Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts is a 2020 real-time and turn-based Naval Warfare Strategy Game with Simulation Game tendencies published by Game-Labs for PC, where the player designs fleets of Steam-Era warships, and then pits them against enemy ships in a campaign, single-battle scenarios, or custom skirmish battles. During ship design and the campaign, the player must make key ship design decisions involving speed, firepower, armor protection, and cost, in order to balance the desire to have the best ships possible with the need to be able to afford enough of them to make a difference. Actual combat is real-time strategy, where the player finds out if their ship designs were up to the challenge and if they know how to handle them. In a way it can be described as "Kerbal Space Program but with Battleships" and half the fun comes from making silly ship design decisions and seeing if they work (or how spectacularly they fail).
The game was fully released on January 25, 2023.
Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts contains examples of:
- A-Team Firing: Particularly at early tech levels, hitting a ship with a shell at the range of dozens of kilometers is very difficult. Dozens of shells are likely to be expended for every hit; the game helpfully calculates a hit chance for each of your gun batteries to help you determine whether to open fire or save your ammo. However at the higher tech levels (the 1930s and later), advanced technologies and upgraded guns make hits more likely, particularly as targets get closer. Also, spending more on recruiting and training crew will lead to better hit rates.
- Armor-Piercing Attack: Naturally, armor piercing shells are designed to do exactly this. How likely they are to actually penetrate the enemy's armor depends on the thickness of that armor, the type of armor used, the angle the shell strikes at, the caliber of the shell, the speed it's flying at, and how much damage the armor has already taken. As with the fire control system, the game will calculate and display the penetration chance of each of your guns for the shell type currently in use against the selected target.
- BFG: At higher tech levels, the player gets access to some truly fearsome naval artillery, such as triple 18-inch turrets, the largest such artillery ever put to sea in real life.
- In the Alpha-9 update, guns of 19- and 20-inch caliber were added, along with the ability to mount them in quad turrets. No naval guns of this size were ever built in real life, though there were various plans and designs for ships armed with them in history.
- Artificial Brilliance: The enemy AI is remarkably good at avoiding torpedoes, once they spot them, and generally knows when they are outmatched and should retreat. And although it is wildly inconsistent, the AI ship builder occasionally comes up with some inspired designs that the player will be hard-pressed to counter.
- Artificial Stupidity: The friendly AI is over-reliant on the player, and will often prioritize staying in formation rather than avoiding torpedoes or collision. And when the AI ship designer is having a bad time, it produces absurd designs that no real naval architect would ever have considered.
- Artistic License – Politics: The campaign doesn't remotely try to simulate real-world politics. For example, the British Commonwealth doesn't exist, with nations like Canada and Australia being completely independent as early as 1890. Also the U.S. doesn't enforce the Monroe Doctrine, with European and Asian countries freely messing around in the Americas.
- Bloodless Carnage: Although the ships can explode violently when hit, their crew is not modeled in the real time battles, even for guns that don't have enclosed turrets and would need a crew standing out on deck to service them, so you never see them get hurt or killed. Downplayed, however, in that the damage tracker will cheerfully tell you how many crewmembers have died with each hit, and the status window shows how many crewmen remain out of the ship's complement for each ship.
- Collateral Damage: Given the potential inaccuracy of the guns, it's entirely possible to be aiming at one enemy ship and inflict a devastating blow on another enemy ship more than a kilometer away from the target.
- Construction Is Awesome: Building your own ships is half the fun.
- Delaying Action: This is a potential tactic in any mission that involves transport ships; often lighter ships must fight a hopeless battle to buy time for the transports to flee and to allow heavier ships to come into range.
- Design-It-Yourself Equipment: This is basically half of the core gameplay, building your own ships.
- The Dreaded Dreadnought: You can easily re-create the Trope Namer HMS Dreadnought in-game. The game will also randomly assign the name Dreadnought to British battleships or battlecruisers. More generally, you can play with ship designs to easily create powerful ships worthy of the name.
- Epic Ship-on-Ship Action: The whole point of the game.
- Fog of War: Enemy ships must be spotted by one of your own to become visible and vice versa. Various technologies can increase or decrease your spotting range and your visibility to the enemy.
- Additionally, once the ships are spotted, they take time for your fleet's intelligence crew to fully identify, so you may be fighting an enemy ship for some time before you know its name, class, and full capabilities, though you can estimate this by visually observing them yourself.
- Glass Cannon: Destroyers and torpedo boats, which carry enormously destructive torpedoes but next-to-no armor.
- Lightning Bruiser: Battlecruisers. Although they have a harder time standing up to battleships due to their somewhat lighter armor, it's still pretty decent armor, their guns are the same caliber as battleships, and they can be as fast and maneuverable as cruisers and some destroyers.
- Mighty Glacier: Battleships, whose heavy armor and guns make them very difficult to kill quickly.
- Min-Maxing: The Naval Academy missions tell you before the design phase what kinds of ships your opponent will have, and custom games allow you to choose your own opponent fleet. Having access to this information allows you to tailor-make your own ships to counter the enemy and eliminate excess equipment that would be needed for a ship that would have to defend against any conceivable enemy. Those ships would be useless in real life or in a campaign, but get the job done handily in pre-set missions.
- More Dakka: Instead of mounting super-heavy guns, the player can instead mount large numbers of smaller caliber but rapid-firing guns, with as many as four guns per turret. By min-maxing the ship's design to reduce the weight of other components (engines, armor, etc) this can be taken to truly absurd levels, with battleships mounting dozens of main guns and hundreds of secondary guns, particularly in custom battles where where available funds are not a limitation. Such a ship might not exactly be the most practical but it certainly will be entertaining.
- Naval Blockade: Some of the Naval Academy missions involve enforcing one of these.
- Non-Entity General: The player is a generic admiral whose personality is not discussed and has no impact on the game.
- Opposing Combat Philosophies: Although not explicit in the game, players and the AI can configure their ships in such a way as to excel at a particular role or type of combat at the expense of the others. Should you build:
- Cheap, expendable but less capable ships produced and fielded in mass quantities or a few expensive, very powerful ships that can each individually outfight any conceivable opponent but will forever be outnumbered?
- Light ships with a torpedo focus or a gun focus, at the risk of being handily countered by the other variety or well rounded ships with less overall combat power?
- Fast, agile but lightly armed and armored ships or slow and cumbersome but heavily protected ships?
- A few very high caliber guns with a long reload or large numbers of lower-caliber rapid firing guns?
- Procedural Generation: This is how the AI generates all of the enemy ships you face, in addition to the other ships in your fleet that you choose not to design yourself. It can lead to some "interesting" ship designs that probably would never have been created by any (sane) naval architect in real life.
- Real-Time with Pause: In real-time battles, the player can pause the action, give ships and divisions new orders, and then resume it.
- Ramming Always Works: Downplayed, but still present. Ramming damage was added in Alpha-8, and is a viable way to sink ships, if you can get close enough. It also depends on the angle the ships collide at, their relative displacements, and how much damage each ship has already taken.
- Running the Blockade: As with enforcing a blockade above, you can also run them.
- Skill Scores and Perks: Crewmembers for your ships were added in the 0.5 Core patch. Now, you can choose how many crewmembers you have aboard each ship and how skilled they are, which affects the ship's accuracy, damage control, rate of fire, and other stats.
- Straight for the Commander: During battle the game automatically assigns one ship in each fleet as the flagship, which the admiral commands from. It's usually the lead ship of one of the divisions of the most powerful ships available. Being near the flagship gives other ships a boost to their gun accuracy; if you can quickly identify the enemy flagship and take it down, you can reduce the effectiveness of their whole fleet.
- Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Much as in real life, certain ship types are ideally suited for dealing with others. In particular:
- Battleships are needed to handle other battleships, and are highly dangerous to battlecruisers and heavy cruisers. However they will have a harder time dealing with destroyers, torpedo boats, and light cruisers, as those are small, fast, and hard to hit. Battleships are also particularly vulnerable to very light ships because typically their speed and maneuverability—which would allow them to dodge torpedoes—has been sacrificed for more guns and armor.
- Battlecruisers are a threat to other battlecruisers, heavy cruisers, and light cruisers. Their guns can do damage to battleships, but their lighter armor makes them vulnerable, particularly at close range. As with battleships, their big guns will have a hard time hitting destroyers, torpedo boats, and some light cruisers.
- Heavy cruisers can take down other heavy cruisers, light cruisers, destroyers and torpedo boats with relatively fast-firing medium guns, but their armor simply cannot stand up to battleships and battlecruisers.
- Light cruisers will generally get gunned down by anything heavier than them due to their weak armor, unless they can run and evade, something made easier by their ability to lay smokescreens. However they are absolute hell on destroyers and torpedo boats using many fast-firing medium-caliber guns and good maneuverability to avoid torpedoes.
- Destroyers and torpedo boats generally have next-to-no armor and very small guns, only suitable for dealing with other destroyers and torpedo boats. However, they are extremely fast and agile, can lay smokescreens, and can carry numerous torpedoes, which do massive damage to anything they hit, making them very useful against cumbersome battleships (or anyone caught unawares).
- Target Spotter: Any ship can function as this for any other ships, but relatively small and stealthy destroyers and torpedo boats are good at it as they can safely get closer to the enemy than the big battleships.
- Technology Levels: In custom battles, the technology available to each country is based on what the year is set to for each. A country whose year is set to 1940 will logically have more technological options available to them than one set at 1920.
- Timed Mission: The Naval Academy scenarios often have a time limit within which to accomplish their objectives.
- Video Game Historical Revisionism: Sort of the point of the game, really, in that it allows you to design your own warships and fleets for various nations, so you can see how they might have fared with some different strategic philosophies. Skirmish in particular allows you to design ships of all types for countries that could never have afforded them nor had the shipbuilding industry to actually construct them in real life (e.g. Hundred-million dollar battleships for the Chinese Empire ca. 1940). However the biggest departure from reality is probably the absence of aircraft (and the required defenses against them, and the ship classes centered around them) as the 20th century rolls on.
- For submarines and mines, this is played with. They aren't represented at all in Naval Academy or Custom games. However, in the campaign, you (and your enemy) can dedicate resources to researching, constructing, and deploying them. This will have an impact on the enemy's (or your) economy and and can even lead to enemy (or your) ships being damaged or sunk offscreen before a real-time fleet battle.
- Weather of War: Wind, atmospheric conditions, and sea state all affect gun accuracy and visibility range, and sea state can affect ship speed and turning radius.
