[reviewed/revised 15 Oct 2021]
This game is a successor to Ultimate General: Gettysburg (UGG), which came out in 2014.
UGG was riddled with problems, and although UGCW is a better game, it still has many of UGG’s problems. These are mainly at the battle-fighting level and include deficiences in the modeling of unit movement, firing rate/accuracy, flanking sensitivity, friendly fire effects, terrain line-of-sight effects, routing behavior, and fortifications—plus the usual shortcomings of the AI adversary. But the biggest let-down is at the strategic, campaign level. Which is to say: there really isn’t a strategic, campaign level. UGCW is really a fixed set of Civil War battles that you can re-fight with the original armies on each side (“historical”), or fight with a more or less fake strategic layer pasted on (“campaign”). There is no freedom to take your armies, TotalWar-style, wherever you choose in the USA of the 1860s. You are constrained to refight Civil War battles at their actual locations and in their actual order, except at the end where there are non-historical war-ending battles such as the CSA’s Battle for Washington.
You essentially must win every major battle you fight in order to continue the campaign, and there is no early exit except through defeat. There is also no political or “national morale” dimension to the game. Playing as CSA you can cause 50-90% casualties to the Union in most battles, with zero effect in shortening the course of the war. Obviously if CSA had won such crushing victories more than a few times in a row in real life, Union troops would have deserted in large numbers, new recruitments would have been impossible, and the war would have ended in a peace treaty and southern secession within a year or two.
I haven’t checked the accuracy of the individual historical battles, outside of the campaign, but I find them generally better—more challenging, and more interesting because they are historically based—than playing the campaign versions. The overall problem, though, as with so many “AI”-driven single-player games, is that once you learn the ropes you will win every time, no matter the battle or what side you play. You can add challenge in the campaign by switching to Major General level where you are burdened with artificial disadvantages, but I never find that satisfying—I prefer to face a competent opponent of comparable strength. On MG you also are more or less obligated to try to encircle and annihilate the enemy in every major battle, which to me worsens the lack of realism. In any case, with few exceptions, the advice in these pages for the BG campaign also works for the MG campaign as well as for the isolated historical battles, and even for campaign battles with the popular J&P Rebalance Mod (1.27.4.3).
I recommend UGCW mainly for educational purposes, and I think it also usefully highlights a need for a US Civil War game on a grand scale. The technology to do that on a mass-consumer platform might not exist for some time. But if you could model the terrain of 1860s USA, the politics, the diplomacy, the chaotic battles, the spying and intrigue, etc., you could get lost in it and never come back!
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