Ultimate General: Civil War

Played the 1st (Gettysburg) and it was perfected over time.

This 2nd version is even better.

Fast, realsitic army sized strategy game with some historical accuracy

Love the game but hate the fact it is single player only!

First and foremost, I'm a civil war fanatic, and love everything pertaining to the battles and history of the time. Anyone who has visit any of the battle sites can stand and imagine what it was like to have to cross the distance under musket and cannon fire and wonder what was going through their minds.
For this game, Ultimate General: Civil War, it gives the player a chance to lead your troops into the famous and iconic battles, and either preserve the union as history recorded it or turn the tide of battle and change it forever. The stunning depictions of the layout and landscape is breathtaking and very remarkable, and has on any occasions, helps a civil war buff like myself to envision what actually took place. There were times that I could see the troop placements, advancements, movements, hear the screams, commands, and smell the cannon and musket smoke just from playing this game while visiting the national battle site.
Again, I state that war is never a beautiful thing. It's horrible, destructive, demoralizing, cruel, and only creates a path of destruction in its wake.
As many have response within the comments below, even with its stunning graphics and designs, I can't bring myself to give this a good rating. It also has me to believe that the makers of this game didn't read one single history book or published book, visited an actual battle site, or even google anything related to the civil war before making this game.
What cause me to rate negatively on this game are as follows:
AI Scaling-It doesn't matter what achievements you were awarded from the minor skirmishes prior to a major battle (Less enemy troops, supplies, reinforcements, etc.), the AI doubles, sometimes even triples the amount of enemies you will be facing. Fore instance, if you are fielding over 25,000 troops in Two or Three Corps, the enemies hits you will what seems like 20 divisions all equaling 2500 infantry, cannon division containing nearly 400 troops, and more skirmishers than I can count. If the AI sees a small break in you're lines, they bum rush that area with everything they have. They don't seem to experience fatigue, low morale, or low ammo. Meanwhile one of your divisions suffers the loss of three people, and they quickly bolt and are running all the way to Washington. Even deploying skirmishers from your on infantry regiments only slows them down for a time, but they attack you main infantry unit harder, like they were angry that you sent mosquitoes to piss them off.
Pricing-Buy veterans or equipment drains your financial resources like pouring water into a bucket with several holes in the bottom. You can't even properly outfit your divisions or corps to even meet the enemy on the field of battle. Now, depending on which side you play, the game needs to take those things into account. The North had all the factories to create many of the war fighting equipment. The South had some factories, but mainly relied heavily on imported equipment from Europe and acquiring cannons and muskets from captives and the dead off the battlefields. I could see paying full price on muskets for under 100 troops, but buying in bulk, say over 100, the price drops a bit. America was founded on Capitalism and the old barter and trade system was greatly in effect during the Civil War at the time. The game should that into effect with the time period.
Career Points-Lets face it, this notion of the game is absolutely nonsense. You get one point for minor battles and two for major battles. Some chapters (or stages) there are up to one to three minor battles, with a major battle that follows. The small problem is this portion of the game is that out of the eight categories to fill up, each one require 10 points to max out. That is 80 points total that you have to obtain to completely better your chances on the game. I have beaten the game twice (both on easy, wouldn't dare try on regular or hard levels) and can never fill up every category on the career page. Also, one slip up on meeting the objectives and you're getting a draw or a lost, which reflects no career point. Take that into account, since the AI likes to increase the odds of your army surviving the enemy that it deploys on the battlefield an impossible feat.
Wounded Officers-Wounded officers take nearly two stages ( or Chapters if you prefer) before you get them back, and that's even with your medicine category is max out. By the time you get them back, You have already spent thousands on a new officer (and possibility have lost that officer from a previous engagement). Speaking on this subject about wounded officers. Actual history did tell the Confederates did target officers to drop the morale of infantry, but the North didn't lose that many officers to be counted as KIA. Yes, many on both sides were WIA, but unless the wound was moral, they were back in the fight the next day or following engagement. Many officers on both sides suffer from stray shots that gazed their arms, legs, or heads, but continue in the fight.
Experience Stars-It seems in the game that if you field more than two two-star units on a major battle, the AI will ensure that it has least six units that have two-stars to counter your units. Experience takes forever to build up and it also seems like you lose experience if you rout or retreat (which when you faced with overwhelming odds all the time). Also, when facing even enemy units that have only one-star, and you have them surrounded on all sides with regiments, it seems to take forever to get them to rout. Lastly, surrendering. This subject I hate. The game provides a bonus of extra troops for turning over prisoners. Well, the game's enemy don't allow they armies to surrender. They will more likely disband and rout, while if the enemy surrounds one of your regiments, they surrender very quickly and you have to chase them down with a Calvary unit behind enemy lines to get them back.
Last Notes:
The game is overall great for reacting the famous battles and the game play of planning and executing strategic battle movements. I love that you can pause during the battle to plan and analysis the battlefield on how to plan and position your troops. I also love before the battle begins that you can choose which units to use, where to stage them, split your forces for maximizing effect, and create protection lines around your general and artillery. The real question is-is it worth buying? The answer is has to be no. As I said, it gets very frustrating building the perfect corp, only to go into a major battle, and have the enemy completely devastate your army (even if you win the all the objectives) and your spending the next stage rebuilding to have it happen all over again on the next major battle.

im nat one for details so all im gonna say is that its goated

This is a wonderfully made game! Very good on historical correctness and awesome strategy options. Buy this game!

Overall its a good game. I like to tinker with the corps composition of troop types. Brigades of infantry on average of 1000 men to start, then bumped to 1200, then to 1500 seems to work rather well. Its not just about packing your brigades full of troops but the number of smaller brigades can flank large enemy brigades on the map. when the enemy retreats in like to bring my Calvary full force to run them to the edges of the map. Concentrating on army organization, medicine, training and logistics first really makes a difference. Barely halfway through the confederate campaign i have 4 corps and field 25000 infantry, 6000 Calvary(8 brigades of 750 troops each mostly swords and a few with rifles) on my primary corps with all infantry and cannons on the rest it almost too easy. The best part is when the AI changes a little bit from the previous campaign run. It almost seems like I am actually playing a real novice player on the other end.

ai cheats like hell dont waste your money

super fun for anyone who enjoys strategy games!

In a word, frustrating. Missions are highly pre-choreographed; even if ur winning, if it has been pre-scripted for you to be on the losing side and fall back, the control point you have to defend will disappear and reappear far away. The enemy AI knows this in advance and has units there to speedcap, causing almost immediate mission failure. Not fun, glad I got it on a big sale, but still wasn't worth the frustration.

Just an all around great game.

Directing confederate troops to destroy union.

Best tactical simulator of the era.

I like the concept of this game but it is so ripe with bugs and nonsense. I have seen so many time the enemies curled into a balls that my troops cannot melee them and took a lot of damage. The melee feels so random when the enemy charge but theyr broken and fled but instead of fleeing back into their line they fled into your back line. So frustrating leh

Fun! Has its own idiosyncrasies that many would find annoying (you HAVE to obtain a close 3:1 causality rate in many battles to progress without problems) and AI goes from surprisingly cunning to stupid at the drop of the hat but otherwise I had a good time making some rough calls that saw a lot of pixel men dying.

I enjoy it quite a bit.

For a History nut it's a must, great game play and scenarios.

It's annoying how the game puts you on a massive disadvantage in battles that are quite scripted in the sense that you are forced to play in a certain way to win, and also by either putting you in a terrible position or by giving the enemy way more numbers than you it feels unfair, also it's annoying how the battles have phases instead of being continuous, this means that the game gives you an objective, for example "Take point A, hold point B and C", but after phase one is over you move to phase two, and now the objectives change to "Hold point A, B and retreat from point C, now take point D", if I had knew from the start that holding point C doesn't matter and that I would have had to take point D I would played the mission differently, this is extremely annoying and by giving you misleading objectives the game forces you to make bad decisions and therefore replay the mission once you finish because you know what the real objectives will be, due to this and the massive disadvantage in scripted battles either due to positioning or numbers the game becomes way too annoying to play, I am tempted to finish it just to see how it ends, but I don't think I will.

I first played Ultimate General Gettysburg and do not recall seeing brigades disintegrate.
Write a patch to fix this...
I do not like how brigades who are broken disintegrate, not historical, if check you would see that broken units went to the rear and did not engage, also a general should keep moral up: rallying broken formations.

This game reminds me of a quote from Ulysses S Grant during the battle of the wilderness, "I am heartily tired of hearing what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is going to suddenly turn a double somersault and land in our rear and on both our flanks at the same time!"
This will happen to you in almost every battle without fail.

Not a bad game, the army customization is almost more addicting than the gameplay itself, id say the most glaring issue is when the game purposely puts you at a disadvantage either through giving the enemy ludicrous numbers or in heavily scripted missions. Fun but not worth full price

I like this game a lot.

Great game should have gotten DLC

I would absolutely recommend this game to any Civil War & RTS enjoyers. This game is the perfect marriage of the two.

What it does well:

-immersion

-animation; art looks great imo, you can tell you're playing a video game though. Some people complain that it condenses your brigades from 2,500 guys into like 60 little sprites on the screen, but that was perfect for me. Trust me, there is enough to manage in this game without seeing an *actual* 150,000 guys on it.

-momentum; morale, condition/exhaustion, supplies; all of the combat mechanics give it an authentic feel for the push and pull of battle. When you repel a charge, you can follow up with a punishing volley for hundreds more kills. Same will happen to you. Every little decision matters.

-urgency; the battles have timers. you have to balance the lives of your men against succeeding in the mission. You have to use your time wisely. Attack too aggressively, you wont have enough men to win. Play too conservatively, you won't have enough time.

-scaling the enemy's forces; How you perform against the enemy matters in the future (to an extent). They managed to reward you for winning without making the second half of the game useless and easy. basically you need to win battles in order to scale at least as fast as the enemy. The fewer casualties you take the better, as recruits arent unlimited and neither is money.

-the "Camp Phase." The UI between battles where you replenish your army, equip them, assign leaders and fill brigades with men--this screen is absolutely beautiful, and it feels incredible to use. It makes you care about your men. And it makes you take painstaking care to manage your money in a way that ensures your army is large, well trained, AND well equipped. Usually though--pick two lol.

-it's really rewarding; you feel really smart and really proud when you win a battle. They're hard. Especially on the middle and higher difficulties. This game doesnt pull any punches.

-accuracy; this game is praised by many enthusiasts as giving faithful depictions of the battles the way they happened.

What it doesn't do as well

-Because of the accuracy, this game is very railroaded (rigidly linear). This wouldn't bother me very much as long as each side can win battles they didnt win in real life--cause it's a video game--and that is the case with this game. You are in control of your destiny. You can win or lose any battle. However, because of the railroading, the game frequently spams you with objectives you dont actually need to win, or fails to inform you that something you did earlier has disqualified you from earning one of the victory conditions, but it won't tell you. So there are, in my opinion, severe problems with this game in that regard. There is always a way to win, even til the last minute, but if you don't really pay attention constantly to the victory conditions, you'll be screwed. Even then, you might still get screwed. I recommend saving at the start of every "phase" of battle. And save in the camp before battle in case you just really mess up deploying your corps.

-I feel it doesnt reward you *enough* for success. There are 38 battles in the game, and in my first playthrough I won 35 of them, Drew 1, and lost 2. And yet, literally anytime the CSA needed more troops to be neck-and-neck with me for the grand battles, they always got them. It seemed the most I could outnumber them was 10-15% or so. Now, in the minor battles, the game seems to have no problem with 2:1 and even 3:1. But having said all that, I honestly felt like the game just gets harder the larger your army gets, because there's no real advantage, only that much more to manage. The enemy always gets reinforced, they'll always contest, they'll never run out of 2-star veteran brigades 2,500 strong. So while you're micromanaging one little push out of your 76 brigades, there's some other line where your guys are getting shredded but you don't even know. Just too much going on at a certain point.

it can be a little janky; pathfinding can be a little clumsy and unintuitive, so there's a ton of micromanaging, but that's the point I guess. Sometimes your guys will have a full reload bar and just stare at the enemy brigade and not bother to shoot no matter how much you tell them to, and then they get routed. I still dont know why this happens, but it's not often. May be related to exhaustion, but i think that only really effects whether they can sprint or charge.

-Some battles overstay their welcome; this is obviously personal preference, but several of these battles can take upwards of 4 to 5 hours. The grand battles will always take at least 3 i'd say. Unless you're really comfortable and confident playing on triple speed or something, where a single mistake costs you 2,500 men lol. It's cool that the battles have all that weight to them, but sometimes you sit down with the goal to get through one battle. Just one battle, I just wanna play one start to finish and progress in the campaign. 1 am comes along and you're like wtf, I have work in the morning. My fault, I know.

Conclusion: this game is an 8/10. Very fun to play, very rewarding to win, easy to learn and hard to master, tons of content (all of my hours at review were from one campaign), and most of it is very well conceptualized and executed. In my opinion it's worth full price.

While I haven't won yet, I thought the game was fun and engaging in order to simulate what really happened. It is important to carry forward stories of the past so that mistakes from our past do not repeat themselves unnecessarily. I wouldn't play this game until exhaustion, but I felt like I was a real leader of men, taking my part to lead from the front, to fight side by side with my troops riding with vim and vigor to meet our worthy adversary. God Speed to the 2nd Ohio!

I have tried for years to enjoy this game, but after one final, fated attempt, I have to give this a thumbs down. There's much potential in this sort of game, and the first in the series (Gettysburg) got right what the sequel got wrong. The game's strict adherence to keeping with the battles as they happened is so scripted that it's broken -- the inability to actually command the outcome of a battle is so frustrating. Sure, if playing the historical battles, I can understand the desire to have players follow the historical script, but to do so in the campaign when players are supposed to take the reigns is so poorly conceived that I will refuse to play this through, which is a shame, because almost everything else outweighs this (major) downside.

Take Shiloh for instance: I manage to deal such a bloody nose to the Confederate attack at the church and along the river that I shouldn't need to fall back on the hornet's nest -- so why in the good lord's name did the Devs think it was a good idea to make that a necessity? Or, if not that, at least give me the option to reassign my units to the new positions post cutscene rather than to have it auto-assigned by the awful computer AI. The fact that this is not included to me feels like a significant oversight. What made Gettysburg such a great game was the choice players got to behave like a general and sort out strategy (flank attack or hold, etc.). There's none of that in this game ... so it doesn't live up to the title: no ultimate general here.

Ultimate General Civil War is quite simply the GOAT of linear warfare RTS games. It might not have the massive sandbox campaign of a Total War title, but it makes up for this by having every single gameplay mechanic honed to near perfection. What is here is about as close to perfect as I think a collaborative art like game development can get. It just works. The only issue I can think of is that for some reason the logistics unit perks dont work but otherwise their is nothing I can say besides please get this game it is great.

great game...I keep seeing more battles in campaign mode which is great even adding more battles would be sweet too....and a LIVE version where you can play against other players would be awesome!

I love trying to figure out different ways to win the battles with fewer casualties. One of the better single player RTS games. I do wish there was a multi-player version though. You'd have to run it at regular speed.

Best ACW tactical RTS i have played... i wish it was regimental level instead of brigade

hours of realistic strategy play

After beating both the Union and CSA campaigns on MG I think this game deserves a maybe in terms of recommendation. I love the idea behind it, not so much the execution.

Pros:
Conceptually very cool, allowing you to play as the Union and CSA and micro units in so many ways to beat the enemy.
It is moderately challenging at it's core and you have to make good decisions on what you need to do to win the battle.
The battles are historically faithful (in terms of the map and phases)

Cons:
It feels like there is absolutely no point in beating the enemy into oblivion especially when they can just spawn in more manpower for later battles. The only thing you get out of it is exp and some equipment (assuming you don't lose more than you gained). I want the enemy to at least less trained units or more poorly equipped units if they are gonna have so much manpower
It is challenging starting off but then the challenge becomes "can you survive the horde" instead of can you be tactical in your battle strategy to destroy the enemy.
A game like this shouldn't need to rely on mods to fix the major problems with balancing especially since there is no workshop support

Good game, solid game. Exploring the campaign from confederate and union side is a lot of fun. the tactics wonderfully connected with flanking bonus' morale, exhaustion. i also love the way the overall campaign builds from one battle to the next. this is a must play for any rts enthusiast.

it really has a nice civil war feel to it . corp .

I only played the Confederate Campaign so far and what I can say is that the game is just as good as the other Ultimate General Games, it is definitely harder though as you need to manage the entire Theatre, meaning guns, generals, PoWs and so on. I really like the dynamics of the Campaign as well, depending on how well you do in certain battles different outcomes and other smaller skirmishes are unlocked to you.

I appreciate how the game play changes each time. No two battles are identical. There is always anther strategy to create.

Excellent, a nice challenge to work with.

Quite a beautiful game. There is a lot going on and while is not a real battleground .... well close enough in letting you understand all the factors and aspects of the real thing. Historically accurate!

Its a good game but these levels just drag on and on. also wish they had multiplayer

Very well put together game. Little to no bugs or issues.

Game-labs only good game, though I've heard from some people that Game-labs didn't develop this game and I wouldn't be surprised if that was true considering it's much more polished than their other titles. Overall I like the game, it's similar to the older historical Total War games if they were entirely focused on tactical battles. I like the army management & camp system it's simple while still giving you options for your units. The units are quite balanced and have their own unique strengths/weaknesses and there are only a couple of weapons that are OP (snipers and certain artillery). My only complaint about the game, barring there not being MP support, is that the AI scales a lot even on normal difficulty. As such half-way through the campaign you might find yourself in an unwinnable position and from there the campaign is a death-spiral. However, going to easy difficulty gives you the opposite result and now you outnumber the AI 3-to-1. So the game defiantly needs a difficulty rework, otherwise it's a great game, cool time period, decent mechanics (with a learning curve). Don't try any of their other games they're either disappointments or scams.

I've gotten the privilege to kill yankees, and in killing all of those yankees, I do not regret anything.

The UI is unbelievably small if you're playing at 1440p; no scaling options. The letters are literally 1-2 mm tall. I'd argue it's not playable even for a 20/20 vision person.

Other than that, I had a weird graphical glitch and it crashed on exit. Awesome.
The gameplay is like watching paint dry. All those numbers going down slowly is such a gimmick. Ugh.

Very good tactical game play

Super cool game. Scaling for the opponent is busted and needs to be reworked. Why get punished bc you did a good job managing your troops in the campaign to have the programming negate that with and extra +++30-80,000 troops.

This game could be fun. But screw this.

Enemy units retreating INTO my lines and suddenly gaining the will to fight behind me.

I adjust my units to fight a particular campaign battle. They are bringing a lot of cavalry, so restart and max out a cavalry regiment to just try and hold them off while I deal with the infantry. No, suddenly they have 5 regiments that are all double the size they were before I maxed out my cav. There's no player agency. Whatever you bring, the AI gets more. They get to run around you in circles. I tell my cav or skirmishers to charge exposed supplies or artillery? They stand there and shoot instead. Enemy cavalry or a pummmled infantry unit that retreats INTO my lines? They insta snipe my artillery like nothing.

Great fun. On your first few playthroughs you'll be a terrible general but just keep playing until you lose. Then try again

My favorite RTS.

awesome

ive had this game for years, and I absolutely love the idea of having more games like this out there than the Total War franchise. But every single time I try to get into it, and I start a new playthrough, its the same fucking thing. I have fun for the first hour or two, but then I realize how fucking busted the flanking mechanic is, or how awful the AI behaviour is (both for the enemy troops and your own troops pathfinding / behaviour outside of being micromanaged), or how featureless the battles are when compared to Total War, even though this is a game essentially focussing ENTIRELY on the battles; whereas TW has a much more expanded and intricate campaign system, and often multiple of them, per game. I realize this isn't a studio as large as CA or with remotely as much funding but like; how much effort would it have taken to add small things like maybe giving your general some abilities beyond just an inspire radius? A more expanded skill tree that actually feels like it does something in battle, grouping units in battle? I want to love this game, but I just cannot ever justify putting my time into it. As well, this dev team has not had a good track record of late, with a couple more games that I want to love because of the concept, but which failed in execution due to what seems to be just developer neglect (UA: Dreadnoughts & UG: American Revolution). I just can't recommend this game, unless you want to fight against the mechanics all day long and get pissed off, for barely any payoff in a barebones campaign.

Historical gameplay. STonewall Jackson shows up at the right time etc. Fun