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Straight Arrow
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The Cossack Swarm

Wed Sep 14, 2016 5:29 pm

How do you use Taras Bulba and the Cossack swarm? Currently I am attempting to:

• Scout for presence and strength of enemy forces.
• Blind the enemy by blocking their attempts to scout.
• Ambush or block supply convoys.
• Shift military control to above or below 25%, thus enabling or blocking supply flow.
• Channel where the enemy retreats after a battle.
• Knock on the gates of enemy cities, deep behind the front lines, in an attempt to force garrisoning of all points, as well as hoping to get lucky in a raid or two.
• Leading the foe on a wild goose chase in an attempt to draw out, wear down and divert enemy forces.

Any other suggestions?
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arsan
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Wed Sep 14, 2016 6:26 pm

It seems you have pretty much everything covered! ;)

Another good use is to send them in advance of your main forces, taking military control of the regions on your way, so your armies can move on defensive or passive posture, expending less cohesion and getting faster and on better shape to their destination. Specially useful when moving the russian hordes from Koenigsberg towards Kolberg.

The russians have so many cossack units that it can be overpowered on my opinion.
A while ago we played a couple of very interesting 5 sided PBEM games of RoP gold and we used some kind of house rule to limit the cossack power.
If i recall correctly, light cavalry could only use offensive or defensive posture (i.e. take military control of a region) if stacked with a leader. But you could scout around on passive posture.
Without this rule, the dozens of russian cossack units used on their own on offensive posture+evade combat could literally "paint" enemy territory your color and wreck havoc with their supply lines.

It worked pretty well i think. The house rule applied to all sides, but it mainly affected the russians as they had so much light cavalry

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loki100
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Wed Sep 14, 2016 7:52 pm

I'd agree with this house rule. In a PBEM with Narwhal I made so much use of the attack-passive stance that it was clearly out of control (the gain is you stop supply moving), so we decided on a rule that this stance could only be used if a general was present.
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arsan
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Wed Sep 14, 2016 8:44 pm

Now that you mention it, i remembered we ideed copied Narwhal and Loki idea for our PBEM! :)

Baris
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Wed Sep 14, 2016 8:56 pm

Maybe they could have area&cohesion restriction as a mod. They could unbalance the whole campaign.

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arsan
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Wed Sep 14, 2016 10:11 pm

I think they used to go with the regular army on campaign anywhere. They were not deployed on a specific area.

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Durk
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Fri Sep 16, 2016 3:09 am

I am not a fan of House Rules as I think the game mostly handles oddities, but Cossacks may be an exception. I like the leader rule. Like in the old AACW, this eliminates ahistorical play.

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