Units are generated very rapidly, and you'll amass substantial armies and fleets in no time, though computer-controlled factions sometimes seem to produce units with improbable efficiency. However, an order queue and easier unit selection would have been helpful. The context-sensitive point-and-click interface makes controlling peasants, raising or razing buildings, and commanding troops fairly easy and intuitive.
Grain fields are automatically replanted after each harvesting, for instance. Mines, farms, and so on require little if any maintenance and just keep cranking out vital goods when worked by your serfs. Fortunately, you usually don't have to hold peasants' hands and constantly issue new orders. After you select a peasant and right-click on a resource center, be it for food, wood, stone, gold, iron, or coal, the villager will trot off and get to work. Your faction's town hall, apparently doubling as a maternity ward, creates peasants, who in turn erect new buildings like a barracks to produce military units or an academy to research technology upgrades. Gameplay conservatively follows a very traditional, straightforward real-time strategy formula. Multiplayer mode lets you "deathmatch" on random maps or fight in historical battles from the Seven Years' War, the War of Spanish Succession, and others. You can also play ten much better single scenarios, and there's a skirmish mode that lets you confront up to six computer-controlled opponents on random maps generated according to basic criteria you set. There are four campaigns, ranging from the Thirty Years' War to the battle for Ukrainian independence, though poorly integrated scripted events and an awkward attempt at injecting some role-playing into the game make these rather uninspired. Cossacks lets you field gigantic armies of various European forces.Įither way, you'll get a lot of replayability from the game. For example, repeated, well-executed light cavalry raids against enemy peasants and resource centers can so weaken your foe that only a hundred or so troops might be needed to march in and deliver the coup de grace. Games will often end with several hundred peasants toiling for you, but likely fewer military units. One of the game's most touted features is the ability to field enormous armies totaling 8,000 units-at least in theory. It all might sound like a bit much, and sometimes it is, but there's a decent tutorial, as well as an extensive encyclopedia feature about the units, technology, and history featured in the game. Each country can also pursue unique paths through 300 possible technology tree upgrades.
Each nation fields a variety of military units from four basic categories: infantry, cavalry, artillery, and navy. You can play as 16 different factions: Algeria, Austria, England, France, Netherlands, Piemonte, Poland, Portugal, Prussia, Russia, Saxony, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, and Venice. You'll enjoy a lot of diversity, if nothing else. Priests act as adjuncts to your troops, and historically based military units essentially work on a simple rock-paper-scissors combat model, in that each unit specializes in attacks on another particular type of unit.įortunately, there's a bit more to Cossacks than first meets the eye. Villagers harvest materials like wood, stone, and gold. Cossacks features a very similar isometric view, visual style, unit scale, iconic interface, resource display, and map. Initially, Cossacks also looks like an Age of Empires II clone, just set a few centuries later. The details of the conflicts featured in the game, like the Thirty Years' War and the War for Austrian Succession, aren't exactly common knowledge, and units like the spakh (Turkish cavalry) and serdiuk (Ukrainian musketeer) will seem obscure to players without an encyclopedic knowledge of military history. The gameplay in Cossacks is reminiscent of Age of Empires II.Īt first glance, Cossacks looks like a real-time strategy game aimed at history majors. These dramatic events of the 16th through 18th centuries in Europe have provided Ukrainian developer GSC Game World with ample material for a fairly ambitious, if flawed, real-time strategy game. It was a time of war after bloody war, wars lasting decades, wars involving nearly every European nation. Mighty nation-states were forged in the fires of the battlefield, and massive fleets set sail with dreams of conquest. Cossacks: European Wars is a game about epic battles in one of the most turbulent eras in European history.