Which Cossacks game should I buy?

[Tuidjy]

Hello guys. I have been reading about Cossacks 3, and it sounds like my kind of RTS, but I wanted to get a taste of the developers output, so I am looking to buy one of the prequels. This board seems to be the most active of all the Cossacks boards... although they all seem to be mostly filled with questions about getting the games to run.

Anyway, my question is pretty simple: which Cossacks game is the best introduction to the series? My gaming PC boots in XP, Win7 and Win10, and I am OK at getting old games running, so I hope that compatibility will not be an issue. Basically, I would like one or more challenging campaigns, some decent random skirmishes versus the AI, and if possible a chance at multiplayer.

[MagneticJerk]

Back to War because it has the most refined gameplay, although that doesn't come with a campaign by default. You can however either buy the Campaign DLC to get all the campaigns from European Wars/Art of War or get the Ultimate Edition community patch that adds those as well:
https://www.gog.com/forum/cossacks/ultimate_pack_for_back_to_war_by_pisces72

[Tuidjy]

Thanks for the info, although I am not quite clear on something: if I buy all three (Back to war, Art of War and European Wars) am I going to get everything that I would get by buying Back to War and installing the community patch over it?

[MagneticJerk]

Content-wise yes, but you'd have to switch between games and there's a few quality of live improvements UI-wise in BtW that you'd miss out on in the EW and AoW campaigns, though you might be able to just move the campaign files manually to fix that, not sure. It's also a lot more expensive than just getting BtW and then either the DLC or the Ultimate Pack.

[Tuidjy]

Thanks a lot. I appreciate the thoroughness of your answers.