Guardian54

You need to survive, and that means survive on the field. Running away doesn't count for that, otherwise there would have been no battle to begin with at such inferiority of force.

A stationary/fully dismasted sailing ship could technically move and turn by dropping boats to tow it. A stationary sailing ship that has been dismasted and is under fire, however, COULD NOT POSSIBLY turn by any means except being driven by the current, which would be glacially slow at best. It would be good if stationary ship turn rates could be nerfed to something like 1/10 of the present rate, particularly when under fire (when boats to tow the bow around would be shot to splinters) Otherwise, one runs into the UTTERLY LUDICROUS situation of a deeply-loaded frigate with some sail damage (let alone another third-rate) being unable to reliably get behind a dismasted third-rate to rake its stern until it surrenders, because the dismasted third rate can somehow turn on the spot fast enough to keep the frigate under fire, especially once the time comes for the frigate to need to sail into the wind to continue the raking attack. So stationary ships with no (working) sails should turn LAUGHABLY slower than they currently do, at least when under fire.

I am displeased to inform everyone that grapeshot seems incapable of penetrating frigate armour when fired from a third-rate's guns. It can damage crew and masts on deck but will refuse to go through the enemy's gunports, let alone their sides. So I cannot do Objects in Motion until the hull damage bug gets patched out because I am determined to have a perfect capture record (thus far I've lost the captured San Silvestre to magazine detonation though during the capture of the Arrogante). Let's hope that patch comes out soon like they promised (they promised to release it today)

Not hard at all. Just tilt it depending on what the player chooses for big battles like Snatch.

It seems to me that to capture guns you must have them under control at the end of a battle, not abandoned. I've captured a good few guns before, but there does seem to be an appreciable fraction discount, ugh.

1. Research the Light Infantry to make room for Grenadiers to pop up. 2. PROFIT!

First of all, it's grapeshot, not canister. Canister usually comes in a can (hence the name) and is musket ball sized, grapeshot is CONSIDERABLY larger to actually be able to punch through some boards. Are there rough rules on how much armour grapeshot can penetrate? Like "1/3 as much as Ball at same range from the same gun" or something? Because it seems that when I shoot brigs with heavy guns firing grapeshot, I can still just lol through their armour and wreck guns, crew, etc easily. I'll test this tomorrow if the hull damage bug hasn't been patched out enough for Arrogante to not roflstomp the French frigate line in "Objects In Motion" by then. Because dropping the enemy down to 40% hull (or in the last of the three frigates in the enemy vanguard, 20% hull) but 50% armour in one broadside doesn't give me much chance to capture them as I don't have enough men in my fleet to just overrun ALL their crews even with great melee skill and sword bayonets. I dearly hope there's established rules for this...

Weird. Even on Easy in the British campaign, due to presumably poor purchasing decisions or preferring to rely on grapeshot instead of boarding pushing my repair costs up and reducing money gain from selling obtained ships due to damage, I kept running low on money even after getting +25% income with a +20% income bonus from total success in "Dinner For Admiral".

I don't mean the "+ -90% accuracy" and such obvious problems that somehow comes from Marksman Training (which I didn't dare take on my fusiliers in case they went full stupid somehow). I'm talking about how "+5% rewards from Admiralty" is OP as hell compared to "+5% casualty recovery" or "5% discount". Because you need +100% income vs -50% cost i.e. 10 ticks before the discounts start eclipsing the income upgrade, and you don't get nearly that many ticks. This seems to make it so that your first thing to fill after Luck (superbly useful for making money and reputation on side missions) and maybe technology is going to be gold income, every single British campaign, because it's the primary source of income. Gold is used for everything, so item-specific discounts should go 10% per tick to make it more worthwhile to pick and to snowball faster to "you can afford 2x as much stuff (additional fees may apply though)!" at the top end, compared to gold income which is universal. You can spend a skill point on a 5% discount on any one of those items, to a max of 25% discount... or you can spend the same 5 skill points to get 25% more funds which allow you to be more flexible and buy more overall. It's very obviously not balanced.

I am pleased to report that the (detached) Skirmishers problem has apparently been fixed so that Grenadiers can actually reliably beat them within 6 volleys if the Grenadiers have the stamina remaining to keep chase for that long and close distance whenever they are reloading. In other words, micromanagement FTW.

Shh, no taking steroids when on duty! ...I mean that's APPARENTLY how it works... I know, it's ridiculous that I fire like 15 guns into his side with grapeshot (canister doesn't work vs ship hulls, grapeshot can once they're weakened enough) and still only manage to kill 8 people on his gun deck. If I aim at his weather deck a lot of the shots miss high so I don't bother, and even then the killing isn't nearly effective enough. Seriously, once the armour is compromised each shot of grapeshot that hits the enemy ship and penetrates its residual hull thickness should kill at LEAST one crew member, and that's for a 4-pounder!

My own unit of 30 skirmishers detached from a normal unit, vs a dedicated enemy unit of 50+ skirmishers is a foregone conclusion. Believe me, I tried it. Better to have the fusiliers just keep on exchanging volleys than throw men away like that. At least Grenadiers are somehow the same price as Fusiliers so I was lucky to switch to them really early in a campaign. (It's nice that you can't upgrade/switch unit types for the same unit in this game, because I don't think fusiliers can magically grow taller to qualify as grenadiers) You sailed far too close and presumably didn't wear their armour on that side down to 0 with round shot first. Because even a cutter with 6 guns per side can pull 3 casualties per salvo with canister if the enemy has 0 armour left on the side being shot. Meanwhile a 5th rate vs a troopship in that 2.3 (IIRC) intercept mission, in the same stage as Crossfire, can only do 8 crew kills per salvo of canister even after his armour on that side was at 0, ugh. However, I kept the ships easily far enough apart despite me being upwind (at half sail though) that he couldn't snipe any of my men. As an example, Age of Empires DE got good enough with the AI coding that the AI now knows to scout with sheep.

Manual aim is REQUIRED to hole get the enemy's sails properly, and their sails also have to be out to do this unless you manage to dismast them with round shot (if calibre is small). The sail damage is annoyingly slow regardless though. Oh right, it's critical to have multiple ships ganging up on one to get them to surrender. Otherwise even troopships will stay at Wavering morale for insanely long times while you're slowly depopulating them. Multiple ships surrounding them convinces them to surrender much faster.

You would think that Fusiliers or Grenadiers would be trained to "if ordered to shoot at skirmishers, shoot as soon as you are in range, forget the volley or formation when it comes to fighting skirmishers, just shoot before they run away". The way skirmishers can fire and the Fusiliers just refuse to fire back until the whole lot slooooowly turn around to face the skirmishers--who are long gone out of range by then--is quite irritating. Because any officer with half a brain is going to train the men to use line tactics when facing line infantry, but against skirmishers just shoot as quickly as you can aim before they run away again. Please program the units to fight more intelligently against skirmishers! Because really, if they were armed with rifles or better muskets as skirmishers usually should be, they'd be out of range anyhow, it's quite irksome to have 1/3 of your unit in range yet no one shoots because they got to turn half the unit or more to be in range first. I am continuously losing more men than I kill in land battles on EASY, albeit with captives making up the gap, because of the inability of enemy troops who are routing to actually run away more than 10 meters before rallying to let off another volley, the inability of my troops to navigate, the left-click drag often disrupting manoeuvres, and the accursed lack of anti-skirmisher firing.

This is seriously terrible when you're just verifying a unit's stats before a charge makes contact, and tends to disrupt manoeuvres in general. It cancels charges even when you are paused. I think a more Total War like momentum charge calculation might be better than the MOBA-style ability button like thing we have at present if this control problem doesn't get fixed. I know it's a part of the "manual pathing" function but really, it's... a drag *inb4 infraction for bad pun.

I was told on Discord that the devs have to make their maps pretty much manually in the game engine with no separate easy-to-use scenario editor like the Age of Empires series has. So the most important DLCs would be: The World Is Your Oyster: Can replay won campaign missions as scenarios (just discovered the Battles tab in-game after purchasing so I suppose this is already there...). Starting funds before the battle are based on price tag of max-scaled enemy forces on max difficulty, plus/minus some (say +/-20%) depending on difficulty. Here Be Dragons: To make campaign creation easier--because the game is sure to attract enough customers to justify MANY DLCs, almost Paradox game tier DLC counts (see Europa Universalis IV), the devs really should make a scenario editor for dev usage. A slightly less background-code-heavy version can eventually be released for the general public. It will not negatively affect sales of official DLC campaigns because AOE2's editor sure as hell didn't affect their later DLCs, and in fact massively boosted the longevity of the game!

I'm intending to name him for my YouTube channel. The problem is that it's three words, totalling 16 characters counting all spaces (no hyphens). If you can have an officer with the last name Wilburforce or similar in the game (I seem to recall one such from History Guy Gaming's videos) then most first names would push him well over that character count. "René Duguay-Trouin" (4 + 7+1+6 = 18 characters counting hyphen) does not strike me as a longer name than, say, "Alexander Elphinstone" (9 + 11 characters)) which is a perfectly reasonable British name I'm mentioning it as "you have already allowed historical accuracy in the names out the window, so why not allow people to include spaces and hyphens in their officers' names when that would actually be historical?" I'd be willing to pay up extra when I order Admiral's Edition if I was able to name a character with spaces/hyphens in the names. If it's not possible to have a space, well I suppose I'll have to figure something out.

In the gameplay videos I saw by "History Guy Gaming" on YouTube, I was shocked to see that John Paul Jones was simply "John Paul" in the game. I learnt that this is technically historically correct, as he added "Jones" to his name later to evade law enforcement and was named "John Paul" at birth. Perhaps this could be added as an event in the campaign following his career! I understand middle names are a thing in Western Europe and usually omitted from display, BUT there are still numerous admirals in history with spaces in their first or last names. So I inquired on Discord about multi-part names and was informed that multi-part names were not yet supported. I will now show some exhibits on why it should be supported Here is a list of some notable naval figures whose names are often stated in full. I have taken some liberties abbreviating slightly, but still present my case well enough. Where the spaces are for what are likely to be classified as middle names, I have made note: Jean-Baptiste du Casse (French Navy 1686-1714)--A timeline expansion would be good for DLCs as this is still strict Age of Sail (1677 Royal Navy gun-based rating system established to 1815, the end of the Napoleonic Wars), and his last name is "du Casse" which has a space... and suggests to me that his nickname among players would be "duckbutt" and any campaign featuring him likely to be nicknamed the same... so maybe not include him. But Jean-Baptiste is a VERY common French name, so hyphenated first names when? René Trouin, Sieur du Gué, usually called René Duguay-Trouin (French Navy 1690-1736)--Given his last name was used for a class of cruisers, I do not think it is reasonable to not include it in full, with the hyphen Louis-René Levassor de Latouche Tréville (French Navy 1758-1804)--Even if you abbreviate the rest, his first name is still most definitely "Louis-René"! Louis-Thomas Villaret de Joyeuse (French Navy 1778-1797) Armand Blanquet du Chayla (French Navy 1770?-1803)--this is a spaced last name, and probably a middle name. Pierre-Charles-Jean-Baptiste-Silvestre de Villeneuve--May be spelt "Pierre Charles Silvestre de Villeneuve" or "Pierre-Charles Villeneuve" but the point remains. These are cited from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Navy Now for British officers there was really only one big name in this period with multiple names, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Royal_Navy_admirals_(1707–current) we have: George Brydges Rodney (middle name) (RN 1732-1792)--The other name the Nelson-class battleships drew from seems slightly important to me. And then you get the massed spaced names of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Spanish_admirals Obviously, for a good Age of Sail experience you also need (in DLC) to cover big names like Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp (counts as a middle name methinks) and Michiel Adriaenszoon de Ruyter (middle name, but also a spaced last name) . In conclusion, it astonishes me to hear that there may not be coding that allows for spaced/hyphenated first and last names for officers in the game, considering how many notable officers had such names. Please comment or upvote if you like the suggestion of adding spaced and hyphenated first/last names into the game. It would certainly be less radical an in-game idea than recruiting an officer named "Destructor Maximus" as I saw on gameplay videos.

1. Ensure you have as many crew on your ships as can fit after you get Optimal Crew and Best Weapons (your shipboard muskets should have sword bayonets if you plan on doing any boarding, but regular bayonets will do if needed) 2. Get rid of their rigging on ALL the ships you're engaging, as in fire pure chain until they're all immobilized. 3 Sit across their stern (or bow) and shoot them with grapeshot, or ball if grapeshot isn't working for some reason (probably just not straight enough down their stern and the flank is ricocheting too many of your grapeshot due to the armour still being up. 3a. If they are beached, shoot them in the side with ball at an angle they can't shoot back at until the armour on that side is down to almost nothing, then go grape until the crew surrenders or is down to few enough men you can board. 4. Keep shooting until they surrender. Then haul up alongside and transfer a prize crew. Mind you I have yet to buy the game since I haven't gotten a reply on my inquiry about multi-part first/last names for the red-ribbon-officer yet, but this is what I've observed from watching gameplay videos.

The obvious DLCs for the 1775-1815 period are (hypothetical titles): Rise of the Raj, the ascendancy of the British East India Company, and a chapter or two in a campaign that needs to be unlocked--by winning the British campaign on the corresponding difficulty or higher first--focusing on the decline and ultimate collapse of the Dutch East India Company Ice and Gunfire, the Danish, Swedish and Russian campaigns, considerably shorter and more compact than the others, mostly in the Baltic but with a chapter or two elsewhere, includes such historical features as being robbed blind of your fleet's heavy units and everything on them and being limited to small-boat attacks on British warships if you play the Danish campaign on Hard and unlock the bonus chapter of "After Copenhagen", with a possibility of saving the last Danish ship of the line at Zealand Point if you are skilled and lucky... The Old Empire, Spanish campaigns, of course! I'm sure there's at least one or two big admirals of this period to follow... The Old Alliance, Portuguese campaigns (following multiple major admirals), because the Portuguese Empire was still considerable even in this time, plus British campaigns around the Iberian Peninsula. Viva La France, Obvious name is obvious. Those are the "LOL SO OBVIOUS" ones. More importantly, the choice of "Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail" as a name gives you a large, LARGE variety of options. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Sail Now, for emphasis... ...I think I've communicated that clearly, so on to the actual point! Post-Napoleonic actions with steam ships existing would be more difficult to model unless we model them as being able to make way (when sails are rolled up) against the wind, so we can probably narrow it down to 1571 (Lepanto) to 1815. IF you want to go for when the British first had their first-rate, second-rate, etc. rating system by gun count, you are looking at 1677 to 1815. Before this however there were many very obvious campaign sets which can be modelled with existing game mechanics. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars:_1500–1799. For naval wars we want the colonial empires, so right off the bat we have... The Armadas: Anglo-Spanish War 1585-1604 (Because it wasn't just the Spanish Armada, but also an English Armada). Be warned that you will have plenty of land actions including swords and pikes. Cuius Regio, Eius Religio: Naval and minor amphibious actions of the Thirty Years' War. The Dutch East Indies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch–Portuguese_War and some later Dutch wars' campaigns in the region. Oliver Cromwell: This is likely to be two or more campaigns, including the English Civil War, the Anglo-Spanish War (1654-1660), an Anglo-Dutch War, etc. Because I can assure you that Netherlanders and even Belgians or Germans would be VERY interested in playing de Ryuter, Tromp, and other comparable great names. The Sun King: Nine Years' War naval campaigns Consanguinity Is Unhealthy: War of the Spanish Succession The Quadruple Alliance: War of the Quadruple Alliance, of course! A Friend In Need: Portuguese Restoration War Ave Maria: War of the Austrian Succession Some terrible joke or other about Oranges: one or more Anglo-Dutch Wars. Rule Britannia: Seven Years' War, the rise of the First British Empire, also known by some as World War Zero but actually World War Negative One. And so on for various other major wars or chains of wars where you can assemble a good campaign or two. Most of the ones before 1677 aren't exactly required, but if World War -1 AKA the Seven Years' War (Napoleonics is World War 0) isn't fertile ground for DLC campaigns, player discontent is likely to get real. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ I should note that even after 1815 there are campaigns which rate attention. For example, do the words "Almirante Cochrane" ring a bell? He served in the RN, the Chilean Navy, the Brazilian Navy, and the Greek Navy. . What do you guys think? Any other suggestions you'd like to bring up?

I almost forgot something important! If it turns out to be annoying to program the editor to actually deploy units with facings, strengths, targets etc. as part of the "place item/building/VP" function for whatever reason, then just enable a sandbox game mode where the player has control of all sides, then convert savegame into scenario start condition. This is how Rollercoaster Tycoon / RCT2 maps were made if the RCT2 editor's limitations were any indication.

There are two possibility they have for a scenario editor: 1. Manually upload an elevation map and then map out other items by coordinate, like in Supreme Commander. 2. Have an editing tool built into the game engine where you only need four tools for map creation: "place item/building/victory point", "set elevation (3rd coordinate) of brush area", "Smooth elevation changes", "Paint Terrain type" and for the latter three there would be either a marquee tool or a sliders/number input for brush radius (with a few presets for ease of use), and another number/slider for intensity (you don't want to make what was intended to be a slightly less vertical cliff into a ramp by accident). An advanced tool for ramp creation would of course be "mark start line, mark end line, mark elevation of ends." after outlining the hills followed by going around the edges with the smoothing-out tool. And if you want smoother hills without annoying quirks of lines of fire and random accidental trenches, then "Bulge/Depress area" with a marquee tool on the 2D surface should be enough. Option 2 would easily allow for players to create maps and, with triggers programmable a la the old RTS games' built-in (or packed-in for StarCraft) editors, even whole campaigns. The editor would also require a "Water Level" setting, either that or "Move selected area up/down elevation by ___" tool.

Does this game have Scenario Battles like Order of Battle: World War II where you can play any campaign battle you've won before as a scenario, at any difficulty setting, with a preset amount of resources you can allocate to your forces? I saw someone talk about how they had a save file for each battle, like how one had to do it for say Red Alert 2 or Tiberian Sun back in the day. I think being able to replay completed battles as scenarios would be great. This would also allow you to add difficulty-exclusive scenario unlocks, like say on Normal you can get a couple extra missions, which you can replay on Easy in scenario if you want for the lolz, and in Hard you get a few more extra missions.

@Ink Do the names allow spaced or hyphenated names? Cause John Paul Jones is only "John Paul" in the gameplay videos I've seen on YouTube, which I find questionable. And you can't have a French Navy without a few Jean-Baptistes, right? I also emailed info@ultimateadmiral.com asking if this feature is available or may be added sometime soon.