Ultimate General: Civil War

I have over 1200 hours of the game and have nearly achieved every single medal. It's an understatement to say I love the game and think there is a lot of replayability. I enjoy building your army, upgrading the units inventory, and slowly building brigades that are elite. Each time I play a battle I can try different strategies and approaches. The AI is fun to fight against and I feel its sufficiently balanced. My only recommendation is to launch a live player vs. player on a given map like the U.G. Gettysburg had. I really love the game and would buy it a second time in a heart beat.

This is a fantastic game. I think it's the strongest in their entire series. (Although don't underestimate the calm fun of building battleships in Dreadnoughts) Anyway if your not a naval nut you'll find everything you want in Civil War, real-time strategy.
The battles are smooth, and the army customization really adds to the flavor of the game. The only thing I would say is perhaps a weakness is the fact that when you win battles, it doesn't really affect your campaign in the sense that you can maneuver to different battles. For example, if you win Gettysburg as the Confederacy, you still just fight the next battle. Or if you really smash the Confederacy as the Union, you're still kind of stuck to the historical campaign. You just start each predesignated battle a little stronger or weaker. And it can actually get to the point where you've kneecapped the enemy army so badly that it becomes kind of a wash-over, but it's still a very fun game. Its the real descendent of Sid Meyers original Gettysburg.
So I would say if you love maneuvering columns of Civil War infantry around, as well as managing cavalry that can dismount and a variety of artillery, you'll like this game. Play style is basically capture the flag, but like so many games in this genre, you're really trying to surround and destroy your enemy in encirclement battles where massed rifle fire makes the difference. And you can upgrade units with everything from Mexican-American War-style rifles all the way through state-of-the-art late Civil War guns, including the Henry rifle and Spencer carbine, things like that. Cavalry can be equipped as melee or dismounted specialists. There's also a variety of artillery, so you can customize your artillery force, it's quite fun.
Key to the game is the barracks mode between main battles and skirmishes. These skirmishes serve as preliminary battles before major campaign battles like Antietam or Gettysburg. They give you an opportunity to win, to collect money and resources to optimize your army in order to win the big multi stage campaign battles. They are actually a lot of fun and cover dozens of the smaller ACW battles that do not warrant a large battle treatment. Think of them like mini bosses or tactical problems before the big multi echelon grand battles. The barracks are important because that's where you enhance your character (general characteristics like politics medicine and logistics) create new divisions to increase the size of your army, and add customizable attributes to your generals and individual divisions so you can take them from, essentially, greenhorn militiamen with antique 1840s weapons to crack infantry armed with state-of-the-art 1863 weapons after a few campaigns.
Resource management is critical in this game, and it's quite fun to handle. The decisions you make in the barracks absolutely affect your potential to win the battles. For example, you can choose to reinforce a division with veteran troops and expensive weapons, but if you do that, it will come at the cost of massing large formations. And so you'll have these elite crack units that are capable of holding their own until attrition breaks them if you prefer that, and you're a good player, that will work. But for the same money, you could have bought four low-quality divisions with four times as many soldiers on the field maneuvering. So it's up to you. And that part of the resource management is actually a lot of fun pre-battle to see if you can tune the army just right for the coming challenges.
Grand Battles put you into sometimes multi day or at least multi stage battles where you get a chance to bring multiple corps to bear on the enemy. They are fun but the big ones force you to zoom out quite a bit and manage large operational level maneuverers unless you constantly pause and orient every brigade you will take casualties on one side of the battle field as you manage another, not unrealistic they are just a lot to manage at once.
The smaller battles between the grand battels really shine for the tactician because you usually bring only one or two divisions to bear on the problem so direct control and fine tuned tactics are most rewarding.
But a lot of saving and redoing is required at first because you really cannot afford to lose battles as you go or you will never have enough gold and recruits to replace casualties. Later battles are set up that way on purpose. For example if you win a Pyric Union victory at Gettysburg you are very likely to get spanked at Chickamauga because there is only one small battle between them and the confederates come out aggressive in that battle.
You swing back and forth between the Western and Eastern campaigns of the ACW so you will fight Shiloh and Antietam with the same campaign army for example. Its not a realistic campaign in that sense, you basically take a core army around and fight kind of like Panzer Corps. However many battles do offer auxiliary units to aid your battles.
I really have enjoyed this game over the years and despite their other titles I find myself returning to this one again and again as it seems to be the most balanced and ROI friendly. I don't love mixing naval campaigns with ground campaigns like in the American Revolution and find the Naval battles a distraction before the next land battle. Here there is none of that, sometime you are supported by gunships from rivers but you dont have to manage them.

Fantastic real-time tactical game. Wish UG American Revolution were half as good.

it is an interesting game, especially in campaign mode.
will say not much exists for a tutorial but similar enough to other games of this type to learn.

I can summarize: general career points can be used to upgrade stats.
your reputation is how you loose and another currency outright. if your reputation hits zero you loose, but if your reputation is above the starting amount (20) you can spend reputation to buy things like commanders, extra manpower, extra cash, or more likely weapons outright.

the campaign takes you through the entire civil war and most the major battles. it is entirely possible to win every fight and still end up loosing because your army is exhausted and cant be replaced fast enough. this is more of a confederacy then union issue, but the union has a crisis of leadership; units will break way easier and struggle to keep morale up.... and yeah, units can get captured, routed, shaken; use it to your advantage.

its a comprehensive civil war simulator and will keep you busy for hours. again, my only complaint is it doesn't have much for a tutorial

(Summary) Its okay. 6/10

Its fun, when you know what your doing.
I like that theres scenarios for when you lose.
But the missions that require you to use someone else's army is sometimes unfair.
And I despise timers on every mission. Every ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time, the ai is saved by the bell.

If you're into RTS and, more importantly, the American Civil War, this is the game for you.

Great game
- Really sad this game studio is effectively dead and gone (bought out, laid off) - This is a really unique game and I wish we could have a modern one, but their current game is dead in the early access water.