Cossacks II: Napoleonic Wars

In Battle for Europe mode, 6 nations are playable: France, Russia, Prussia, Austria, Egypt, and Great Britain. With one of these, players attempt to conquer Europe. The 2006 expansion, Cossacks 2: Battle for Europe, also includes Spain, the Duchy of Warsaw and the Confederation of the Rhine.

Players have a single army to command, which can be ordered across Europe on a turn-based scale. Battles are fought in real time. Over time, player experience improves, depending on the number of battles fought. As promotions are earned, more units become available, and better ones may be unlocked. At first, only infantry can be used, then light infantry, engineers, and cavalry are allowed, followed by artillery, and finally elite infantry and cavalry.

In Skirmish mode, a map is chosen, and a fight begins in a Real-Time environment, reminiscent of Age of Empires II. The human player begins by choosing a country with which to play, and then attempts to defeat the computer player's nation, by trying to capture all of the villages on the map, or by destroying all of the enemy's town centers. To capture a village, one, sometimes two, group(s) of thirty militiamen must be destroyed.

In order to capture it, a group of men must be moved near the center of the village. Each village can collect one of the four resources: coal, iron, gold, and food. Peasants, or serfs, can collect wood and stone, which are stored in storehouses. Two extra map packs, one with three extra maps for skirmish mode, and one for historical battles, have been released for free download at the Cossacks II official website.

In the historical battles mode, a variety of historical battles may be fought. They are predesigned, which means no new units may be trained. A couple of the battles playable are the Battle of Austerlitz, and the Battle of Ulm.

There is also a map editor by holding 'Ctrl' and clicking on the main menu, where players can create and edit their own maps. Cossacks II also includes a gameplay mode called Battle for Europe in which your orders are to capture everything on the vast map of Europe that range from major cities, such as Moscow, Paris, and London, to smaller provinces such as Nantes and Toulouse that you must capture in order to gain experience. This in turn gives you access to more squads and more elite infantry to be able to capture the capital cities.

You can move up in rank and experience levels every time you win some battles or skirmishes in this mode. For example, when you first start the game, you are a 1st Lieutenant. If on your first skirmish you gain a victory, when you get to the battle report menu, it will tell you how much experience you gained and when you get past that there will be promotion and rewards messages and you are likely to become a captain, etc.

In multiplayer mode, players can play a skirmish battle over the internet.

Multiplayer games have to set up through a VPC (virtual private network) such as LogMeIn Hamachi. After connecting to a player made server a player may join another players server. However, many bugs can be experienced while playing like this. It also important to note that if you use the required patch for the Steam version (for it to even launch properly) you won't be able to play the multiplayer at all.