Cossacks II but good.
The game fills a very interesting and very tiny niche of basically being Company of Heroes 2 in gunpowder warfare, which isn't exactly its goal - it was built out of a series that was an Age of Empires clone - but is what it is functionally. You fight mostly over capture points and engage in semi-realistic (not simulationist) tactical battles that are meant to evoke the feeling and concepts of gunpowder warfare. Same as how Company of Heroes isn't Command and Conquer but it isn't Steel Division, this isn't Age of Empires III but it isn't Empire: Total War.
The problem with it is that it has some design decisions that are just awful. It feels like every game begins with the enemy immediately rushing the player's base, singlemindedly, and the morale and resource mechanics are so tight, so punishing, that you can win or lose the opening round on a single salvo. Literally. They break your formation, you have nothing to do, and yet they can't actually destroy your base either until they're much further in the game.
I think part of it may be taking away the Cossacks sacred cow of maintenance costs on units. They really don't add anything, not in a meaningful way. I guess the difference between Cossacks and CoH may be that CoH has a lot more units that are expected to die, so you have a hole to throw resources down. You should never lose a tank, but you WILL lose tanks. In Cossacks, defeated units just go into a full rout back to the base. The game also ties all of your resources, all of your warmaking capabilities, to villages. So if you get penned up, you're just done.
I'm inclined to think of it as being framed around a design philosophy like CoH where everybody gets symmetrical amounts of the core unit-making resource (Manpower), but units do sometimes require other resources, which frames it as a matter of how you expend a very precious resource that basically unlocks "actually good units." In CoH this is just Fuel (what percent of your deployed force can be armor) and Munitions (special abilities), while in Cossacks' era I'd basically just suggest having Horses as another one to portray cavalry. For some reason (pure balance?) it likes to use Wood with them. Basically, should be:
Coal: Essentially, "shooty" units: grenadiers, artillery and light infantry
Iron: Armored heavy cavalry (like cuirassiers), melee infantry perhaps, artillery, perhaps fortifications (kind of just abstract stone and metal together)
Wood: Construction, artillery and baggage potentially
Horses: Cavalry and baggage
Gold: If necessary at all, progression, elite units, abilities and such; however, I feel like it's pretty much unnecessary
And the base building could be simplified. Frankly, nobody likes it in Cossacks II anyhow. The Soviets, for example, have four buildings to construct beyond the basic bitch "just infantry" building, corresponding to support weapons, riflemen and scout types, shit-ass light armor and then heavy armor. A basic progression could go something like:
- Building for elite infantry (light infantry, grenadiers)
- Building for cavalry (hussars, cuirassiers, dragoons)
- Building for artillery
- Building for support? Nothing? Just leave three buildings?
And RTS or not, the manual ordering of fire is aids. I'd rather have at least a toggle for independent fire and then maybe some toggles for automated volleys (like "hold the third volley until they're in your red zone," or staggered automated volley fire on anything within green). Something where the unit can at least survive. This is debatable, though, people that are serious about Cossacks just get used to it and seem to consider the micromanagement a core part of the game.
