"Cossacks? What fun is there in playing a 17th/18th century tech RTS? It's definately not a battle for dune, nor is it anywhere close to Red Alert! It doesn't have fancy sounds or 3D graphics, but it sure does have one helluva good AI player!

The difficulty levels vary tremendously - the "hard" and "very hard" levels present a good challenge for veteren RTS gamers. Most RTS games vary difficulty by making the AI send more units or by giving them an advantage (i.e. faster, weapons do more damage, more $$$, etc); the AI in cossacks reacts according to the player's troop movements, strength, and positions itself to defeat the player's military strategy. It does send more troops... and it uses them in combniation - that's hard to beat! The only "unrealistic" aspect of the AI is that the player can bait a whole mass of AI troops (say 100++) with a handful of tactically useless troops.

It builds up slow - not like RA2 or AOE2, so younger players might find it a little tiresome spending a good 10 minutes micro-managing economy/production before the serious action starts. The key to having a better game actually occurs during that 10 minute "Prep-phase". Players will find out what that means after a while; you can't defend everywhere and everything all the time, so knowing what can or cannot be sacrificed makes all the difference!

To enjoy the game the player will have to know a little bit of military strategies or at least patience enough to learn. Or s/he just might discover the fact that this game does not really have a unit limit... my last battle involved more than a 600 troops on each side. It lasted less than a minute. Go figure!" - jimbo