Thanks, Hesp. Here's a couple more tips...when forming a defensive or an attacking line...don't leave gaps in it if at all possible! The enemy will exploit those gaps.

The easiest way to destroy any opposing unit is to surround it and attack from all sides, leaving no avenue of retreat for the unit under attack. It's usually best to do this with strong, healthy units, and preferably against an already weakened opposing unit. A unit that cannot retreat is lost entirely, whereas one that can will live to fight again.

Outflanking a position is often the best way to surround enemy units. If their path of retreat is blocked by other units in their own forces, they still have no place to retreat, by the way.

With regard to that, don't get your own units so crowded together that the same thing happens to them...leave lines of retreat open behind your defense lines in case you need to fall back at some point to a new position.

Trade land for time. This is what the Russians did in 1941 and it saved Russia. If they had stood and fought for every inch of land, the Germans would have annihilated the Red Army, taken Moscow and Leningrad, and won the war in the East. But the Russians instead yielded vast areas of land, and fell back until they had enough strength to hold, and until the Germans were stretched thin. The same Russian strategy, on a much smaller scale, defeated Napoleon Bonaparte, and lost him a million men!

Hitler never understood the "trade land for time" concept, and sacrificed whole armies defending indefensible positions, because he associated any retreat with cowardice and moral weakness! He was one of history's most incompetent military commanders...most of the time...and should have left battlefield strategy to his generals.

Good thing he didn't, actually...it might well have been a much longer war, and an even bloodier one.

Whether any of this has any bearing on a game about cossacks, though...well, maybe not. Depends on the game system and how it works.

- LH