Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts Reviews

Still needs a ton of work, mainly the money balance with AI, money management options, being able to take over a port needs to be a lot more simple, cutting off AI ships is pretty much impossible even if you have 500 ships.

Unfortunately, Game-Labs has a bad history of making interesting concept games and then over promising and under delivering in the end. I guess shame on me for buying an early access game more on promise instead of something finished and polished.

It saddens me to say that this game had so much potential, but even after all these updates, it still, unfortunately, falls short. A few years ago, this game seemed so promising—I had an absolute blast playing it back then, with the expectation that the bugs I encountered would eventually be patched out and that it would evolve into an awesome naval warfare game. But sadly, that never happened.

As others have said: this game is abandonware now. The devs had something special here, even given how janky it was at times, but they decided to concentrate on something literally noone asked for: multiplayer. That's right. Instead of concentrating on making the designer function properly, or optimizing the base gameplay, or improving the AI, or making the campaign mode worth a damn, they decided to focus on adding something that the game was [i]NOT[/i] ready for and that the playerbase made [i]VERY[/i] clear we did not want. And the multiplayer mode was trash (or so I've heard I haven't played it) and it didn't even come with the base game. TLDR: the devs abandoned the game that was in a rather shaky state to make a half-baked MP mode [i](that was PvP only)[/i] that noone wanted, and when it expectedly bombed they decided to abandon the game. Well done idjits.

90% fantastic design undercut by 10% flop in execution. The appeal of putting together 3D warships ranging from pre-dreadnoughts to the superbattleships of WW2 is totally realized here. You can model real life warships or go off the beaten path to make some truly "inspired" designs to your heart's content, and this part of the game really is excellent. The campaign mode is engaging, the campaign and combat level enemy AI never made a painfully obvious blunder, and there are few titles that can give the same experience of guiding a nation's development as a naval power. The core issue with the game is the combat level maneuvering AI. In a game all about building warships and arranging fleets to fight each other, the maneuvering AI cannot even sail in a straight line. The fundamental issue is a lack of look-ahead/PID control for speed or turns. When a ship needs to make a turn to follow its leader, the ideal behavior is that it shifts the rudder hard to begin the turn and then, as its bearing approaches the target, it slowly returns the rudder to a neutral position such that it does not oversteer past the target bearing. In UA:D, however, the ship will not back off on its rudder angle, overshoot the target, and then try to reverse the turn leading to a sine wave pattern behind its lead ship. Because ships cannot regulate their rate of closure, it will typically overtake the lead ship, colliding or turning away to attempt to fall back into formation, which cascades its failure to ships behind it, as well as subordinate divisions set to follow the tail of the lead division. It is more common than not to see your entire fleet - instructed to sail in straight lines due North - scattered over an area ~10,000 meters in diameter with some ships straying directly into torpedo range of the enemy force. The issue extends even down to the lowest levels of manual control of ships; instructing even a single ship to turn to a new bearing will cause it to oscillate left and right of the target for multiple minutes! This is a glaring oversight that should never have been present in any build in the game, let alone what the developers have claimed is the final release. Every other system in the game has been completely undermined by a lack of attention at what should have been a core concern for a game about ship combat. There are other, some fairly serious issues. The "Screen" and "Scout" orders roughly translate to "suicide charge the enemy," as there is no measurement for the relative threat of an enemy force, or the threat that force poses to the division's assignment. Cruisers will charge headlong into the enemy battleline - despite the fact that the enemy task force's destroyers are nowhere near in range of launching torpedoes. The campaign UI can become very cumbersome when handling large numbers of ships and ports; there is no way to see on the map which ports have ships in them, requiring you to either hover over each port or scroll through a list of every ship you have, looking for ships sitting around in a random port in the Pacific. If you want the experience advertised, play Rule the Waves instead.

The good part is that you can design ships. The bad part is that a large number of them are broken, incapable of slotting parts and modules assigned to them. This would be OK if not for the unbalanced mess that is campaign mode. The odds of any of this getting fixed? Poor. The devs seem satisfied with the product as is, which means it's not ever going to get fixed.

Awesome game. I like that you are only the admiral of the Navy. So there is some empire management but not the whole empire so it is a nice break from the total empire management games I like too. And the navy battles are well done.

abandoned just like every other game put out by game-labs, not worth the price even on sale.

To preface this: The game studio was acquired and basically dissolved by a private equity firm. It's almost certainly never going to be updated again, even though it genuinely did need some more love and polish. Now, despite this problem, I still enjoy this game. The campaign has its shortcomings, namely in minor nation conflicts and the lack of player agency in land warfare. The AI nation balancing is so-so, and it does have some peculiarities. However, the ship designer is reasonably intuitive, and the battle UI is perfectly fine in my eyes. Performance can start to drop as the save goes on, if you've still got multiple major powers surging upwards after ~1930. This is a very decent game if you like tinkering and fiddling with things. Get it on a decent sale though, because it's definitely abandonware in the strictest sense of the word.

TLDR: the game had so much promise, some of which it delivered. But ultimately it has been left in an incomplete state which makes me quite sad, so i cannot recommend this to you, unless you can pick it up fairly cheap. I love the ship building, especially the WWI era dreadnoughts, main reason i bought the game, and have mostly enjoyed over 400 hours of game play focused on this. But the game is still buggy, the ship building does not offer as much freedom for component placement as one would like and the campaign and its AI sill needed a bit of tweaking IMO. The UX also is not great, and probably one of the main turnoffs for the game, especially in the campaign mode, its usable but wears you down over time. That along with rng of the appearance of minor nation conflicts and having no player controlled ability to influence these, really puts a dampener on the campaign mode.