Little men scurry about convincingly, trees flutter in the wind, but the best thing has to be the explosions. Even my increasingly decrepit P3/450 can run things smoothly at a relatively high 1024x768. The graphics, as with so many games of this genre, are pretty impressive. Get the formation right and you'll walk it, get it wrong and you'll be absolutely murdered. Likewise the formation of troops is also important as you get certain combat bonuses to attack and defence, which can make an incredible difference. Sending Pikemen to assault a tower would be suicide, but if you were to send in some howitzers and back them up with one or two grenadiers you'd be in with a fighting chance. Getting the right troops in the right formation against right opponents is critical. The reason for this is because the combat has a great amount of depth and if you play a lot of multiplayer, you're guaranteed to be playing Cossacks for a long, long time. Combat is also surprisingly frantic and for all my berating of the duller turn-based games, I can't help but feel that Cossacks would benefit greatly from a Baldur's Gate style pause system where you can halt the action but still issue orders. This can be a bit irksome when you've almost beaten that dirty great battalion of musketeers and your troops are suddenly shooting empty barrels because you forgot to take a trip to the market. If you're unfortunate enough run out of iron and coal, your units will run out of ammunition and won't be able to fight the enemy. The resources also have a direct effect on combat. Thus the strategic importance of any resource drops to virtually nothing. If the enemy takes your coal mine, all you have to do is move the workers onto another resource and trade for coal from the marketplace. The ability to trade for any resources that you need means you don't have to worry about guarding any one specific resource. There is a downside to this that isn't all that apparent in the single player game. Got loads of coal but no food? Trade that, too. Got a huge pile of timber but no iron? Trade it. This is where the market comes in handy, as it allows you to trade one resource for another. The only gold mine, for example, might be deep in enemy territory and it's virtually impossible to mount a decent assault without a healthy gold reserve. As far as extracting resources is concerned, the two games are identical save for a few very minor differences, such as not being able to mine stone and quarry it or rear pigs for food.Ĭossacks does include a marketplace, however, since it's not always possible to get the goods you need. By now, some of you will be thinking all this sounds a little familiar - ahem, Settlers. Iron, coal and gold need to be mined, stone is quarried, and wood, believe it or not, grows on trees which you will need to chop down. You can get food by building a mill and telling some peasant folk to start farming or by building some fishing boats. Wood and stone are used for building the various structures your town will need, iron and coal keep your military units in ammo, gold is useful for just about everything and food stops your people from starving to death - handy that. Obviously, to do this you need to gather resources. Your objectives vary from mission to mission, but usually go something along the lines of build a base, establish a decent economy and kick foreign ass. You are an esteemed military commander from whatever European power the campaign features. Fortunately (for me), Cossacks is an example of the latter type of historical strategy. Granted, neither of these games are anything like the relatively fast-paced rompings of the likes of Red Alert or Ground Control, but they are significantly less banal. You can build a cannon in your artillery depot.Mention the words 'historical strategy' to many people and if they don't get away in time to "stop their granny eating the cat" or some such excuse, they'll fall asleep faster than if you placed a chloroform-soaked rag over their mouth it's a weapon so effective it could be used to stop advancing armies.īut it's also a phrase that's often misleading because while it can conjure up images of the anorak-wearing population spending day after day calculating action points and firing modes, it also covers the likes of the fiendishly addictive Age of Empires and the Settlers series. When shooting, a cannon requires a substantial amount of coal and iron. Unguarded cannon may be captured by the enemy. If you run out of gold, your cannon will stop shooting. In closer combat, they can hit cavalry and infantry with grapeshot. Cannon can fire cannonballs at medium and long ranges. It is effective against enemy buildings, fortifications and ships.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |