Ultimate General: Gettysburg

I found this to be a very fun and unique take on the genre.

A refreshingly crisp and astutely focused look at one of the greatest 19th century battles. [Sept 2014, p.60]

Ultimate General: Gettysburg works surprisingly well as a game, but could use some oomph and chrome, as war is too clinical. [Aug 2015]

Ultimate General: Gettysburg is a prêt-à-porter RTS, very easy to pick up but difficult to master and quite varied despite the apparent monotony of the single setting available. The tablet derivative movement system is a major flaw, but for 12 euros on Steam, you can live with it and smell musket powder for months.

A real-time strategy game more for the armchair general than the real-time strategy gamer.

Strategy games aren’t normally on the top of my to-play list, but I liked this game. Ultimate General: Gettysburg does a great job of being simple enough for anyone to learn in a short sitting, but deep enough to keep you learning and perfecting your tactics deep into subsequent playthroughs.

Even though Ultimate General: Gettysburg offers just one historical event, there is enough variety to make your next play-through different than the previous one.

This is a fun tactical game simulating the American Civil War. It has an easy learning curve, beautiful graphics, complex battlefield AI, and a beautiful art style to represent the largest battle of the American Civil War. Controls are fluid, even if picking exact units is a little troublesome, but the scale and depth is magnificent. Performance is awesome. There are hundreds of scenarios representing different parts of the famous three day battle and the nine AI settings all perform differently and competently. Combat is focused around infantry brigades firing volleys and batteries of artillery that can limber an artillery and the game features a line of sight system for what the player and his units can see. Infantry brigades are rated based on the unit's historical reputation and by a three star rating system (for instance, the famous Confederate Texas Brigade or the Union Irish Brigade are rated with three stars, while less reliable units like some of the Union Eleventh Corps brigades are rated only one star). There are few historical quirks and rating differences I disagree with though. For instance, Union corps are labelled with Roman numerals, which is an anachronism for the period, and some generals like Richard Ewell of the Confederate 2nd Corps are rated as three stars, when I would argue that his performances would earn him a lower rater. Overall, however, these are minor and I found didn't detract from the gameplay experience. The only gameplay negatives is that sometimes matches can drag on and there is a timing issue. There is no fast forward button, only pause and play. Pause is useful for micromanaging, but arranging attacks and waiting for units to march across the field can take a long time. If you wish to arrange an intricate assault with a lot of maneuvering, this will often eat into match time. The game is also limited to just the Gettysburg battle, though a future expansion with Antietam is being talked about. However, these negatives are not overwhelming. By far, Ultimate General Gettysburg is an excellent, light, but intelligent title and recommended for Civil War Buffs and Strategy Fans.

The highly innovative control scheme is mixed with wildy varying AI strength both in terms of the 9 AI general choices and the decisions individual units make on the battlefield. Troop reinforcements vary in time adding realism and replayability to the scenarios but simultaneously making it very difficult to develop a consistently successful plan of attack against even the weaker AIs. To elaborate on the control scheme, I've really never seen anything else as accurate in depicting battlefield orders. You can command your troops to suicidal marches across long stretches of open ground and they will follow you, but only if you place generals to guide them. Without leadership they are easily routed. Routing units follow orders inconsistently, again making for a very realistic command experience. All these commands are given through drawing routes by clicking and dragging units around the battlefield, similar to Madden 09's system for drawing audibles on the Wii. At the same time the system of units routing is the source of a few minor bugs, occasionally your troops will be unable to stop attacking a destroyed unit and the entire battle will be broken as a result. Minor flaws like this currently prevent the game from being consistently enjoyable. I will be very excited to see further efforts from game labs and the improvements in patches to this game, but for now the game feels like an unpolished demo.

Very enjoyable, reminiscent of table top wargaming. At the time of writing the game is in early access beta, and still needs quite a lot of work. The AI is very good, but by no means perfect - there's a few crucial gameplay mechanisms that it doesn't take advantage of that make all the difference & allow you to beat it easily once you know how. I do like how there's 9 different styles of AI, though really only the 3 hardest ones are worth playing against. That aside, the game suffers from a lack of content. It really needs to be a full Civil War campaign with dynamic paths to follow depending on battle results - not just one battle as it is now. Also the various phases of the battle have a way of ending abruptly with no warning, sometimes while the battle is just warming up. Units respond instantly with no courier system to relay orders. There's no command HQ for the general commanding the armies, and the corps HQs don't seem to make any difference to unit morale or rallying disrupted/routed units. There's no way to set formations, to limber/unlimber artillery (which by the way must be closely micromanaged as it has a mind of its own), or to detach regiments from brigades. Artillery line of sight is troublesome, often with units refusing to fire even though the LoS display indicates no problems. Multiplayer will be interesting, but the single player at the moment is only good for about 20 hours or so of playtime after which it loses interest. I hope they continue to add to this game and expand it to become the classic it has the potential to be.

A game with some of the best AI, some bad design choices, and a fair share of bugs makes for a game which can't live up to its own moments of brilliance. The map, whilst very nice to look at, is horrendous. It gives no real visual clues to anything, especially line of sight. You place your cannon or men in a position which looks like they'd clearly be able to fire and engage someone, and they will sit there, motionless. You click on an enemy unit, and they refuse to fire at it. Doesn't matter that they are lit up to be in your LoS, whether they think they can actually see it is apparently random. There is a topographic mode included, to help alleviate this bad visual design. Shame that's mostly useless as well. You place your cannon at the top of the hill, they still can't see bugger all. Oh, it's because I placed them a few meters to the left so now they can't see. Even with the Topographic mode it's still hard to tell ridges and valleys apart, so in the end I felt I had to play the same map several times before I even knew where and where not to put my units, or where I had to exactly place my cannons for them to be useful. Every battle so far seems to have its share of bugs. Units will sometimes follow crazy paths, they will need to be told to do things several times, or sometimes they will just suddenly become pacifists and never fire at anyone. In my most recent battle, almost all the units on the map stopped fighting each other. They apparently declared a truce and never did anything to each other. I could order them to attack and they would stand there. I could position my units so that they were physically intermingled with the enemy, and still nothing. When ordered to charge they ran past the enemy unit and had a tea break. In other battles I've had magic positions on the battlefield, where any unit that enters it is petrified for the rest of the battle and can never move again, both my side and the enemy. This isn't the pre-release version. This is several months AFTER release mind you, plenty of time to fix issues like this. When the Unit AI isn't bugging out, it's actually rather good, at least for Cavalry and Infantry. They can often be trusted to carry out orders without any intense micro-managing, but I found it's easier to keep check on them in case they decide it'll be fun to walk across 50 enemy cannons and have a tea party whilst being flanked. Cannons need to be micro-managed though. If you place it just below the crest of the hill (A very easy mistake to make with the unclear maps) and you order it to attack someone, there is no clear visual or audio feedback telling you they can't attack. So rather than having an artillery barrage help break the line before your army attacks, your attack has been routed because you didn't know your cannons are a few meters out. You'd think that they'd maybe roll forward at least a few inches so they can attack what they are being told to attack, but they prefer to just ignore you The enemy general AI, however, is brilliant. There are several different AI Personalities that a general can get, ranging from ultra defensive to all-out attacking. And they do make a big difference to how a battle goes. The AI isn't stupid either. They actually know how to fight battles, using actual proper tactics. I've been fairly outplayed by them a good few times. They know when to attack weak units, when to charge, when to swap out tired units for fresh ones, and a few times I've been totally out flanked. It isn't just good AI, or passable, this truly is some of the best I've ever seen in a game. The UI is rather pretty, but this is apparently at the expense of usability. It gives very little feedback on your units, terrain, or the battle. It's hard to determine when a unit is breaking or not without first clicking them to bring up their small info-boxes. Whilst it is manageable in the smaller battles on the first day, as soon as large battles start it can be incredibly easy to miss units breaking or routing on different parts of the field, or whether or not that unit you're attacking with is in any condition to fight. This all isn't a very bad point or anything, but it is more of an annoyance. I would much rather have a lot more information presented to me rather than having a screen that looks pretty. In summary, this is a flawed game. Bugs can easily ruin enjoyable battles, and it's Mobile orientated design saps a lot of character from units and makes it very hard to easily tell what's going on. However, the AI is really something to admire. I've not seen Strategy AI this clever in a long, long time. It's such a shame that the rest of the game lets itself down

Two similar units of equal size. Mine stands on a hill with with a forest that provides 70% cover, the enemie stands on a clear field, gues what? The enemie's unit manages to kill 6 times more (not joking, 6 times) soldiers than mine. Tactics my ass, this game is garbage.