Battle of the Nile
Unit types for Cossacks 2: Battle for Europe are pretty much as you’d expect for the era in which the game is set. The main ‘meat’ of your army will be the infantry units, those poor buggers who are lined up in rows to be mown down in their hundreds by the opposition’s cavalry and cannons. But you have your own cavalry too, so you can do the same to the enemy, after having ‘softened’ them up with fire from your artillery units.
Non-combat units include the aforementioned peasants who, apart from giving everyone else someone to look down on, can construct your buildings, harvest food, quarry stone and cut wood. So although peasants are the lowest of the low, they’re actually pretty damn important as without them you’ve won’t have the foundation to build your army.
Click for larger imagePriests, as you’d expect for a strategy game, can heal wounded units and boost flagging morale. If you keep a priest hanging around a squadron he’ll increase their morale recharge rate as well, very handy if you’re in a tight spot…
Artillery is where the real action is at though, as good artillery fire can win a battle before it’s even started. Although the artillery moves at an incredibly slow pace and has a nail-bitingly slow rate of fire it can be utterly devastating at long range and, if you load up grape shot, can make minced meat out of broken or tired enemy formations.
Click for larger imageHow you use these various units, where you place them and how they cover each other is the key to winning battles in Cossacks 2: Battle for Europe. Although artillery is stupidly powerful at range and pint blank, these units are pretty much defenceless. Similarly, an infantry unit that has no artillery or cavalry support is going to get butchered. Then again, sweeping in with the cavalry is all well and good and is the stuff that legends are made of. But the most famous cavalry story is that of the Charge of the Light Brigade, which serves as a gruesome reminder of what happens when cavalry is sent in unsupported…
So, to avoid it being Pedigree Chum time for your cavalry and to keep the morale of your troops high enough to make them an effective fighting force, you need to get your units working in concert with each other. The mechanism for doing this is simple enough, as a right click on a unit will allow you to select a wealth of options, covering everything from their movement through to which direction they should face and in what formation you want them to be.
Click for larger imageActually, now I think of it, telling a unit which way to face appears to be one of the most bone-headed commands in an RTS ever. I mean, do you really think that if you were foot soldier in the Napoleonic Wars you’d be a bit confused as to which way to face? My money would pretty much always be on looking in the direction of the bloody great army on the other side of the valley… But that said, there’s been several times when I did actually want a unit to look one particular direction. This was most usually when I was planning a complicated two pronged attack and needed units to defend an area I expected the enemy to withdraw towards.
Overall, the usual AI glitches of poor pathfinding and illogical enemy tactics appear to have been beaten in Cossacks 2: Battle for Europe. Because you’re working with units that represent several hundred individuals, you don’t tend to try and get them to manoeuvre in tight, enclosed areas. If you do find yourself in a bottleneck situation you’d better sort it sharpish before the enemy brings the guns to bear and wipes out half your army.