Ultimate General: Civil War

It's a fun game, the main thing that bothers me about the campaign is how determined everything is.
For example, I've beaten the Confederacy all around Virginia since Bull Run, with only a draw and no losses. I crushed them so badly that I destroyed half their army multiple times, I broke their line and wrecked them at Fredericksburg, and that was after doing the same at Antietam and Second Bull Run. Between losses and prisoners they had half their army gone and I got their supplies
But now instead of chasing them down south to Richmond I'm having to fight a just as strong Army of Northern Virginia at Chancellorsville. Like I didn't just crush them at Fredericksburg, very near Richmond.
I won at Chancellorsville, they didn't get my flank or surprise me like happened historically, but now the Confederacy is still invading Pennsylvania with a bigger army. It just doesn't make sense for campaign progression, it's more like a tour of battles with some leveling up and customization mechanics.
An old game from like 1997 I played took this stuff into account and you could take Richmond or even Washington if you won certain battles, and there were alternate scenarios for battles too. And this was an old hex game.
The leveling up and customization is cool, you can build divisions as you wish for certain purposes. I invested pretty quick in a high quality cavalry division.

After 75+ hours of marching tiny soldiers across massive battlefields, I can confidently say this game has taught me three things:

Flanking is life.

Artillery solves everything (including bad decisions).

My inner general is apparently part Napoleon, part coffee addict.

The battles are intense, strategic, and sometimes hilariously chaotic-like when my cavalry heroically charges… in the wrong direction. But every victory feels earned, and every crushing defeat is a lesson (usually “don’t march into cannons”).

The campaign system is addictive, the attention to historical detail is impressive, and the satisfaction of outmaneuvering an army twice your size? Chef’s kiss.

10/10 – Would once again send men uphill into musket fire because “it felt right at the time.”

Super cool game. Scaling for the opponent is busted and needs to be reworked. Why get punished bc you did a good job managing your troops in the campaign to have the programming negate that with an extra 30k+++ troops.

This is one of the greatest tactical warfare video games ever made. It's a real shame this dev studio fell apart, this engine would have been perfect for a Napoleon game.

great game...I keep seeing more battles in campaign mode which is great even adding more battles would be sweet too....and a LIVE version where you can play against other players would be awesome!....was until I kept getting negative morale and cannot finish campaigns due to this bug

Firstly, yes the enemy gets increased scaling on victories, but it really doesn't matter besides buffing the units health. When you learn to break the enemies morale, health means nothing besides the length of time it takes to kill the unit, which can be long if haven't lost or drew in a bit. It's annoying to say the least.
All units have a purpose, no unit is a "waste". Just harder to use than others. Melee calvary chase down broken units and are really fast so they stay with broken units. If you charge the any calvary head on they are going to die :0 There's a battle midway through the game that uses mostly calvary and highlights their use, very insightful to learn, still hard to use.
Tip: Recommend buying as much high tier equipment as you can as soon as you can (no reason not to), if you don't want to buy put it into supply.
Overall good game with a bit of balance issues when learning the game, can feel like winning is all for naught (which is probably what winning in a civil war feels like, kinslaying and whatnot).

I just finished my first campaign, a lot of my playtime is AFK, I would estimate I have closer to 80 or 90 hours of playtime.
Pros:
- The battle physics are phenomenal. This game does an amazing job of simulating momentum. Every attack and charge has weight to it. I think the physics are better than the physics in Napoleon Total War.
- I feel the combat in this game is much more realistic than in Total War. Your men will get tired if you march them back and forth. so you have to deliberately plan every action. Morale is also important. A smaller brigade with high morale and low fatigue can route a much larger brigade with a bayonet charge if the larger brigade is tired and has poor morale.
- The devs prioritized historical accuracy when they designed their maps. Anyone who's read Shelby Foote's books about the civil war will immediately recognize the in game battle fields from the maps in Foote's book.
- The game gives you a lot of weapons to chose from. Each loadout and unit type has its uses. I had fun experimenting with different compositions for my artillery.
Cons:
- The campaign is on a railroad. It doesn't matter if you kick Lee's ass every time you fight him in the Peninsula campaign you will always end up retreating back to DC. As other reviewers said the enemy AI will also always conjure soldiers out of thin air to ensure the historical battles can be fought.
-Morale impacts only individual units and not the entire corp. Each corp as a whole will fight to the end as if they were Japanese soldiers from WW2. A corp could be reduced to just 2000 men, but those 2000 men will continue to hold out until their individual morale meter is shattered.
-The AI conjuring soldiers from thin air and there not being an overall corp morale system leads to absurd casualty rates. In my campaign the total deaths from combat was 1 million. IRL the total deaths from diseases and combat combined was no more than 750k.
-The game tries to make battles play out the same way they did IRL. This can lead to a lot of tedious waiting around if you have managed to defeat the enemy army before every “scene” in the battle has played out.
- The battles are broken up into multiple scenes. In each scene you only have a limited view of the battle field. This makes coordinating attacks between your corps virtually impossible unless you've played each battle multiple times.
-It's also not clear how many scenes are in each battle, so many times I take excessively high casualties. I feel like I have to act aggressively because I don't know how much time I truly have in each battle.
All in all this was a pretty fun game, I don't regret paying full price for it but I'm not sure if I'll re-play it due to how railroaded it is.