Should You Buy Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts In 2024? 

I think your comments on player control is spot on. Nothing frustrates players in games more than not understanding HOW some aspect of a game works, and not being able to control it or influence it makes it even worse. Players are willing to accept random actions in games, for flavor or spice. But not if those random events can drastically ruin the game play. And if there are things which they feel they have no understanding of or no control (like land battles in this game and army logistics), to them it's as if they are random events that can ruin the game play which is very very frustrating. And how developers do not understand this basic aspect of ALL gaming .. is something I can't think any sapient creature would not understand.

It’s my belief that a game that’s on steam needs to have a workshop feature to achieve long term success. With a workshop, we could submit our designs, upload game rework and make modding generally easier.

Hot take: Ultimate Admirals Dreadnoughts is good for multiplayer, and its single player campaign is just the devs decided "Let's copy Rule The Waves", and then making what they thought that idea meant.

Campaign needs much refinement, but the game as a whole looks so much fun. So I'd say it is worth it. Hopefully the campaign gets improved so it's not a frustrating experience from start to finish.

12:12 the ai tends to not use torpedos if its a 100% hit but when the enemy ship is at an angle where my torps can never hit the ai uses them

Deck pen is a disaster. The amount of deck pen required vs historical is imbalanced. UAD requires 3 times the amount of deck armor to stop shells. I’m working on a historical mod that will use real data and using the facehard armor calculator for penetration. It is a huge mod I’m working on and it hasn’t even started the first build yet. So far has taken me 6 months of research to work on. Still working on the base untuned values to this day. I’m about 75% done with those.

Thank you for the shoutout for mods! I wish modders could address some of the issues you identified as being somewhat sub optimal but most of the game isn't accessible to us. Both myself and the Baron are currently trying to tackle the economy weirdness but the rest are sadly out of our capabilities.

Rule the Waves is a game just like this one,BUT it han next to no graphic representation, verry minimal, it does have a lot more detail to its mechanics

I can get passed all the other stuff just because i can design my own ships, just like i could in naval ops warship gunner back in the early 2000s on playstation. The differance is i can fight in random battles on a dinamic map with random nations, unlike the storyline set battles against a set foe like in naval ops.

Excellent review. In a nutshell, design you own ships, min-max, destroy your enemies, all for it not to matter in the slightest due to AI cheating. Bought this game on early access maybe 7 years ago, well before it came to Steam. Never dreamed it would be in this state by now.

0:49 + Rule the Waves

One other franchise that allowed you to build your own warships that would be the Naval Ops: Warship Gunner/ Commander. Didn't have the early year range that UAD did thought. I wish they'd bring the series back, but until they do...

This game is the content I subbed to this channel for. I generally watch a shit ton of content about a game - at least strategy games - before I decide to buy or not. This one I ended up buying for exactly the reasons you mention. It does its core gameplay incredibly well. Even if the surrounding world simulation is frustrating, you get to build ships with insane levels of customization, rooted in history and reality, and play around with them. That being said, there are many games who have the same issue as this game. There is a strong core, but a frustrating lack of clarity and player agency surrounding the mechanics that support it. I hope this will be one of the games that manages to address its issues, because it won't be the first game I abandon for failing to address the pain points.

Some things that cause me a lot of frustration in this game are my task forces not engaging enemy task forces despite being almost on top of each other. Having multiple tf's around an enemy port because I'm invading and yet enemy ships are able to enter and leave the port at will. I've reported this on the forums months ago and never received a response from the devs of any kind. I've seen my ships change squadrons mid battle all on their own and also had my ships refuse to join squadrons despite me telling them to join. This game still has a lot of work and it frustrates me not to hear anything from the devs acknowledging these issues and saying they are working on fixing them. All I see is them saying they are adding things to the game, great, but how about fixing the game first. I want to love this game but these bugs and the ones Stealth mentioned make me sorry I bought it.

Shouldn't Rule the Waves have been mentioned in that list of games? Considering it does pretty much exactly what UAD does but with no 3d graphics?

It's your content that convinced me to buy the game. Took me at least a year before I started it up though, as I feared indeed that the early access version would make me too frustrated 😏 Keep doing what you do, as I still enjoy your campaign playthroughs and challenges after many years now 🚢

This was a nice, clear-eyed analysis, Stealth! For games like UAD, I typically watch a fair amount of let's play before making a buying decision. It was videos from you and Brother Munro that made me aware of the many issues this game had, and still has, but also showed the potential entertainment value. I have never regretted purchasing the game, and have enjoyed over 500 hours of good entertainment in return. This is one of those games where I wish Steam allowed a review to have a "conditional" recommendation rating, instead of just yes or no.

As a Uad player, these are the things that annoy me and most other players -1 actually being able to control engagements and start wars in a reasonable amount of time 2- economy is busted, larger ai economies can unrealistically spam ships and logistics dont exist, making raiding kinda useless. 3-not being able to control land engagement, they are started by ai and you cant really help unless you have battleships, there arent even troop transports just straight up battleships for invasions. 4 -The ai has either, 100 ships for 1 of your ship Or has 3 ships against your entire fleet. Logistics dont exist, i mean you can build ships with money, not steel , you cant even trade recources as they dont even exist. Ai just straight up cheats in battle, the entire battle is decided by rng, there is nothing guranteed, i had an ai get 2400% accuracy one time and won against my bc with a cl by just setting it on fire. Devs just add more bugs and ruin campaigns instead of fixing them We cant even control the designing or building of subs, build a type, send it into enemy and autoresolve. Devs dont fix bugs, notice a pattern here?

I have no idea how you beat someone in a war and they come out of it stronger economically than they went in and my god, the slow down between turns becomes unbearable.

0:43 Since 1.4 released, the campaign can run up until 1965 (although BrotherMunro managed to push it to February 1962)

There is another game like it. Look up Rule the Waves 3 You build your ships. You fight them. You have a campaign from 1890-1970

Germany pumping out BB and BC despite having only a single port left. Same for Spain when I left them with their only port and territory as Dutch New Guinea. There was some frustration.

This game is optimized for merchandizing. It has the promise of all the bells and whistles you would desire but falls short on all of these promises. This is a "how-do-we-get-as-much-money-as-we-can-while-doing-the-least-amount-of-work-for-it" product. The parent company of this software developer is known for a shady past. Do you (and your privacy details) want to go in bed with them?

Gotta be honest I VASTLY prefer Rule the Waves 3 to this game, and was surprised it didn't get brought up at all, as its the only other game that does what UA:D does, and they've been doing it a lot longer lol. The only real one-up that UA:D has is its 3D graphics, as admittedly RTW looks like a spreadsheet sim, but the latter makes up for that with (imo) far more detailed mechanics and a time period going from the late ironclad battleship era into the early missile age, carriers and all. I like both, but there's no contest if I had to choose one

The UI is honeslty so bad, it's frankly embarressing. It's shocking they decided this was at all aceptable. The ship designer is utiliatian, but it works and I think is acceptable. The campaign stuff, is like. not even a first draft, its a prototype. and they just left it. It's the main reason I've never bought it after playing a couple dozen hours with a [legally aquired] copy.

If they took a page out of RTW and got in with a theatre + division system/editor it would make controling the campangains much more better, compared to RTW is much more better looking, but incredibly clunky to control in comparason to a game that looks like a spreadsheet

I dont like how they made campaign, a lot of things are missing or incomplete, making it very annoying. One of smaller things is that map has Europe in center and its NOT round, why its not like in Hearts of Iron 4? It makes Pacific campaign absolute pain because you need to scroll from one side to another all the time. You cant tell ships to do certain thing like escorting your capital ships, often times my battleships for some unknown reason leave port or task force alone to get ambushed by torpedoboats, overall engagements seems to be absolutely random generated and their position and present ships makes often zero sense. Positioning your task forces have no effect, lets say you block Germany, their ships will just teleport past your ships. And as mentioned AI is just BAD. It just doesnt feel like finish product... Its clumsy, incomplete draft that still needs a lot of work. If you want naval strategy game with campaign, this game will most likely let you down. But if you want to design ships and pit them against each other then you will absolutely love this game.

Rule the Waves 3 , makes uad campaign look simple. 2d though. Worth looking into.

I like the ship building, and blowing things up. The ship building AI can be hilariously bad. The economic system is a mess. The army AI needs work. The diplomatic AI is terrible; in that a nation shattered, and lacking a navy may declare war. The tech system needs to be revamped, as of now the dates don't match up no matter what. There probably needs to be a system where if most everyone else has a tech, you should probably have an advantage in gaining it too.

Another game to look at is Men Of War / Faces Of War. They realized they couldn't make the perfect Ai that always played the game nicely and to the player's satisfaction. (You order a squad to run to Point A and take shots at the enemy, or throw a grenade at that particular spot.) So they offered a really nice alternative, hit the END key to end the stupidity and take manual control of the unit to do that grenade throw, that magic shot, that suppressing fire moment, that building penetrating shot to kill the guy on the other side. If this game gave a WoWs launching option for torpedoes, it would be fine, as we have seen just launching into a horde, the chaos alone makes it worth those torpedoes.

One thing is, that when the guns start turning, the other that are in range wait for the others. You always want all guns on them at all times. More damage the better, and torps, different torps have different speed. The slower the torp is the more likely the enemy ship is going to dodge it, but this game is probably more aimed for history nerds that really love naval history (like some of us here) but its easier to learn and understand then HOI4.

Good video, I'm on the fence for this game. Every time I see the sale I am tempted to get it, and every time i read the player reviews I get discouraged. I seen a ton of your videos and it looks like fun, but now you are confirming those reviews as well....ugh...guess I'll think more about it till the next sale.

Makes me wonder: Are Gamelabs other games this "half-assed"?

Your videos, whether they be overall Campaign, Custom Battles or the unique/wacky ship designs; was what made me decide to buy the game a year ago. The game has so much polishing to do and quality of life features that could make the it more enjoyable, plus the AI certainly does feel like it cheats in the Campaign, but even then I had fun playing the game. In most of my play time I tried to maintain a mostly historical set up for my warships, trying my best to recreate my favorite ships like the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen for Germany or the Nagato, Amagi or the Takao-class (since they are now finally adding in that Cruiser’s hull for in the game design can hopefully recreate them) for Japan, while also making purpose built ships for my fleet be it ASW hunting or Mine laying/sweeping. They really need to make Ground Combat less of a head ache since outside of Navel Invasion where you can somewhat influence how that will go you really can’t do anything for the territories that are more interesting inland. If just feels like they purposely made it that way to make sure you don’t become too powerful and get more screwed once the AI pull out these massive armies to push back against you.

short answer: yes Long answer: YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

It’s a decent game. I do enjoy designing ships and making historic navies and such. The game NEEDS to make more historically accurate design templates and improve the game mechanics

I don't even need to see this video to know that the game is worth buying. The only question is if the machine the player uses is good enough to play it. I do think it might be rather demanding on memory and grapjic resources, so the older devices might not cut it.

Me who is a warship enjoyer. I enjoy the game a lot. Im not usually a RTS enjoyer normally, but this is the exception I made

In my opinion, the devs should give the players more info about gdp, etc. Or how to change the Gouvernement, or more player influence on the campaign.

10:41 common battlestations W. Its why I still play those games.

I have more than 500 hours on this game, some parts may be buggy, like warship formations or strike probabilities, but I spent great hours playing in the campaign mod, designing wonderful ships and create crazy designs. this game is worth its price. Enjoy!! (despite small bugs)

I want to add, if every 'major' patch will throw curveball to your understanding of the game mechanics. The latest patch, making the academy mission super weird. Armor is useless. Like how 10 inch gun suddenly can penetrate 13 inch of armor with ease. So much a single hit flood my BB and sunk her. Then i said screw armor, i went with 2inch of armor. My ship survived the battle, all of them.

I really like Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts and at its core as a ship builder and battle simulator I think it delivers pretty well. However, I don't think I have ever played a game that has as horrible of a UX as UA:D. As pointed out in the video, the lack of control over certain aspects of the campaign, the lack of explanations, and the absolutely horrific UI with its many windows and buttons that don't even always work. I would really love to see this game get a proper new UI design and perhaps an AI that actually seems to have a goal, as opposed to right now where it feels like it literally takes actions at random.

We can "almost" get a HMS Hood, can "almost" get a USS Iowa "almost" other classes

A very well thought out and presented argument, I have 450+ hours in and do not use mods so the economy aspects of the early campaigns are quite challenging as shown in your Russian campaign, but enough rhetoric, let's start a new campaign - GO!

does anyone know how long this game will get updates? i remember hearing theyll stop updating/supporting it 6 months after full release

I’m a little confused, is there a sandbox mode where everything is unlocked? Or is the campaign the only way to unlock these things

You forgot to mention the performance of this game even on really strong computers. It can work really poorly. It is Hanging on preparing to battle way too often, achieving stable 60fps at x3 speed or higher is almost impossible. Takes forever to start new campaign.

I love designing ships in this game. What's the easiest way to instigate a war, other than just spamming the increase Tensions button? I've heard that parking a fleet near another nation's coast will do it, but I parked a fleet of 30 ships for 20 turns and it didn't seem to do anything.

Formations at the battle start usually feature divisions which are ordered to screen your lead division. I have found this invariably causes collisions and other disorganized mayhem. The very first thing I do is get all my ships into one line formation preferably into one single division. I set them to "loose" spacing and of course turn on the torpedo and collision avoidance which should be automatic. Is any fleet admiral going to give a directive to the contrary? I also slow down my lead ship so that others can control their spacing by closing distance as needed. Slowing down to about 70% of top speed also aids in accuracy. So then give your fleet time to get organized before closing distance with the enemy and keep in mind what your optimal range is for optimal results. If you want to avoid torpedoes keep your distance as great as your largest guns will allow. Keep a close eye on the actual number of torpedoes your enemy ships have remaining. When you see the number of torpedoes drop you know they have just released them in your direction. When they run out of torpedos they should no longer be considered a primary target. If a ship in your line suffers considerable damage or any rudder damage it might be best to detach it to its own division and let AI command it for the rest of the battle. This will help keep your battle line intact and functional.

It doesn't surprise me if I see 34 ships building. I routinely build torpedo boats in groups of 25.

Ship design: Great for player, AI is still awful. Naval combat: The AI sucks so bad, but seal-clubbing can be fun. Campaign: How the technology progresses for your ship design is very nice, but the campaign itself is oddly bad. Also, since the AI is so terrible, it's all about how your one heavy cruiser can sink five enemy battleships and things like that.

Honestly I'll get wait for a sale as I have two rules: Under $30 Older than a year this includes early access.

I don't mind the randomness of things that are out of the player's control. I'm playing as the admiral, not the dictator or leader of the country. I can attempt to influence things, but I'm not an all-powerful being. Anyway, I can save scum if there's an outcome that I particularly want.

19th century late sailing ships and early ironclads would have been quite interesting DLC which could include Crimean, ACW and Austro-Italian naval combat.

I fought a really long fight if I will buy the game or not. I am watching all your videos here on RU-vid more than 1 year now. I refused to buy the game for more or less 1 year due to different reasons. One reason were all the problems which you described here in the video. One other reason was the bad experience which I made with the developers in Naval Action. Of course, I watched all the UAD videos from you and Brother Munro the whole time. But this has changed now! I bought the game last Friday. Why I bought it? Very simple. I found a video from a German content creator and he explained an existing MOD for the game. This MOD is from Brother Munro, easy to download in the internet and easy to install. This MOD is really a game changer. Is it funny to play the game with this MOD? How I can explain this simple! I have the game 40 hours now and I have a playtime from 35 hours only now! I must explain more? I don’t think so! What is the MOD doing? The content creator Brother Munro is playing this game roughly for 2 years now. With his expertise, he has developed this MOD that aims to correct errors in the game and make the gaming experience more challenging and exciting. The MOD brings numerous changes: from the removal of submarines and mines, which make little sense in the current game, to adjustments in game mechanics and ship construction. The fights are becoming more realistic and the AI is generating better-designed ships, which of course means harder fights for us. Enjoy the game!

I wouldn't mind AI's auto deploy if there was a condition "not at war with player", If I am at peace with that nation sure, keeps my campaign more fun since AI is not I.

Ahh, but you don’t understand: Every other nation has the “Starforge,” and you do not :P

In my opinion, they should work on the ai, and more player influence in the campaign, and on a multyplayer mode, i mean a REAL one once things like firespam or else are balanced

I do like watching you play the game, but I don't think I'd get as much enjoyment out of it if playing it myself. Franky I am much more intrigued by your recent foray into starsector, and i very much hope for you to continue with that.

Rule the Waves 3 is actually a game that does what Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts does, and based on reviews, quite a bit better. Its just not an eye candy type of game like this one.

As I understand the economy the objective is to increase the rate of growth of your nation's GDP compared to your opponents. Access to oil and abundant transports aids in that objective. The nation with the highest rate of GDP growth will eventually, if given enough years, outstrip all others by increasing the naval budget and thus increasing the fleet strength which in turn increases the army logistics support which in turn increases the number of ports and provinces which can be controlled. Please let me know if this is not correct TY.

The devs should add more information, like in politics i hover over GDP, nothing shows, if i hover over Gouvernement it shows the Gouvernement, but not what i can do to change or keep the Gouvernement, like i cannot influence elections etc.

I agree on pretty much everything. If I may express a personal opinion tho. The biggest things that make me cringe : late game torpedo spam (they do spam early on, but at 3km range they just yolo and die like idiots). IRL most navies dropped torpedoes altogether from capital ship more and more. And only Japanese were crazy enough to reload them in combat. But ingame, they don't. Around 1930-40 it turn into a massive torpedo soup as the range increase aswell as the number of tubes per rack. When you meet a fleet and all of the ships have 5-10torps, you're looking at dozen of them, a hundred perhaps, and it's just not fun. And the owned ship AI is dumb as a brick to avoid them (they apparently turn randomly one way or another, sometimes toward the torpedo). That and the fact that rich nation get richer, while poor one have little hope to ever catch up. I gobbled all of China, India and some colonies here and there as Japan, I was still earning less than Germany, which lost one of their core province to France. There are penalties to owning non core provinces, to the point when taking province can actually penalize you. In a wargame where the main goal is to paint the map your colour. And they made it worse over time, nerfing income so now everyone is using 1900 guns by 1930 because tech is crazy expensive, a DD cost as much as an IRL BB cost and so on. It's a wargame where you use boats, I want new guns and big boats to fight each other, not field a bunch of crap DD and watch my money as closely than I do IRL. Finally I once watched Austria lose the game and get gobbled up by Russia. Without fighting a single sea battle. All land battle where the 1millions Red Army was rolling over the poor thousand of Austrians. While hilarious, that's kinda show how dumb it can get. And why I avoid playing Austria :D

Oddly not being in control of the nation is part of the game I like. I mostly just ignore the ground wars those decisions are non of my business I'm the damn admiral I work at sea. If anything being able to talk my way into wars all though being necessary ruins the I just do what I'm told of being a military "leader".

I'm still confused by the colonial conquest and minor nations mechanics. It seems totally random when they happen, independent from how you position your fleets. I also don't get how alliances with minor nations happen and how you can conquer them. Fun game with massive potential but the devs don't seem to have their priorities straight. Most problems could be fixed by more expansive tooltips and insight in what and how the game calculates.

Crazy the same core issues are still there if not worse years later. I can't bring myself to like playing it.

For the version 1.5, I think they forgot to add the file with the accuracy of German guns. In v1.4, my 1950 super Bismarck armed with four triple 42 cm turrets and maxed out rangefinding could achieve 5-10% accuracy at over 40 km and almost 50% at 20 km. Now, in v1.5, the same ship (redesigned from scratch, as the changelog notification suggests) has 0.5%-2% accuracy at 40 km and maybe 5% at 20-30 km, while the 1930 enemy has twice the accuracy even with far bigger guns.

If you dont want to buy first. TEX of 'Black Pants Legion' does awesome alter history lets plays of this game. May i suggest his 'Italian' Playthrough.

I have spent the last week for the first time in the last two or three years really sit down and play the campaign. The tech tree is out of control especially in latter repeatable techs that only drive costs so high that even a large empire would struggle to build ships. Costs that are no where near offset by things like weight savings if anything at some point even techs that do add weight should naturally transition to saving weight. Modding the game to get around this is difficult and is compounded by the constant rapid strings of updates which at least show that the game is progressing in some form. The whole thing only makes the time sunk into the game more wasted even if once you finally get a ship built and the sea battles start its great fun but a few moments of good gameplay isn't enough to save the game right now.

Battlestations Midway was such an amazing game back in the day!

In one of my campaigns america had 150+ battleships. And a commom bug that happans is that an enemy country will retain 100%army logistics even when they have 1 or 2 ships, and then your own country even if it has a way bigger army will only attack with 30 or 60k troops and the attack will just fail, and you cant do anithing about it.

after my destroyers 2 clicks away from the enemy armed transport did not want to fire the god damn torps despite the fact that they sailed side by side and had the best chance possible to hit and then get sunk by the armed transport i stoped playing the game. the landbattle campain thing is kinda doable once you have a big fleet so you can start naval invading next to everything. this way you can push up the warscore and if you lose some land you can take it back that way if you are lucky. what i personally think is also annoying af is the fact that once you make peace and choose the parts of the land you wanna have the AI can just say nope. you get only a small amout of what you should get and there is nothing you can do about what means that even if you are strong and if you beat your enemy up you still cant controll shit. i dont know how often i did beat up france for example or GB and had a insanly high warscore but got from the 5 islands i wanted and i teoretically could take because i have the warscore for it i got like 1 and some money. if i cant controll that dont even give me the option to choose something. i got the game because of you stealth. i struggled hard, managed to understand the most of it, loved it and in the end hate it. it needs way more work. the points you said and the points i said are just to much. in war on the sea the AI is cheating aswell and it can be frustrating with all the air raids the AI is doin but atleast i can choose everything i wanna do. if someone looks for an ww2 naval combat game rn i would say go for war on the sea over dreadnoughts

Really not impressed with what I have seen after looking into RTW. A lot of their "unique" mechanics are so shallowly implemented I wouldn't even count them. What I have heard 1) RNG coastal fort placement. The reason: "players would just stack them in one place." Well yeah, that's not totally ahistorical. Where stuff like the Atlantic Wall was implemented, it was due to concerns that an army could land in one place and surround the fort, which just implement that then. How hard is it to implement a risk of getting surrounded? 2) Seaplane tenders are supposedly pointless. Either that or the players complaining of that don't know how to implement them properly. 3) Missile ships poorly implemented. Why bother then? Again, unless those reporting that simply don't know how to use them. 4) RTS element (from what I have seen online) looks pretty half-baked. Poor graphics is one thing, but it doesn't look like there's a lot of detail in terms of factors that would affect maneuvering. It appears that ship construction outputs a number, that is then run in a simulation in a very mana-like way, rather than actually seeing a lot of influence specifically in terms of range, acceleration, etc. Sounds like one of those elitist "sims" that uses poor graphics and lots of spreadsheets to look deep, while in practice leaving a lot of mechanics half baked. Overall it looks very D&D-ish to me. How accurate a given skill level of crew is at firing is one thing, the actual movements of your ship in terms of angling, hydrodynamics, etc shouldn't be.

Fantastic video!

I love this game, i conquered the world as the French in my 1890 Legendary Campaign.

I've been a supporter of this game since before it came out on Steam. It's truly one of a kind. I have logged 850 on steam but have played an additional 200+ before the campaign came out. Should you buy it? Yes. Worst case, you have 2 hours to refund the game. That's more than enough time to play the tutorial and design a ship.

worst part for me is the balance. the uk has a massive technological headstart while frances provinces are on avarage worth 5 to 50 times more than anybody elses. (especialy frances home provinces) so britain has always better tech and france has always the biggest economy and several times more ships than all other nations. the naval invasions also need some updates. needing 5+ million naval tonnage to take southern france or any us province is just stupid and unrealistic. not to say the game isnt fun but things can get rather frustrating. especialy trying to play the campaign as spain or japan. (cause their economies are shit)

battlestations midway mentioned! wooooo!!

im actually contemplating this very question since the game came out :D im still not sure :D

It's fun. But still breaks saves from update to update.

I just completed a Japanese campaign in which my ENTIRE fleet camped out near Pusan for 30 YEARS. Never got the option to invade. So I never got Korea. I did get China though. All of it. And all of Russia's eastern possessions within 14 months of war. That's because I could do something about that. Though I never did get Korea, the United States AI was on an aggressive campaign gobbling up every neutral territory in the Western hemisphere as usual. It just doesn't make any sense. Add to this the having to scroll way the hell down the screen to see what you are researching instead of them just putting it up top of the list. The fact that France, in just about any campaign, ends up with huge territorial gains and a 500+ ship fleet though I have no idea where they keep them all. The fact you can only bring so many ships to the fight but the AI can bring 80? Not that it ever stopped me from scrapping all 80 of those ships in the battle with my 5 while taking light damage. An economy that one month is losing $377 million naval funding and you can't figure out why, then next month you are gaining $172 million and you can't figure out why. Or here's one for you - why I'm expecting the campaign to end in 1950 then find out it was extended to 1965. *shrug* Or why control stations and cruisers are so easy to research but submarines and armor take so damned long. Or why my new ally Serbia keeps requesting I build ships for them. I can't tell you how many times I fell asleep during that Jap campaign just waiting for the world to load after a battle, or after designing a ship. That said, I recommend buying this game. If for no other reason than to experience designing and building the perfect ships, then watching with joy as they totally annihilate the cheating AI and it's 80 ship task force. The absolute glee at ending up in a war with China while their ally the US watches on as you dismantle them, because your politics was just that perfect separating allies. The overcoming of your huge unrest as either Russia or Austria-Hungary. The building of a titanic economy and shipbuilding capability. There are a lot of things to like about this game as well. I've watched any number of Stealth17's campaigns and often witnessed his oddities in tactics choices and ship designs. It occurs to me that there are a LOT of different ways to play this game, and a lot of personal goals in each one that I would never have thought of...and the fact the developers have done most of this during a massive invasion of their country is extraordinary. I think it's worth a look. Over 1700 hours in from me tells the tale in the end.

800 hours? Damn. I've logged more than 1,500 hours in about 18 months lol. I might be ble to start to understand what I'm doing at some point.

I agree with what you have said and I play this game regularly. Other issues about the campaign are 1) if you get stuck with a right-wing government your economy goes to pot (ie Japan), 2) the game seems to overvalue colonies and I've often seen France with a greater income than all the other countries combined and 3) the AI seems to love Italy for it's own unknown reason. I think that both France and Italy have some inbuilt, and unknown, advantages. The devs also seem to hate Russia.

The campaign is passable. Not horrible, but still engaging. I think it's well worth buying.

this game is such a let down, they have worked so hard for years to take a great kernel of a game, then slowly disassemble it so that it's a glorified erector set. THE game director should be fired, he has the final say and he's chosen mental violence on the player base.

I would say Rule the Waves is the nearest to this game rather than the others you mentioned. Yes the graphics and sound are antiquated but the way you design and run the campaigns is very similar. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Overall I prefer Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts though I do own both. And I have to say by far the worst thing in Dreadnoughts is the magically disappearing enemy ships which continue to fire upon you, yet you cannot fire back. Then boom they reapear, sometimes much closer to your ships. This part is nonesense and needs to be addressed. Anyway, enough ranting,I am off to finish off the German fleet once and for all.

I'm in 1:44 hearing "there is no other game like it"... I refuse to believe You haven't hear about Rule The Waves part 1,2 and 3. This game added 3d graphics to RTW concept. Which is cool but... really? "...no other like it"?

I would wait until it is under 10 bucks. I could detail everything that is wrong and you certainly mentions some of it. But self damage from your own torpedoes and the lackluster boring campaign are two fun killers. So many things doesn't work, and the campaign is so utterly outside what you can do, that nothing really seems to matter. The diplomacy porting is fundamentally broken. It feels like you fight the game more then enjoy it. I got 3100 hours in the game on steam. And I honestly don't know why. Maybe because things just takes forever to happen and I keep hoping that the next patch actually fix something. And don't get me started on how a 12" HE shell bounce on 0.2" armor.

I just want to know how 1895 Russia builds a battleship with 20 inches of belt armor, four 9 inch guns, and 18 knots top speed.

5:08 Really? I found the campaign relatively easy. I can play China on legendary without any difficulty, I would consider Spain the hardest nation and I can generally scrape by on legendary. Keep in mind, I'm not generally a great player of rts or tbs games. AoW3, I could only play on squire and Wargame RD I am butt awful. This game has been just about formulaic for me to get ahead as any nation but Spain (with an 1890 or 1900 start). I have less than 350 hours in this game, compared to just over 350 in Age of Wonders 3 (as it is turn based, like the campaign) or a similar number of hours in Red Dragon. I have noticed that most AI will positively gimp their economy to catch up. Once I defeat a navy, a nation will be in a (what used to be perpetual) cycle of "excessive naval expenditures," with naval ministers being regularly replaced. It does seem to eventually end now though. Important to note that for UK in particular, not only does it take a lot to beat their navy, but if you beat them they generally have the economy to come right back anyway, lots of colonial powers just have a ton of money. You can still bleed them dry though. Only difference is that if you get sacked, it's gg. If the AI gets sacked, they just keep hiring new ones. If those were players, it would be as if the incoming players had such a bad start that they just had no chance and kept losing, which would be more satisfying.

I ended up preferring Rule the Waves 2 and 3. I enjoy the research and ship building. Obviously, they lack 3D combat and other smaller details this game has.

Spent many hours in this game. Hell yes it’s worth buying. Warts and all.

To expand on the frustrations with the AI's economy, the AI is allowed to spend itself into huge debt without consequence, and you know this because the game frequently gives you a notice that "this AI admiral might be replaced with another AI admiral" and forces you to respond "oh that's interesting." It is NOT interesting, it's completely meaningless and just rubs in your face that the AI suffers no penalty from building to unsustainable levels.

I suppose your Russian campaign is gonna be when the next update arrives since its gonna break everything .. again..? That might actually be good for your sanity so its not that much of a deal

I bought the game when it first um came out of early access and now I've spent more than a thousand hours on it yeah I'm addicted to the damn thing after a minute kind of the funnest funnest naval game I've ever played no I do find sympathy with everything you've said in this video I think I agree with literally everything you said and that's coming from the first new things that I'm going to play The Campaign from the start to finish trying to conquer the entire world I haven't yet succeeded in that but I am trying anyways love your videos and love your campaigns I think they're funny and you're definitely still a better player than I am but well get weight where your next videos anyway see you

Technically from the depths is similar but it’s getting a bit dated at this point and could really do with a successor.

It keeps getting more and more updates1.5 feeels better

Bought this game early October 2023 and closing in 300 hours played, Its the campaign and designing that keeps me here. But there are inconsistencies in the design from update to update that are frustrating. I agree that the game is worth buying but it takes 20+ hours until you see the sense of it all and where the gaps in logic are. That said this game is not for everyone since it requires a long attention span.

Can't get the refit option to work and also can't design any submarines. What am I doing wrong? TY