This game is not bad at all. Most of the negative reviews i see are people expecting this to be Total War, where you are constantly attacking your enemy, moving forward and attacking again, until the whole map belongs to you. That is not how war works, nor is it how this game works.

You have to have patience and plan far ahead. This is how I assume most negative reviewers campaigns went:

You are a fresh new general in the American Revolution, your first battle at Concord to secure ammo went very well! You destroyed the British troops attacking you, and sent them back to Providence. What's that? Providence is now only defended by a weakened British army that you just pounded into retreat? Forward we go! Onto Providence!

You attack Providence and secure another key victory for the Americans. Now you have a warehouse full of supplies at your disposal. Nothing can stop you...right?

This is where most make a mistake. The Total War mentality kicks in and instead of hunkering down in Providence, resupplying your ammo, reinforcing your lost troops, and waiting for additional regiments to arrive from Hartford, you just press on and attempt to sack the town of Middleborough. You see, Middleborough (and Salem up North) are very close to Boston, where 90% of the British army is stationed. Once you attack either of these, the British come at you in full force to defend them. You get annihalated and sent back to Hartford at best, or even killed and ending your game at worst.

This game is designed to be played slowly over a long period of time. You will win territory, then you will lose territory. Play offense, but dont forget to play defense, and that is why I love it.

The tactical battles still give me the feeling i had back in UGCW, where tactics matter tremendously. You cannot expect to send your regiments of local militia into the formed lines of the greatest army in the world at the time, and expect them not to route. "But theres 400 men still alive why are they running???" Because they are blacksmiths, bankers and candlemakers buddy. Not trained professional soldiers.

In my opinion, this game is definitely worth it. Took me a while to buy it because of the price point compared to other games, but it was on sale so I bit, and boy am I glad that I did. Just remember that it is a strategy game first, and tactical battle game second.

Secure supply lines between cities to keep your army provisioned, Research and build critical buildings, produce weapons and ammo in your large cities, and just take your time. I am sure you will not regret your purchase.

If you're thinking this will be UGCW during the Revolution but with boats you'd be wrong. Actually it's UG Age of Sail's tedious land combat bloated far beyond what it is capable of managing until it is an exceedingly unpleasant experience to play. Also the naval gameplay was gutted so if you were looking forward to that you should turn away and flee.

It might sound great to play at company scale. Wow so authentic! So much control! It is massively not great when you have to fight a 10k vs 10k field battle and the tiny deployment boxes literally cannot contain all the units so you end up with a giant undifferentiated blob that must be spread out in contact. I have had completely unplayable 30k v 30k field battles. As someone who thoroughly enjoys mass scale war games in other contexts (the Wargame Red Dragon franchise in particular) I thought I'd be in heaven. Turns out this is actually hell.

Units under fire last mere seconds and positioning and facing are incredibly important factors in their survival. This means the game is played at an incredibly intense pace. Fine for Starcraft with a carefully honed UI and merely dozens of units on the field. Not fine at all for this game with its shoddy ui and hundreds of units on the field. Units will break, run away and then need to be lassoed back into position with incredible frequency, far greater than in UGCW as they are much weaker individually.

You'd think the regimental or brigade command structures would help to reduce the micro. Surely those units can be controlled at that level with merging or AI support! But this is false. All it does is act as a worse control group that spaces your units out into a massively useless box with arty positioned so that it is intensely vulnerable. So helpful!

Almost all gameplay is at the max level of zoom as otherwise the battle is completely uncontrollable past a certain scale. This results in all sounds being deadened except for the random extreme long range cannon sound from Age of Sail that plays without any reference to what is going on on the map. This makes the game feel quite unpleasant soundscape and beauty wise as you're moving silent icons around in a silent battle.

Fort battles look neat but the costs of an assault are so high that everyone just baits the ai into coming out of the fort and kills it in the open.

At the very highest level of difficulty almost nobody actually plays the battles because you are able to generate massively more favorable results from autoresolve by stacking huge hordes of units and mashing them into the ai before it can bring up its own forces allowing you to quickly snowball to unbeatable strength while taking minimal losses because of course you should be rewarded for not playing the game.

Naval combat is many more kinds of horrible than land combat. You don't move your ships to specific spots. Instead you assign them to a sea zone and combat kinda randomly happens. Except you can also order them to attack specific ships but you can't know how many ships are in the fleet you've ordered them to attack. It could be a dozen ships of the line or a single brig and you have literally no way to know. You can't escape sea battles. You are instead forced to sit there and take it from a massive enemy fleet that teleported into the zone until you're permitted to roll for withdraw. Unfortunately even if you roll to withdraw you can't actually escape most of the time as there's not a grace window for getting back to port. If you battle them and then withdraw you can end up with your entire force deleted. Oh and again all of this is microsecond timing so if you want to play land and sea at the same time forget about it, you'll get smooshed.

Tactical battle naval gameplay is heavily dumbed down from Age of Sail with many fewer options for officers, weapons, ships and ship management. The wind system is also much more random and can flip to opposite sides with zero warning or delay.

The economy game on the campaign map is execreble. There are massively too many settlements with massively too many building options many of which are completely worthless noob traps. The developers also expect you to spend an inordinate amount of time financing your war effort not with bonds issued by Congress but with furs, cigars and rum sold on the market. Because apparently what a Revolutionary War war game desperately needs is a trading minigame.

If I hadn't bought it on Xsolla I'd have refunded. The whole thing is an abysmal waste of time. After this and Ultimate Admiral Dreadnauts I'll be skipping future Game Labs offerings. I'm tired of half baked garbage at full price.

As someone already said: Explanation of the rules of the game - particularly for campaigns is virtually non-existent.
If dev's can't be bothered for 5 minutes to learn me play their game I can't be bothered to play it.
I have finished all the previous UG entries so probably I would be able to figure it out eventually but this approach is pissing me off royally.