There are not many games that let you design your own WW1 or WW2 ships out there and watch them battle each other out like Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts. The game has just come out of Early Access and is now in its full release and a lot of players are trying out this game for the first time.
The game can be quite difficult though, especially for people that don’t know their naval history so in this guide, we’ll show you some tips and tricks for beginners to make learning the game a tad bit easier!
5 Tips & Tricks for Beginners | Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts
Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts doesn’t have a learning curve, more like a learning cliff. Still, it’s not as bad as a flight simulator game so you don’t have to worry about learning how to control load a shell into a gun or how to prep up boilers.
When you play the game you might get intimidated by a large amount of numbers, but don’t worry, the game is actually pretty easy to understand.
Here are some tips to get you started.
Naval Academy
The Naval academy isn’t just a tutorial to teach you the basics of designing a ship, it’s also filled with fun challenges and unlike the custom battles, actually gives you a limit to your spending so you have to balance things out of your ships.
You shouldn’t skip the Naval Academy missions because not only are they fun and challenging but also gives you a small taste of how you’ll be designing ships in the Campaign.
Starting Dates
When starting a new campaign you can choose the starting year for that campaign. You would think that starting at a lower number would be easier, like the earliest starting date being in the 1890s but you would be wrong!
I highly suggest you start around the 1900s or even in the 1920-1930s because by then you’ll have access to a wide range of technologies for you to experiment with.
Starting at 1890 is a challenge since you generally have poor accuracy on all of your guns, limited design hulls, and ships don’t even have rangefinders making landing shots even more of a challenge!
Crew Training and Research
When you’re in the campaign, you should check your finances tab and get the Crew Training all the way up.
Crew training has different levels, from Cadets to Veterans, and using this can train these crews faster to the level of “Trained.” Of course, you’ll need to actually send the men into battle to get them beyond that level of training.
The reason why you want to do this is that Cadets actually have massive debuffs to your ship from basic aiming accuracy to aim speed and reload rate. That’s why it’s always best to get your crew trained as much as possible.
You can make the best ship in the game and they won’t hit anything without the proper crew!
When you go to the research tab you might see the “Free Priorities” at the upper left of the screen. You can place these priorities at different parts of your research to make them research faster.
As a famous admiral once said, “It’s a trap!” Don’t actually do this, prioritizing research will make the chosen research fast, but it will also make all other research slow. If you prioritize more research, the bigger the research debuff is. I usually only prioritize research on one thing, and usually to speed it up to a couple of months.
Ships In Being
When it comes to war, you may have noticed that your ships aren’t doing anything, or some of your ships aren’t joining the battles. That may be because those ships have their roles set to “In Being” which just means they’re sitting pretty in the ports.
Make sure to go to your fleet tab and actually set the ships you want to fight in Sea Control, so that they’re active in the war. It’s just a few clicks but the game doesn’t really explain it well to you so it’s easy to miss.
Strategic Withdrawals
Okay, let’s call it retreating. When you know you’re outgunned and outmatched, you should know that you can actually run away from the battle. You lose the encounter but you get to keep your ships, as long as they can outrun the enemy.
When starting a battle you plan on running away from, take your entire fleet and make them go to the complete opposite of where the enemy fleet is.
You can know where they are even if you don’t see them by the “Enemy Smoke is spotted to the [Direction]” message. Just go the opposite and fast forward time, after a couple of minutes at max fast forward, as long as you can outrun them then the “End Battle” button should appear above.
The battle should be a draw if no shots were fired so you technically did not lose!
Congratulations, you now know more of the tips to help you play Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts, now go out there and try them out yourself!
The game is quite difficult to learn for new players but that’s usually the main fun part of simulation games, the learning, and mastering of mechanics!
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