The Cossacks are coming to Paradox's cheerily daunting grand strategy game Europa Universalis IV. Specifically, they're coming in a moustache-heavy new expansion called, er, The Cossacks, which enhances the game's diplomacy options, and gives you more things to do during peacetime, among other stuff. As ever, the base game will receive a big, free update to coincide with the expansion, even if you aren't interested in picking some Cossacks up.
Here's the full list of new stuff featured in the expansion, from the EU4 site:
- New Diplomatic Options: Let the world know what you think of your neighbors by setting a public attitude to foreign powers.
- Tell The World What You Want: Designate neighboring provinces as “places of interest”, build trust with other nations, and entice allies with the promise of land for their support.
- Tengri: Tengri is now a Syncretic faith, allowing it to tolerate a secondary religion as if it were a national faith.
- Horde Unity and Razing: Nomadic nations now must pay attention the horde unity of their tribes – a unity that can only be maintained by the occasional pillaging
- Improved Culture Change: You can now restore a previous culture to a converted province, or convert a province you hold to a culture that is not your own.
- Native Policies: Set your policy for colonial encounters with natives. Are you focused on quick subjugation, peaceful growth or trading advantages?
- Improved Espionage: New spy actions allow you to study the technology of more advanced countries and prod your rivals’ subjects towards independence.
Expect The Cossacks "Late 2015". Or, seeing as it's already quite late 2015, sometime before the end of the year.
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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.