Cossacks 2: Napoleonic wars review and screenshots

Well it got my copy of Cossacks 2 last week. After 5 days of delays it got to my local EB. It took a bit longer than average to load the game onto my system, but it installed with no errors. Performance wise it runs very well on my set, and considering that my PC just barely scraps into the minimum sytem requirements it's a friggin miracles it runs at all. ~;) The graphics are 2D/3D hybrid, but unlike Rise of Nations the 3D bits of the maps are the ground and flora, the buildings and troops are sprites. There are 6 nations in the game, the UK, France, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Egypt.

The gameplay is very similar to the other games in the series (Cossacks 1 and American conquest) you train soldiers officers/stanard bearers/drummer and make regiments/squadrons of them. They come in 3 sizes 120 for regular infantry, 45 for cavalry, and 15 for specailists. The combat is both slow and fast. What I mean is that it takes your troops a while to get into the fight but the actual engagements between your armies don't last long. The winner of an engagement is who ever can inflict the most casualties the fastest wins. Why is this so you ask, answer the morale system. Just shooting at a regiment drains morale. Killing someone, which considering the wepaons involved at long ranges can by more by fluke than willful action, drains more morale. Hitting flanks and the rear is a bigger morale hit. Heavy cavalry also has a automatic, and large, morale drain when they charge. Also there is a fatigue system it only applies when marching off roads, when is reaches 0 then morale starts to drain. Marching via roads happens when you put a regiment into column they will seek out a road and go. Infantry tactics usually consist of matching you foot units to where ever the enemy is advancing or likely to forming a line (3 ranks deep) and waiting. Then you time when you fire you muskets, you can also pick which rank fires and when. My personal tactic is to fire a whole 120 gun volley if the unit coming at me is green or low quality, if there better troops or cavalry I fire the first and middle rank and hold the 3rd in reserve. There is also attack and defense bonues when your foot units go into hold ground mode. This mode only applies for line and square formations not column. You can tell the regiment is in hold ground because the first/outside rank kneels. This gives an attack bouns of +3 and a defense bonus of +40. Regular infantry come in 3 types, musketeers (average melle and ranged attack), light infantry (low melee and high ranged attack), and grenediers (high melee average ranged attack plus grenades). Specialist infantry are skirmishers and combat engineers. Skirmihers are the sharpshooters, they can move overland anywhere and not lose fatigue. Also they reload slowly and have a very strong ranged attack, with weak melee. Combat engineers and weak in the shooting and stabbing their strength is that they build field works (which I'll get into later) and blowing up buildings. They blow up a building by placing a powder charge on it Cavalry in several types of light medium and heavy units. The typical unit are hussars, mounted chasseurs, light dragoons, dragoons, heavy dragoons, ulhans, and curiasseurs, mamlukes, and Cossacks. As well as guard type cavalry.

Cavalry like infantry have thre foramtions, wedge, column, and line. Wedge is for charging, when in that mode cav. gallops everywhere and burns threw fatigue. Column is for marching and line is for using your dragoons like mounted infantry (at least that's what I do). Light cavalry (hussars, mounted cahsseurs, light dragoons, ulhans, Don cossacks, Egyptian light cav.) are best used for raiding the enemies economy and charging the flanks and rear. Heavy cavalry (heavy dragoons, dragoons, curiasseurs, mamlukes, black sea Cossacks) can charge the enemy from the front if they are experienced enough. When green it is best to stick to the flanks.Also all cavalry units have firearms, save ulhans. The weapons are carbine muskets (dragoons, mounted chasseurs, Egyptian bedouins, Don Cossacks), blunderbuss (hussars) , and pistols (curiasseurs, black sea Cossacks, egyptian mamlukes and light cavalry).

Artillery has 4 types. Light cannons, which are short range and not quite as devastating. Heavy cannons, long range and uber attacking power. Howitzers, medium range best for attacking buildings. There are also rocket carts available only to Britain, whic fire insanely fast for artillery. But hitting anything with them is more of a happy accident, but they are murder on morale. The last bit of artillery are the limbers. They are a team of 4 horse that you can hitch a gun up to and ahve it move much faster around the map.

The economy of the game is unique. The only resources that you set your peasants to gather are wood and stone. The other 4 food, gold, metal, and coal you get from villiages around every map. You capture them by killing the town militia that is there. Then the villiagers start gather resources for you. When about 1000 or so units of food or what have you are ammased they load it up on a pack horse and send it off to your town center or storehouse, which ever is closer. This is where light cavalry raiding comes in, if you kill the pack train you cut off the enemies resource flow.

Major bugs are, the game has a tendncy to CTD while playing Russia. When unhitching a gun from a limber the gun can shoot half way across the map. Also on my PC when displaying lots of peasants or unformed infantry the frame rate dropped.

Now for the screenshots, these are taken from skirmish games of me as Britain vs the AI as France and Egypt.
https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y2...s573/Brit2.jpg
British musketeers in a hold groun line. Also this musketter unit has enough XP to have been promoted to guards.

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y2...s573/Brit7.jpg
Highlanders, the British light infantry.

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y2...s573/Brit4.jpg
British grenediers, also guards.

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y2...s573/Brit5.jpg
British Riflemen, they are unique to the UK and have a slight range advantage over other nations skirmishers.

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y2...s573/Brit6.jpg
British combat engineers called Sappers. You can see the buildingd they can construct here. Going left to right in the top row blockhouse (a building that fires musket volleys at the enemy), tower (provides cannon fire with upgrades to increase the ROF), Kronwerks (1 cannon trains musketeers), fort (2 cannons trains light infantry), and fortress (3-5 cannons trains grenediers and is freakin huge).

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y2...s573/Brit3.jpg
British cavalry, light dragoons are in the dark blue jackets in the fore ground. Hussars are in light blue on the top left, and heavy dragoons are in the red coats and the helmets.

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y2...573/Brit10.jpg
British rocket cart in action. The red shilloutte on the ground is the firing radius the cursor is where they are aiming, which they rarely hit. ~;) You can also see the top corner of a Kronwerks on the right.

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y2...s573/Brit1.jpg
Limber with heavy cannon attached.

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y2...s573/Brit8.jpg
Sappers building a Kronwerks.

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y2...s573/Brit9.jpg
A resource villiage with the town guard selected.

Excellent review Lars! How does the game compare to Totalwar? And more importantly how is the A.I.?
:charge: :charge:

I've yet to beat the AI.

What Mounted Light Dragoons having such a powerful ranged attack? If it is not short then I don't know what. I mean carbines were rather crap compared to the rather crap that was a musket.
A British formation of light cavalry managed to charge a French formation a bit larger than themselves (of about equal experience and ability) who stood their ground to release a volley of carbinefire. About 200 were involved on both sides. The Britisj suffered in total 6 losses, and we must counght at least 1 of them was suffered in the melee. Hardly impressive carbinefire.

But besides that it actually looks rather promising to me. Might get it at some point.

Some of the noticable bugs:

Artillery still has a few glitches here and there, and some bugs.

When playing Russia the game freezes completely, i have to alt-tab and close it via task manager.

Also the british rocket cart refuses to fire after using the limber, which is rather annoying.

However i still play this game, Lars gives it a fair and balanced review. Its a rather good game if you can habituate with the bugs and glitches ~;p

On another note, they say another patch will come soon, lets hope they fix the annoying bugs in this game.

I played the demo of it
For me it took a while to adjust.
Its real nice, great fun to play.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rom

Excellent review Lars! How does the game compare to Totalwar? And more importantly how is the A.I.?
:charge: :charge:

---

The AI is challenging. For my own part it takes at least an hour to even get close to beating it. The game has some qualities in common with TW, the single player consists of conquering europe and Egypt. You build up the provinces over turns, and get resources and special stuff. Also the combat is unit of 100 guys vs units of 100 guys like TW. Unlike TW when a regiment routes it loses all it's experience. Hell when they runs it breaks formation them runs. Unlike 70% of RTS games Cossacks isn't about building the biggest force the quickest and rolling over the enemy. In fact if you tried that your army would be thrown back in short order. To boil it down green soldiers=routing soldiers, if you send them on an offensive. Running an enemy position needs eperienced troops.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kraxis

What Mounted Light Dragoons having such a powerful ranged attack? If it is not short then I don't know what. I mean carbines were rather crap compared to the rather crap that was a musket.
A British formation of light cavalry managed to charge a French formation a bit larger than themselves (of about equal experience and ability) who stood their ground to release a volley of carbinefire. About 200 were involved on both sides. The Britisj suffered in total 6 losses, and we must counght at least 1 of them was suffered in the melee. Hardly impressive carbinefire.

But besides that it actually looks rather promising to me. Might get it at some point.

---

Cavalry firearms have very short range. Carbines have about half the range of an infantry musket. Blunderbusses and pistols have less maximum range than carbines in that order. The best use of cavalry firearms is to charge melle for a bit then loose a volley at point blank range.

Something I forgot to mention about artillery. You can drive off the gunners, then capture the gun itself. Arty gunners have 0 morale. If they come under fire they leg it quick.

I have some some skirmish screens of the Austrian unit line up ready to go. Also I'll try and get a screen of the single player campagin map, and unit firing ranges.

Time for some Austrian screenshots. I'll start with the infantry.

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y231/lars573/Aus1.jpg
Austrian landwehr, Austria is onw of the 3 nations with a trainable militia unit. The other 2 empires (France and Russia) have them too.

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y231/lars573/Aus2.jpg
Austrian fusiliers guards holding a line.

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y231/lars573/Aus3.jpg
Austria's light infantry, boards men. But IMO a better name would be borderers or their german name Grenzers.

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y231/lars573/Aus4.jpg
Austrian grenediers

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y231/lars573/Aus5.jpg
Austrian skirmishers, Chasseurs. Except for British riflemen all skirmishers are called Chasseurs.

Let me guess, the militia has very low morale and need lots of attention. Line infantry is fair enough (füsilier in this case right?), grenadiers and light infantry have good morale and should be able to take more losses than others before breaking?

I agree Grenzers would be better.

Are the units also differently able in accuracy? Should be so.

hey, I was thinking about getting this Is it an RTS or does it have strategy?
how are the battles? can you pause and give commands or is it just a mass chaos clickfest like some RTS"S

It's alot like the TW games as far as combat goes.

Kraxis, good guesss. ~;) Militia units can't really stand in a battle line but they are effective for taking villiages. Also that yellow bar with red stripes across it is the unit morale meter. The red stripes indicate how many times the yellow bar can be drained before the unit will break. As for the base morale is goes grenediers, line, light/skirmishers, militia. As for range differnece I'm not really sure about light infantry but skirmishers have much higher range than line troops.

thepipe, as far as I know you can pause to give orders. But I've never had occasion to use it. The battles don't move fast enough to need to pause and give orders most of the time.


Here are the rest of the screenshots I have ready. Austrian cavalry and cannons.
https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y231/lars573/Aus6.jpg
Austrian Ulhans, these are the Polish lancers of the game.

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y231/lars573/Aus7.jpg
Austrian Cuirassiers.

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y231/lars573/Aus8.jpg
Austrian Hussars.

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y231/lars573/Aus9.jpg
Austria is the only other European nation save Britian to have heavy and light dragoons. These are the light Dragoons.

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y2...s573/Aus10.jpg
Austrian heavy Dragoons.

https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y2...s573/Aus11.jpg
Austrian heavy cannon

All the cavalry seems to have rather weak attack in melee, especially the Uhlans and the Cuirasiers.

But I'm surprised that the lights and skirmishers are so weak in morale, they were after all a sort of elite unit in the army.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kraxis

But I'm surprised that the lights and skirmishers are so weak in morale, they were after all a sort of elite unit in the army.

---

I am too. The devs must assume assume that "light" denotes "less". This in turn implies a superficial understanding of the period. During the War for Independence, the Continental Light Infantry were the American shock troops.

Can units volley through one another without friendly casualties?

The way the game works is that if you desire elite units you make them your own self. Any unit from what I have seen can get the guard tag (read elite). I actually had a guard heavy cannon once.

Yes of course experience would make a unit stronger, but the armies of the times tended to get the strongest and tallest men in the Grenadier units and the most accurate and those in best shape into the light units (out of these the skirmishers were taken most often). Those two types of infantry got more exhaustive and better training than the line soldiers as they were supposed to do special tasks in battle as well as fight in the line, at least that was the intended use when they were formed, with time they 'just' became better soldiers. So they should start with better morale and effectiveness, but most importantly morale.

Explain that Guard status. Is it visible? I have noticed that experience grants chevrons in the unit picture, is the Guard status similarly shown?
Now that we are talking about it... 1st Militia Guards... Can't let that go without a smile. :gring:

Yes you get flashing stars above the units icon, this indicates its a guard unit.

They become killing machines with gaurd status, but its very hard to get a unit to get gaurd status.

Lars,
Great wrap up, cheers

so heres the rub

Im looking at buying a napoleonic wargame

Imperial Glory? or Cossacks2

I was all set to get imperial glory from the screenies in the PC gamer, but hearing some negative things in other threads, and Cossacks is looking surprisingly better than I gave it cred.

Opinions most welcome

Im desperate for this Napoleonic fetish to be sated, I dont want to buy a box thats going to taste like ashes in my mouth

Not that hard you just have to be careful with them. That said some units accumelate XP and by extention morale faster than others. Grenediers and ulhans collect XP the fastest from what I've seen. Besides I've only given stills to get a better idea of how the morale works you have to the game in action. The morale system Cossacks 2 has in place is every bit a complex as the total war one. You can have mass routes, but when one regiment stands and repells an attack all the units around it are inspired. Having guard units around is inspiring to the line troops. When a unit in C2 is promoted to guards it's like (in STW terms) they morph from yari samurai to warrior monks.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Yunus Dogus

Lars,
Great wrap up, cheers

so heres the rub

Im looking at buying a napoleonic wargame

Imperial Glory? or Cossacks2

I was all set to get imperial glory from the screenies in the PC gamer, but hearing some negative things in other threads, and Cossacks is looking surprisingly better than I gave it cred.

Opinions most welcome

Im desperate for this Napoleonic fetish to be sated, I dont want to buy a box thats going to taste like ashes in my mouth

---

Here are the minimum and recommended sytem requirements

Minimal:
OS: Win98/ME/2000/XP
CPU: 1500 MHz
RAM: 512 MB
Video: 64 MB, directX 8.1 compatible
Sound: DirectX 8.1 compatible
DirectX 8.1 or higher
CD-Rom: 12x CD-ROM
2GB HDD

Recommended:
OS: Win98/ME/2000/XP
CPU: 2400 MHz
RAM: 768 MB
Video: 128 MB, directX 8.1 compatible
Sound: DirectX 8.1 compatible
DirectX 9.0c or higher
CD-Rom: 12x CD-ROM
2GB HDD
I don't have Imperial glory yet, I might get it when it hits the bargin/used bin. But from the comment I've read it's much more like TW than Cossacks is. The campagin game is great the AI is clever and hard to beat. But the real time battles blow. IG has no morale, you can't retreat from a melee. A melee lasts until one unit is gone totally. To break it down IG great campagin game weak battles, C2 weak campagin game good battles. I can't and won't deny though that C2 has some major bugs. The out of box 1.0 version has long load times, and when playing as Russia in skirmish game it will crash to desktop. With the 1.1 patch a lot of battle for europe and multiplayer issues were fixed but skirmish was buggered up but good. For me a skirmish in 1.1 will crash the game after about 30 minutes.

Alright, you have my interest. I shall try the demo :gring: It's not a time period I'm interested in, and I'm leery of the series because I found American Conquest to be very inferior to the original Cossacks. The original Cossacks is one of few RTS type games I've enjoyed since STW came along and put me right off the AOE clones/decendents. But this sounds as though it has some chance of interesting a frog.

Just a warning to you guys who buy Cossacks 2, don't install the latest patch, it makes the game unplayable. ~;p best wait for a newer patch they promised which is less broken.

On another note, the egyptian skirmisher is known as a Taureg, and has incredibly high melee damage for a skirmisher, you also can put them in units of 30 men (unlike chasseurs or riflemen). I'd like to put up screens of the egyptian and russian units sometimes in the near future if anyone wants to see them.

Edit: Photobucket resizes my screens apparently, any other place to upload larger images?

Sure... show 'em.
But really isn't a strong melee skirmisher a bit counterproductive? They are few so even if they are good they will lose to a normal unit.

Actually tauregs if used well, can cause a lot of damage, they can route a unit of fusiliers/light infantry single handedly, but the only way to do that is to exhuast the enemy units volley before charging in. Needs a bit of micromanagment and a forest for that ~;p

Tuaregs are best however in having them shoot and charge the rear of an enemy formation while having another unit (ie Yataghans who are melee) pin them, also another use for skirmishers (not tuaregs only) is to pull enemy units by firing at them and retreating, especially useful when you have enemy units in stand ground formation.

Use http://www.imageshack.us/

What's so bad about the new patch?

Well I could imagine that they would be great for flanking and rear attacks with their superior mobility, but wouldn't they get trampled by cavalry?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Fuct

Use http://www.imageshack.us/

What's so bad about the new patch?

---

It broke skirmish mode. Now when you try a skirmish game it will lock up the game so bad you have to alt+tab or ctrl+alt+delete out of the game to close it. It made multiplayer and the battle for europe campagin work smother though.

Edit, Faisal all the screens I put in this thread are hosted on photobucket.

The new patch is prone to crashing, especially when playing Egypt or Russia, also the campaign doesn't seem to work (for me at least) and sometimes my prussian battle for europe campaign crashes. skirmish also has some graphical glitches, and a weird glitch where one of the enemy unit turns on its own army ~;p

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kraxis

Well I could imagine that they would be great for flanking and rear attacks with their superior mobility, but wouldn't they get trampled by cavalry?

---

Cavalry are rather tough, skirmishers will most certainly get wasted really fast. Best way to fight off cavalry is bring your own cavalry with you, or have foot units in square formation, grenadiers and fusiliers are good at this, egyptians don't have grenadiers or fusiliers so their best bet is Yataghans, but its a rather crap unit to begin with, though i'd rather use mamelukes.

Oh and Lars black sea cossacks carry a rifle, not a pistol. I think they are the best heavy cavalry in the game next to the prussian mounted guard and egyptian mameluke (it gets 3rd place for the crappy double shot pistol).

EDIT: i tried photobucket, but it would resize the image. The image becomes pretty small and rather crap, my resolution is 1280x1024 when playing cossacks 2, and most screens are at 3.7 megs when i take them ~;p

What you do is convert them from bitmaps (which are huge) to JPEGS. You do this by loading the screenie into paint. They go file, save as. Give the screen a name or don't then go to the save as type pull down. By default it will say 24-bitmap change that to JPEG via the pull down menu and save. Now when photobucket resizes your uploads they won't lose much quality.