The has to be the game for every war addictive This article is compering the game to Empire Total War.
The second thing is that in ETW (that short for Empire Total War) you can rotate your view which give you an advantage because you can see the hills and theangles of the landscape and where to put your troops (for e.g you can put your men on top of a hill which gives the advantage). Thirdly the units them selves. In Cossacks II and the others of the Cossacks/American Conquest series is that the men are robot like. They are all excatly the same and move all the same. Unlike ETW where the men twich and move a little and aren't all the same. And when they fight they donts do the same actions, the fight with their own techniques compared to Cossacks II. So Empire Total War win the graphics department by a mile.
But the good news.
The number of things you are able to do with Cossacks II is things like control the buildings and what they do, upgrades, control larger numbers of men (64,000) and personnally send men to build buildings which you cannot do in ETW. Thats what made them even. So for the gameplay department, Cossacks II wins.
So now they are tighed.
The great new feature for Cossacks II is the battle for Europe mod which is based on the Total wars campaign map. Here is were you created your empire with deplomacy and trading. But the best thing is that when you meet an enemy army you go down onto the battlefield and control the armies personnaly.