Cossacks 3

Great game 10/10. Was 1v1s until the wee hours yesterday.

Well, I've seen a good bit of footage, and played a bit. And wow, it really is Cossacks 1 in 3D, if there are any differences at all none of them jumped out at me. You don't even get a visual indicator if you control group a unit selection.

It certainly does bring back the unique feeling that C1 created; nothing else is quite like it. But that is also its weakness, as now it is quite dated. The designers did say though that if they got feedback to the effect of reproducing some of the elements of Cossacks 2, that could be done in this engine, so it might change quite significantly in future.

This is a real strategy gamer's game though; at least as much about wrangling peasants as commanding units. You can go a good 10+ minutes in without encountering any violence, not even harsh language. Which is fine by me, but I'm the sort of person who nearly came after discovering the utility of traffic circles in Tropico. But it's not going to suit everyone.

All in all, I think it holds up pretty well, and it will be interesting to see where it goes.

I'm going to be streaming Cossacks 3 tomorrow and i've never played any of the games before. If anyone could stop by the channel and give me some quick start up tips i'd appreciate that

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Myself and Fortune have been playing this quite alot. Its alot of fun, we're getting pretty good at it, although it is a little buggy atm and some factions are just insanely good

I'm going to be streaming Cossacks 3 tomorrow and i've never played any of the games before. If anyone could stop by the channel and give me some quick start up tips i'd appreciate that

Lots of food, first upgrade on the mill, get a 2nd town center ASAP and just spam workers onto wood/stone. Pretty much the typical start up for all factions....

Oh and make sure you protect your shit with troops, otherwise enemies can just walk in and capture everything.

I'm going to be streaming Cossacks 3 tomorrow and i've never played any of the games before. If anyone could stop by the channel and give me some quick start up tips i'd appreciate that

Make a Market and trade all coal and most gold for food in the beggining to spam workers faster.

I will try to be there What time do you start?

PS
If you are new to this and you don't want to get rekt by stranger right away in 10mins (kinda pointless ), I can go for some epic, low pace 1v1 battle

Make a Market and trade all coal and most gold for food in the beggining to spam workers faster.

I will try to be there What time do you start?

Quicker and cheaper to just get the mill upgrade, then with 5 workers on the field you can spam constantly

Quicker and cheaper to just get the mill upgrade, then with 5 workers on the field you can spam constantly

but you still have 800gold and 1000 coal which are unused

(Tho I hate any manipulation of resoursec and I think markets should be removed)

Yeah you guys will need to explain this all to me It just looked like AoE to me which i'm cool with but some basic teching idea would be lovely.

I have to say on a first glance of other people streaming it I think it looks a bit messy and crowded.

That really is part of the charm. It actually exploits the difficulty of micro; you can band select like 100 pikemen, and move them, but if you also make an officer and a drummer, then you can organise them into a squad that can be selected and ordered as a whole. Unless the drummer and officer get killed, in which case they turn back into a mob that is hard to control.

I was never into AoE so I don't know what is similar and what is not. But what they are referring to above is the importance of production upgrades, and production in general. Specifically, the mill at the centre of your wheat field has an important efficiency upgrade; there are more upgrades to be bought at a structure usually called the Academy.

You;ll be producing units continuously, and therefore have to produce continuously; hence, maximising production efficiency is a significant factor in victory. While just about the worst thing that happen to you is that the enemy breaks through with a squadron of light cav and butchers all your peasants in the field; you might never recover from that, even if you drive them off.

but you still have 800gold and 1000 coal which are unused

(Tho I hate any manipulation of resoursec and I think markets should be removed)

Better to save as much gold as u can for research and upgrades.

If you do it right, as soon as ur mill produces a field of harvest you can just loop build peasants from 2 town center's and not have to worry about it.

Yeah you guys will need to explain this all to me It just looked like AoE to me which i'm cool with but some basic teching idea would be lovely.

I have to say on a first glance of other people streaming it I think it looks a bit messy and crowded.

Fancy playing with me and Fortune sometime?

Ohh, look at this from yesterday's patch notes:

"1. Increased maximum number of units from 10 000 to 16 000. "

Sixteen thousand units; even if you assume that's most appropriate for an 8-player game, that's still 2000 units each.

Now the smallest squad you can make with an officer and drummer is 36 units; the next size up is 72, then 120, then 196. I've seen someone mention 400 units in a squad, and I don't know what the max squad size is.

Even if the max were about 200, and all the 2000 units per player were military, that would give about 10 formations to control, which is comparable to CoH2. If you add up several line infantry, a couple of crew weapons, some light vehicles and a few tanks, you're looking at about 10 discreet things to give orders, give or take.

This said, for a pop of 2000 at least 200 of those are going to have to be peasants, and quite probably more like 500. On the other hand I think it would be astonishingly rare to see all 8 players in a game survive to the point they had populations measured in thousands, and ultimately of course it must come to a "there can be only one" moment in which the entire available pop would be split between two.

But I have never seen a game reach that size, and I doubt that many, if any, others have either. The potential scope of the game is far beyond what it is presently being used for; in a sense you could say that while an RTS, it's also a military strategy and tactics sandbox, almost a military Minecraft, if you will.

Because alongside all the things you can do with formations and unit types and stances, you can also build fortifications, in the form of wooden palisades, stone walls, and gun towers. Palisades are cheap and quick, and you could throw up a veritable Japanese castle of defensive courtyards in fairly short order.

There is an immense potential here for fascinating gameplay to emerge if the game takes off and develops a large player base. Or, it could just flop, again, and the potential be wasted.

There are definitely ways it could be improved in terms of it's 16 year old design. For example, I know the engine is fully 3D and the camera can rotate, because they showed that in trailers, but you can't rotate it in the game because that's not how Cossacks 1 worked. Their dedication to reproducing the C1 experience is certainly thorough, and one might even say wise, because it wasn't broke so they didn't fix it. But user interface in the broadest sense definitely would benefit from being completely overhauled and modernised.

I'm frankly surprised it works as well as it does even without such refinements, and perfectly pleased to see it brought back for another go at the gold ring. With the modern state of Twitch and youtube, word both of the game, and of the tactics used in the game, have the chance to disseminate more widely, and I hope it does. The scope the game offers will only be truly fulfilled if it can attract a mass audience to make the most of its sandboxy qualities.

Having written all that, I might as will go throw in a general description of how it plays for Stormless and others.


We can at least use CoH2 as a reference point, and this is how the two games differ: CoH2 is a game in which you produce units occasionally and deliberately, and preserve them while using them. Cossacks is a game about continuously producing a mass of military power, and then using command and control to turn that quantity into quality.

You start the game with nothing but 18 peasants, and you will use them to build a mill, which will spawn farm plots around itself when complete, and a town hall, which you will immediately order to produce peasants continually. Peasants need to collect wood and stone so you can produce buildings, when the crops grow you will need to send peasants to harvest them, and they also need to go down mines and dig for metals and coal. The metals are used to buy upgrades and build units, and coal is also used (along with iron) when your gunpowder units, cannons and towers fire. You need a lot of peasants, and so most people build a second town hall as soon as they can, and continue to build more as the game goes one.

The next thing of importance that you need is a barracks, but to get that you have to build a blacksmith. (Apart from being a gateway here, the other thing a blacksmith does is offer upgrades.) Once you have a barracks you set it to building units, probably pikemen, continuously. You can set a handful of your pikemen into a guard mode to protect your buildings, which is worth doing in case you get suddenly raided.

The next thing you must have is an Academy (I'm using the Western nations army roster, btw, as they are all the same. The other cultural groups have quirks), because without one you cannot produce officers and drummers from your barracks. Then you are going to want another barracks, because the most basic measure of power between players is the sheer number of unit producing buildings they have both up and running.

At this point a lot of people start sending out individual pikemen to form a picket line into the FOW; they may also send pikemen to the likely sites of enemy bases to scout. Pikemen are used for this because they are so quick to produce that they are expendable. There is no veterancy or anything like that; individual units are cheap and disposable.

You should also now have amassed a body of units, and may have branched out into producing musketeers, and may also have built a stables. At this point you can martial your units, as described previously, and send them out probing for hostile contact. You will also buy upgrades in lots of places; your mines can be upgraded to increase production, notably. Also you can buy unit upgrades in the barracks, and universal faction-wide upgrades in the Academy and Blacksmith.

There is an important factor in these upgrades which is critical for understanding the military tech dynamic in the game. The upgrades you can buy for musketeers, and for "firepower" more generally, steadily shift the balance of power between unit types as the game progresses. In the early game, all you need is pikemen. Your most dangerous threat is that a handful of light cavalry might raid your base, and pikemen can deal with cavalry. Pikemen can also straight up defeat musketeers, simply walk up to them and disperse them. Musketeers and cavalry are still worth having as force multipliers, but if you can put together a block of 120 pikemen, you pose a very serious threat to any opponent against which you choose to direct them.

However, because musketeers benefit from universal upgrades, they steadily shoot faster and hit harder, so that by the lategame even fast cavalry will have trouble approaching them from the front, and they can confidently walk straight into a pike block while gunning it down. So as the game goes on you have to manage the transition from pikes to muskets, with artillery and sundry thrown in for good measure. But musketeers take a good 4 or 5 times as long to build as pikemen, and they cost gold to boot, which is the rarest resource.

Cavalry have their own interleaved dynamic going on. There are three types of cav, light like hussars and cossacks, heavy like ritters and cuirasiers, and ranged like dragoons. These have a lovely rock/paper/scissors relationship to them: light can run away from heavy, and catch ranged, but will be defeated if heavy can close; heavy could also kill ranged if it can close, but ranged can kite. Cavalry can also form innate formations at 40 and 90 and maybe more; they are all good against musketeers in the early game, and OK against them in the late game as long as they don't have to ride straight into the teeth of the guns. Like infantry, different cav types take different times to produce, and you can have more lights than heavies than ranged.

On top of this, you can also put up a diplomatic centre and hire mercenaries, which are notable in offering a couple of types of infantry with anti-building attacks, which can be useful if you don't have cannons, and light cav to be used opportunistically.

You can then eventually upgrade to the C18th, which allows you to build a new type of barracks which produces new infantry, to produce new cavalry from your old stables, and to buy upgrades that were previously locked out. A notable feature too is the Montgolfier balloon: if you buy this upgrade, the fog of war is completely removed and you gain perfect information. Needless to say that is a major change to the play of the game there.

Anyway, I hope that helps anyone interested understand the general dynamic of gameplay, and I welcome anyone who wants to add anything or correct me.

Edit: Oh there is one other important thing I neglected to mention. As I indicated, the basic measure of power is the number of unit producing buildings. But each additional copy of a building costs more, sometimes significantly more. So for the barracks, the first costs something so cheap I don't actually know what it is, but the second is bottle-necked by requiring 3000 gold, and again, gold is the rarest resource. The third barracks takes 30,000 gold, so you won't be getting it in a hurry. A player with two barracks can comfortably knock about a player with one, a player with 3 likewise to one with 2, etc, all other things being equal.

I was a HUGE fan of the original Cossacks: European Wars, but I've heard from gaming magazines and people playing it that this remake has many bugs so far, even more bugs than the original from 2000 and that pathing and the AI is very horrible

Is that true?

There have been several patches to deal with bugs. I've one crash myself. Otherwise, it feels exactly like the original did. As for AI, well, I think a lot of people have excessive expectations.

Seen more reports since of people having significant difficulty with multiplayer, but whatever it is is not ffecting everyone.

Seen more reports since of people having significant difficulty with multiplayer, but whatever it is is not ffecting everyone.

We've had some experiences with crashing on it quite alot. But its not that bad... for a $20 game in alpha its more stable than Coh2


I think the main issue for me is faction balance. Ukraine is insanely powerful... And Turkey/Algeria cannot keep up late game when 18th cent hits. Starting to get abit stale playing as some of these for them reasons.

Havent got any crash yet

I love this game!!

It is really good, it has its balance issues, some countries are just wayyyy too powerful in the late game (Prussia and Ukraine).

But it is well worth a try, and the game makers are really on the ball with patching and fixing things...

Unlike some others i could mention.... Cough lelic cough.