10/14/2023 0 Comments Custom dreadnought ships![]() The big one is that it's not really set up to let you iterate on previous designs. The biggest issue is still the shipbuilder, which has some new issues in Campaign mode. Dissatisfied because there were a lot of things which didn't work as well as it seemed they should have, and baffled because RTW2, which has been out for 3.5 years, did these things better. I played a bit as both the US and Britain, and came away both dissatisfied and baffled. Work continued on UAD throughout 2022, with something like the full campaign available by November. It might be when they get the campaign finished, depending on how that's handled, although I think that unless there's a major overhaul to the shipbuilder, it's always going to play second fiddle to RTW2 in my eyes.Ģ022 update: The above was written shortly before the first playable campaign released. There's definite promise here, but I don't think it's worth $50 today. ![]() On the whole, I would say that Ultimate Admiral - Dreadnoughts isn't really ready yet. There's no air component, which is slightly weird in a game that goes through the end of the dreadnought era. The big downside is that you're playing from a third-person perspective instead of the map view of RTW2, which makes it harder to be sure where everyone is and make your choices strategically. It's also much prettier, although how much you care about that depends on personal taste. I haven't had the frustration, common in RTW2, of having ships decide to ignore me and go do their own thing, but I also haven't played large battles. It does a better job of letting you know what's going on, and it's more responsive, at least in the relatively small amount I've played. The other main pillar of the game is the combat, which is a mixed bag relative to RTW2. Having all the options would be fine if it felt like they were trying to build Warship Engineering Simulator (a game that Lord Nelson fervently hopes is never done well because I would disappear forever), but I get the strong impression that this is an attempt to attract fans of World of Warships. RTW2 (and Aurora) avoid this problem by going light on graphics, and give you a few meaningful options instead of a bunch of mostly meaningless choices. (This isn't helped by its tendency to default to the lowest option, which is sometimes "none" in cases where it really shouldn't be, like rangefinders.) The graphics make this worse, as you have to spend a fair bit of time fiddling with where to put your guns and such, and there's a fundamental constraint of it having to look reasonable with the base that they give you. There are a huge number of options covering everything from boiler type to shaft details, but they all feel like the sort of thing you get in a video game, with specific percentages given for the benefits and drawbacks of each option, all of which look suspiciously neat and rounded in percentage terms. My main criticism here is that it mistakes complexity for depth instead of letting depth emerge naturally. Both are nice enough, but rely on single battles instead of a campaign.īut what if you just want to build ships and don't care much about the larger strategy? Unfortunately, the only place where UA-D's shipbuilder is clearly superior to RTW2s is in graphics, which are quite nice by the standards of this genre. The game I've played that's most reminiscent of UA-D is Children of a Dead Earth, which is a very hard sci-fi space combat and shipbuilding game. And even in the custom battle, you build only one type of ship, with the AI generating the rest. But in both cases, you're building a ship before every battle, and using it for that battle only, which removes the higher strategic element that makes both RTW2 and Aurora so compelling for me. Instead, your options are either the Naval Academy, a series of missions with specific goals that you have to build ships for, or the custom battle, where you can set up almost any combat you want and have at it. The main issue is simply lack of a campaign mode, which is supposed to be coming soon. Let me start by saying that Lord Nelson likes it much more than Rule The Waves, because it lacks the essential addictive element that means I disappear for days or weeks at a time. I recently figured out how to buy the still early-access Ultimate Admiral - Dreadnoughts, a game that seems to be an attempt to compete with Rule the Waves in the early 20th century warship builder genre, but with better graphics. ![]() Now that I've settled into the new rate, I'm going to start posting some shorter stuff on Wednesdays when I have things written up that don't justify taking the Sunday slot. ![]()
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