Cossacks! What an odd choice of infantry unit to build a game around. A very specific, Eastern European, mounted, sort of cross-era renaissance man of a soldier, at once barbaric and civilised, ordered and chaotic.
I love Cossacks – specifically Cossacks: European Wars, because it’s the only one I played – for that very reason. My gateway drug to the RTS, only the drug is LSD. Cossacks, as I remember it, had no limit on unit numbers, which was a pretty big deal for the age of Age of Empires. And yet it had the most sublime means of organising them. Sublime.
Indulge me for a moment here, but there is a divine pleasure to be had in organising RTS units. Cossacks was unique in the sheer extent of ridiculously, ludicrously impractical formations you could put this infinite swathe of little men into. These ones are going in a square. These ones are in a triangle. This one’s a circle. They should have called it Geometry Wars. 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.