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.