Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail is a real-time and turn-based Naval and Amphibious Warfare Strategy Game with Simulation Game tendencies published by Game-Labs for PC in May of 2021.
In the game, you control fleets of sailing warships and ground troops deployed from those ships in campaigns, single-battle scenarios, or custom skirmish battles. The ships and forces are realistically modeled and where possible based off the actual design documents for historical ships of the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Era.
There are three campaigns, one for the Royal Navy and two for the United States Navy.
Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail contains examples of:
- Abnormal Ammo: The standard ammunition of the time for cannon was round iron cannonballs, which will definitely kill crew, and are even better at punching holes in the sides of wooden ships. However, you can also load:
- Chain shot: A pair of half-cannonballs attached to each other by a length of chain. These are designed to rip large holes in sails and tear or tangle up rigging, in order to immobilize the enemy ship.
- Grapeshot: A bag of oversized musketballs which tears open when fired, turning the cannon into a giant shotgun. Used to kill the enemy crew at close range, usually prior to boarding.
- Explosive shells: Only loadable by mortars, these are very early black powder weapons. Their fuzes are actual flammable cords, and the time to detonation is set by cutting the fuze to the appropriate length and lighting it just before firing. They're used to light things on fire and kill the enemy with fragments.
- A-Team Firing:
- Realistically, smooth-bore iron or brass cannon firing round shot are not particularly accurate, though you can somewhat improve this through various ship and officer upgrades. Likewise cannon and mortars on land struggle to hit anything but large formations, and infantry companies firing smooth-bore black powder muskets will naturally kill perhaps a dozen enemy soldiers with a hundred-gun volley.
- Averted by the various dedicated skirmisher units, who tend to carry rifles and are quite capable of picking off individual soldiers at long range.
- Armor-Piercing Attack: The higher velocity a canon fires at, the more likely it is to be able to penetrate the thick wooden sides of heavy frigates and ships-of-the-line. Some of the available guns focus on armor-piercing at the expense of range or accuracy.
- Anti-Infantry: Grapeshot can be fired by shipboard guns and basically turns your cannon into very-large-caliber shotguns.
- BFG: The largest guns in the game fire 68 pound shells/shot, which is pretty impressive for a black-powder weapon, and a big step up from the 4-pounder guns found on light warships.
- Bling of War: All of the ground forces, and the portraits of the various units and officers, depict soldiers and sailors in the ornate, brightly colored uniforms characteristic of the period. Moreover, the ships themselves are brightly painted, some have ornately carved figureheads and stern decorations, and some even have colored sails.
- Bloodless Carnage: Downplayed but still present. Ships show realistic battle damage, and dead soldiers can be seen littering the battlefield, but no blood is shown, even when people are hit with cannonballs that should realistically tear them to pieces.
- Boarding Party: Realistically, this is an important way to win battles and grow your fleet. Any ship with sufficient troops or sailors, and officers to lead them, can board and take control of another.
- Collateral Damage: Given the inaccuracy of the guns, it's a common occurrence. The game's tutorial even warns you to keep your troops well clear of the target area when conducting shore bombardment with a ship's guns, as cannonballs do not care whose uniform you are wearing.
- Color-Coded Armies: Realistically for the period, ground units wear distinctive, brightly colored uniforms. Ships also are often painted in a color scheme favored by their country; e.g. the yellow and black "Nelson chequer" on Royal Navy ships, or the white and black version on US Navy ships.
- Defenseless Transports: "Unrated merchant ships" used as troop transports do not typically have guns and are defenseless against cannon. However, with several hundred troops aboard they can contribute to a naval battle if you can manage to get them close enough to board the enemy.
- Delaying Action: Several campaign and battle scenario missions call for one of these, both on land and on sea.
- Easy Communication: Ships and ground units instantly receive and begin responding to orders as soon as you give them, unless they are routed, in which case they simply ignore the player.
- Easy Logistics: Played with. Ships have infinite ammo, but in real life it would have taken several hours to exhaust their supply and in-game actions rarely go on that long. Ground units, however, must be resupplied with ammunition, and many campaign missions involve defending a source of supplies or capturing one from the enemy. Food and fresh water are ignored in gameplay but lampshaded in the campaign missions and descriptions.
- Epic Ship-on-Ship Action: The whole point of the game.
- External Combustion: Fire ships are merchant ships packed to the brim with powder and other flammable materials, then lit on fire shortly before ramming into enemy ships. The crew of a fire ship (hopefully) bails out before the ship becomes completely engulfed.
- Fog of War: Downplayed at sea but in full force on land. Enemy ships must be spotted by one of your own to become visible and vice versa, but ships with tall masts, flags, and bright white sails are hard to miss, particularly at the short range necessary to fight in this era. On land, however, line of sight around trees and buildings is very important, particularly for artillery, which can shoot much further than their crews can see.
- Geo Effects: Ships can run aground in shallow water; terrain, buildings, and trees block line of sight for all weapons, and it's easier for troops to shoot downhill than up.
- Glass Cannon: Light ships of the 6th and 7th rates can be fairly well armed, if you've researched the right tech, but there's only so much hull to armor on a ship that small.
- Instant Militia: Ship's crews, led by the ship's officers, can be deployed in ground battles as landing parties. However, they are usually less skilled, less disciplined, and smaller in number than professional soldiers and doing this is risky, as the officers and sailors may be killed or wounded, losing their shipboard skills and experience and forcing you to spend money to recruit more. Also, artillery crews can abandon their pieces in order to fight as an infantry unit, but again, they're not as good as a dedicated infantry unit.
- Lightning Bruiser: Frigates and heavy frigates, particularly 4th and 5th rates. Their relatively large hulls can support a lot of sails, but their guns are only on one deck and despite being of heavy caliber there's not enough of them to weigh the ship down too much.
- Mighty Glacier: Ships of the line, whose heavy armor and guns make them very difficult to kill quickly.
- More Dakka: 1st rate ships of the line can carry more than 100 guns, allowing for 50+ gun broadsides.
- Naval Blockade: Some of the campaign missions involve enforcing one of these.
- Real-Time with Pause: In battle, the player can pause the action, give units new orders, and then resume it.
- Running the Blockade: As with enforcing a blockade above, you can also run them.
- Suicide Mission: Merchant ships can be "upgraded" for use as fire ships, where particularly brave crews light their own ships on fire and attempt to get close to the enemy before bailing out.
- Target Spotter: Any ship can function as this for any other ships, and it's particularly important on land for artillery spotting.
- Timed Mission: The scenarios often have a time limit within which to accomplish their objectives.
- Tech Tree: Research in the campaign is important, and relies both on cash earned in the campaign, and reputation points representing your standing with the admiralty and their willingness to give you new and improved equipment and more elite troops.
- Video Game Historical Revisionism: You can do this particularly in the battle and custom modes, where the US Navy and other relatively small navies of the period can get access to ships of the line they were completely unable to afford in real life.
- Weather of War: Wind, atmospheric conditions, and sea state all affect gun accuracy and visibility range, and sea state can affect ship speed and turning radius. Wind, of course, is the God Stat, as it determines which directions your ships can go and how fast. That in turn affects how much the ship heels over to one side or another, which affects the max range of your guns since they can only elevate so high.
- Wooden Ships and Iron Men: The game's setting.
