Wall of text warning. Very sorry.
I’m going to start off on Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts by mentioning a problem I felt the first time I played that’s still there now, just to get it out of the way early, and that’s the lack of interactivity during battles.
Inside battle you get to control your fleet’s heading and speed, select targets, pick between high explosive and armoured piercing shells and control how cautious your gunners should be, between waiting for what they think is a good chance to hit and just blazing away and then… that’s really it.
Battles can push 30+ minutes and for much of that you’re probably making occasional heading changes and then watching long-range gunnery competitions with a to-hit chance of maybe 5%, so you’re going to see a lot of water splashing.
With that out of the way… I really enjoy the game!
I tried some campaign last night, but it still feels very under-baked right now. Don’t buy it for that.
Right now the meat of the game is custom battles and especially the Naval Academy. The Academy is a series of puzzles really, that give you a scenario and then let you work out how to solve it:
“The enemy has a pre-Dreadnought and a screen of light cruisers, you have $66,000,000… sink the Battleship.”
You can then build a fleet of many torpedo boats to overwhelm the enemy and land torpedo hits, or, given that the CL screen might wreck TBs or Destroyers, you can build a Battleship of your own. If you can keep the cost under $33,000,000 you’ll get to build two.
You’ll then get dumped into a screen with an empty hull on it and you’ll need to choose, add and place conning towers, engine funnels, barbettes, main guns, secondary guns, casemate guns, underwater torpedoes, deck torpedoes.
Do you want a 6" main gun, or dual 4"? Do you want an 18" torpedo, or maybe you could downsize to a 16", but put an endurance engine on it so it gains 2km more range.
Everything you add will add both cost and weight and you can have fine control over these elements with what you place, but also with the tech you choose - some propellent charge choices are lighter than others, but cost more… you could always go with single-layer torpedo protection instead of double. etc.
If you’re right at the border for weight you also have explicit control over armour levels to the tenth of an inch. So you could always take two tenths of an inch off the roof armour on your main gun turrets to get back under weight… that couldn’t possible go wrong in battle!
This balancing act is educational and addictive.
I just played back-to-back Naval Academy missions where I had to make torpedo boats to sink a BB and then I flipped around to play the Battleship trying to survive the AI torpedo attack.
As the TBs I went for speed and numbers, with eight 30 knot boats armed with one 3" gun and four 6km torpedoes.
At battle start I cranked the engines to flank, turned nose in on the BB and charged. One TB was knocked out almost immediately when a hit went right in through the nose and came out the back, taking out two engines along the way. Then two more TBs took significant damage, but that still left five, who landed five torpedo hits to set flooding the enemy crew couldn’t stem - mission successful.
For the mirror mission I loaded my BB with 9" single barrel main guns, because I figured they wouldn’t really be too much use against fast-moving targets and then absolutely soaked the sides in 4" secondaries and pumped up the crew training to veteran, to try to make the stream of fire that would be coming out as accurate as possible.
I guessed the enemy would have maybe 4" guns at best, so I stripped armour and bulkheads down and then tried to give it as much speed as possible. A 26 knot BB gets to shoot a lot at enemy boats when they can only close at 29 knots.
That worked really well - the 4" HE set fire after fire on the tiny targets, whittling down enemy crew, taking away their C&C as conning towers were hit, or caught fire and damaging their engines, making it impossible for them to close distance at all in some cases.
This is the only time torpedoes got close to my ship:
There are hours and hours of fun in the dock building like this. You can make ironclads, late war Battleships, insane IJN torpedo Cruisers with 40 22km torpedoes and really anything else you can think of.
However, when it’s ready the strength of the campaign will be compromise and utility. You won’t be able to design specifically to purpose like I did here and you won’t have the exact rock to enemy scissors in the right bit of ocean for the fight that’s about to happen. Your BB might face two Destroyers one week and a BB/CA/CL mix the next and have to be able to survive both. And you’ll have to do that under your total fleet maintenance budget.
So I’m enjoying it, mostly for the madness of concocting my own ship designs and using them to solve the Academy puzzles. I think the campaign will eventually really push design skills and how to balance both ship design, fleet composition and fleet placement, but that’s not there yet.
Cautious thumbs up. Looking forward to the future, having fun right now.
