Cossacks II: anybody try this game?

[jbmagic]

i see Cossacks II is out.

anybody play this RTS game? i never played the first one.

i wonder if its better than Age of Empire 2.


http://www.cossacks2.com/index.php?m=news&lang=us

[CHEMICAL SOLDIER]

It looks pretty good. All the troop movement looks pretty.
I never played the first one but there was alot of talk about the original on this board.

[jbmagic]

anybody try any of the Cossacks RTS games? what do you think of it?

looks like Medieval Total War will all those units at the same time.

http://www.cossacks.com/

you guys know if it better than Age of empire 2 and rise of nations?

[Julio Riddols]

In my opinion, WAY better than AOE. There are a lot more options with 10,000 plus units in dispose at a time.. and the maps are massive.. The anticipation of watching my armada of cutters, ferries (filled with 250 units apiece) and gunships go across the water (on this particular game it was about a 10 minute trip across to my main rival) was what I liked most.. They didnt even know I was coming.. And after a long, hard fought (I think it was 40-plus hours) game, I had vanquished all my enemies and stood alone, rich, well-fed, and without peer.

Yeah, I think Cossacks should be way more popular, but for some reason, its not.

No glitches ever appeared in my games, and it ran pretty smoothly on a 500mHz computer, even with all those troops..

There you have it.. thats my 2 cents.

[Whar]

Cossacks is my all time favorite RTS. Its focus on a short period of time allows for more examination of the period. You start around the 30 Years War tech, musket and pike formations, and end about Seven Years war period right before the rise of Napoleon.

The scope of the game is much larger than many RTS with hundreds of peasents gathering resources and unit formations that can go into 100+. I generaly hold my regiments around the 36 or 72 level for practical purposes.

While you do not have as much diveristy in your tech upgrades they attempt to make up for it with depth in each line you can upgrade. Musketeers can be updrage 7 or 8 times, same with the 3 horse units, pike men as well.

To handle the enormous number of units you can generate the individual guys are fairly small and very average in the graphics department. The game also removes most workers from the screen through the use of building assignment. Instead of watching a worker gather gold and walk it to a gathering spot the game asks you to assign a worker to a mine, the workers enters, and the mine starts producing its output. Via upgrades mines can hold over 100 workers each though this gets prohibitively expensive. However it does allow you to focus your production on key regions.

Another fun feature of the game is the ownership of most buildings and workers is assigned to the guy with the nearest military units. This means if you do not protect a mine an opponent can walk 2 pikemen over to it and assume control, workers included. Workers that remain on the field of play, those assigned to gather wood or food, can be captured by running military units into their midsts. There is a guilty genocidal pleasure that comes from capturing 35 enemy workers and self destroying them before your opponent can recapture. This is of course devasting to your food production and can cripple you very early in the game.

The name of the game is Cossack and early on you must be ready to deal with the first 5 cossack the game throws at you. If these early attackers get thru your line of defense your workers are all but gone. Nothing moves faster than a Coassack in this game and the Coassack AI will avoid battle almost at all costs. They are brutally annoying in the early stages of the game.

If anyone wants to play and needs a human opponent I would be more than glad to break out my copy and provide a semi-capable punching bag. :)

*EDIT* I am really behind the curve. I had thought Cossack II was released long ago but that was an expansion only. I will buy this game tomorrow if it is out. The original Cossack was incredible.