Cossacks II: Napoleonic Wars

aka: Cossacks II: Napoleonské války, Kasakad II: Napoleoni sõjad, Kozacy II: Wojny Napoleońskie
Moby ID: 18267
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Description

The sequel to Cossacks, Cossacks 2: Napoleonic Wars is set in the 18th–19th century and involves Europe and parts of Africa. Surprisingly it has little to do with Napoleon. You can play as six nations, all of which have their own units and available tactics (the British can use congreve rockets, the Egyptians can use Taureg mercenaries, etc). There are over 140 different unit types available.

Some of the changes from the original Cossacks are that the economic and empire-building parts of the game have been de-emphasised and combat is given a higher priority. Also, there's the inclusion of factors such as morale and fatigue. If your troops are exhausted and you force them to fight a battle, they'll have weak morale and will probably break ranks and run after suffering a few casualties. Terrain also has a big impact, trees will shield your men against bullets and shrapnel and if your men are firing from a hill they'll receive an attack bonus.

There's a campaign mode, a series of pre-set battles, a Conquer Europe mode, and the traditional start-from-scratch mode in the original Cossacks.

Spellings

  • Казаки II: Наполеоновские войны - Russian spelling
  • 哥萨克II:拿破仑战争 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

124 People (105 developers, 19 thanks) · View all

CEO
Producer
Project Leader/Manager
COO
Lead Programmer
Programmers
Programmer "Battle for Europe"
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Game Designer Assistant
Lead QA Testers
Lead Mission Designer
Mission Designers
[ full credits ]

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Critics

Average score: 73% (based on 26 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 7 ratings with 1 reviews)

The game that killed the franchise

The Good
Cossacks 2 is the sequel to a multi-award-winning game that sold over a million copies. Those are big shoes to fill for any developer. To GSC's credit they decided against rehashing their previous game and did something radically new and different. Did they succeed? Not really, but the game has its share of good aspects.

I guess you could call Cossacks 2: Napoleonic Wars a warfare simulation, albeit a lightweight one. Set during the era of Napoleon, you can play as several states (France, Great Britain, etc) and relive the epic battles of history with thousands of soldiers. That's pretty much where any resemblance to the original ends. Remember that Cossacks was part war game and part empire sim. Here in Cossacks 2 economic and empire-managing aspects have been downplayed almost to the point of non-existence and strategy and tactics take centre stage. You won't be worrying about maintaining your city's walls or what technology to research next at the university. You'll be worrying about how to protect your army's flanks and ensure you have open supply lines.

The game is very realistic, and models factors like morale, fatigue, leadership, experience, terrain etc, etc; all of which play a vital role in your campaign. It doesn't exactly take realism to Total War levels but it's much less of an arcade RTS and much more like a hardcore war game than its prequel ever aspired to be.

The game lets you control 16,000 soldiers at a time, and Cossacks 2 hosts some of the biggest and bloodiest battles this side of a Total War game. Combat has been completely revamped, and is now much more interesting than just producing hundreds of soldiers and flooding them at the enemy. You can group soldiers into formations, something you could do as a novelty in the original Cossacks but has now been turned into an essential part of gameplay. Formations have a fixed amount of morale, and if it bottoms out they run away and you can't control those soldiers anymore. Things like a skilled officer and good equipment increase their morale. Things like heavy casualties and a bad strategic position decrease it. Soldiers need rest and if you march them for too long it leeches away their morale. A clever idea by the designers is that soldiers traveling on roads don't suffer from fatigue, and therefore most of the battles are for control of the major road networks, just like in real life warfare. This is all stuff we've seen before in other games, but compared to its predecessor (where winning a game means killing everything that moves) Cossacks 2 seems like the pinnacle of depth and sophistication.

Probably the game's most successful aspect is how it merges those complicated gameplay features with a simple and intuitive user-interface, making the game very easy to play. Formations, the level of aggressiveness your soldiers have, everything is right at your fingertips on the screen. As per RTS requirements these days there's a learning campaign that teaches you how to play, and it's also quite good.

Just about all the problems in the original have been fixed (or at least alleviated) in Cossacks 2. You can choose what type of weaponry your troops use so you no longer have grenadiers attacking with bayonets when you want them to attack with muskets. You no longer have to build hundreds of houses all over the map so you have population space to build an army. Once your men start attacking you can call them back at any time. You are warned in advance if you're running out of food or ammo, something that saves a lot of frustration.

There are quite a few gameplay modes available, including random map mode, skirmish, and campaign mode. And for those who find the game a bit too cerebral there's an arcade mode that removes all the advanced strategic options, making the game much more like the original Cossacks.

The game also ships with one of the coolest concepts in a recent strategy game. You can log on to the internet and participate in the "Battle for Europe" mode, which is kind of like an MMO and board game combined. You and thousands of other players fight for control of a global Europe (it's divided into territories) through hundreds upon hundreds of Cossacks 2 matches. You can invade or reinforce territories, trade with your neighbors, bully weaker states into surrendering, and generally go through the whole "Realpolitik" thing Europe is known for. Cossacks 2 doesn't exactly take this idea and run with it (it contains a bare minimum of features, and hasn't been well supported according to various user complaints), but hopefully the idea will be developed more fully in another game.

The game still keeps the pseudo-3D graphics engine of its prequel (a 3D landscape and 2D sprites) and with a new set of Direct9.0 pixel shader effects looks spectacular. Performance-wise the game leaves a lot to be desired (addressed below) but the game's artwork is truly outstanding, with elaborate watercolor paintings serving as the backdrop for load screens (no doubt any number of professional artists were enlisted to help make this game) and various video clips that play during gameplay help heighten the authenticity.

However...

The Bad
Despite grand intentions Cossacks 2 is an outdated, boring exercise in confusion. I have no idea what went on during the game's development period, but it honestly feels like it was thrown back and forth between several development houses, all of whom had different ideas of what the game should be. The result is a bipolar mess that ultimately fails to be fun.

Combat, while fun up to a point, is also marred by design decisions bordering idiocy. Cavalry units are ridiculously overpowered; foot soldiers are almost redundant once your economy is able to afford those 100mph tanks. Soldiers travelling on roads don't suffer from fatigue. While this is not a bad decision in itself, it also means you can simply stick masses of defense towers and picket fortresses along all the roads leading to your town. No one will ever attack you unless they want to lose half their army. This is a problem found everywhere in the game, there is no way to realistically counter defense buildings. Battles will often turn into a stalemate with both sides facing each other across a river (which no-one will want to cross, since soldiers lose morale when fighting in water), building crap all along their respective sides of the No Man's Land. It's so much like trench warfare you seriously wonder what war GSC is trying to recreate here.

And other than combat, there's really nothing at all to Cossacks 2. It's a very substanceless game, especially in comparison to its prequel. Just run the numbers: Cossacks had 21 playable civilizations, Cossacks 2 has 5. Cossacks shipped with 100 single-player maps out of the box. Cossacks 2 has 10. Cossacks had 200 technologies, units and buildings. Cossacks 2 has about 50. Not that I'm implying quantity has anything to do with quality, but there's a decent amount of the old "they took x years to give us less?" feeling floating around while playing Cossacks 2. Also puzzling is the omission of naval combat. If the British hadn't won the battle of Trafalgar, all of Europe might well be speaking French today, but in Cossacks 2 ships are nothing more than eye-candy.

It seems the game was built around the new strategic system, and everything else was thrown together as an afterthought. The single-player campaign sucks and blows, it's just an overlong series of build-and-destroy missions held together by the world's most retarded storyline (a Horatio Nelson wannabe who has to save London from the invading French...I'm not kidding, the developers actually passed up all the intrigue and excitement of the Napoleonic war for a fictional plot.) and the collection of single-player maps are all designed in the same spirit of laziness and disinterest.

...But all of this assumes you can even play the game. Go look on any Cossacks 2 forum out there and you'll find endless complaints about crashes, lock-ups, bugs, terminally slow frame rates, etc. I was surprised actually, because GSC has always produced solid games in the past. They've released two patches that fix the worst of the problems but you'll still have to deal with serious lag on all but the smallest map sizes.

The Bottom Line
As a fan of the original I really wanted to like Cossacks 2. But as the game progressed seemingly small (and then not so small) problems piled on top of each other, ruining the experience, until I lost patience and threw in the towel. The tactical side of the game is reasonably well put together, but just about everything else about Cossacks 2 sucks. In a market dominated by games like Rome: Total War and Imperial Glory, Cossacks 2 just doesn't cut it.

Windows · by Maw (833) · 2007

Trivia

Historic anniversary

2005 is the 200th anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar, which is regarded by many historians as the turning point of the Napoleonic Wars. Fitting, eh?

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Maw.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, JRK, tarmo888, Aubustou, Stratege, Patrick Bregger.

Game added July 2, 2005. Last modified March 7, 2024.