wozmir

I have a CQB-like 3rd rate, with carronades only and fully maxed armour. It takes little damage really, at least when facing AI 3rd rates.

So just today I had the pleasure of shooting enemy 5th rates with my geared up 3rd rates. All the jazz: experienced officers and crew, amped up cannons, reload/spread upgrades. It was lovely, I often toppled masts in one volley! Attacking enemy 3rd rates was an issue still, having to strip their armour first (I think I'll go 3rd rate boarding, sounds scary), but I'm happy that the game kinda shifted into a higher gear - naval battles do play different with 3rd rates now!

Seems like you've got the UG series mastered, I presume? I sinked thousands of hours into total war, playing UA:AoS on medium, I hardly won bunker hill battles and actually completely lost it in latest beta patch iterations (pre-yesterday's fix). Actually shooting at the ships with cannons? o_O Never occurred to me I could even survive that long!

I did play original UC: Gettysburg for a short while, never played Civil War. With that said, here's my impressions of UA:AoS. Also - I'm just about to start the section where there's the American ship defenseless in shallow waters, so I'm not that far into the campaign. The good: - limited game scope with focus on mechanics; it's mostly 1 kind of ship shooting at the same type of ship, 1 type of infantry shooting at the same type of infantry. I like it, it's easy to focus on the strategy - Land AI: whoah. I've repeated the US campaign 3 times already (some using vanilla, some using earlier beta) and no battle's been the same. The AI seems VERY competent and will react to your actions. I actually completely lost the bunker hill land battle in my current campaign. - management: I actually started winning once I started to specialise my ships and land units, switching officers, weapons, cannons and making sure the crew/soldiers don't lose their bonuses due to rookies - scale: I actually like that the land battles aren't super big sometimes. The smaller skirmishes are fun - The game is hard. I like it. Makes me think and consider all options before sailing/marching out. - Amphibious invasions are FUN. I wonder if there would be any where you land, e.g. take a fort, and then defend it from another invasion? Or you have to defend 2 points? Or you land, capture something and then have to evacuate/redeploy? The bad: - limited game scope: well, yes. I was kinda expecting cavalry to show up as well as some other types of arty? - Naval battles seem kinda random. It took me lots of time to understand that it doesn't usually make sense to shell the enemy ships from distance since your cannon shots will lose velocity anyway. - Campaign setup: you don't know that retreating from a battle is also an option to conserve your ships. I'm not even sure if that's possible in a land battle? - Land weapon management gets tedious once you have lots of different rifles available. - Mortars are super slow and have low range, I tried them once - in a defense mission! - and they took AGES to get in position. It's a pity since they're super effective The neutral/the confusion: - I don't understand why arty sometimes has horses to pull it and sometimes it doesn't. The one with horses seems way more useful since it can reposition, um, at all - I'm not sure about the replayability for land battles. Sea battles are fine since a sea is a sea is a sea, but while I love the land battles, they kinda get stale, which is a pity. But all in all, keep on trucking game devs! I clocked uuuhh 25 hours in a week since I got this game? It's been a blast! I believe I'll continue the US campaign but wait for some updates to start the Brit campaign.