Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail is apparently on Steam now. Dreadnoughts still is not, but is still available to purchase and play from their site, as far as I know. Has anybody here given either of them a go? I can’t recall off the top of my head.
Thank you!
I am getting pretty tempted by Dreadnaughts.
I like Dreadnoughts a lot. Right now it’s primarily a puzzle game with lots of “here’s the enemy fleet composition, here’s a bunch of money… sink their ships” scenarios, but it does that thing really well and the ship building element is well done enough that it’s fun to experiment with.
I’m looking forward to what it becomes once the campaign element lands.
Good enough of a recco for me :) I am gonna snag it, thank you!
Playing the Persia expansion for FOG Empires. My usual games in the original involved scrimping and scraping along to try get a progress token but generally being stuck in the bottom third of nations. Starting as Persia you have 3 territories, but the game whooshes you up the CDR and basically gifts you Media, Babylon and Lydia until you own all Asia Minor in around 20 turns. Quite the change because now you are really struggling with decadence.
@Mr_Bismarck Thanks for this recco.
Turns out this is one of the greatest games of all time (for me). Its pretty much every naval miniatures wargame all in one box. Easy to use, no rivet counting, huge variety of ships and lots of fun cruising around having battles.
I spent 10 hours yesterday just playing little scenarios and thats before the campaign mode exists! Love it!
Is it Compass games that seems to have QA issues lately? I’ve been looking at Blue Water Navy and wondering if there were any warnings I should be aware of. At a glance it looks like my kind of strategic level mid complexity CDG.
I fiddled with the training missions. Took me forever to win the one fighting the single ironclad (had to go for bigger guns and heavier shells, trading off armor) and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to win the flip side of that one, the mission where you have the casement ironclad and have to kill two monitors. The enemy can just run in opposite directions, or just run, and I can’t seem to catch them or get close enough to do any damage. Still fun, but some of these training missions are a bit obscure.
I had no idea this was available to buy now - steam still shows it as TBA. Thanks for the oblique heads up! Purchased.
I’m wondering the same for Hearts and Minds. Can anyone provide feedback on it? How does it compare to other grand strategy Vietnam wargame like Fire in the Lake?
I watched most of the video of Dreadnoughts you posted, and I was pretty impressed. Apologies in advance for the barrage of questions that follows!
First, the narrator did repeatedly comment on deficiencies in AI ship design, such as BB Maryland having no rear turret. How are you finding the AI? Maybe this issue could be ameliorated by scenarios that involve a pre-built enemy?
Also, the narrator said something about 1940 tech only being available. Does the game progress through all of WW2? For that matter, I see a Civil War battle of ironclads on the website, though the date is April 1st, which made me wonder if it was an April Fools thing. Is WW2 only modeled, or does it also cover WWI or earlier?
I assume it’s surface ships only – no carriers or subs?
Finally, are the scenarios or campaign based on historical engagements at all, or are they all hypothetical surface battles?
The name of the game, Dreadnaught, should be a clue! It seems to focus on the late 19th to early 20th century era, centering on the Dreadnaught period, which would include the run up to WWI, WWI, and the early inter-war years. It seems to extend into WWII, somewhat, but the emphasis from what I can tell is on “classic” big-gun battleship combat, with destroyers and torpedo boats but limited air and sub stuff. I.e., it’s not a WWII sim per se, but rather more a WWI-ish sim.At least that’s how it appears to me after limited experience.
Heya!
The AI design is just semi random and does a really great job making interesting ships. It has no interest in making historical ships though so I am sure the criticism is correct. But I really like seeing what crazy designs the ai come sup with and running them or tweaking them after the ai comes up with something.
Its a wargamers toy, not groggy at all it. So it primarily plays like a traditional wargames army list sandbox.
The game flow right now is:
design and spent spend points on your ships.
Fight an enemy who has similar points but spent them differently.
A sea battle usually take ~15 mins or so.
re: 1940. Yes the game stops at early WW2 before aircraft and radar come and ruin all the fun :) So you can do fun surface WW2 engagements. You will get your japanese torpedo boats attacking the US fleet but you wont get aircraft carriers or subs etc. Surface ships only from small torpedo boats up to battleships.
For a game going form Ironclads to WW2 destroyers it handles the span pretty well imho.
I agree with @TheWombat its sweet spot to me seems the leadup to the dreadnaught age. with all these wacky ships transitioning technologies. I happen to think the later periods are less fun as the guns get pretty accurate. Which is historically correct of course which is fine. Also like every naval wargamer ever I say “”#&@ torpedoes!?!!" every 5 mins :)
Hope that helps! I am really enjoying it!
@TheWombat Yeah I just skipped the reverse one as well :) It seemed in impossible. That was the challenge that made me realize the training stuff is custom scenarios anyway so I should just build my own or copy user scenarios.
I would also note I skipped the Napoleonic one because they do not yet have the custom points battle feature, just some single player campaign malarkey. This one is also meant to get that at some point, I have no interest in that kind of linear story in my wargame but your milage may vary so if it matters to you its coming here later.
Cheers hope that helps! I really am having a blast!
Thanks for the info, @Rod_Humble!
I like naval games, and even more modern stuff. There was a game in the 80s called Action Stations, developed by a Navy officer I think, that was really good if graphically, um, limited. Never was developed beyond its initial state though, which is sad, because it was one of the most authentic feeling and playing WWII surface combat sims I’ve ever seen. I have to say, though, that once you get into radar, airplanes, and really modern fire control, ranges and capabilities skyrocket and you start to edge into Command Modern Operations/Harpoon territory.
Of course, history only gives us a handful of Dreadnaught-era pitched sea battles, from around 1905 (1898 if you count the Spanish-American War I guess) to 1916 or so. The sweet spot from a tech point of view would be the inter-war years, before carriers came to dominate everything. Of course, there are only hypothetical battles to play with in those years (which is good for humans in general but bad for gamers!).
Thanks for the information, guys! It sounds like a lot of fun. I’m pretty tempted.
Carrier Battles 4 Guadalcanal is out today for PC and Mac. I played it a bunch on my iPad a few years ago and found it diverting.
Ohhhh, that looks good.
Also this just dropped:
https://www.matrixgames.com/game/shadow-empire
I got a copy to stream, and the manual alone is AMAZING. This looks like it might be something special.
Oh wow. I spent SOOOO many hours way back when on my Apple 2 playing Grigsby’s Guadalcanal Campaign, breaking a sweat searching for the Japanese CV task force, hoping the reports from my search planes were accurate. As in real life, sometimes the reports from the search planes could be wrong and the only way you knew for sure was launching an attack. I LOVED that game, enough that I found a version I could install on my Windows machine and run (and it was SO much clunkier than I remembered!)
Hopefully this will be a worthy replacement. My main concern if the fog of war aspect, as that was such a critical part of the cat and mouse nature of these campaigns. After playing 4 or 5 times, will I know where the enemy CV TF is going to be every time? Will my search planes provide less than perfect information? Etc.