Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts

 
Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts is a game that knows exactly what it wants to be: the most detailed, granular battleship designer on the market. It lets you live out the “Fisher vs. Tirpitz” fantasy, starting in 1890 with coal-belching ironclads and ending in the 1940s with radar-guided super-battleships. If your idea of fun is spending three hours debating whether to shave 0.5 inches off your belt armor to afford a slightly larger funnel draft, this game is a masterpiece. However, once those ships leave the drydock, the cracks in the hull begin to show.
Rivets, Rangefinders, and Refits: Core Gameplay

The Ship Designer: This is the game’s crown jewel. You don’t just pick a “battleship” unit; you build it from the keel up. You choose the hull form, place the engines, design the towers to clear smoke interference, and select every caliber of gun. The physics are ruthless—place a turret too far forward, and your ship will plow into the waves, ruining its accuracy.
Ballistic Simulation: Combat is not about health bars; it’s about penetration tables. A shell needs to physically pierce armor to damage internal components. A lucky shot can detonate a magazine and instantly sink a pristine ship, or a dud might bounce harmlessly off a turret face.
The Global Campaign: Spanning from 1890 to the 1940s, the campaign maps the entire globe. You manage your nation’s GDP, naval budget, and technological research. The real hook is the technological arms race; your 1895 pride of the fleet will be obsolete junk by 1905, forcing you to constantly design new classes or expensive refits.
Task Force Management: You control fleet movements on a world map to protect trade routes and intercept enemies. However, the auto-resolve system is famously unreliable, often forcing you to fight out minor skirmishes manually to avoid losing precious destroyers to “bad dice rolls.”
Naval Academy: Aside from the campaign, there is a set of dozens of tactical missions that act as puzzles, challenging you to design a specific ship (e.g., “Build a cruiser under 10,000 tons”) to defeat a superior enemy force.

How It Stacks Up
Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts occupies the middle ground between arcade action and spreadsheet simulation.



Game
Key Difference




Rule the Waves 3
RTW3 is the superior admiral simulator with a deeper campaign, better AI, and realistic budget politics, but it looks like a spreadsheet. UAD wins purely on visuals and the tactile joy of 3D ship design.


World of Warships
WoWS is an arcade shooter where balance trumps history. UAD is a simulation where a 1920s ship will unfairly crush an 1890s ship because that is how technology works.


From the Depths
FtD is a voxel engineering sandbox where you can build anything (lasers, flying fortresses). UAD restricts you to historical hulls and technologies, grounding you in the reality of the era.



Key Details

Developer: Game-Labs.
Publisher: Game-Labs (acquired by Stillfront).
Platforms: PC (Steam).
Release Date: January 25, 2023 (Full Release).
Genre: Simulation / Strategy / Naval Wargame.
Vibe: Victorian Engineering meets Industrial Warfare.

Who It’s For

Must-play for history buffs who know what a “super-firing turret” is. The joy of recreating the HMS Dreadnought or the Yamato (or fixing their design flaws) is unmatched.
Perfect for tinkerers. If you love optimizing builds in RPGs, you will love optimizing weight distribution and citadel armor schemes here.
Skip if you want a polished grand strategy experience. The campaign AI is erratic, often building fleets of 100 torpedo boats that lag the game engine, and diplomacy is bare-bones compared to games like Hearts of Iron.

Why It Works
It works because of the visual feedback loop. In text-based sims, you read that your ship sank. In Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts, you watch your custom-designed leviathan take a hit to the magazine, see the turret fly into the air, and watch the hull list and slip beneath the waves. It validates your design choices (or punishes your mistakes) in glorious, terrifying real-time 3D, making the endless hours spent in the drydock feel meaningful.