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Cossacks - European Wars
By Jim "Bismarck" CobbArticle Type: Review
Article Date: July 31, 2001
Peeling Back the Layers
Open the main menu and Cossacks has an irritating similarity to any other real-time strategy (RTS) game . You can choose between single missions, four campaigns of linked missions or a random map. The opening moves are also a bit too familiar. You start with a random map with some gold, food, stone and maybe some iron or coal. Peasants are available to lift that barge, tote that bale and build the basic facilities like a city hall, mines, barracks and the like. On missions, you’re given a few soldiers and orders.
The map is the usual basic black until explored and terrain isn’t anything special. Left clicks selects and right click orders. Click-and-drag covers numerous units that can be assigned numbers for quick retrieval. You must balance the demands of building a town versus maintaining armed forces capable of defense and, eventually, offense. Sounds like the usual click fests we’ve been inundated with since Westwood first had a denizen of Warcraft say “Aboo”. Right?
A budding Turkish village goes about its business.
Well, not quite. Yes, you can play Cossacks like a typical smash-and-grab RTS but then you would be missing the hidden character of the game. The power and depth of this game first surfaces with agriculture. The fields around the mill must first be seeded and then they ripen and die with the seasons. The first improvements come from the blacksmith shop and represent the first steps in the agricultural revolution of the sixteenth century.
As resources are amassed, you can go for a quick win by building the basic military facilities—barracks, stable and artillery depot—in order to strike your enemies with a mob of early pike men, musketeers and cavalry. With luck, you might even make it. However, if your coup de main goes amiss, you will have lost time and resources better spent in improvements and resources such as bayonets, training, multi-barreled cannon and better industry techniques. Your enemies won’t have made that mistake and will come at you with forces you can’t hope to match.
A besieged French city is stormed by a mercenary band.
The turmoil of the seventeenth century can hide the extremely vital scientific and societal advances made at that time. Europe was reaping the fruit of four hundred years of Renaissance. Advances in husbandry, metallurgy, chemistry and learning were reshaping a society seemingly bent on self-destruction.
Cossacks captures this dichotomy by replicating not only the tech tree of the period but by stipulating the sequence of buildings necessary to optimal play. After building enough defensive forces and outpost towers, you need the market place because the resources at hand will never be enough to pay for advances. With enough resources, the academy becomes possible and advances flourish. Of course, your enemies will have become bothersome by this time but they can be held off by another sign of those times, mercenaries.
These heroes are bought from the ironically named “diplomatic center” and, with an assist from the locals, can buy time for your advance to the eighteenth century. Now, proper battles can be fought.
Combat reveals those aspects that set Cossacks off from click-fests. Command and control gives battles a touch not seen in many other games. Any group or unit can be ordered to stand their ground, attack or attack and pursue. These functions are hardly new but a new feature puts a great spin them.
With the advent of officers and musicians, pike men and musketeers created by you can be formed into formations like line, attack column and square. These formations serve as massive force multipliers and allow for easier movement on the battleground. Given that cannon can be likewise grouped into batteries, you can raise tactics above the usual “shooters protected by cold steel” level found in other games.
Units act intelligently for once with musketeers staying out of harm’s way and using cover. As technology advances, you train your units and equip them better. Eventually, you will be handling the trained national armies of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. In short, you will come close to using historical tactics with historical armies. Therefore, stripping away the ordinary RTS features yields a product that surpasses the run-of-the-mill examples of the genre.
French and British armies meet in a typical eighteenth-century engagement.
Varsity Level Variety
CDV is not content with using history in combat. They present buildings and units of fifteen different nations. The sixteen different building types have not only different graphics (splendidly done) but different costs and defense values. Military units are so varied that they provide an encyclopedia of arms for this period with eleven different infantry units from stolid Austrian pike men to wild Turkish janissaries.
“Military units are so varied that they provide an encyclopedia of arms for this period…”
Cavalry shows up in four “cold steel” categories and two types of firing units. Artillery includes cannon, mortars, howitzers and multi-barreled guns. Navies are not overlooked with five kinds of ships. Terrain effects combat accurately so that battles resemble the best table-top miniature games.
Game speed can be set low enough so that control and thought can be used instead of reflexes. Insight into the period can be gained through fights ranging from Ukrainian liberation to control of the Caribbean. Beauty and sound are combined with great historical insight to provide an exciting yet intelligent experience. The hefty 191-page manual gives you easy entre into the multitude of units and buildings.
Massed batteries and swordsmen repulse cavalry outside their walls.
This diversity continues into the selection of play modes. Ten single missions cover an array of situations and the random map generator allows you to create infinite combinations of enemies, terrain and resources. Multiplayer modes allow TCP/IP, Lan and Internet play. Here, not only can you choose the city-building route but you can get straight to the action with numerous historical battles.
However…
Alas, CDV’s efforts are tarnished by two kinds of errors. Cossacks keeps some unfortunate elements of RTS games. Units tend to have bad path finding so that you spend more time than you should shepherding wayward souls to their goal. Peasants stand next to an obvious task and do nothing until ordered. Explored territory becomes completely black again once your units have vacated. Priests heal troops instantly in the midst of battle. Also, it’s a shame that historical battles are limited to the multiplayer mode. Perhaps the AI is not up to single player action on that level.
“…it’s a shame that historical battles are limited to the multiplayer mode.”
The other type of error is more irritating because it is historical: you cannot create formations combining pike and cold steel. Through out this period, almost all formations had both arms in them and setting the proper ratio of one to the other was a point of ragging debate. Not allowing this mix robs you of the chance to simulate of the great issues of the day. Also, you can only form up with set numbers of men: 15, 36. 72, 96, 120, and 196 (although the formations don’t disappear with casualties.)
Obviously, this restriction deals with hexadecimal issues, not history. You will find these restraints to be frustrating. Unfortunately, artillery moves. In fact, artillery was placed before the start of battles and, with the exception of Swedish “leather guns," stayed put during the fighting. Finally, the eighteenth-century walls are the same as the eighteenth-century ones. CDV missed by not creating graphics for the low, sloping Vauban fortifications.
These errors are more than nits; they prevent Cossacks from being a definitive game. Nonetheless, Cossacks is a fine product. Its variety, innovation and attempts at accuracy will make it an enjoyable addition to any collection.
