It’s been a long a protracted battle, but things are starting to go my way. In point of fact, I’ve actually increased my armada. I managed to sandwich an unfortunate enemy ship between two of my own, and after a few broadsides ripping into either side of the ship from point-blank range, the crew simply surrendered, allowing me to easily board it and take over. Another enemy ship, this one a Spanish sloop (I think) takes a vicious broadside that snaps one of its masts. Between this and the wind, it starts to lean in a rather dangerous fashion, before inevitably collapsing into the water. Then things started to go wrong.
My flagship, a lovely, 46 gun frigate, receive a few cannonballs below the water-line. What’s worse, the pumps (which would usually help mitigate such damage) have also been hit. By the way she’s slowing down and starting to list, I know that it’s only a short while before she sinks, something which stings all the more because the ship had otherwise received very little damage. Ordering my crew to abandon ship, I get them to row to the rest of my armada, to reinforce the crews of ships that have taken casualties. Most of my boats make it, though one is unfortunate enough to catch an enemy cannonball, sending it and all 33 men aboard to their graves.
While there is one enemy brig left, I’m confident that my bruised and battered fleet is more than capable of taking it on. What they can’t take on, however, is The Arrogante, a hulking warship packing over 60 guns and 500 men. My three brigs and one lowly sloop barely have enough firepower to dent its armour. This was more than apparent in the first exchange of fire: the shots from my brig literally bounced off The Arrogante’s hull, while its answering volley all but demolished one side of the brig, forcing me to turn it away, and risk exposing my lightly-armoured rear in order to escape the firing-arc of its deadly cannons.
I have one card left to play. I had deliberately held it back, hoping that I had a chance of taking The Arrogante as a trophy and adding it to my own fleet, but that one exchange of fire has left me in no doubt that what I’m looking at is not a potential prize, but the annihilation of my own fleet.
So I send in my merchant ship, hoping that I can last long enough for it to arrive. Large, slow and unarmed, it has only 16 crew to run it. It also has fire. Facing the wrong way into the wind, The Arrogante is unable to maneuver out of the way, and as the doomed merchant draws alongside, I order it to be set to the torch. A ranging inferno quickly engulfs both ships, and while The Arrogante manages to pull away, it looks like the damage is done.
As I re-engage the remaining enemy brig, I keep a wary eye in case The Arrogante’s crew manage to bring the fire under control. Having defeated the last brig, I turn my attention back to The Arrogante, which has been ablaze, yet still sailing, for several minutes. Even in this state, I doubt my guns can be much use against it. The end is sudden and violent. The flames reach The Arrogante’s powder magazine, and the ship, and all aboard it, are destroyed in a single, fiery blast. Welcome to Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail.
For anyone who ever read CS Forster’s Hornblower books, or watched the excellent TV adaptation of the same and thought ‘that could make a good game’, then you are not alone in thinking this. While on the face of this, it may seem a similar concept to anyone who’s played the excellent Warhammer 40,000: Gothic Armada 2, in practice it is anything but. This is far less of a ‘game’, and more of a simulator.
Take movement, for example. In most real-time strategy games featuring ships, you simply click on your destination and the ship will sail there. This is not necessarily the case here, as all the ships rely on the wind. While you can sail across the wind at a massively reduced speed, if you angle your ship into the wind with all your sails unfurled, you will find your ship 1) grinds to a halt, and 2) starts getting blown backwards. This fact alone changes drastically how you have to think about maneuvering. It may make escape viable, or impossible, allow you to quickly pull alongside a crippled enemy, or place much needed backup out of reach, especially if the wind changes as it is occasionally wont to do. The wind also affects the range of your cannons. If you sail across wind, your ship will tilt, elevating one side of the ship and depressing the other.
The simulation also covers, crucially, cannonballs. Fire from too far away, or at the wrong angle, and you can see the shot actually glance off the armoured hulls. When you do manage to land a shot, the damage it inflicts is determined not only by the size and velocity of the round, but where it hits. You can see the balls tear into the woodwork (and often out the other side), and the crew may be killed, the hull holed below the waterline, masts may be snapped, sails torn, rudders smashed, or, most damaging of all, the powder magazine may get hit. In fact, you can even choose where on an enemy ship you want your gunners to try to hit (especially useful if you have a knowledge of basic layout and where the powder magazine is likely to be). Because of this, ships can both take a tremendous amount of damage and still float and fight, or be suddenly put out of action by a few lucky shots (or unlucky shots, as the case may be).
Because of this emphasis on simulation – where cannon reload times are counted in minutes – battles can, and do, take a lot of time. Fortunately, there is the ability to compress time which does keep waiting to a minimum. This feature is also welcome in land battles. Yes, you don’t just get ship combat, but land combat. While the basic style of this combat will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played any of the Total War series, the feel, is again, totally different. Beyond the obvious visual difference (while a block of 200 troops will have more unit models than one half that size, it will not be comprised of 200 individual units), you can forget about blobs of troops. Line of sight absolutely matters as troops cannot fire through their own ranks.
Morale and exhaustion also plays an extremely important role, and it’s more than possible for a unit of fresh, enthusiatic troops to engage and quickly break an exhausted and demoralised enemy division even though it has three or four times the number of men. Combat turns into a series of lines advancing, or being pushed back and then regrouping, giving it a distinct ‘ebb and flow’ feeling. Again, maneuvering, firing and reloading all take time, and given the humongous size of the maps, the ability to compress time is definitely welcomed.
It should be stressed that while combat is slow, it actually doesn’t feel that way because there is always something for the player to do. You will find yourself constantly assessing when and where to move troops, when to pull back a tiring unit and replace it with a fresher one, if you can safely flank an enemy, and so on. This equally holds for sea battles. And because of the nature of the simulations, and the fact that it’s perfectly possible to mismanage things so badly that you snatch defeat from the jaws of victory (rather than the reverse), combat rarely turns into the purely intellectual ‘match-up’ judgements (where you can tell at a glance which unit is going to win a given fight) that can plague other RTS games. Rather, you find yourself actually ‘feeling’ the flow of combat, both on land and sea.
You feel, rather than know, when it’s going in your favour or against, and it tends to swing backwards and forwards, rarely ever going obviously in one direction or another until just before the final stages of any engagement. All of which serves to keep battles intense and engaging, and give you the feeling that you’ve actually won a fight, rather than merely watched the unfolding of a foregone conclusion.
Outside of combat, if playing one of the three historical campaigns (English, American War of Independence, and the fight against The Barbary Corsairs), you can also spend time upgrading the abilities of your commander, and purchase ships, crew, equipment and technology. The love of the period and the attention to historical detail is clear here, with there being dozens of different ships, guns and cannon to choose from. Technological upgrades take the form of historical advents like the invention of the sewing machine, or new ways for reinforcing hulls (though at the expense of some room) or masts. Even your soldiers can be equipped with different arms, affecting their range, damage, melee efficiency (never bring a simple musket to a bayonet fight) and reload time. There is also a small selection of stand-alone battles you can play, as well as ones you can customise to your tastes.
Presentation-wise, Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail is a bit of a mixed bag. While I particularly enjoyed the sound design – with distant cannon fire turning into a thunder-like rumble as described in historical accounts, and being able to zoom right in and hear the splintering of wood and cheers of your crew responding to a well placed shot – and the overall design of the menus and use of period paintings just feels right, the graphics do look a bit dated. This is most noticeable with the low-detailed soldier models. However, in all fairness this is something you notice the first time you encounter it, and then you simply get too engrossed in ordering your army or fleet around to care.
More concerning was the occasional glitch which meant that units occasionally failed to follow commands. This was quite frustrating when it occurred (leaving a few, desperately needed squads stranded away from the main fighting), but thankfully it only happened once over several hours of play, and restarting seemed to solve the problem.
While far slower than the more action oriented RTS games, and probably not for everyone, I found the depth of the simulation to be surprisingly intense and always engaging, with the added attention to historical detail being the icing on the cake. In conclusion, if you love sailing ships, and the idea of them trading broadsides, and have always dreamed of playing at being Admiral Nelson (which you can do in this game), then Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail is probably just what you’re looking for. ■