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Rob Zacny

Episode 381: Ultimate General: Civil War

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Three Moves Ahead 381:

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Ultimate General: Civil War
Rob, Rowan, and Troy "My favorite civil war documentary was F Troop" Goodfellow get together to talk about Ultimate General: Civil War. Game-Labs had an impressive debut with Ultimate General: Gettysburg, putting out a game that was lauded by the community at large as well as our panelists. With UG: Civil War, they take on a much larger task by adding persistent units, more battles, and a grander scale. But are they up to such a daunting task? Can they overcome the focused genius of the first game? As it turns out: yes. Yes, they can.

Ultimate General: Civil War


 

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Wish I had this passion for that theme. When you talked about Ultimate General Gettysburg once I've asked for a way to get into the conflict. Bruce Geryk recommended reading The Killer Angels and I liked the book but still couldn't really care about the war itself. So couldn't many people, it seems, cause Wikipedia only has English and French versions of an article about that book and there's no Russian translation so I've read it in English. And that's not an easy read.

 

Still was a good listen, even if I'm not into wargames or ACW. Thanks.

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Appreciate this episode. UG:CW somehow isn't what I'm looking for (the discussed Wild Wild West train and the RPG elements are very much unwanted), but I hope it's successful. I think the model could be applied to a lot of other conflicts, and I'd love to see sales enough to entice other developers into trying their hand at the war management level of the American Civil War. I'd love to see a successor to VGA Civil War Strategy that is the Dwarf Fortress to its Nethack. ;)

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I bought this and would like to give it a shot when it's out of early access.

 

I am a bit obsessed with how to make large-scale battles fun to fight at, say, a company or regimental scale, but running the whole battle against the AI and have it be challenging and enjoyable.

 

 It should be possible to make an overall deployment and battle plan for a large scale battle like

Antietam, sit back and watch the battle unfold in "real time" and make decisions about which sectors to take over and micro for a limited period.  

 

This would also allow for occasional large scale orders like assault, skirmish, defend, draw arrows etc at a divisional scale. The battlefield would be arranged in sections - each perhaps a Total War scale of about 20 units - which you could then take over and try to micro. 

 

I hope this is something Nick Thomadis and his team are seriously thinking about for the future, especially for the large scale battles of the 18-19th Century. Would love to see UG beat Creative Assembly at their own game, especially seeing how bogged down in the fantasy arcade style CA is at the moment. 

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I got it and have played the first couple of battles from the Union side.  I didn't play UG: Gettysburg.  I love the interface - it's very easy to get the troops to do what you want to do with very minimal fuss.  I think there is great potential for the campaign.  I'd like to see more of a Panzer General style approach where your core corps (see what I did there?) is the core (ugh) of your involvement in the scenarios.  Right now it seems like my corps is just a supporting actor to the much larger army.  But I've only played a couple of scenarios, so that may change.  

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17 hours ago, Procyon Lotor said:

I got it and have played the first couple of battles from the Union side.  I didn't play UG: Gettysburg.  I love the interface - it's very easy to get the troops to do what you want to do with very minimal fuss.  I think there is great potential for the campaign.  I'd like to see more of a Panzer General style approach where your core corps (see what I did there?) is the core (ugh) of your involvement in the scenarios.  Right now it seems like my corps is just a supporting actor to the much larger army.  But I've only played a couple of scenarios, so that may change.  

Eventually your force becomes almost the entire force in the battles, they just start off with a bunch of non-core troops so you don't have to have several corps from the start.

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