Ultimate Admiral Age of Sail: British Campaign Guide (Tips & Tricks)

All missions are played on normal difficulty for both land and naval missions. I also completed all missions with the War hero modifier activated (more rewards but more enemies)

1. Always use aimed shots. If you don’t use aimed shots, your damage potential falls drastically.

2. Always capture enemy ships. Don’t try to destroy them.

3. To have an easy time capturing ships, break their armour with solid shots then soften the crew with grape shots. Once the crew is cowering, board their ship. If the ship is much lower tier than yours, don’t even bother breaking the armour.

4. A ship has only three states: fighting, passive (aka surrendered) or destroyed. This is important to note because it means a ship is never crewless. If you leave a passive ship alone, it will eventually go back to the fighting state.

5. Passive ships do not count has captured. You need to board them to complete your missions.

6. When capturing a ship, you have two options. Transferring an officer and their men or just the minimum amount of sailor. Always transfer minimum if possible. Transferring and officer and his men can be good if a ship turned to passive and you don’t have the time to send a ship to it.

7. You can unload an officer and his men in a boat at any time as long as your ship is immobile. And then send that boat to capture a passive ship. Useful when you bring a troop ship in a naval mission.

8. Never bring a troop ship to a purely naval mission if you have fighting ships.

9- You can bait the bot with low value ships to delay their reinforcements, captured ships are great at that.

10- Do not use fire ships. Sell your extra ships. Never unlock this research.

1. Never rush your objectives, use the timer to your advantage. Defence is stronger than offence and the bot will usually send multiple attacks where you get to thin their troops easily. Playing the timer also gives you time to soften the bot defence with artillery.

2. Always make you troops go at walking speed. Making them run drains their condition too fast. Troops with low conditions cannot fight effectively. So use run only to pull back troops in danger.

3. Charge and Melee is a strong tool when used right. Get used to the charge and melee mechanics as soon as possible.

4. Artillery is very powerful in defence and offence. They are your most important troops. Bombards are the best.

5. Units shatter when they have around 20 men left in the unit. As such, do not form skirmishers from your low manpower units.

6. Skirmishers formed from regular units are not meant to fight, only to scout. They exchange poorly in a fight and will shatter easily.

7. Try to capture exposed troops with charge and melee when practicable. You need local superiority to do have it succeed easily.

8. Always mind friendly fire. Do not have your troops fire at an enemy if you are engaging it in melee with another unit. Also get used to the firing arc of canons, when you’ll start you will have a lot of friendly fire from them if not careful. That is why bombards are best (along with their kill potential).

9. Canons are great at long range and move fast. Bombards are great versus infantry. and move slow.

10. You can bait the bot into stupid attacks.

1. Always distribute your career points. You get a bunch after the tutorial mission and then 1 every mission.

2. The perks to prioritise are these ones and max them out in this order:
Reputation
Mission Reward
Luck (only until you can have 100% success chance at the brown missions)

3. Not all research are useful. Here are the main ones to prioritise (not in order as this depends on your campaign pace):
Artillery efficiency (always take it asap at every tier)
Units research (you will unlock them all eventually)
Boarding equipment
Equipment’s that reduce the weight of ships and canons (gun carriage, lightweight, etc)
Infantry weapons
Some types of canons (see the Internet for an in depth guide there, so many choices)

4. Ships are also touch and go. Ship purchase depends heavily on what you capture. However, bigger is always better.

5. To sell a captured ship, you have to purchase it with reputation. Before selling a ship, always remove everything from it (canons, equipment, crew)

6. You get an income every turn. That income is not meant to make you rich but to pay for your forces upkeep.

7. The reserve option when reinforcing a unit is expensive but useful to keep your unit stats intact. Only use it for your elite units.

8. You can give cheaper weapons to your ship’s crew. But don’t cheap out for land troops.

9. Missions give you three options – they change the amount of rewards and enemy forces that the mission will have.

10. Rename your land units right away. Very useful to differentiate them from free units some mission gives so you know who to keep safe.

11. save often as you start to learn this game. It does not forgive.

Only points to note here:

1. Restart or load a save as many times as you need to get used to the mechanics.

2. Capture both ships from the bot, even though all the units the units in this mission will not stay with you, the two captured ships will. And they will cheese the first few chapters for you. So restart if you destroyed one.

3. Don’t start the landing of your fighting troops until you took care of the enemy ships.

4. Once you’ve landed it is straightforward. Capture the small village, leave your most depleted troop to defend to or unload some of your ship’s crews. Walk up the cliff and capture the canon emplacements.

5. Always click on finish mission asap. It is not worth fighting the bot any longer. That costs you troops so money and the bot always have a fresh new batch of units on the next mission anyway. Only point, make sure you have captured all the bot’s ships before that.

Preparing for your first naval mission:

Integrate the two captured 6th class in your army. Sell all your other ships except for the unrated merchant ship with your land troops.

Max out the reputation perk with your career points.

Take the artillery efficiency research

Now go to the campaign map and launch the first naval mission Dinner for Admiral:

This one is easy with your two 6th rate ship you will use grape shot right away and board all vessels. Transfer the minimum amount of sailor every time and finis the mission.

Once back to the harbour, integrate the captured ships, strip them and sell them.

If you took the free crew training perk during your childhood do the following now or wait until the next turn if not:

Raise the number of men in your two land unit to 200 each about. You will have to install the lightweight equipment to be able to do that. Change your units officers for better ones. The base ones are terrible.

Now advance to the next turn.

We will do the naval mission first because it is easy and the money will help with the land mission if needed.

Naval mission: Priority

With your two 6th class, you are not outgunned. But you are outnumbered. So bring your troop transport on this one for extra manpower to capture ships with.

Rush you 6th class ship in while your troop transport and supply ship back. Wreck their ships with grape shots while you board them 2 at a time.

For the first two ships, once they turn passive, do not load them with your 6th class crews. Unload your units from the troop ships into the boats and have them raw to take over your prizes.

Do transfer the minimum crew for the remaining ships.

Back to the Harbor:

Lets unlock researches to make reputation management easy. You’ll want to take these ones for sure:

Bayonnet
Supplies
Marines
Boarding equipment

You’ll still need to pick one more research to unlock the next tier. Take the one you think is best. just note that double charge and double shots are the least good followed by sail. So a type of cannons is the remaining slot.

Now lets go for the land mission: Snakes and Powder

You will face a 1 to 3 disadvantage. So make sure you move carefully. This is the mission for you to learn and master the movement, charge and melee mechanics. Save often and reload often. Also, send any captured units to the bottom right corner to avoid having them liberated by the bot’s units.

From the road leading to your objective 6 units will come down to challenge you. 4 infantry, 1 cavalry and one artillery. Don’t face them head on, create ambushes by using the forest on both side of the road. The point is to shatter them far from the artillery to keep your troops alive. Here, skirmishers created from units are useful, you send them forward into the forest to spot for you. Don’t have them go too far forward and reattach them if a fight is about to break out.

A nice touch is that your land units can shoot the cavalry even if they are in melee with on of yours. It seems the system takes into account the height of the unit so friendly fire casualties will be low.

From your back will come a couple of weak units, keep 1 or 2 weak units as reserve to deal with them. Don’t pursue them if they run away.

Now that you have shattered the units protecting the canon, get as close to it as you can while using the forest to stay undetected. There is a tempo here, if the canons are ready to shoot, make them do it while you’re far from them, then charge right away to stop them from shooting again.

Task your most depleted unit to take over the canons. They’ll be vital real soon. Now go to the objective, if the bot followed its scrip well there will only be a supply unit left to deal with. Supplies unit do not shoot, but they count like any other regular unit with an equipment. Shatter of force the unit to surrender. You can task one of your unit with taking the supply wagon. It can be useful but not vital.

Now capture the objective and enter part 2 of this mission.

For this part, you are charged with protecting the objective from a counter attack. It will be gruesome but easy. Since you should have taken your sweet time on the first objective, the game will give you your reinforcements before the attack begins. If you went fast, you will get them a little bit later. A supply point will spawn on the objective.

The enemy will send one main attack force by the river crossing and road at the top right of the map. And a 2 units force by the river crossing on the left of the objective. The goal is keeping the enemy from pushing you out of the objective. The bot infantry is not a problem, their cannons are. So you have to delay and attrition their infantry.

Send your 2 regular units to hold the left river crossing, use the forest on the right to place a unit that will stop the bot into the water with no cover, then hit them on the side with your second. repeat as needed.

Put all scenario units into stopping the main force. The units crossing the river can be ambushed but don’t place them too close. The bot units will spawn there and cannot be attacked until they get on land. This ambush will pin them there and their cannon will not shoot easily at you from the midst of their troops. This can be done with 2 strong units and your canons

Place your remaining troops along the forest and one into the little forest triangle on the side to form an effective line. Keep one unit in reserve for the unexpected.

Once the bot has brought their last canons by the road on the right, you will have to give ground. Once placed correctly by the bot, this artillery will hurt you bad. Pull them into the forest and make another stand until their canons start doing damages.

This is the last step, pull back your line into the second forest in the back. And a little past your objective after the house. The bot will follow with its bruised units into the clearing. You must break its units now. The bot will capture the supply point but won’t make it far enough for the objective. Your units well protected by the wood will do short works of their oppositions Allowing you to send most to the objective soon. At this point, the 2 units attacking from the left should be either too weak or destroyed, allowing you to send at least one of yours to support your main defence.

The bot will not make its artillery go forward without strong infantry. Wait for the timer to end and finish the mission asap. Don’t continue the fight, the game does not provide any benefits for doing so.