I never got into the Cossackss series. What did it do better/differently than Age of Empires?
Everything.
Really? The only thing I constantly heared about it was that you could have a bazilion units on the screen at once, but apart from that, I thought it was just poor man's AoE. But if it is not the case, I should not miss on GOG next time.
I didn't play multiplayer, at this point it must be impossible anyway, but the single player is great. It is far better than AoE 1 single, only AoE 2 single comes closer and even there I still think Cossacks is better. Imagine an AoE where the designers actually tried to make things a bit more interesting on single player, sure, it's still a base building RTS but each mission is different and with an interesting level design, most maps don't just degenerate on building a base and trying to overhelm the Ai on numbers, you have to gatter troops to defeat armies on strategic positions with artillery and all that stuff, most missions feel like puzzles.
Let's say you are given a story excuse for a mission, like harass the enemies supply line while the main army prepares to engage, for example, on most RTSs you just start on a map like any other skirmish map with nothing of special and have to defeat the enemy base, the missions feel generic, like some skirmish maps that were put hastely together without care, more of a excuse for a single player campaign than anything.
On Cossacks, you get the same mission and when you look to the map, there are two huge armies that are soon going to engage, one is your ally and another the enemy, if you get too close to the enemy main army you are toast. You have to sabotage the enemy supply lines, that is your goal and you gatter an army for that on the traditional base building RTS way but it's very frequent for scripted events to happen, all of sudden, you get messengers announcing that you annoyed the enemy enough that a battalion from the main group was sent after you and you have to do something quick, after defeating that, you watch the main event to unfold and the two armies clash, getting you by surprise again, your ally send a messenger warning that he is retreating and you should do the same. The missions were like little scripted war stories based on the European wars background than the traditional lazy RTS missions.
They got anal on detail on some aspects like you having all levels of naval units, some were floating fortresses that costed a TON of resources to make and maintain(yeah, they cost upkeep), losing a ship on a naval battle was a huge loss. Imagine AoE + Total war (no strategic map) where the missions were more like the historic battles from Total war than random skirmishes.