Total War: ATTILA

[Spectacle]

I will completely disregard the opinion of anyone who thinks it's a "shame" that a game isn't dumbed down for new players.

 

[Jick Magger]

It's why you've gotta wait awhile in regards to user reviews: right now it's just infested with either "10/10 complete improvement a CA employee came into my room and stimulated my prostate as I played" or "My 15 year old computer can't run this beyond 10fps 0/10 literally worse than Hitler".

 

[Astral Rag]

Day 1 DLC

 

[Makabb]

I wish the games of today would be using sprites graphics, would tax much less resources and it looks good.

My dream game would be a world war 2 sprite graphics game like total war with thousands of soldiers fighting at stalingrad.

 

[Icewater]

Please be good please be good please be good

 

[Corporate_Jew_Master]

Saw a greek stream of Attila, game has some gimmicks like army coherence (mutinies), title grantings to characters that increase some logical stats as well as the ability to recruit defeated soldiers into your army but bringing down it's coherence.

Stream wasn't that long and the guy only played 1 battle since he was doing the WRE and turn 1 took him 30 minutes due to WRE being WRE and all.

 

[Kane]

Total War moar liek Total Shit amirite?

 

[Corporate_Jew_Master]

I would like a Total War game that simulates forum flame wars.

For example, you pick a faction like RPGCodex, RevLeft or, God forbid, Kotaku and try to conquer them through battles and sieges. (raids/shitstorms) There would be unique and uniform units like neckbeards, Dong Disciples, WCDS etc and also hero units that would represent fora personalities. Cleve, for example.

Game map would be something like the Neuromancer world.

 

[Spectacle]

After reading a couple of halfway decent first-impressions I decided to jump in and buy the game. Haven't played much yet, but it seems OK so far. The performance is good and the hordes have some unique flavor. Each horde is both an army and a mobile city of sorts, you can upgrade your camp with different tents and followers that provide income and/or allow unit recruitment. Investing too much in upgrading the hordes seems like a bit of a waste for most factions though, you'll have to settle eventually to gain control of the regions you need for your victory conditions, and settling makes all your nomadic improvements disappear.

The horde armies don't like being in the same province as other hordes from the same faction, so I split up my starting force to go raiding in different parts of the WRE. This turned out to be a bad idea when rival barbarians declared war just a few turns in and sent two full stacks against each of my stacks that were already weakened from fighting the Romans. I had to restart the campaign and keep my stacks together, making sure to loot Romans every turn to keep my Vandals happy despite their intra-horde rivalries. Good times so far.

 

[Disgruntled]

Chose the Jutes on very hard, played for a few turns, didnt get disgusted and quit to desktop like Rome 2 so thats already a good sign.

Feels like a standard TW experience, still has its faults but nothing game breaking thus far. I have an i5 and gtx 570 with the game installed on an ssd, runs fine on quality/high quality. Loading times are quick and turn times havent bogged down (although my map is mostly undiscovered).
The campaign map looks much better than I remember from Rome 2 at launch.

Im still having to jump through hoops a bit looking for information, like right now I cant hire agents (im not sure which buildings unlock them, will have to scout the encyclopedia) and I have political positions that I cant fill despite eligible characters. Otherwise the UI is the most welcome revision. Diplomacy is reasonable, usual non-aggression offers as well as a faction asking for my daughter's marriage in return for some gold which was nice to see.

Battles are ok. Troops move, fight and shoot like you would expect them to (which was one of the major turn offs during Rome 2s launch where there was something seriously wrong). I turned off most of the floating markers and yellow selection indicators, making it more natural and less gamey looking. But the lack of flags and the way the game is colored still make the troops muddy looking and hard to discern from a distance with the markers turned off (nonetheless better than yellow triangles everywhere).
Difficulty is there, I tried to raid one particular roman settlement in Britain and got owned despite 3 tries. Underestimated the staying power of their hardened troops against my levies, noticed their responsiveness moving units towards my main detachment and not allowing themselves to be flanked. Havent had a field battle yet so I cant comment on their abilities there.

Advancement wise, there isnt an epic amount to look forward to, but I suppose it makes sense given im playing a nordic tribe.

 

[sser]

This thread disappoints.

Day 1 buying a CA game.

Day 1 posting reviews by mainstream media of said CA game.

Day 1 DLC trolololo.

Fuckin'... Day 1 Disappointment, bros. Y'all let me down.

 

[Steve]

Brother gifted the pre-order for my birthday, would not have bought this after Rome 2.

Played a few hours yesterday, seems like a solid total war so far. The first thing that struck me is how much better the UI is, I absolutely hated the UI in Rome 2. Basic shit like having the tech tree on one page instead of Rome 2's eight sub-menus is a good example, makes planning your research much more convenient as you don't have to shuffle around so much, same thing with army and character upgrades, just one clear tree instead of that really weird system of Rome 2 where you didn't even see which way you were going.
You can now actually make sense of what the unitcards are supposed to represent and all the units status effects in battle are displayed clearly instead of that annoying one status blinking at a time. There are lots of different cinematics for events bringing some life into the game, overall Attila doesn't have that soulless and bland feel of Rome 2 and is more akin to Shogun 2.

There are actually new faction mechanics in this one, barbarian hordes and the Huns play differently than other factions. You start with a few armies but no settlements, instead you have a camp that is attached to your armies that you use to recruit from. You can also capture a settlement and "convert" into a normal faction if you so desire. I haven't played a lot but as far as I understand hordes are based around pillaging and wrecking shit up instead of building a stable economy so I guess they're a good choice for a player who doesn't care much about empire management (which is still pretty shallow).

The battle and campaign AI is pretty much the standard total war AI.

Oh yeah, governors and family trees are back, I wonder if you can again lose the game if your entire family gets killed or if some dude just spawns like in Shogun 2.


Performance is pretty good on SLI 670 (Not sure if there even is SLI support) and i5 4670K. Running everything on extreme.

 

[Steve]

Investing too much in upgrading the hordes seems like a bit of a waste for most factions though, you'll have to settle eventually to gain control of the regions you need for your victory conditions, and settling makes all your nomadic improvements disappear.

At least for the Huns razing or sacking cities counted towards their victory condition, not sure if this is the same for the other hordes.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

http://www.gamereactor.eu/news/291284/Creative Assembly on a modern era Total War: "It's on the list"/

"Modern's interesting. Modern, when you start getting into the 20th century, the game engines that currently stand can deal with it to some extent but would need quite major revisions to deal with it well. I think we could make a World War 1 game with our current technology, but I don't think a World War 1 game would be much fun. Fun is not a word you'd normally associate with World War 1; there's something too raw and unpleasant about that whole period, which makes it difficult."

CA's creative director continued: "World War 2 is obviously a much more popular time to set a game in, but the scale is completely different to the type of thing our engine does, so we would have to do something completely different for that. So yes, we do talk about modern era from time to time. It's on the list, don't know when we're going to get to that. It could be a long time."

Yes pretty please. But I'll take Warhammer too. Total War is in dire need of a major overhaul. Annualisation has made the series insipid.

 

[Spectacle]

After playing for another evening my conclusion is that Attila is the least battle focused Total War yet. Practically all I've been doing is moving around the campaign map and autoresolving city assault to loot them. The Romans have been doing fuck all to stop me, seems like they are as overstretched as the previews made them out to be, but that means a boring game for me.

Total War needs to go back to the roots and go for a simpler campaign map like in Shogun and Medieval in order to increase the amount of time you actually spend fighting battles, because this has gotten silly.

 

[Corporate_Jew_Master]

Playing as WRE (and to a lesser extent, ERE) it's a fight against huge stacks of rapists, insurrections and headaches on every front.

 

[kris]

i almost caved in and bought it. But then I saw that the (day one DLC) vikings was an extra €7 and decided to wait until it is on the cheap. Only out of principle.

 

[not an artichoke]

screw the day 1 dlc. don't want it, don't care.

It still needs help from modders, particularly with the speed of running and killing etc., but vanilla vs. vanilla Attila wins hands down over Rome 2. Haven't played it enough yet to offer detailed opinions beyond what have already been mentioned, but I am enjoying it whereas I quit vanilla Rome 2 after a couple of hours.

 

[Andkat]

Does it still have the godawful vanilla gameplay mechanics? Things like machine gun archery, infantry moving as fast as mechanized vehicles, absurd kill rates, howitzer ballistae? Even with Emperor Edition I found the game basically unplayable without resort to combat overhauls- battles just felt totally lacking in anything resembling verisimilitude. Also, did they keep their absurd rock paper scissors mechanics, whereby superheavy cavalry can struggle against levy spearmen (this was also a problem in vanilla M2- Gothic Knights charging a spear levy head-on would outright lose, because any spear no matter how short the reach and how inept and weak the hand wielding it would still kill any horse it brushed)?


Are the army/agent limits and generals autorespawning in armies (resulting in a perverse incentive to keep the general of the enemy army alive but battered if you were winning but knew that you weren't going to be able to completely exterminate every last unit in his army this battle, just so you wouldn't have to fight a full strength elite bodyguard next turn when a new general spawned for that army) still around?

Also, I feel like people tend to look at Medieval 2 in far too positive a light. The mods scene was great and the aesthetic and engine felt a lot better than that of the Warscape engine games, but the base game was pretty broken- two handers, pikes, and gunpowder units all basically didn't work in even the patched vanilla game (the expansion fixed some things but it took modders to port fixes backwards).

 

[not an artichoke]

Battles? Yes yes and yes.

Army limits? None that I can see. Generals do respawn fresh into armies, but that's a fairly minor problem.

So yes, the battles are ridiculous, but the campaign part is most interesting to me and it's much improved. And there are already mods out that whip the battles into decent shape. Battle AI performance is hit and miss, but seems better than Rome 2 to me so far.

 

[Heresiarch]

I am seeing amazing reviews everywhere, from TWCenter to Reddit to Metacritics to Steam. On the contrary, it is the real review sites (Gamespot, IGN) that are giving less than perfect (7 to 8) scores.

I'm really really tempted to buy it since I have not seriously played a Total War game since Medieval 2.

 

[Luka-boy]

I'm really really tempted to buy it since I have not seriously played a Total War game since Medieval 2.

Buy Shogun 2 instead. With the Fall of the Samurai expansion if possible. At least you know for sure those are decent instead of taking a risk with this one.

 

[Trash]

Don't let anyone fool you. I've seen a lot of comments about how fresh this is supposed to be but it's nothing but Barbarian Invasion for Rome 2. That said, it's a big improvement over Rome 2 in pretty much every way. Seems they listened to their fans and made big improvements in CAI, UI, presentation and depth of its mechanics. Oh, and polish which is quite a new thing for CA. Despite all that, it still is the same crap Warscape engine. Make of it what you want.

 

[Tigranes]

It's worth repeating: don't be fooled, again, by a new TW.

 

[Heresiarch]

Ok so I've decided to spend a grand total of 40 euros buying CK2 and 43 DLCs (WTF?) instead of jumping the Attila bandwagon. Looks like I've a huge amount of text in the manual and wikis to read and learn. Hope I won't regret the decision of trying a Paradox game for the first time.