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For all you AOE, AOK and AOK:Conquerers Fans

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 36 / 38
Date: March 18, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I'm an avid AOK:Conquerers player and I NEVER thought I would find a game that would blow it away. I've found it!!! The graphics are stuning. The detail in the buildings is extreme. The trees really look like trees. The peasants and military units perform their tasks with an almost lifelike grace.

Rifles, cannons mortars etc. all have different sounds and all produce puffs of smoke when they fire. The artillary bombardments are spectacular; actual explosions and clouds of smoke and flying debris when they hit a target.

The ships are very lifelike, especially in their movements.

Forget the 200 maximum on units... I just finished my first run thru on this game and had a maximum population limit of 1000 and could have gone higher. There are also LOADs of unit upgrades.

On a scale of 10 I rate this one a definate 12!!

I for one will stick with AOK - especially for Multiplayer

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 39 / 48
Date: April 30, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Well, I REALLY wanted to love this game. I came close, really close, but ultimately returned it today. I won't repeat everything that others have said about how great it is, but I do agree with most of their points. Using more than 200 units was a great feature, it got a little crazy at first but once you got used to it it did add realism - costs of units in Cossacks have been lowered compared to other RTS games so you can afford huge armies. I must compliment Strategy First on their attention to detail, the buildings were spectacular, and as far as I know much of the game was historically accurate in generating thier 16 (yes 16!!!) different nations. In Cossacks defense it was quite fun to play in a genre between AOK and more modern warfare such as one of the many WWII games out there.

OK, now here is why I returned the game: My biggest complaint will probably not effect too many people but since 75-90% of my gaming is gone multiplayer with friends from accross the country we were dissapointed with the fact that AI controlled armies were unavailable in Multiplayer mode!! I don't understand why this was since they do have a random map option for sigle player and it wouldn't have been too complicated to include this option for multiplayer. Not everyone is super competative and loves to whoop up on thier friends - we prefer to work together to overcome multiple AI Armies which is not possible in Cossacks

I also had problems with the game play. The Frigates and Battleships (emphasis on the later) were just too powerful. Their cannon range is incredible!! If you play an Island or Continents map these ships could almost fire all the way accross the land. No building or unit is safe from their wrath. The Frigates were bad enough but then the Battleships have increased rate of fire, damage, AND range - I can agree with the 1st two but the 3rd is unnecessary. Of course one way to try to stop these monsters is with stone walls, however Strategy First in their infinate wisdom chose to charge you for stone continuously - not just when you built the walls!! Huh?! I was constantly at zero stone and I couldn't seem to recruit enough peasants to get more.

There were some more other minor annoyances: no way-points and units sometimes had trouble finding the best route to a place; the ferrys were quite picky about where to land to load troops; peasants don't automatically go to work, as in Conquerors, which can be troublesome when you are talking about 100s of them; Other than the tech trees there is no real description of the pros and cons of each nation.

In the end I pretty much have to agree with CGW that this is still "just another variation on an oft-played theme" and that other than extra eye candy it doesn't add too much to the genre. There were not enough pros, or atleast too many cons to convince me that I wouldn't just go back to AOK in the coming months once the initial charm wore off.

I'll end in Cossacks defense: if you are not like me and have time to play single player games than it may be worth it - not at the standard retail price though find it on sale.

Happy gaming!!

Could Have Been Classic

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 47 / 62
Date: June 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I have been playing Cossacks for about a month. At first I was thrilled by the superb graphics andd the number of available upgrades. As I got deeper into the game, small annoyances began to appear and eventually grow into larger annoyances.

For example, the ability of a handful of units (like Cossacks), to completely overrun a city which has taken a lot of time for you to build is a real drag. As a matter of fact, the ability of just one enemy unit to just stand next to your buildings and convert them is definitely unrealistic, and greatly takes away from the fun. Add to that the expense of defending what is yours, with either stone or wood walls, makes it that much more difficult to succeed.

In addition, if you simply just race against your opponent to try and raid his town so he can't raid yours isn't strategy, it's a race. The game allows little time to think and develop strategy, even after adjusting the game speed.

Finally, the upgrades, although numerous, just get repetitive and tedious after a while, with no obviously noticeable results.

I found Age of Kings, combined with The Conquerors Expansion, to be much more rewarding, a lot more fun, with many more options and variety, and not "childish" at all.

Cossacks: European Wars could have been as good if the gameplay was structured better. Unfortunately, it falls short of its ambitious mark.

Overall: A disappointment.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 21 / 22
Date: January 05, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I greatly enjoyed the Age of Empires series, but I always wished it was based more on actual history rather than a very loose interpretation. I thought Cossacks would be the answer to my hopes. It was billed as the most historically accurate of the build and destroy realtime strategy games. It would achieve this by having a much narrower scope than the Age of Empires games: two hundred years of European history with a focus on Eastern Europe in the 17-18th centuries. Although, the narrow scope may sound limiting, any history buff will recognize that period as a treasure trove of conflicts and wars: the Thirty Years War, Ukranian Revolts, Turkish Invasions, French Wars of Religion, the English Civil War, and so and so on. As a huge history buff, I couldn't wait to get my hands on this game.

Cossacks looks impressive: sixteen different nations each with their own seperate building set and most with their own unique units. Also the AI is fairly aggressive especially in the early stages of the game- it's a "rusher." How one raises an army is also much more complex than other realtime strategy games because your units use resouces so if your economy is destroyed then your army will run out of supplies and will then desert. Also the graphics and sound are terrific: pikemen advance in formation, musketeers in line firing and reloading, heavy cavalry charging into battle, your peasants walking through a sea of wheat, and the roar of cannons.

However, after numerous playings I grew more and more disappointed with how Cossacks played. First off, despite the individual building sets and unique units, there is little difference between the various nations. Although a handful of nations have some limitations on what technological advances they can access, the vast majority have access to all the same technologies. What made the Age of Empires games so fun was that each nation had its own strengths and weaknesses as to technology. It was the techs that made the nations unique in AOE, and Cossacks sorely lacks this aspect. Also unit balance is completely off kilter: cannons, especially those on naval units, are devastating- destroying entire armies and cities. Cannons should be valuable units, but for the timeframe they should not be trump card to everything. Also the buildings explode when destroyed- its fun to watch, but there have been games where I lost more units to exploding buildings than I did the enemy units. It's very silly. And the AI, which is an aggressive rusher, can be easily countered. Although in some ways it is far superior to AOE's AI, but defending itself is not one of them. I don't how many times I attacked an AI city, systematically destroying it, while not far away a huge AI army just sat motionless not responding to my attack on its precious city

The historical campaigns that shipped with the game are a real disappointment, and probably the biggest reason why I stopped playing. Although, they are based on interesting subjects, they played as puzzles (ex: if your units went the wrong way then they would not trigger an event required to win) instead of a strategy game. Some of them played as if you were playing a maze game. Also the game did not come with an editor, which denied players the ability to create their own historical scenarios.

Some people may enjoy Cossacks for its complex economic system and its ability to handle thousands of units. However, I eventually grew bored by the sameness of its nations, its puzzle campaigns, the silliness of its battles with cannons blowing hundreds away, and the AI's predictability. Instead of a realtime strategy game with a sharp historical focus on a fascinating and bloody period of history, I got an Age of Empires clone lacking alot of what made those games great.

COSSACKS: The Greatest Strategy Game Ever Made

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 24 / 27
Date: April 25, 2001
Author: Amazon User

What can i say, The gamepay is exellent, the grafics are exellent, there is nothing i can find whitch is wrong with this game. These are the points i can think of that make this the greatest strategy game of all time...

1. The enemy attacks you in formation (not scattering its units like in age of empires or red alert).

2.it features loads of countries.

3.it is 100% historicaly accurate. the units themselves, tecnologies, formation of units,

4.in this game the population limit is 8000 (not 50, or 100 like in red alert or age of empires) + the computer does not crash even if you have 8000 units in play.

5. the grafics are brilliant, great attension has been given to the detail of the units. units are in proportion, they act so realiticaly, and are so finly detailed, that its almost as if in real life.

6. it has loads of units and upgrades, more than any other game ive seen n my life. every type of infantry or cavalry that ever existed in that time.

7. Every country has its oun type of buildings and units (unlike all other sutch games)

after playing the demo, and then getting the full game, i must say, this the only game i have not gotten bored of. for more info on the game, go to: www.cossacks.com

The Best RTS now

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 16 / 16
Date: April 19, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I like RTS games, but all of have their own disadvantages. When I first played Cossacks, I was waiting to face a new one, but the only thing I found was advantages. The game is better than Age of Empires 2 and the magnitude of choices is unbelievable. The computer is clever and unpredictable and this makes the game very interesting. (If you play the game in the "Very-Hard" Mode, your possibilities to win are limited.) If you like RTS games, this is your next game.

Awesome RTS game!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 19 / 21
Date: April 30, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I'm always alittle weiry of "real" RTS games because in general they never seem as fun as the "fictional" RTS games like Red Alert 2 or Warcraft, but this game is as fun as those games and in some ways funner becasue of the huge armies you can command. I hear it's possible to have 800 units onscreen at once, but I have only reached around 300 units which, in my book, is already simply amazing.

I have been playing the full version for a day now and only have 1 complaint, and that is there seems to be an issue with building wood or stone walls, as it seems it will drain your wood or stone resources way way too much when you have long walls.....perhaps it's a bug, or perhaps I'm still not sure how to play properly.

In any case that is the only downfall I could find. I would also like more sound effects, but that's really a minor issue since the sounds effect themselves are good. The graphics are the best I have seen on a 2D RTS, and the animation is amazing.

I absolutely love deploying 4 ferries with 80 units each and unloading them at the enemy island...They dont know what hit them, but the battles can get huge and some maps seem to take forever since it's based in reality and you just can't take 300 units and "mop up" the enemy like you can do in other RTS games. You really need to play strategically, or you will waste way to many units.

Do yourself a favor and download the demo, and you will se what I mean, then go out a buy this game!

Cossacks is actually one of the best RTS-Games

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 15 / 18
Date: March 25, 2001
Author: Amazon User

If you're a RTS-Fan, Cossacks: European Wars is a must for you... I've been really suprised as I played it for the first time a few days ago. The Graphics are the best I've ever seen in a 2D RTS Game, there are even much more better than those in Age Of Empires 2. The Game balance's nearly perfect.

The most interesting thing about Cossacks, is that it's the first game ever with a realistic number of combat units, indeed you can handle more than 8000 Units... Isn't that fantastic?

In a word, Cossacks' a game which provides you a high gaming pleasure and a long time motivation...

Will never de-throne Age of Empiress II but still a fun game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 10 / 11
Date: October 26, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game is a good game for those of you who can't possibly play another game of AOEII and are waiting for the release of Empire Earth. That's where I found myself a month ago when I decided to give Cossacks a try.

Cool features: unlimited resources. Nice graphics. Units not limited to 200. AI of Cossacks is very good. Even on the easiest level, enemy armies will search for your weaknesses...They circle your city looking for an approach that you haven't protected well and that's where they will attack.

Annoying features: Enemy units can capture your buildings, builders and artillery if left unguarded. (this really gets to be a pain in the butt after a while.) Farm fields regenerate once and then you have to manually regenerate them. Firing cannons costs entirely too much coal and iron. Units require resources for upkeep. In other words, once you build a battleship for instance, it sucks gold right out from under you at an alarming rate. Then if you don't catch it in time and you run out of gold, a mutiny happens and your battleship becomes independent, attacking everything it sees. Keeping enough food on hand can be a challenge too. The enemy will distract you on one side while their ships sneak in and destroy your sea port and all your fishing boats. Then you go to fix that and fend their ships off and they sneak in from the back side and steal your mills from you. Before you know it, you're out of food and all your people start to die. ARRRGHHH!! anyway, you get the point... Annoying but neccessary parts of the game.
Most annoying thing about the game: Mortars. Boy do I hate those things...

Overall, Cossacks is a fun game and worth the 40 bucks. It'll make you pull your hair out for a while but once you get the hang of it, it's really quite enjoyable.

Almost, but not quite...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: May 27, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I am an Age of Kings fan and I spent perhaps 30-40 hours playing Cossacks. I like the game, but have a number of reservations:

1. Battleships are more powerful than they should be, at least when playing against the computer. Once I played against the computer on "very hard" and parked a battleship off the coast of the computer player. The battleship destroyed nearly 3000 enemy units and was essentially undamaged when the game ended.

2. The game does not allow you to freeze the game to assign tasks to your villagers. If you are involved in a protracted battle, you tend to neglect domestic affairs, which is perhaps realistic in some respects, but it makes the game less fun for me.

3. Individual units are not particularly intelligent. I would like to be able to assign military units to guard structures. Also, villagers who finish repairing a building should begin repairing again when the building sustains additional damage. This is particularly annoying when the computer uses artillery to attack one of your buildings or mines, you send a villager to repair the damage, the villager finishes repairing the damage, and the artillery then proceeds to demolish the building while the villager stands and watches.

4. Cossack units are extremely difficult to catch (which is perhaps reasonable), but it takes them no time whatsoever to capture your buildings and kill your villagers. One or two Cossack units can cause a tremendous amount of damage since buildings tend to be destroyed when you recapture the building. The only decent way to defend against Cossacks is to build walls around your cities and hope that you remember to keep the city gates closed.

By this time, you might be asking yourself what I actually liked about the game. I liked the tech tree, the ability to control large armies, and the ability to organize soldiers into armies. I also liked the way the game charges you progressively more resources to build multiple barracks, stables, town centers, etc.

My advice is to consider purchasing this game if you do not own Age of Kings, but otherwise save your money. The difference between the two games does not justify the price. Perhaps the publishers could offer people "upgrades" from Age of Kings at a discount.

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