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.
British musketeers in a hold groun line. Also this musketter unit has enough XP to have been promoted to guards.
Highlanders, the British light infantry.
British grenediers, also guards.
British Riflemen, they are unique to the UK and have a slight range advantage over other nations skirmishers.
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).
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.
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.
Limber with heavy cannon attached.
Sappers building a Kronwerks.
A resource villiage with the town guard selected.
Reply With Quote
The rest = 
Originally Posted by Rom
Bookmarks