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Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail

Wyatt_Derp

Arcane
Joined
May 19, 2019
Messages
3,062
Location
Okie Land
Artillery is expensive?!
Good cannons very quite expensive from what I remember.

And often quite hard to acquire. Just ask ole' Henry.

serveimage
 

Burning Bridges

Enviado de meu SM-G3502T usando Tapatalk
Joined
Apr 21, 2006
Messages
27,562
Location
Tampon Bay
Artillery is expensive?!
Good cannons very quite expensive from what I remember.

I just picked up the latest stuff from the Union and slowly built up my artillery from what was captured. A smoothbore is almost as good as a parrot, so I never purchase them.

I hope during Christmas to do more playing UGCW.
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
first, your troops mustn't stand in front of the artillery, meaning you will be having a gap in fronline plugged only by the artillery alone. The artillery's rate of fire means that unless you already battered the enemy regiment beforehand, it won't break and will just charge onwards, massacring the artillery unit, which is simply too costly to allow.
In the Total War games, what I'd do is put artillery inside the valleys of VVVV formations, with the sides made of line infantry. If the enemy attempted to charge the artillery, he'd get caught in a crossfire between the two lines of infantry while getting shotgunned in the face. If he attempted to attack the infantry at the outer points, he'd be raked by the artillery on both sides.
 

sser

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Mar 10, 2011
Messages
1,866,661
I dig the ambition, but the ship combat seems too in between realism and arcade, making it like a boring, slow arcade game, as if boring and slow are 'realistic' and the arcade aspect is supposed to be 'fun', but in reality they just drag each other down like a really long run on sentence.
 

Burning Bridges

Enviado de meu SM-G3502T usando Tapatalk
Joined
Apr 21, 2006
Messages
27,562
Location
Tampon Bay
There will never be a realistic age of sail combat game, especially when it comes to sailing mechanics.

What I do resent though is that they make absolutely tiny maps and thereby take away the thing that is most exciting about ships.
 
Joined
Mar 15, 2014
Messages
683
I really like their take on the ACW, I'm still at my Confederate playthrough and enjoy it immensely. I'd definitively be interested in this one as well but to be honest: 40 bucks for EA is too much for my meagre budget.
 

Carpalone

Novice
Joined
Aug 31, 2017
Messages
25
I see this game going on sale soon because they are not going to sell many copies with that price. Mount and Blade will be able to get away with charging $50 for EA this game can't.
 

Burning Bridges

Enviado de meu SM-G3502T usando Tapatalk
Joined
Apr 21, 2006
Messages
27,562
Location
Tampon Bay
Well, for once a new strategy game that does not look like shit and has a management layer. There is not much to choose from, so I will get it once I have time.
 
Joined
Mar 15, 2014
Messages
683
Well, for once a new strategy game that does not look like shit and has a management layer. There is not much to choose from, so I will get it once I have time.
You should give their Ultimate General: Civil War a try. Doesn't look like shite, you can build your army after your own preferences and organize it between battles, purchase new weapons or sell old stuff, assign new officers, use experience to specialize brigades for different tasks and much more. It's a nice game and decisions really matter on the battlefield.
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
What I do resent though is that they make absolutely tiny maps and thereby take away the thing that is most exciting about ships.
Ah, yes, tiny maps in boat and spaceship games are the worst, especially with sailboats that cannot easily be turned freely so you end up smashed against edge of the map because you can't actually turn around or you'd be unable to move.
 

thesecret1

Arcane
Joined
Jun 30, 2019
Messages
5,675
Loved ACW so I was looking forward to this, but boy, is this not ready. ACW looked great, seemed polished, ran well... This one does none of those things from the limited peek I've had. The management layer and the ship mechanics and all look really neat, but I think I'll hold on until the end of Early access for this one, because the performance is bad, the graphics somehow look significantly worse than ACW (at least to me. Not like it's that big a deal, but why the decline?) and more importantly I really, really hate the UI. It seems so much worse than in ACW, like, why? I liked the UI there.

Still, what I did see of the mechanics, this is shaping to be one of the best naval combat games out there if they don't fuck up. Definitely still looking forward to it, just after the Early Access is done.
 

Andnjord

Arcane
Joined
Aug 22, 2012
Messages
3,026
Location
The Eye of Terror
Been playing (okay binging) in the past few days, just some thoughts.
At the moment I've only played the British campaign which is sadly unfinished as of yet.

-The land combat is mostly the same as you'd remember from UG:CW, though the smaller unit size makes combat (and especially melee combat) feel muuuuch more deadly for your units thought that being said I haven't seen the equivalent of the three star CSA brigade that could slaughter you in one volley if it ever caught you in the open. Gone are the endlessly routing and reforming troops, whether you thought that was a good or a bad thing, units will shatter or surrender much more quickly. Gone are also the woods made of reinforced concrete bunkers from before, being in a forest is a definite advantage but it won't make your troops nigh-invulnerable. Overall land combat feels pretty good, like you would expect from the developers of UG:CW.

That being said, what AoS is definitely lacking in comparison is when it comes to the actual battles themselves. First, there is less variety on the field itself due to the absence of cavalry (consistent with the focus on amphibious actions) ad the lesser variety in guns and artillery. Second, out of the two chapters that have been released from the British Campaigns there has been nothing as memorable or as exciting as the major battles from the predecessor, there is no Antietam or Stones Rivers here to be sure. But again, maybe the American campaign is better in that regard or later chapters of the British campaign. Land battles have been serviceable, but somewhat filler.

-But this almost doesn't matter to me, because of mah gawd did I have a good time playing the naval battles. First off, the Harbor, for those who played UG:ACW the equivalent of the camp, where you get to manage and specialize your ships. It seems you can really focus your fleet on completely different strategies, either go full-on ''rageboarding'' (what they call insta-boarding on the forums regardless of the status of the target ship) with max-out crews, boarding equipment and perks and officers, long-range fast-moving French style shooting or what I did in my British campaign, short-range tanky and maneuverable British style tactics. These decisions can be supported by your choice of guns (long-range vs short-range, heavy vs light), ship upgrades. Due to the weight limits of the ships you really have to pick one tactic and stick to it, for example, the extra armor upgrade allows you to stay real close to the enemy for extended periods of time but reduces significantly your weight limit preventing from getting boarding equipment and maxing out your crew size which is a requirement for going full out on boarding tactics. And this specialization is fleet-wide as each type of gun and ship upgrade has to be individually researched, and due to the fairly high cost of techs, you do want to focus on one area of research to be effective. Will need more testing to see how viable the different strategies are or if there is a PICK THIS ONE IF YOU WANT TO WIN option.

The fleet battles do a good job of simulating the wind and its effect on maneuvres and tactics. Having the weather gauge or not will significantly affect your decisions and you will fight tooth and nail for it if your tactics require it. It's a joy to outmaneuver your opponent and position yourself so as to rake their stern, something that like in real life is tremendously effective. Unloading a full broadside of 24pdr, 32pdr and 64pdr carronades into someone's stern will completely fuck them up, through crew losses, morale shock, guns destroyed and various equipment destruction. You can target different sections of the ship and different tactical situations will require different choices, kitting a heavier ship off his bow? Shoot his sails. Same scenario but your ship has bigger guns than it ought to have (did someone say carronades?)? Target his bow. Coming up a ship's stern? Target his rudder to break it. Appropriately it takes an inordinate amount of effort to outright sink a heavy ship, but you can get it to surrender by surrounding it and morale shocking it (stern rakes) or a combination of the previous with some well-timed boarding actions. The choices you made in the harbor will completely change your decisions at sea, and that felt good.

Overall really happy with it so far, and looking forward to seeing how they're going to finish the British campaign and finish tweaking the numbers.
 
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Andnjord

Arcane
Joined
Aug 22, 2012
Messages
3,026
Location
The Eye of Terror
Further update after playing the US campaign a bunch.

This campaign is actually huge, on par with UG:CW in length if not more. So far, you go through the Revolutionary War finishing with the battle of the Chesapeake where you lead your fleet (I was up to six 3rd rates and a 2nd rate) together with seven french ships of the line against fifteen British ships of the line. I'm curious whether or not the AI gets more ships if you bring more yourself. Now, unlike the real battle and this is a weakness I'd like to see addressed in the future, you have to sink or capture ALL enemy ships, and let me tell you it takes a heck of a long time to destroy that many ships of the line and it is a pain in the ass when the AI bugs out and forgets about five of its ships miles upwind from the battle forcing you to spend ages tacking upwind to reach them since you HAVE to sink them. Considering that no battle in the Age of Sail history ended with one side wiping out the other it's a damn shame that at the moment the AI can't retreat once it knows it's been defeated. If they could count the enemy fleet retreating as being 'destroyed', that would alleviate a lot of the tedium of chasing down the last ships and fix the silliness of enemy fleets fighting to the last and ending up annihilated. True, that was a problem in UG:CW as well, but you never HAD to wipe out the enemy to complete the objective, that was just something you'd do if you were a min-maxing scumbag (like I was).

That being said, that battle was a lot of fun, the vastly different scale meant that big maneuvres of several ships at a time took a whole other meaning and deciding when and how to break the enemy line is extremely fun, and the ensuing melee puts those little frigate and sloop fights that you had at the beginning into a whole other perspective. I'm looking forward to when they add the big battles of the British Campaign. One more thing I would like being added whose necessity becomes apparent in these large battles would be the ability to turn your ships over to the AI with the instruction to just stick to its target broadside, follow its maneuvres and stay there until one or the other is dead. Currently, you can already turn a ship to AI control, but I have no idea what it tries to do and seems to just mill around doing nothing (true enough I haven't actually tested what it does in any length). I like the micro that you have to do when you're encircling a ship and pounding it from all sides before boarding it, but it's annoying to have to babysit your other ships that are duelling one on one on the other side of the map.

So, as if the Revolutionary War wasn't enough after the battle is over peace is signed (no Battle of the Saintes, booooh), everyone is happy and your fleet is disbanded (damn you penny-pinching Congress :argh:). The End? Nope, fast forward to 1801 for the Barbary War! You receive the 6 super frigates (including the USS Constitution) and off you go fighting Barbary Corsairs! Which makes me wonder whether we will go all the way to the war of 1812, which considering there is also the British Campaign that is advertised as going all the way Trafalgar including the battles of Cape St. Vincent, The Nile and I hope the Glorious First of June, would mean the game's length is huge, beyond UG:CW as each of those fleet battles if the Battle of the Chesapeake is anything to go by, can take well over a couple of hours. In terms of content, the game seems weeeeell worth its asking price and I seriously hope that at the very least they fix the 'Destroy Enemy Fleet' objective and no retreating AI that can make several of these battles feel like a chore at the end. If they do so I would heartily recommend it to anyone who enjoyed UG:CW or is looking for a good age of sail game. There are a lot of small issues, balancing details to fix but even so it is already a lot of fun.
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

Filthy Kalinite
Patron
Joined
Apr 24, 2015
Messages
19,110
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Bubbles In Memoria
https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/1069650/view/2870438584802771992
"Barbary War" DLC, new game engine, and other
An important historical period of US history at the beginning of the 19th century is introduced in the new DLC "Barbary War". The DLC is free for all Early Access buyers and transfers the player into the early forming of the United States as a new country, capable of protecting itself and its citizens. You will be able to stop the extortions and atrocities of pirates in North Africa, organize the first landing operation on foreign territory in the history of the United States, and feel the power of "Old Ironsides" USS Constitution and other legendary American ships.

We have fully reworked the movement mechanics of the in-game soldiers, so that their animations and behavior are much smoother and more realistic.
Additionally, we worked on improving the naval AI, making the AI ships to maneuver much more intelligently.

We've fixed a number of crashes and memory leaks and upgraded the game engine. All those improvements have significantly increased the game stability, which was one of our main goals for this update. Unfortunately, there are still some known crash issues and we are working to eliminate them.

Patch notes:

1. Barbary War DLC. The DLC is free for all Early Access buyers.
2. New game engine.
3. Improvements and fixes in naval AI, tuning in Naval AI aiming.
4. Fixes of crash and bug reports.
5. Removed legacy deployment points information from intro maps.
6. Increased the limit of the number of soldiers in battle.
7. Added map navigation on edges of the screen.
8. Hints' appearance time is tuned.
9. Increased range for land artillery and mortars.
10. Various fixes in unit's attributes calculations.
11. Fixed issues with the grouping of units.
12. Fixes of memory leaks.
Many other changes and fixes.
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

Filthy Kalinite
Patron
Joined
Apr 24, 2015
Messages
19,110
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Bubbles In Memoria
https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/1069650/view/2766856426235037343
Cavalry is here!
We added cavalry into the game. You can test cavalry units in a few battles in the "Battle" section. Try your cavalry units in the roles of reconnaissance, screening, and harassing in the enemy army.

Additionally, we fixed multiple issues reported by you.

Patch notes:

1. Added in Battles a test battle introducing Dragoons to collect feedback about cavalry unit performance
2. Decreased hint time
3. Increased starting career points for DLC
4. Added a notification when the leadership of a group is slowing down waiting for the following delayed ships to get positions in group formation
5. Fixed several issues with ships sailing in formation with damaged mast/sails
6. Corrected typos according to feedback reports.
7. Fixed issue with artillery collision
8. Fixed issue with mortar unit get stuck while on the move
9. Fixed a case in port with negative refilling supply cost
10. Fixed issue with the sliding soldiers after artillery incoming
11. Fixed inconsistency of ship capacity in Marine Corps window
12. Fixed several issues in port with fleet scroll, trophies, and marines picker
13. Fixed an issue with player units in Desert March that may get stuck on entering
14. Other minor fixes/improvements
 

Xamenos

Magister
Patron
Joined
Feb 4, 2020
Messages
1,256
Pathfinder: Wrath
So, can I charge across the frozen sea and capture ships with my cavalry yet?
 

oscar

Arcane
Joined
Aug 30, 2008
Messages
8,036
Location
NZ
Ohh yeah baby time for a Jack Aubrey larp!

UG: CW was a nigh-perfect game bar the hideous level scaling. Hopefully they've learnt their lesson as in every other regard it was what the genre is dying for (crisp clean graphics, intuitive and sensible UI, fairly competent AI).
 
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KateMicucci

Arcane
Joined
Sep 2, 2017
Messages
1,676
Is it good? Not interested in the ships so much but I want musket fights.
 

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