Ultimate General: Civil War is a Real-Time Strategy game depicting The American Civil War developed and published by Game-Labs, in a similar vein to Ultimate General: Gettysburg that it is essentially a sequel to, with Nick Thomadis again serving as its lead designer.
Going on early-access release on November 16, 2016 before being fully released on July 14, 2017, the core of the game consists of fighting individual combats portraying a variety of actual battles throughout The American Civil War in real-time while managing their armies’ troops and weapons with the money, recruits and reputation available to them between the battles. Additionally, players can play singular battles against the computer following a historical format for them or allowing the player to customize and build their own army for fighting the battle.
Was followed by Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail in 2021 that combines land and sea combat.
This game provides examples of:
- All-or-Nothing Reloads: An Averted Trope with a red gauge for units which represents the percentage of individuals in the brigade that have loaded their weapons. A brigade can fire at the enemy, have their full firepower be interrupted by other orders which can leave the successful shooters able to reload, and then fire off the remainder of the unit’s ready arms again before requiring the unit to totally reload before the next volley.
- Alternate History: Pretty much inherent, considering for example, the commanders of the armies involved at the Battle of 1st Bull Run were completely different than the Battle of Shiloh while it’s pretty likely that your Corps commanders (including whatever you named yourself) won't be changed at between these points and will be presiding at both...not to mention that a Confederate player can win the The American Civil War!
- Alpha Strike: Multiple units firing into one unit at near-touching distance is highly demoralizing to units due to the sheer damage, even if the unit is in good cover. The most reliable way to force a quick breakthrough into enemy fortifications that cannot be easily flanked is to march as many infantry brigades that can fit in front of them while they hold their fire until all of them are just outside of the fortification.
- Having multiple artillery units fire upon one unit before they get in small-arms range is also a helpful way to break or weaken enemy units before the lines truly clash.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Rather than letting units pointlessly stack upon onto a location unable to get a clear line of fire toward the enemy while making themselves an easier target to the enemy, units too close together will spread out enough to be able to fire unhindered while enemies are nearby...though this may cause units to let themselves out of concealment and reveal themselves to the enemy prematurely.
- Anyone Can Die: It doesn't matter whether you've got Robert E. Lee or William Tecumseh Sherman leading your brigades or your divisions - any of your officers can absolutely suddenly die if their brigade/division takes damage. It's not very likely as long as the brigades have plenty of men or are in cover, but it's hardly impossible for them to still be surprisingly wounded, if not killed.
- Artificial Brilliance: If there's a spot somewhere on the map unguarded to let the enemy march their units into your flanks, they will find it. Always have units for watching every angle toward your forces.
- Artificial Insolence: Units that are at around 17% morale will become uncontrollable and try to fall back from the fight regardless of orders as they sporadically fire (usually ineffectively) on the retreat. Units that rout simply run away from the enemy at full tilt.
- Artificial Stupidity: Routing units automatically run away from enemy units. This can cause the likes of them fleeing straight into enemy lines, or even stranger instances of them running around on the spot until they are shattered by enemy fire if surrounded by all sides from enemies (easily done with a few units if they are chased into one of a map's corners).
- Bottomless Magazines: Averted, brigades have a red gauge which depletes after firing to represent the percentage of individuals in a brigade having to reload before firing again. Brigades can also be interrupted while firing (such as being ordered to turn around while in the middle of shooting or getting engaged in melee while shooting), causing less of the brigade to have to reload again before fully-firing or shooting with the remainder before everyone has to reload before the next volley.
- Cannon Fodder: With the greater expense of more veteran units and the cost of replacing weaponry, it's pretty much a certainty you'll be deploying a number of low-experience infantry brigades to act as this while you have other units serve as the corps' damage-dealers.
- The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Inverted with the Detach Skirmishers feature for infantry brigades – this feature is vitally helpful for scouting for your army, setting up flanking attacks against the enemy and making better use of an area with scarcer cover. Your AI enemies, however, are incapable of using it.
- Played straight with the computer’s manpower on the campaign side. Players are a lot more able to put themselves in a negative loop from too many losses and poor handling of their finances that makes you unable to not lose Grand Battles. The enemy’s manpower actually can also eventually start petering out to be barely a threat as the campaign goes on if one kills them well enough, though they’d have to take a lot more losses than the player ever would.
- You may see cavalry units with over 1000 men inside them in the computer's hands, while yours can only go up to 750. Same with AI 3000 man infantry units, compared to your 2500 man maximum.
- On Legendary Mode, the AI will always have plenty of ludicrously tough three-star units, even if you've been wiping out his army every battle.
- Cap: Unit skills are incapable of going above 100. 3-star veteran units are far from unlikely to hit these caps over their service and thus there can be a financial benefit to replenishing a 3-star veteran unit's numbers with raw recruits to some degree since the veteran unit can still go back up to 100 in a skill in a battle anyway.
- Infantry units can go up to a maximum of 2500 men, skirmishers to 500 men, cavalry to 750 men, and artillery units at 24 guns.
- The Cavalry: All of your corps' units will rarely all be immediately present at once in a battle, so it's pretty common for your units to be desperately holding on just before your reserves march on the field.
- Just like in the actual Battle of Gettysburg, a Union player will probably invert this and act as The Cavalry to John Buford's cavalry division delaying the Army of Northern Virginia while heavily outnumbered.
- Close-Range Combatant: There's a variety of these throughout the armies in the game.
- Smoothbore artillery tends to be the Close-Range Combatant sort out of artillery units, preferring to position far closer to the enemy (though still generally hoping to remain outside of gunfire range unless they have support - only already rather demoralized units will rout first when artillery and them are both able to be shooting at each other).
- Cavalry and Skirmishers will frequently tend toward this as the campaign goes on - while infantry, cavalry and skirmishers' weaponry generally start out with similar range, better infantry rifles tend to have dramatically better range than the cheapest and earliest-available muskets while the range of carbines of cavalry and skirmishers generally do not change very much with higher quality versions. This applies further to sabre cavalry, who are armed with sabres and revolvers making them very good in melee and capable of devastating close-range fire with the cylinder revolver varieties, and even automatically move into melee range with attack orders (they must be ordered to stop/halt or move close-enough-but-not-in-melee while in range of the enemy to continuously fire on them). This does not apply to long-range rifle skirmishers who are, of course, of a Long-Range Fighter style instead.
- Infantry units are probably the best units in the game in a head-on melee fight due to their numbers, and can get some skills or equip certain weapons to further additionally specialize them in a close-combat fight. Their weight of numbers further make them difficult to match if firing virtually next to another enemy unit for maximum possible accuracy.
- Decapitated Army: A General unit being eliminated makes his army far easier to defeat, as units only shatter entirely when reduced to 30% of their original number and can rally from routs fairly quickly after being out of enemy contact range – the lack of a General unit around to replenish their morale will cause enemy units to rout again soon after the pursuing enemy starts shooting at them again.
- Do Well, But Not Perfect: Routing enemy units that find themselves encircled (and thus running into more enemies into melee range) are very likely to surrender. Surrendering enemies are exchanged at the end of the battle for additional recruits for your army...to a very small Cap of 1000 recruits, as they go back into your enemy’s ranks to try and kill you again. Combined without how this means many surrendering enemies will mean a lot less kills and thus Stat Grinding for your units, actively encircling a lot of the enemy’s army entirely and breaking them from there isn’t quite as much of a masterful display of maneuvering that the enemy will be lucky to recover from as you'd expect and can be a lot less beneficial to your campaign’s prospects then leaving holes for them to flee into and get shot up.
- Easy Logistics: Players certainly should be trying to make sure their units will have enough ammunition for the next battle by investing enough to their supply wagons and bringing the wagons to their units while managing their units' numbers and weaponry against available money and recruits, but any sort of actual strategic supply lines, matching all of the many varieties of weaponry their units will surely be using to their ammunition or dealing with sufficient food and other equipment are not matters that come up at all.
- Exclusive Enemy Equipment: A variety of weapons can only be bought by either side - the Union has access to some of the most accurate infantry rifles, ranged skirmisher/cavalry carbines, and rifled artillery; meanwhile the Confederacy has infantry and skirmisher rifles that are better in melee as well as the best cavalry pistols & sabers. While you're one of these sides and you want to use the weapons that are exclusive to the enemy side, you'll have to hope you'll capture them from the enemy.
- The Enemy Weapons Are Better: Are you a Confederate player that likes counter-battery fire, flanking the enemy with skirmishers or cavalry, or just plentiful amounts of effective rifles? A Union player that likes a good melee charge by man or on horse? Either way, you're going have to nab enough of the enemy's weapons to fulfill your predilections since your sides can't give what you need for these jobs very well.
- Fog of War: Areas of the map that none of your units are able to look into are darkened, and clicking on a single unit shows a detailed version of their sight lines by darkening everything that they can’t look at.
- Additionally, much of the information about the enemy will be unknown without having enough points in the Reconnaissance skill even while you can see the enemy's units. 2 points lets you see the starting enemy's numbers, 4 lets you see the enemy's designations and the overall enemy army's strength, 6 partially shows enemy units' status, 8 fully shows enemy units' status while giving partial information on their attributes and weapons, and 10 now fully shows enemy unit's attributes and weapons.
- Friendly Fireproof: Averted, though since only 5% of allied fire can cause any friendly fire damage, the effect of it is usually unnoticeable except with seriously heavy-duty artillery potentially causing a mobbed ally unit to rout (a terrible thing for any outnumbered unit).
- Geo Effects: All over the place! Let us list them here...
- Roads speed up units’ movement while affecting nothing else.
- Grass is like roads while giving less of a movement bonus.
- Wheatfields slow movement and make units less accurate but also makes them harder to be hit and spotted.
- Scrub is largely negative, slowing movement significantly and reducing accuracy like wheatfields while providing very small bonuses to stealth and cover.
- Mud is like scrub but doesn’t reduce accuracy while reducing speed even more.
- Forest provides even more cover and stealth bonuses than wheatfields.
- Dense Forest slows and reduces accuracy like scrub but makes units very hard to spot or hit.
- Houses do not penalize accuracy and provides the best sort of cover in the game for units fitting inside of it, but slows units like scrub and only gives comparable stealth to wheatfield.
- Water is literally the worst terrain in the game, greatly penalizing units at absolutely everything. Fords slow units and makes them slightly stealthier than water, while Bridges improve upon fords by only reducing speed as much as a forest.
- High ground also emboldens units, makes them more accurate against lower units and gives them better sight lines from above them, or can block the enemy from seeing them if higher ground is between them and the enemy. Lower ground however, causes inverse penalties against higher units.
- Fragile Speedster: Cavalry and Skirmishers, both units are a fair bit faster than infantry or artillery. Cavalry units may have 250 more men than skirmishers, are faster, and are better in melee, but they are easier to hit with shooting and neither hide nor spot as effectively as skirmishers (though they still spot better than infantrymen and will probably hide better as well due to lower numbers).
- Glass Cannon: Fittingly, artillery is capable of shooting the enemy from ranges that only other artillery can return, but are vulnerable when attacked by other units. Only weakened or particularly small units (like detached skirmishers) will rout before artillery units in a mutual slugfest, and artillery has little hope of escaping and reforming on their own due to their slow speed.
- Guide Dang It!: Disbanding units puts them back into the pool of recruits...because of this, disbanding veteran units will improve the average skills of buying new green recruits. This has the funny effect of doing this being cheaper for the player to replenish other veteran units if their entire manpower pool is depleted as green recruits cost less to buy even if the manpower pool is really only veteran men.
- Fortifications reduce the damage of a garrisoned infantry unit, much like being in trees or wheatfields. However, skirmishers' damage will be unaffected. The effects of the latter can be noticed by clicking on a single unit and mousing over the terrain, but this isn’t a possibility with fortifications. Not to mention players will usually find them a lot less useful than they’d expect...
- The different kinds of artillery can be a little bit more complex than the statistics and blurbs provided for them (so this guide is suggested
for fully understanding them). For example, the 10-Pdr Parrott and 12-Pdr Whitworth cannons are highly effective at long-range and are still useful at canister range, but are atypically poor at shell shot range.- The game does tell you that increasing a unit's amount of men providing diminishing returns with more of them for its damage output, but for some reason, artillery units outright lose sheer damage effectiveness when over 12 guns regardless of the rank of the officer in charge of it. Therefore, the only reason to have more than 12 guns in an artillery unit would be for intentionally placing it into close-range to fire canister shot which will probably put it at risk and ironically improve its damage output as the enemy puts it lower toward 12 guns.
- Similar to artillery performance being a tad obfuscated, some weapons may be unexpectedly more lethal than the statistics mentioned would imply because they fire from a magazine or cylinder like the real weapons they were modelled off of, meaning they can pour out fire into the enemy and break them much faster than one would figure from just comparing the rate-of-fire statistics.
- Hero Unit: Generals automatically restore morale within their circular command radius. They cannot attack enemies at all however, and can be eliminated to prevent the morale regeneration, though the AI usually will never try to attack them when there are actually lethally-capable units nearby.
- Hit-and-Run Tactics: The purview of skirmishers and carbine cavalry, who are usually less numerous than infantry units but move faster and automatically fall back from combat after firing unless ordered to hold position.
- A badly outmatched/close to breaking unit is probably better off falling back from any enemy brigades that are charging them - even if this causes them to run out of good cover and get shot, forcing the enemy brigades to keep charging exhausts them more and will still probably cause them to take less damage than getting charged, losing a melee, and then getting shot by nearby enemies/shot in the back anyway once the charging brigade is out of melee range.
- In the Back: Units hit in their flanks take more damage and lose morale quicker, and units hit in the rear even more so.
- Kick Them While They Are Down: Units who are hit from behind take a lot more damage, and routing units will inherently be running away from their enemies. Since units need to take a fair amount of losses before shattering (which only happens when reduced to 30% of their starting numbers) and can rally fairly fast while away from enemy contact, routing enemies should be chased and attacked as much as one can spare.
- Killed Off for Real: Officers absolutely can and will die throughout battles, though their odds will be better for the more men that are in their unit. Be very careful about placing Ulysses S. Grant in an infantry brigade just because you couldn’t afford to give him a Corps yet...
- Long-Range Fighter: Rifled artillery, which tends to be most effective firing out of the range of other units and is more effective than smoothbore artillery while firing at targets from the farther half of their maximum range. Inversely, smoothbore artillery is not as much the same case and is better firing at targets toward the closer half of their maximum range.
- Skirmishers can be equipped with especially long-range and accurate but slow-firing rifles that can allow them to shoot from outside of the range of any other firearm-wielding units.
- Long Song, Short Scene: The music that plays during deployment is quite a grand piece over its three-and-a-half minutes duration. Players' deployment also will rarely, if ever, take long enough to listen to the entire time unless they decide to truly maximize every unit's placement whenever they have a full corps or more immediately at their disposal.
- Mighty Glacier: Infantry units are slow (though they may run faster at the cost of Condition), but their potential numbers makes them unbeatable against other units in a head-on fight. Outranging and/or outmaneuvering infantry units are the best way to defeat them.
- Min-Maxing: With how reinforcing units with veteran men costs progressively more as the units' stats get higher, it's quite logical to want to greatly limit veteran reinforcing to some particularly key units that will serve as your corps' main source of damage to better invest the money into more units and weaponry.
- Morale Mechanic: Units have a morale gauge that is increased by killing the enemy, standing on high ground and being nearby a commander, and is decreased by taking losses, especially from the flanks or rear. Exhausted units are also lose morale much quicker. Units that are at around 17% morale will start wavering (signified by the color of their icon being whiter) and are rendered uncontrollable as they fight much less effectively and try to fall back from combat. Units that run out of morale entirely panic and rout from the battle, running away trying to flee from enemies as best and quickly as they can, though units that are not shattered can rally toward controllable morale fairly quickly once they get out of range of the enemy.
- Mucking in the Mud: Mud slows down units greatly while providing little cover. Attacking enemy units that are in range of this mud unless both their artillery have been silenced and the enemy units are greatly outnumbered is a very bad idea.
- No Range Like Point-Blank Range: Units’ reliance on accuracy to hit their enemies goes down as they get closer to enemies – this can cause any decently-sized infantry brigade standing just outside of melee range with an enemy unit’s back to shoot a lethal volley that will rout just about any unit immediately.
- One Stat to Rule Them All: The Politics skill is kind of hard to beat when you're thinking about what your general should maximize first. Its increases to gold and recruits rewards from missions are pretty much universally useful to any kind of strategy while other skills have benefits that while useful are more situational and dependent on other factors about your army, and improving the Politics skill immediately is the sensible way to deal with it if at all since putting points in it later on means losing out on part of its benefits to earlier missions.
- Overheating: Units have ammunition reserves, but are actually still capable of firing without ammunition (which represents them scavenging off of the battlefield). Reloading without ammunition takes far longer and reduces the unit’s condition more severely.
- Reality Has No Soundtrack: The game has music for the main menu, pre-battle deployment, and the results screen after winning battles, but the gameplay itself does not use background music. The in-game battles only have the sounds of combat and marching, and the camp screen instead uses a bunch of sounds to resemble the bustle of a busy military camp.
- Real-Time with Pause: Units can be ordered around entirely while the game is paused or slowed down, and this is pretty much a necessity on a few battles where you can have 5 full corps for a total of 125 units...and that's just when all of the infantry ones aren't detaching skirmishers!
- Resources Management Gameplay: On the "camp" screen for their campaign, players play around with available money, recruits, weaponry and reputation with which to build and replenish their army for the upcoming battles. General skills generally affect the player’s interactions with these resources in some way, aside from the Reconnaissance skill.
- Sequel Escalation: This game isn’t just some sort of simulator of a single famous battle of the The American Civil War like Ultimate General: Gettysburg, but battles spanning the entire The American Civil War!
- Sound-Coded for Your Convenience: A distinctive trumpeting happens whenever a unit charges at another unit (as well as the commotion and yelling from troops in melee or charging), making it helpful for realizing that troops you weren't directly looking at are being charged while you were expecting to be just trading fire with the enemy.
- Sprint Meter: The Condition bar represents a unit's fatigue, which goes down while moving, reloading or firing and goes down much faster while charging, in melee, running or reloading while out of ammunition. It regenerates while the unit is at rest. Condition affects a unit's combat effectiveness, speed and morale and penalizes the unit on these aspects as the unit becomes more exhausted.
- Starts Stealthily, Ends Loudly: Player should definitely be fanning out their skirmishers, detached skirmishers and cavalry into good positions for them to spot the enemy before your army inevitably starts shooting at the enemy.
- Stat Grinding: Efficiency, Morale, Stamina, Firearms and Melee skills of your units inherently improve as you use them – more specifically, by respectively killing enemies, being in battles, moving, shooting, and scoring melee kills. Additionally, units separately gain perks from gaining enough experience by training skills to gain stars that can also improve these aforementioned skills.
- Take Cover!: Like Ultimate General: Gettysburg before it, in a Company of Heroes-esque manner, all units inherently Take Cover! automatically to where they stand on the battlefield based on the terrain features around them with the protection it provides them infers by a “Cover” gauge that goes from 0% to 100% – a unit in a heavy forest or within a town’s buildings will be well covered from all forms of ranged attacks, but even on fairly open ground, it will be quite rare that units see their Cover gauge be absolutely zero, which requires the likes of them going into a river. Smaller units will also proportionately be better able to take cover in terrain, with small skirmisher units being able to gain a maximum cover benefit from smaller forests while larger infantry brigades will require the densest forests in the game to be as well protected.
- Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Battles' briefings don't completely tell the player how exactly it will turn out, making it hardly unlikely at times that they'll be shifting their lines and moving units over to flank the enemy only for it to turn out that enemy reinforcements will shortly appear to march right into these flanking units as they get into position.
- Universal Ammunition: No matter how rare and expensive the weapons a unit is using, any supply source – be it an allied supply wagon, a captured wagon or a controlled supply point – will be able to provide ammunition for these units until it runs out. However, it should be noted that the standard infantry weapons were all .58 caliber (the Enfield .577s use the same bullet) and artillery was fairly standardized as well, as the Confederates were using more or less the same cannons as the Union. So it's less silly than it might at first sound...mostly, as Voodoo Shark elaborates on.
- Useless Useful Spell: A lot of fortifications verge on this, with how they spread the garrisoned unit out making it more likely for them to be counted as flanked, the unit tends to fire freely in trickles rather than volleys which can be somewhat counteracted by morale regeneration and makes enemies take longer to rout, and providing less protection for the unit in practice than nearby forests or buildings. They do provide a significant melee effectiveness and resistance boost to the unit inside them however, potentially making even these usually-should-be-ignored fortifications handy for going into them if an enemy nearby them charges them.
- Veteran Unit: All units have an experience bar that increases as their skills improve. Gaining enough experience for each bracket can earn up to three stars for each unit and each star for a unit means they can choose a perk which can improve their skills further or provide other bonuses. However, this make replenishing a unit’s numbers with veteran troops progressively more expensive and refilling a unit’s numbers with green recruits dilutes their skills and can even cause the unit to lose stars and the benefits of perks.
- Voodoo Shark: Units can still reload and fire their weapons even while their ammunition is depleted, just they’ll reload far slower and lower their condition quickly. This is explained as the unit scavenging ammunition off of the battlefield and the dead, which is a reasonable picture for most infantry brigades, but not an airtight explanation for artillery brigades using the largest and most expensive cannons that are probably rare even on their own side or skirmishers armed with rare sniper rifles where both units are hardly unlikely to manage to fire off all of their ammunition while avoiding enemy fire.
- With This Herring: Confederate players can purchase (or Union players that have captured enough of them) and choose to equip their brigades with Farmer or Rebored Farmer muskets which represent obsolete non-military-grade flintlock muskets pressed into service. These weapons are mostly just an improvement over the unit theoretically being armed only with knives, and legitimately are far more useful in melee rather than actual shooting. Players should definitely avoid using these weapons further at the first opportunity.
- You Lose at Zero Trust: The Reputation stat on the campaign side grants a bonus to the morale of all of your units, but can be lost by consuming it to bargain for additional government support (such as more money, recruits, weapons or officers) and when defeated or drawing in battle. If at low reputation, your units' morale decreases. If a defeat or draw makes a player’s Reputation goes to zero, they will be removed from command and their campaign will end.
