Cossacks II: Napoleonic Wars is the fourth computer game in the Cossacks series of real-time strategy games, released in Spring 2005. It features sixteen playable nations each with its own architectural styles, technologies and units. The same guys had made a very good Russian translation of Dune II.Cossacks: European Wars is a real-time strategy video game developed by the Ukrainian developer GSC Game World.Cossacks: European Wars has an isometric view and is set in the 17th and 18th centuries of Europe. Here's an entire playlist of videos from that version.Īnother, less well known translation of Warcraft II was made by AnyKey Entertainment (again a Ukrainian team). This was the original DOS version of Tides of Darkness. Word, Palette, Code) was arguably the most popular one.
In fact, there were several Russian pirate/unofficial translations of Warcraft II, and the one made by a studio called СПК ( SPK, which stands for SlovoPalitraKod, lit. Back in mid 90s me and my classmates were fans of Warcraft II and we were quite excited with the new, if unofficial, sequel to the game.Īpparently, GSC Game World (BTW, I did not quite realise these guys are actually Ukrainian, not Russian - even though making a game about cossacks is far more logical for Ukrainians) also made an unofficial Russian translation of Warcraft II: Edition. I wonder however why I have nearly forgotten about it. It is also not an official installment in the series. I don't think Warcraft 2000 is known to any significant extent outside Russia/ex-Soviet Union countries. FOr some reason I had never heard of that game before, which is kinda sad when being a Blizzard historian Thanks for that info! I thought the guy at the Cossacks forum was just confused when he said Warcraft 2000. I can't be sure if the engine in Cossacks was directly based on the Warcraft 2000 engine, but this is quite a possibility. You can Google up box art and screenshots from this game. Warcraft 2000 was even sold commercially in Russia (of course this was done without any consent or knowledge on the part of Blizzard). Another new feature is that there are different terrain elevations, simulated by changing the brightness of the terrain tiles. I think the only terrain type that is used in this game is the swamp terrain from BtDP.
They also added nuclear weapons and aliens, removed any unit limits, and magic worked differently. MrFlibble wrote:The guys who made Cossacks started as an indie team with a fan-made Warcraft II "sequel" called Warcraft 2000: Nuclear Epidemic.Įssentially, this game uses graphics, music and sounds from Warcraft II (and fonts from Diablo), but the engine and game mechanics were written from scratch. de&strip=1 He missed to check the file dates though and the responses to his question weren't very interesting either.)ĭownload of 4 different demos (including the early one):
#Download cossacks european wars demo full
Seemingly, the full game also features some of the files and back in 2002 a user named bobx over at the official Cossacks forums posted about them. (I must add that I am not the first person to notice the Orc files. Orcs.nds from mid 1999 already has the 17th and 18th century contents that we know from Cossacks. I suspect, they used Warcraft 2 sprites and names for testing their engine back in 1998, before implementing all the historical units that the final game uses. As we can see it's a 1:1 Warcraft 2 ripoff.