The Ironclads Collection

The Ironclads Collection is a bundle of five single-player naval wargames developed by Totem Games, a small Russian studio with an obsessive commitment to historical accuracy. The titles span a range of 19th-century conflicts: the American Civil War on the high seas, the Anglo-Russian War of 1866, the Schleswig War of 1864, the Chincha Islands War, and more. Each game uses the same core engine, a turn-based tactical system where time is divided into rounds representing roughly five minutes of real combat, and within each round both the player and the AI execute orders for every ship. There are no hexes or grid cells: battles play out on 1:1 scale maps built from historical charts and archive documents. Ship models, from sloops and coastal gunboats to casemate rams and early monitors like the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia, are derived from original blueprints and restored drawings. The ballistics calculator applies real artillery tables, and physical interactions including collisions, flooding, capsizing, and ammunition fires are all modelled. For anyone who cares about decision-making at the strategic layer, the design delivers a board-game-style campaign map sitting above the tactical battles. You manage a treasury fed by merchant trade routes, spend it on warships, harbor defenses (shore batteries, mines, torpedo boats), and repair bills, then assign squadrons to stations across the map. The three-phase campaign structure, early wood-and-steam dominance shifting into an ironclad arms race and then a late-game technological comeback, gives both sides genuinely asymmetric build paths. As the Confederates you face a resource-deficit holding action; as the Union you choose between an aggressive early push to deny rebel ironclad construction or a long blockade strategy designed to strangle their merchant income. Those are real decisions with real consequences, and the replayability that comes from asking yourself whether a swarm of gunboats with AP ammunition can punch through a Union monitor line is exactly the kind of question this series rewards. That said, the collection comes with significant caveats. Steam reviews for the first-generation titles are mostly negative, with players pointing to an obtuse interface, limited tutorial guidance, and AI behavior that can be unpredictable at the tactical layer. The turn structure, where the active ship acts while everything else freezes, can feel stiff once you are used to real-time naval games. There is no multiplayer across any title in the bundle, and the strategic layer, while replayable, is relatively shallow compared to a full grand-strategy title. The XML-based game data is entirely editable, which gives modders a low barrier to tweak ship stats, armor values, and shell behavior, but there is no active modding community to speak of. Here is the honest pitch for newcomers: this collection covers naval conflicts that almost no other PC game touches. The Schleswig War of 1864 and the Chincha Islands War are genuinely neglected theaters, and Totem has done the archival legwork to model the ships correctly. If you approach each title as a specialist wargame rather than a mainstream strategy release, the depth of the simulation makes the rough edges easier to forgive. Set your expectations to "grognard niche product" rather than "polished commercial release" and you will find something with more historical meat on its bones than its presentation suggests. Casual strategy players will bounce off it hard. If you have ever color-coded a tech-rush timeline or lost sleep over optimal fleet composition, there is something here worth the patience.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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