I just reloaded Cossacks on my computer. It was a game that I've had for awhile but never really gotten into; probably because I bought the Gold Edition the week after MTW. This is all just my two cents.
Don't get me wrong Cossacks is a fun game and I love having access to so many different nations and units, however I have a few general problems with the game itself and the RTS genre as a whole.
There is no accurate proportion between building/unit size and the amount of space that they take up on a map. Ever notice that you are playing a game set in Europe and if you look at the map the Town Hall is so out of scale to it that it takes up as much room on it as France does on a map of Europe? The size of units/buildings in regards to the whole map is so skewed. That's the beauty of the campaign map in MTW or the Civ map, the population centers actually take up as much space on a map as they should.
This lack of map size relative to the buildings makes your area of operations very limited. You build armies that can physically take up large chunks of the map and fight battles over the same few terrain features over and over again. Again the use of battlefields that you go into in MTW eliminates this. It is a real weakness for a long game. Sometimes I have gotten so tired of fighting over the same gold mine that I just quit. There is not as much pleasure for me in drawing a game out.
The actual fighting of battles is also much more mob oriented than formation oriented. If you build a large army with a whole bunch of artillery then you can just march it around with no real sense of order. Although some games have formations there seems to be little incentive to use them if you can just develop a large enough army. For instance in MTW some pikemen can hold up an entire army for a good while, even though they are grossly outnumbered, but in Cossacks a 36 man formation of built up musketeers can't hold off a 72 man formation of less powerful troops for more than 45 seconds, even if it does outflank the 72 man formation. This happens to a lesser extent in AOE and Empire Earth, where there seems to be a little bit more balance, however it still seems in those games that mass trumps flank/formation more often than it should.
The other big issue that Cossacks has, the others thankfully don't, is pathfinding. That game will drive you nuts the way soldiers and peasents alike just wander off or even worse get stuck behind something.
I'm not all gripes. The reason I keep playing RTS like Cossacks is I love the resource systems. The use of peasents and the limitations on population are an area where a game like MTW is flawed. I don't like that in MTW you can raise countless armies and only have to pay upkeep, there is no size limit and there is no economic penalty. It seems like in a game set in the Medieval period, in the year after the Black Plague, you should not be able to have 10 full stack armies in one province. It also seems like if you maintain huge armies your agriculture should suffer, because those soldiers have to eat. This is an area where Cossacks really gets it right with the food cost per unit plus the firing cost for going into action. The TW series need a system wherein you are limited by the size of your population your economic output. That would give you more incentive to build up economies and populations.
I also like the ability to raid resources. It is fun to make exploratory probes that take down the periphary of the AI's economy and it is fun to be able to take over whole towns. This is an area where the out of proportion maps, and not using the battle map system, is good. It allows you to attack the enemy's economy or infrastructure without going after the enemy's main cities/provinces. The ideal game, imo, is one that balances the raiding capacity of a RTS, a RTS resource/population system with a TW campaign/battle map, and tactical system.
