You are Adam Smith just before there was Adam Smith, dividing labour, hurling coal on the fires of early, Polish industry.
This is a game about the joy of discovering, by miraculous inception, that giving people different tasks to specialise in is better than just having everyone do everything.
It's about the spirit of the age: blasting a musket! Spending several minutes stuffing it with gunpowder in the middle of a battle! Standing in a square for no reason! It is not about hard science, like your Starcrafts and you what-have-you, because we'd barely got to that yet. This is a game set in the early 1700s! At the latest! This is the age of modes and monads and cutting people up to find out where God put the soul. It's organising, farming, researching, producing. The fun of these games and the point of them is teching. Sending a wave of villagers to go attack someone else's villagers to knock them off production targets by seven seconds or something. Whisper it, but I think rushes are rubbish. The genius of Cossacks, to me, was its ability to completely transcend all that normal stuff you're supposed to do in RTS games. Hours and hours I spent, plugging in cheat codes - do not judge me, I was nine - so I could churn out endless waves of pointy little automatons and lay them out in different shapes. They should have called it Geometry Wars. Cossacks was unique in the sheer extent of ridiculously, ludicrously impractical formations you could put this infinite swathe of little men into. Indulge me for a moment here, but there is a divine pleasure to be had in organising RTS units. And yet it had the most sublime means of organising them. Cossacks, as I remember it, had no limit on unit numbers, which was a pretty big deal for the age of Age of Empires. My gateway drug to the RTS, only the drug is LSD.
I love Cossacks - specifically Cossacks: European Wars, because it's the only one I played - for that very reason.
A very specific, Eastern European, mounted, sort of cross-era renaissance man of a soldier, at once barbaric and civilised, ordered and chaotic. You can catch up with all of our Double-A Team pieces in our handy, spangly archive.Ĭossacks! What an odd choice of infantry unit to build a game around. The Double-A Team is a feature series honouring the unpretentious, mid-budget, gimmicky commercial action games that no-one seems to make any more.
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