct niche real time tactics game. Everything Millais has said about it goes with what my friends have said about it.

 

[millais]

In fact, it's probably faster to list the things that are unrealistic about UG: Civil War than to do it the other way around.

You don't have to worry about enlistment terms expiring for your soldiers. They are locked in for the duration!

You don't have to worry about attrition from desertion or non-combat disease/accidents

You don't have to worry about food or clothing/shoe supply for your army

You don't have to worry about strategic-level routes or order of march for armies (the real-time tactics part of the game takes place on set maps, you only get to pick the order your corps and divisions arrive on the field. Once on the field, you do have to worry about routes of march and order of march because the maps get to be increasingly very big)

You don't have to worry about siting/building field fortifications (the fortifications are provided on the battlefield in the most practical or historically appropriate places)

You don't have to worry about service arm experience for your field officers (ie, you can arbitrarily transfer an artillery battery commander to become an infantry or cavalry commander without any ill effect, so long as he has high enough rank and "combat career" experience to command a larger unit)

Similarly, you can shuffle around brigade, division, and corps commanders to you heart's content as long as they have enough arbitrary "combat/career" experience to satisfy their new role. You can still swap them around if they don't have enough experience, but their units will suffer penalties in that event. You don't have to worry about playing party politics with regards to political generals or be afraid of losing morale by taking away a longtime commander from his unit.

You don't have to worry about coordinating combined arms, navy-army operations. The navy units are pretty much autonomous, static gunboats drop anchor and do their own thing without any input from you.

The prisoner/parole exchange ratio is scaled for gameplay balance, not an exact 1 : 1. So you can't gain a giant 10k influx of new troops to your army by capturing 10 enemy brigades in an especially lopsided battle. Similarly, there's no termination of prisoner exchanges by Lincoln in 1865.

You can't end the war early. The campaign will force you to fight all the major historical setpiece battles, but the orders of battle and army composition of the enemy AI will change based on your performance in the previous battles.

To extend the length of the overall campaign and include as many historical battles as possible, your army gets transferred back and forth from the Western to Eastern Theatres way more than any single commander or unit ever was during the war.

Your cavalry and skirmisher units' autonomus AI is not very smart. You have to micro-manage orders for cavalry and skirmishers a lot to redress this AI shortcoming, which is the exact opposite of how it should be for a division or corps level commander of the period. The infantry and artillery's autonomous AI is pretty decent though.

Similarly, the division and corps level AI is not so great. You can play the game by only issuing orders to the corps and division level AI, but it will be a bloody slaughter because the enemy AI will be micro-managing its army at the brigade level. So you do kind of have to play the game as an omni-present division commander in order to match the enemy AI. The micro management is actually very easy in this game because when the battle starts in earnest, you can set the game to play on a very slow "gameplay speed" setting that kind of reflects real-time scaling (ie a minute to load and fire a volley), and adjust the speed to a higher setting if there's nothing important going on, like just waiting for your brigades to finish a circuitous flank march that would take hours in real-time.

When you order cavalry units to dismount in battle to use them as skirmishers/mounted infantry/dragoons, every cavalryman joins the firing line, ie for a 500 man cavalry brigade, you get 500 carbines on the firing line when they dismount, instead of every third or fourth man having to be held back from the firing line to mind the horses.

You and the enemy AI can "liberate" surrendered units if they are not adequately guarded or escorted off the field of battle in time. So if you (or the enemy AI) ambush a "POW" column, in one fell swoop you can create with a literal Fifth Column in the rear of the enemy, since "liberated" brigades and batteries are not disarmed and get their firepower back the moment you regain control of them. Similarly, due to some kind of coding error, surrendered "POW" units that have expended some of their ammo supply in combat will replenish it from the captors' supply train, so they can actually steal ammo intended for your (or the AI's) frontline forces.

In spite of the pretty complex system of veterancy leveling and combat skill modifier/statistics to simulate the different unit-level qualities of past combat experience and competency at fieldcraft, marksmanship, etc, there is a more abstract and "video gamey" perk-system that augments the more realistic veterancy leveling. However, you can opt out of the perk system by just not selecting any perks for your brigades, divisions, and corps whenever they earn new perks.

 

[BONE_Buddy]

I was going to type out a whole big thing, but millias wrote everything I was going to say and more.

As a moderately skilled, hardened veteran of historical wargames. Ultimate General: Civil War is one that I heartily recommend.

 

[Ted_Breakfast]

I bought it for a pittance during a sale, but I haven't tried it yet. Anything that lets me take command of Johnny Reb is immediately interesting.

 

[millais]

I was going to type out a whole big thing, but millias wrote everything I was going to say and more.

As a moderately skilled, hardened veteran of historical wargames. Ultimate General: Civil War is one that I heartily recommend.

I find there is sometimes a big gap between video games that try to simulate traditional tabletop miniature wargaming, with all its convenient abstractions and simplifications, and milsim-type strategy games that try to simulate "real" warfare, with all its inconveniences and frustrations.

UG: Civil War is one of the more recent breed of indie titles that tries to straddle the gap and find a happy compromise between the two genres, and it's one of the better polished ones for accomplishing that purpose. For sure, it won't satisfy the ultra-purist milsim grognards and the lifelong tabletop wargaming diehards, and you'll see as much in online discussion of the game.

But for simulating many of the tactical situations faced by a historical corps, division, or brigade commander via a well-polished and user-friendly interface, I think it is greatly successful. I actually found the game highly educational for getting a feel for the tactical challenges and terrains of the historical battlefields, even when held in comparison to more properly academic Civil War literature and reading. While falling well short of the opportunity to walk the real battlefield with a guide to get a lay of the land in person, I'd argue that the game does a better job of giving you a comprehensive idea of the historical battlefield terrain, lines of sight, deployment/disposition of battle lines, movements/phases of battle, etc than any 2D battle map in a Civil War book or atlas.

For me, at least, it was always something of a challenge to keep flipping back and forth between the text of a book and the topographic battle map three pages back in order to construct a moving mental visualization from all those static red and blue arrows marked with time-stamps and the wordy annotations at the bottom of the page and in the body of the text.

The UG: Civil War game basically does all that visualization for you and allows you to intuitively see everything unfold in real time. Aside from the entertainment and fun of just playing through the game, I really appreciated gaining that intuitive understanding of the historical battlefields in the process.

 

[Karl der Grosse]

So I went ahead and took your advice and bought UG: Civil War. Very very nice. Smooth interface, intuitive commands, good AI. Not very good AI for skirmishers and cavalry, but you can't have everything.

Big thumbs up, and thanks for the recommendation. I doubt I would have tried it after the disappointment of UG: Gettysburg without your enthusiastic reviews, so much appreciated.