So Is Ultimate General: American Revolution Any Good?

It’s never going to be finished like you’d want. Ultimate General: American Revolution marks the end of the line for the small wargame studio built around former Total War modder Nick “DarthMod” Thomadis. They had an incredibly promising debut with Ultimate General: Gettysburg, still one of the most beautiful and replayable casual wargames ever made, but never went back to the “single battle” style of wargame and pursued larger, theoretically more replayable dynamic campaigns. American Revolution was far and away the most ambitious attempt on these lines yet, and perhaps that ambition played a role in the fact that Thomadis and other senior leadership left the studio and wrapped up work on American Revolution after its hastened exit from Early Access on Steam. 

As you might expect, Steam reviews are deeply negative, both from players who feel ripped-off by the semi-unfinished state of the game and from those who think the series’ developers were let down by their publisher. Those reviews might be overly harsh: Ultimate General: American Revolution is good enough to be heartbreaking, an enormously fun and flawed toy that suggests Game-Labs was improbably on the right track.

American Revolution has a strategic layer that owes a lot to Longbow Games’ Hegemony series, a terrific real-time ancient warfare strategy game where your ability to see what was happening around your empire  depended on your line of sight, and you were often racing to-and-fro to drive off raids and expand into rivals’ territory. The other point of reference, one that is almost directly quoted in the interface, is Hearts of Iron’s model of territorial development and military production. The art style on the strategic map is consistent with the bright, museum display-style maps that the series used in both its Civil War outings. When armies move into proximity there, you get the option of letting them whittle each other down in a slow-paced simulated battle, or intervening at any point to fight a tactical battle.

The connection between the strategic layer and the tactical battles is handled excellently here. If units have been campaigning for days in difficult countryside, you will find they enter the battle exhausted and depleted by sickness and injury. If they are fresh off another battle, they will be low on ammunition. Once a unit is out of ammo, the game assumes soldiers are able to scrounge rounds from the battlefield, meaning that they can still shoot but at a vastly slower rate that leaves them sitting ducks in a firefight. The battlefields are also huge, so while the game recycles a lot of them, battles play out very differently depending on where units start and when reinforcements arrive (based on their location on the strategic map when the battle begins.

This has the foundations of a very good game about the American Revolution: the backbone of the Americans’ forces at the start of the game are militia who are plentiful enough but untrained and out-of-shape. They can form a credible battle line but they can’t hold against a charge, and they can’t maneuver much without being completely exhausted by the effort. The game does a great job of giving you the kinds of battles that gave Washington such fits early in the war, where the Americans would hold a strong position and then come completely undone when pressed by British regulars. Further, the colonists don’t have an armaments industry to speak of at the start of the war and their infantry carry civilian muskets into battle, which don’t shoot as far, aren’t designed for quick loading or fitting a bayonet. Small quantities of military-grade weapons are available on the marketplace, so you can give your best troops something like parity with the British, and American victories usually yield them a supply of Brown Bess muskets and precious cannons, but it takes a while before the Americans can build good weapons in sufficient quantity to have something like a professional army.