Cossacks: European Wars is a historical real-time strategy based on events of the 16th through the 18th centuries in Europe, when nations and states were created and demolished, and wars shed seas of blood.
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Not sure if anyone can help me here (or if this is the right forum to ask in) but thought I would try!I recently bought Cossacks: Emperor's Edition, which contains European Wars, the addon Back To Wars and Cossacks 2: Battle For Europe. The problem I have is that I can't run European Wars, when I try I get an error message saying:dmcr.exe has encountered a problem and needs to be close.I tried google it but any answers I found was to no help. I also sent in a support ticket to the company that made the game (CDV) and they replied with this.' It seems the driver for the Geforce 8 videocards is the source of the problem. As far as I know there're also other games affected. I hope that Nvidia will provide a solution or updated videocard driver soon.'
Now that surprised me since I thought that an old game would work fine on a new graphic card?!? The Cossacks 2 works just fine, which don't really helps me since I want to play the 1st on first.So, I was wondering if anyone here might have any solutions? I have updated my graphic card to the latest drivers, with no luck.
Is it really the case that one just have to wait for nVidia to get their thumb out and make the drivers compatible? My specs is in my sig and if there is anyone else here that plays Cossacks and has similar specs and runs XP SP2 on their rig, could you please let me know what you did to make it work, since I can't get it to work on my rig!CheersTom. Have you tried back to war? It includes everything from EW & art of war except the campaigns and has a bit more features, nations, etc.Back to War also is a standalone from European wars ( unlike art of war wich needed EW to work) so it migth work when EW doesn't.All I can say is European wars, art of war expansion and back to war all work fine on a geforce 6800GS here on the newest 164.something drivers.Cossacks 2 worked okay ages ago too, but I quickly removed it as imo it's poor compared to the original 3.Perhaps try the win98 compatibility mode?And ehhh, is the game patched? What the hell, I've played cossacks not too long ago and now I tried to start it and I also get the crash, screen goes black and DMCR.exe has to be closed.Back to war does exactly same as you said, plays intro's for me it also start playing music and then crashes.I'm sure this is definatly the fault of the nvidia drivers as I've played it alot on my 6800GS.Will try older nvidia drivers later today, hope it works again, as I quite fancied a few games again after reading this thread, I could play mp if we both get it working if you want.
But still, what on earth have nvidia done?On a sidenote, after back to war has closed the music continues to play, from the cd, even loading new tracks and I can't find a cossacks process in the background, what the hell?I doubt it's sp2 I've played it in sp2, that I know for sure. Never had the Direct Draw error, so don't know why that occurs. The problem I do have is that I have other games which I am not sure how they will act on a to 'low end' card.
But then again I am just looking around to see what the prices are right now. Might even go for a 7900GT/X and then sell my 8600 card. According to the nVidia site its not much difference between them.
But knowing my luck it probably wont work with that card either!Appreciating your help in this matter. I hope you can get it sorted, since at least that would mean there is still some hope!CheersTomEdit: What screen resolution are you using? On the game CDV's message board someone says they had to change the screen resolution to 1024.768 since thats the default setting for the game. Hi, Bardock9000, and welcome to the CDV Forum.
![Cossacks back to war mouse won Cossacks back to war mouse won](https://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/gamespot/images/2005/039/reviews/639864-560990_20050209_004.jpg)
Unfortunately I seem to have missed this post earlier.Grotesmurf's advice is good. It seems the video introductions were made by different people than those who made the game in the first place. They made it in a different video format than the game itself, and some video cards have difficulty in adjusting to the difference, so they don't.If you find the Video folder directly under your Cossacks main folder, right-click on it, click on 'Rename,' and then add a 1 or anything after the 'Video,' you will skip the video flash screens and go right into the meat of the game. Trust me, the video entries are no great loss. I wish I could do something similar to some of the other games, as wading through the all-too-familiar preliminaries - which are basically just advertisements - is a waste of time.
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- Cossacks: European Wars
5 / 5 - 1 vote
Description of Cossacks: European Wars Windows
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Mention the words 'historical strategy' to many people and if they don't get away in time to 'stop their granny eating the cat' or some such excuse, they'll fall asleep faster than if you placed a chloroform-soaked rag over their mouth; it's a weapon so effective it could be used to stop advancing armies.
But it's also a phrase that's often misleading because while it can conjure up images of the anorak-wearing population spending day after day calculating action points and firing modes, it also covers the likes of the fiendishly addictive Age of Empires and the Settlers series. Granted, neither of these games are anything like the relatively fast-paced rompings of the likes of Red Alert or Ground Control, but they are significantly less banal. Fortunately (for me), Cossacks is an example of the latter type of historical strategy.
![Cossacks European Wars Graphics Problem Cossacks European Wars Graphics Problem](http://media.gamingexcellence.com/screenshots/cossacks-european-wars/300.jpg)
You are an esteemed military commander from whatever European power the campaign features. Your objectives vary from mission to mission, but usually go something along the lines of build a base, establish a decent economy and kick foreign ass. Obviously, to do this you need to gather resources. Wood and stone are used for building the various structures your town will need, iron and coal keep your military units in ammo, gold is useful for just about everything and food stops your people from starving to death -- handy that.
You can get food by building a mill and telling some peasant folk to start farming or by building some fishing boats. Iron, coal and gold need to be mined, stone is quarried, and wood, believe it or not, grows on trees which you will need to chop down. By now, some of you will be thinking all this sounds a little familiar -- ahem, Settlers. As far as extracting resources is concerned, the two games are identical save for a few very minor differences, such as not being able to mine stone and quarry it or rear pigs for food.
Cossacks does include a marketplace, however, since it's not always possible to get the goods you need. The only gold mine, for example, might be deep in enemy territory and it's virtually impossible to mount a decent assault without a healthy gold reserve. This is where the market comes in handy, as it allows you to trade one resource for another. Got a huge pile of timber but no iron? Trade it. Got loads of coal but no food? Trade that, too.
There is a downside to this that isn't all that apparent in the single player game. The ability to trade for any resources that you need means you don't have to worry about guarding any one specific resource. If the enemy takes your coal mine, all you have to do is move the workers onto another resource and trade for coal from the marketplace. Thus the strategic importance of any resource drops to virtually nothing.
The resources also have a direct effect on combat. If you're unfortunate enough run out of iron and coal, your units will run out of ammunition and won't be able to fight the enemy. This can be a bit irksome when you've almost beaten that dirty great battalion of musketeers and your troops are suddenly shooting empty barrels because you forgot to take a trip to the market. Combat is also surprisingly frantic and for all my berating of the duller turn-based games, I can't help but feel that Cossacks would benefit greatly from a Baldur's Gate style pause system where you can halt the action but still issue orders.
The reason for this is because the combat has a great amount of depth and if you play a lot of multiplayer, you're guaranteed to be playing Cossacks for a long, long time. Getting the right troops in the right formation against right opponents is critical. Sending Pikemen to assault a tower would be suicide, but if you were to send in some howitzers and back them up with one or two grenadiers you'd be in with a fighting chance. Likewise the formation of troops is also important as you get certain combat bonuses to attack and defence, which can make an incredible difference. Get the formation right and you'll walk it, get it wrong and you'll be absolutely murdered. There is no middle ground.
The graphics, as with so many games of this genre, are pretty impressive. Even my increasingly decrepit P3/450 can run things smoothly at a relatively high 1024x768. Little men scurry about convincingly, trees flutter in the wind, but the best thing has to be the explosions. Instead of just being a generic ball of flame, any big bang is accompanied by a large amount of debris chucked into the air with great enthusiasm. Not all of your shots will hit - in the case of musketeers and archers, this doesn't mean an awful lot as far as flashy graphics are concerned, however, when it comes to a naval battle, cannonballs splash in the water with a pathetic plop when they miss, but make a big boom and send a shower of timber up in the air when they hit. A very nice touch.
However, one of the things you'll find yourself working around is the atrocious unit AI. The pathfinding of units is the first clue that something is wrong. Send a ship to the other side of an island and it's 50/50 whether it'll go the long way around or not. Squads of soft, squishy archers seem quite happy to walk straight into the firing line of nasty enemy howitzers when you tell them to back off. But perhaps the strangest sight is ordering your ships to attack a fleeing enemy. After pursuing into firing range, they stop and turn their side to the enemy (that's where they keep the cannons), but by the time they've finished spinning around, the enemy will have fled out of range, so they catch up, stop, turn around again etc.
It's also easy to pick off enemy units one by one, as the others don't seem to react to what's going on around them. You can bombard the crap out of them and they won't do a thing until you get in range or trigger a certain event. They also seem quite keen to attack the floor. Although sometimes a unit will tell you it can't hit the specified target because something is in the way, more often than not it just stands there and pounds the living hell out of an offending hill that just happened to get in the way. Which brings me to ask why cannonballs aren't lobbed over the hill?
Now with all this negativity you will probably be wondering why I still like it. Well, it's partly because of the multiplayer and partly because of the resources. The multiplayer takes away a lot of the problems you get with the single player game. If you're desperately trying to organise your troops mid-battle, you know your opponent's trying to do the same. You know that he also has to mollycoddle his ships into going the right way and attacking your diversionary ferries properly, and most of all that he's suffering from the same bad unit AI. The resources might have been ripped off from Settlers, but they're perfectly balanced and you get a genuine sense of achievement as you build a thriving town from a few sticks and a couple of peasants.
Conclusion
Getting Cossacks to play single player will be largely enjoyable but also frustrating at times, due to the poor AI as well as a surprising amount of scripted events that, rather than adding to the dynamism of the game, take away your sense of control. But if you walk away from Cossacksdisappointed, then you've got very high expectations. Sure, the game isn't perfect, and if you haven't played Age of Empires 2 you'd be better off getting that. But if you lower the bar just a little and can put up with its quirks, you'll see there's a lot of fun to be had.
Review By GamesDomain
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Screenshots from MobyGames.com
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