Flag of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1750 to 1801, covering the Seven Years War and the French Revolutionary Wars. The eagle’s design fuses elements of both the red eagle of Brandenburg (seat of the Hohenzollerns and their capital Berlin) and the black eagle of Ducal East Prussia.

Availability: Base game
Focus: Late, 18c. Musketeers, Hussars
Playstyle: European

If you’ve spent any amount of time in the Cossacks community, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Prussia. The nation’s reputation as a late-game powerhouse is almost second to none, with lots of players regarding them as being overpowered in games with long peacetimes. There’s certainly some truth to the hype–Prussia boasts the strongest 18c. Musketeer variant in the game as well as extremely spammable and cost-effective Hussars. With these two units, Prussia can build one of the most powerful armies in the game.

The downside is that building said army takes a very long time and until then Prussia is nothing special. Their sub-par early game makes them vulnerable to being rushed and while their mid game is better, they still come off as average. Just surviving as Prussia in low-peacetime games is hard, let alone building the sort of economy you’ll need to reach their full potential. This is why Prussia works best in games with teammates, millions of starting resources, or long peacetimes which ignore or mitigate its early weaknesses.

If you prefer long games, enjoy using Musketeers and Hussars, or just like the idea of slowly building your country into an unstoppable juggernaut, Prussia is a great nation for you.

+ Armored 17c. Pikeman
+ Prussian Musketeer–very strong but trains slowly
+ Prussian Hussar–cheap, quick-training, and highly effective fast cavalry
+ Balloon to reveal map
+ Tech cost discounts:

• Artillery accuracy upgrades (Academy)
  
• Cavalry recruit speed (Blacksmith)

~ Prussian Grenadier–strong in melee but trains very slowly
~ 18th century upgrade costs more gold but less coal and iron
- Tech cost penalties:

• +5 cavalry attack (Blacksmith)
  
• Early 17c. Pikeman attack upgrades (17c. Barracks)

Being a nation focused on the late game, Prussia’s unique traits don’t do them much good early on. In particular, their extra expensive Pikeman upgrades make them one of the worst nations for games with 0 to 10-minute peacetimes since being even a tech behind in early pike fights can lose you the match. The only potentially helpful bonuses for the 17th century are their tech discounts on cavalry recruit speed (to increase Reiter or 17c. Dragoon production) and artillery accuracy (so your Cannons can actually hit their target). These bonuses are nice and they’re the main reason why Prussia does okay in 15+ peacetime games, but they’re still mostly just average.

Once you hit the 18th century, things start looking up. Prussian Musketeers and Hussars are very effective if you can train enough of them, and their cavalry recruit speed discount helps out with that. The only hiccup is a major cost increase for the +5 cavalry attack upgrade, which you’ll still want to grab because it makes your Hussars a lot deadlier.

Aside from those changes, Prussia plays like a standard European nation with the same units, buildings, and tech tree. They’re a bit more complex than some other factions, but they’re still easier to learn than countries like Turkey and Ukraine.

COMING SOON!

Base stats:

Full upgrades:

Cost: 70 food, 80 gold, 40 iron max: 70 food, 40 gold, 20 iron min.
Training time: 6 seconds
Range: 17.81
Reload speed: 4.69 seconds max: 2.3 seconds min

+ Long range
+ High damage
+ Becomes good in melee with upgrades
+ Population efficient
+ Very powerful when massed
- Slow training time
- High gold cost
- Melee upgrades are expensive
- Can be overwhelmed by faster-training Musketeers before you get a critical mass of them

The Prussian Musketeer is arguably both Prussia’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. In large numbers, they can dominate a game, smashing larger armies with their high ranged damage. The problem is training them in a timely manner with their slow 6-second production speed. These blue-coated troops are the main reason why Prussia is a late-game nation.

Stat-wise, Prussian Musketeers combine the long range and high damage of Bavarian Musketeers with the fast reloading, decent HP, and strong melee potential of generic 18c. Musketeers, creating an all-around powerful package that can put out loads of damage both from far away and up close. Only French Chasseurs and Swiss Jaegers can beat them in a ranged shootout with equal numbers and those units have their own issues to overcome (even longer training time, vulnerable to fast cavalry like your Hussars). Once a good Prussian player has a critical mass of Musketeers, they become very hard to stop.


For Father Fritz: A wall of victorious Prussians advances over the enemy’s shattered remains. Seeing this many Prussian Musketeers often means it’s game over for the opposing player.

The problem is reaching that critical mass. Prussian Musketeers take 6 seconds to train, a whopping 1.5 second increase over standard 18c. Musketeers. To put this in perspective, for every 80 Musketeers Prussia makes, a generic nation with the same number of Barracks will make 108 normal Musketeers–units that, while not quite as good as Prussian Musketeers, are still very strong.

So are Prussian Musketeers worth it? Are they elite enough to make up for their slow training time?

The answer is yes, but not immediately or without help. With equal upgrades, 108 normal Musketeers will usually beat 80 Prussians in a straight shootout. Bavarian Musketeers and French Chasseurs did even better while Hungarian Szekely were pretty much a tossup. (Other unique Musketeers did worse, including Ukraine’s Serdiuks.)


96 Bavarian Musketeers vs 80 Prussians, reflecting the difference in training time. In repeated tests, the Prussians scored zero wins against their south German foes.

This creates a brief window in the early 18th century where other nations can potentially overwhelm Prussia with a larger army of faster-training Musketeers. Portugal, Saxony, and Bavaria are especially good at this as is a Ukrainian Serdiuk army, but any nation with generic 18c. Musketeers can be a problem.

Fortunately, straight shootouts are rare in Cossacks and Prussia gets very good blocking troops in the form of its spammable Hussars. Maneuver your Hussars and mercenaries in front of your Musketeers during battles to soak up incoming fire and give your Musketeers time to dish out damage before the enemy can reach them. Between your Hussar swarm and Musketeers’ range and damage, you should be able to swiftly overwhelm the enemy’s blocking troops, allowing your Hussars to charge his Musketeers and force them into melee while your Prussians keep blazing away. Tactics like these can smash an enemy army in seconds and it’s what makes Prussia so terrifying in the late game.

So that’s the Prussian Musketeer. They train slowly and take a long time to amass, but if you treat them with care, slowly nurturing them until you have a large army of them, you’ll be commanding one of the most powerful forces in the game.


Humbling Holland: Prussian Musketeers scything through a Dutch army. Note the range some of the Prussians are firing at.

Base stats:

Full upgrades:

Cost: 90 food, 100 gold, 45 iron max: 90 food, 50 gold, 22.5 iron min.
Training time: 7 seconds
Range: 16.88
Reload speed: 4.38 seconds max: 2.14 seconds min.

+ High HP
+ Very strong melee stats with full upgrades
+ Fast reload rate
+ Great against buildings with last attack upgrade at Barracks
- Very slow training time
- High cost
- Melee upgrades are expensive
- Way worse than Prussian Musketeers as mainline ranged troops

Grenadiers don’t get much love in Cossacks. Aside from mercenaries and maybe Saxon and Bavarian ones, they’re a rare sight since they take too long to train and 18c. Musketeers are much more effective against the ranged armies that rule the late game. Prussian Grenadiers suffer doubly from this since they take even longer to train than normal ones (7 seconds vs 6) and they compete with their nation’s strong Musketeer for Barracks production time.

Despite his impressive HP, monstrous melee stats, and fast reload rate (the same as Saxony’s rapid-firing Musketeers), the Prussian Grenadier just takes way too long to train and opting for him over his Musketeer cousin will drastically lower your army’s overall firepower. Considering that shooting dominates late-game combat, lowering firepower in exchange for increased melee strength is just a plain bad bet. Add onto that the fact that Prussian Musketeers are capable enough in melee once upgraded (to say nothing of Prussia’s great Hussars) and it becomes very hard to justify ever making Grenadiers unless you’re really, really desperate for more melee power for some inexplicable reason.

Like other Grenadiers, Prussian ones can destroy buildings with grenades, and they become very good at it if you research their last attack upgrade. Also like other Grenadiers, this takes a lot of time and resources that would be better spent pumping out more Musketeers. Prussia even gets a discount on artillery accuracy techs, giving you more reason to stock up on Mortars and Howitzers for your town-wrecking schemes and leave your poor Grenadiers at home.

Base stats:

Full upgrades:

Cost: 80 food, 15 gold, 2 iron
Training time: 11.25 seconds max: 7.5 seconds min.

+ Very quick training time for cavalry
+ Fast cavalry
+ Long line of sight
+ Great raider, flanker, and bullet sponge
+ Can easily overwhelm stronger units with their superior numbers
- Individually slightly weaker than standard Hussar
- Defense upgrades are expensive
- Can't make formations

The Prussian Hussar is one of the best fast cavalry units in the game and pairs extremely well with their nation’s Musketeers. For a tiny drop in offensive stats, they gain a bit of tankiness and a huge reduction in training time, allowing you to field swarms of them once you lay down some Stables and grab the discounted upgrade to speed up cavalry recruitment.

Stat-wise, Prussian Hussars have -3 attack but +10 HP over generic Hussars. Their protection is the same, meaning Prussian Hussars are actually slightly tankier than normal ones. Their cost is also shifted more towards food than gold, which is nice since it helps balance out the price of your extra expensive Musketeers. But the most important thing Prussian Hussars have going for them is that they only train in 7.5 seconds instead of 10.

To put that in perspective, in the time it takes most nations to train 72 Hussars, Prussia can make 96, and 96 Prussian Hussars will trounce 72 normal Hussars any day of the week.


96 Prussian Hussars vs. 72 standard Hussars, reflecting how much difference 2.5 seconds of training time makes in a game like Cossacks.

In fact, during tests against other fast cavalry with equal upgrades and training time factored in, Prussian Hussars tore up the field, easily beating everything from Polish Winged Hussars to Swiss Mounted Jaegers. The only unit that could challenge them was Ukraine’s Sich Cossacks and even then the Prussians won more often than not.

These tests aren’t perfect, of course–they don’t account for the fact that 17th century fast cavalry can be produced earlier, allowing those nations to potentially have a sizeable cavalry force already in play by the time Prussia reaches the 18th century and starts pumping out Hussars. That said, they do demonstrate how effective Prussian Hussars can be and how much of an advantage their rapid training time is.


A standard Prussian engagement: Hussars and melee infantry out front, Musketeers in the back.

Prussian Hussars are extremely useful on the battlefield. Whether it’s riding in front of your Musketeers to absorb incoming fire during a big fight (as we talked about previously), overrunning the enemy’s Musketeers and artillery, raiding supply lines or isolated mines: Basically, everything normal Hussars can do, Prussian ones can do better because you’ll have more of them. They still don’t do well against stronger melee units like Reiters and Cuirassiers without Musketeer support, but that’s to be expected and doesn’t detract from the unit’s quality in the slightest.

Finally, remember that Prussia gets a discount on the cavalry recruit speed technology at the Blacksmith, meaning it’s easier for them to get their Hussar spam going. The tradeoff is that the Blacksmith’s +5 cavalry attack tech is more expensive, so fully upgrading your Hussars later will be a bit harder.


Charging through the snow: Prussian Hussars use their speed to intercept a sneaky enemy force trying to disrupt their supply lines.

NOTE: This section assumes you’re only playing with Prussian units and buildings. That means it largely ignores capturing, although the advice given can easily be applied to games that allow it.



Humble beginnings: A Prussian base three minutes into a 15-minute peacetime game.

Like many late-game nations, the early game is when Prussia is weakest. In fact, they’re one of the worst nations for games with 10-minute peacetimes or less thanks to their more costly Pikeman techs. Being behind even a single upgrade can be a death sentence in early battles, making Prussia vulnerable to being rushed by just about any other nation.

Things aren’t so bad in games with peacetimes of 15 minutes or more. That’s when the Musketeer becomes the early infantry of choice, allowing Prussia to skip over its Pikeman penalties. This helps them perform better and they can even be slightly above average as their discounted cavalry recruit speed and artillery accuracy techs allow them to start really utilizing those units’ potential sooner than most other nations. Being able to start off with three Town Centers also helps Prussia build its economy faster, allowing it to reach the 18th century sooner.

That said, they’re still vulnerable to countries with stronger early Musketeers like Russia, Turkey, and the Netherlands, so be careful.


The Great Elector's army: A 15-minute peacetime Prussian force of 17c. Musketeers, Dragoons, and mercs beats back a Swiss counterattack. Prussia may not be an early-game superstar, but they aren't helpless either. (Note that the AI seems to assume every game is a low-peacetime one, hence why they always make Pikemen.)



Typical pre-musket pike spam; a Prussian mid-game base.

Things start to look up once Prussia hits the 18th century and gains access to its unique units. Between their powerful Musketeers and fast-training Hussars, Prussian armies will quickly become a far more serious threat than they were in the preceding era.

While it’s tempting to just throw down an 18c. Barracks and start producing Prussian Musketeers as soon as you age up, it's better to start off with some 18c. Pikemen. This will quickly bulk up your army and give you more breathing room to start amassing 18c. Musketeers. (This is also why you should build your 18c. Barracks before you get the musket cost-reducing tech, since you can make Pikemen while saving money to research it).

Even after that initial period, you should always make decisions based on the state of the game. Numbers matter in Cossacks, and since Prussian Musketeers take a long time to amass, they’re unlikely to be much good if your needs are more immediate when you get your Barracks up (like if your team’s making a crucial push or if there’s a large army bearing down on your base and you need more troops ASAP). In these situations, investing in more Hussars or even halting Musketeer production to spam some 18c. Pikemen would be a better option.


Beginnings of greatness: A mid-game Prussian army marches south.



Center of the Enlightenment: A late-game Prussian base.

This is it. This is what all your effort has been building up to–pure, unadulterated late-game dominance.

Prussia is often considered the nation to beat in the late game, with vast ranks of elite Musketeers, swarms of Hussars, your 17th century infantry of choice, and Mercenary Roundshiers acting as a bullet sponge. Only other late-game powers like Denmark, Saxony and Bavaria can reasonably stand up to a fully-boomed Prussia: For those troublesome rushing nations that threatened you earlier, it’s basically game over barring some great engagements or cannon shots.

Still, as tempting as it is to cut lose and go on a rampage, remember that all of your power units take at least 6 seconds to train. If you throw your army away, it'll take a long time to rebuild it, which could be enough for your enemies to turn the tables on you. So don't get complacent and keep playing smart.


Preußen’s Gloria: A late-game Prussian army advances over the enemy's shattered remnants.

Countercharge: In response to a successful attack by the enemy's Hussars, a huge force of Prussian Hussars swoops in to save their infantry. (Also, shout out to that Mercenary Archer who's somehow survived 90 minutes of battles despite only having 20 HP.)

As already mentioned, Prussia is a great pick for games with long peacetimes or huge amounts of starting resources, which allow the nation to effectively skip over the early game. Conversely, Prussia is less suited for very short peacetime games with few resources. Not only does this expose them to early aggression, but the need to invest heavily in an early-game military also slows down their economy.

In terms of map geography, any settings that make early aggression harder are a boon to Prussia. That means larger maps that force armies to take roundabout ways are helpful. Large team Mediterranean maps are especially good for Prussia, though do note that those maps tend to be very chokepoint-heavy which can lead to games lasting multiple hours.


Bavaria will never be a great power: A victorious Prussian army savors their triumph amid the dying ruins of a Bavarian town before advancing on the final enemy base.

Speaking of team games, playing with allies can also help mitigate Prussia's early-game weaknesses. With other players to share the burden and take some of the pressure off, a Prussian player can have the space to build a strong economy and become the team's late-game heavy hitter. Standard European units are effective enough in the early game, so it's not like Prussia can't play a major part in an early push or defense.

That said, the one thing to keep in mind is to always play an active role and support your team, even if it slows down your development. Late-game Prussia may be strong, but it can't solo multiple competent enemies at once, and if your teammates fall because you focused on booming the entire game then no amount of elite Musketeers or strong cavalry will save you.


Allies off and on again: Prussian Hussars arrive just in time to aid their French allies during a battle with Russian troops. Being able to dash across a large map in support of a teammate's push is one of the many reasons why fast cavalry are awesome.

A collection of great Prussia games and tutorials showing how to skillfully play the nation. If you have any video recommendations, send me a link through Steam or YouTube (username 1Korlash) or Reddit (Effective_Can72)!

1. The first of two classic guides from top player colorfit. A must-watch for people looking to dive into multiplayer or just get better at the game.
https://youtu.be/XP19ocvOIg0

2. The second colorfit guide, this time covering how to micro your armies in battle. Again, a must-watch.
https://youtu.be/t6JE59Gnesk

3. A 1v1, 15-peacetime Prussian mirror match cast by Odin. This nicely shows off the standard European build order and army composition for these kinds of games and it's what you'll generally be using as Prussia if you play this peacetime.
https://youtu.be/ev_sIJv-WMM?t=643

4. Old high-level Prussia team game from top-tier player colorfit. Note how quickly he's able to amass a force of Prussian Hussars and what a decisive difference they make.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyYxlSBaDJk

5. Another old colorfit game, showing how important it is to work with your team, even when they're new and don't know what they're doing. ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4QFCz6EXJA

Modern state flag of Brandenburg, having reverted back to its old red eagle after the fall of communist East Germany in 1990. It's actually rather poetic: In the beginning there was only Brandenburg, and now in the end there is still only Brandenburg.

Thank you for reading my guide! This was a lot of fun to write and I'm very happy with how it turned out. Whatever your skill or experience level with Cossacks, I hope you got something valuable out of this.

Algeria
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Bavaria
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