Recent reviews by RICH EVANS

Despite how much I love this game and the time I'll put into it, I think it's flawed in major ways at the moment that make it only just a postivie recommendation. However I can see it reaching a strong recommendation in just a few patches.

The biggest issue I have with the two Ultimate General games is the lack of information given to the player. The style the developer has gone for is very minimalist for such a complex strategy game and I think it suffers because of this.
Engagements between units are often impossible to predict as you have little information to inform your decisions.

Most of the time I'll simply position my units in cover and whittle down the enemy, hoping their losses end up greater than mine. I have no faith in the melee system, despite how useful it should actually be, I almost always lose these engagements. Full morale units with 4 times as many soldiers and a commander unit close by will lose melee engagements and rout leaving you asking yourself what you could have done but spend another 10 minutes exchanging fire. If you hover over a patch of ground, you are given stats about the cover and terrain, but this is useless when half the map is covered in soldiers and you dont know which matter at that exact moment. Add to the confusion even more stats of each individual unit, their condition, their veterancy, their rifles, and the commander buff, it's impossible to explain how each stat interacts and how that will tangibly effect the immediate battle you're in.

I have no doubt that there's complex mathematical algorithms behind it all taking every aspect of the a civil war battle into account to produce the most realistic response, but the reality is that it doesnt translate into a game that players can coherently understand and the mechanics available to you are too basic to match the complexity of the information you receive. Games like Total War are great at explaining stats and buffs so that you know exactly which unit should engage which enemy and in what manner. If a unit routs, you know why and the impact of armour or weapon buffs are obvious.

The AI is fantastic and should become the standard for strategy games. The AI will fall back, regroup, counter-attack, press their advantage and use a combination of units on the attack. I love reforming my strategy as the AI tries something new and it's satisfying to overcome a opponent who is challenging because of its skill and not thanks to unfair buffs or unit spamming. I have heard rumours that the enemy armies are scaled to always be slightly better than your own, which I hope is false as it would make all of the out-of-battle micro-managing and side-missions even more pointless.

I love the visual style of the maps. A tonne of effort has gone into making the battlefields look as realistic as possible, recreating the scenes of actual civil war engagements down to the tree-lines and streams. Much like the AI, it serves as an example of the level of detail historic strategy games should meet.

I've been watching and playing this series from the beginning, even playing the Total War mods that the developers made previously, so I'll always recommend these games to strategy fans. But as this game develops, I hope to see some major changes, namely gutting the pointless out-of-battle upgrades so that only the coherent and useful ones remain and adding features to the in-battle UI to aid in strategic decision-making and understanding the state of your units.

And make melee a viable tactic.

TL;DR
> Over-complicated stats and upgrade system
> Under-complicated battle UI
> Melee sucks
> Amazing AI and dedication to the history

Bought eggs from a trader thinking they'd make a good meal for my colonists.
They sat untouched in the freezer for over a week.
My colonists awoke one morning to 33 chicks streaming out of the freezer.
Spent the next hour naming them.

Is like Church all over again...

(Srs review tho: tiny price for a cool looking, cool sounding and cool puzzling game. Worth it unless you're a tightfisted ♥♥♥♥ who's companing about a £4/$5 pricetag when Call of Duty: OurFanbaseisOblivious and Assassins Creed: CantModelFemales/Faces costs £50 and is the epitome of non-fun)