Profile of squippy

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 don't understand why there aren't more narrow but wide maps in the pool. There's no tactical advantage or gameplay reason to keep scaling up both dimensions of the map, it just makes retreats take longer and waste time. And Redball is bad, breaking the map into narrow lanes with no interaction with one-another for flanking was just asking for MG lockdowns.

There is actually a credible reason for doing this. A map that was very wide would have a tendency to turn into a long thin engagement which each player against their opposite number, and a player on one wing would struggle to help an ally on the other. Building the map with depth allows the battle to have a discernible forward and rear. It lets a rhythm develop where allies spell each other holding the front, and generally offers them more opportunity to synergise and interact; one might use a semi-defunct light vehicle in the late game to guard an ally's artillery, for example.

Redball is very similar to a 3v3 lane map that came with Dawn of War, and I think it was intended to be so. The laning is different there than in CoH and CoH2 because of the destructability of terrain, but it's still a particular style of play that not everyone likes. And seeing as it is aimed so specifically at 3v3, it might not be appropriate for 4v4 at all.

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.

Exactly. There is little so dispiriting as putting a lot of energy into a project and never get any feedback. It is teh suck.

But for that same reason, I don't want to just spam stuff for people who may not be active or interested any more; hence my effort to tempt them out. But we'll see; maybe I'll look at those too.

Well, inasmuch as modern jousting is a recreation of medieval jousting, it was not mainly combat so much as a combat sport. So even historically, the lances were designed to shatter, a dramatisation of the kind of thing that might happen in a real battle. But both then and now, this is still a full contact sport, and so injuries happen, like american football or rugby, at least.

Not sure this is an actual injury, but here is some footage from Leeds Armouries which happens to show someone taking a bad strike: