Combat has some uniqueness to it in Cossacks: European Wars with a greater focus on formation tactics than similar strategy titles. When your economy is stable though you’ll be able to invest the excess into developing your army of units to achieve your overall objective that generally requires you to overrun an enemy. Running out of food for example will cause a famine in your civilisation with dire results as your units die from starvation with a lack of coal and iron preventing your ranged units from firing their weapons and running out of gold will cause a mutiny of your military forces and leave your vulnerable to civil war or enemy attack.
Having a stockpile of your resources is particularly important in Cossacks: European Wars since there are penalties for not carefully managing them. Uses of each resource are as you would expect with wood used primarily for construction and upgrades, stone for defensive structures, food for unit creation and gold, iron or coal for advanced units. Underpinning your strategy is the six different resources used in Cossacks: European Wars with food, wood, gold, iron, coal and stone which are collected throughout the game world from various resource node sources by your peasants who serve as the workhouse units of your selected nation. Regardless of how you prefer to play your strategy games Cossacks: European Wars includes all the necessary foundations you’ll need as you fight wars, battle economic growth and construct a range of buildings to grow your settlement with historical accuracy. Like most strategy games Cossacks adopts a formula that offers you a large amount of campaign content through 5 separate base campaign stories but also allows players to challenge themselves with a large list of random maps that offer customisable settings. Expanded with several expansion packs all of these were made available in on collection marketed as the Cossacks Anthology. With over a dozen nations that bring their own uniqueness the strategy elements of this first game in the Cossacks franchise offers a wealth of tactical options.
Cossacks: European Wars is a real time strategy (RTS) game developed for Windows and released in 2001 that explores the European 17th and 18th eras and draws inspiration from the popular strategy titles of the day.