Total War: ATTILA

[curry]

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.

Actually, at the moment CK2 is somewhat broken and there's a beta patch that you can get from Paradox forums.

 

[Renegen]

I haven't played a TW game since Medieval 2 either and I used to be on TWCenter as my main forum, I neeed a new TW game goddammit.

 

[Bradylama]

No way this will ever be worth anything more than 20 bucks. It's just Rome 2's version of Barbarian Invasion and they're practically charging full price for it.

 

[kris]

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

I am not being fooled, but I kind of crave it!

 

[omega21]

Are the graphics still as broken as Rome 2? To this fucking day I have not been able to play that game properly despite my friends going "holy shit man this game is so kewl you are missing out!!! CA is the best dev, better than paaradox!!"

 

[Disgruntled]

A few people online are overreacting a bit with the praise, its not the best TW ever. At the same time, I would not put it down as a shitty Rome 2 expansion that doesnt deserve attention.

The campaign is good enough to keep me engrossed. Because I hardly played R2, a lot of features feel fresh to me and/or bid a welcome return. Handling the family tree and politics is pretty cool, theres a nice sprinkling of minor events and choices to deal with them. Placing dudes in positions of power to maximize benefits while also keeping an eye on the loyalty to keep the main family in control gives you a bit to do (although its not enough overall with the other restrictions and I find myself pressing end turn with greater frequency)
This is an area where they are starting to catch up a little with CK2.

Building limits still feel a little too sparse. Ive finally captured a city region, before that I was going for dozens of turns where nothing got constructed or upgraded. Then there's unit training, whose biggest obstacle is acquiring the proper building & technology, after which you can spam 3-5 units a turn no matter their strength. They are expensive but I miss having to value them as elite troops who required years of training or have a limited pool (maybe this is present for tier 3 troops, but I still feel it needs to be done for tier 2 as well).

Faction dynamics and diplomacy has impressed me the most. There are still the odd moments where they'll do something idiotic, like leaving a major city unguarded while the enemy is heading their way. But otherwise alliances, relations and actions keep a sense of coherence. The time period plays into the hands of CA, it frees up the AI to do chaotic things and take risks with horde mode. Taking a region presents a hefty challenge in Attila, ive had to keep a sizable army guarding all of my settlements and risking war with the wrong faction can turn bad very quick. There are a lot of places I simply wont conquer because they are exposed or require a heavy investment to restore from desolation.

I agree with the general consensus on battles although they are a great deal better than what I played in Rome 2. The most obvious thing ive seen requiring a patch is siege weapons. Onagers et al are like pinpoint missiles at the moment, precision hitting even light cavalry on the charge. More subjective are kill rates and battle length, and Im on the side that thinks its a bit too quick right now. Maybe it was a conscious decision to keep them around 10 minutes because there are hardly any encounters below 14 units a side. Nevertheless I think they should have made two sets of configs, for those preferring fast battles and the rest of us who dont mind sinking a good half hour into an epic struggle. I hope i dont have to go mod hunting but it might be the case if CA really did choose to make em fast paced.
Incidentally, one of the ironies of this quick battle pace is rendering unit special actions wasted unless you can multi-task like a pro.

This has been worth the money for me. Im looking forward to patches and extra content that can build on a solid base, rather than hoping it would make the game playable like last time. If they can just ease up the restrictions a bit, add more buildings, units and other tidbits.. bolster and balance the battles and fix the lighting on the battlefield to be less dark, it could make a great TW game.

 

[Tigranes]

Well, I'll bite. To what extent are the ultimately gamebreaking flaws extant in every 3D TW game at least (nonsensical battle AI that sits there being killed by siege weapons, runs in circles with its cavalry, randomly changes direction while charging you, gets stuck at bridges, etc; campaign armies that sit around in random little blocks without properly forming armies and moving towards targets) fixed or minimised?

 

[Corporate_Jew_Master]

Huns are extremely aggressive and hordes are inclined to machete rape everything in sight.

Sassanids became fairly offensive and all their subjects remained loyal in my campaigns. Your allies remain loyal as well. Overall, a lot of the nonsensical diplo shit is fixed.

 

[Makabb]

Is unit collision as bad as rome 2 ?

 

[Mr. Pink]

Is unit collision as bad as rome 2 ?

It's warscape. nothing can be done about that.

 

[Raghar]

Is unit collision as bad as rome 2 ?

What unit collision? If you meant, does unit behave as in real life during engagements and orientation? Then not, it would require certain modeling which I would able to teach in 6 months, but I'm not currently hired as teacher. If it would be just for CA, then I'd just need 3 months for preparation, and then if they would be willing to learn, it would take 3 months of hard attempt.

The difference between the first and second game, is the first game has been made by fans, who knew how it should look like and wrote right, the second looks like it's result of people who had University education, had sufficient papers to be hired, were send by unemployed office to CA, and had no skill.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

What unit collision? If you meant, does unit behave as in real life during engagements and orientation? Then not, it would require certain modeling which I would able to teach in 6 months, but I'm not currently hired as teacher. If it would be just for CA, then I'd just need 3 months for preparation, and then if they would be willing to learn, it would take 3 months of hard attempt.

Raghar is such a splendidly retarded user

 

[Andkat]

I've been told that their attempts to hack in a vague approximation of unit collision (by making the unit AI behave in fixed and arbitrary ways when formations contact, rather than having an actual collision system) is better in Attila, but fundamentally Warscape still doesn't have any real collisition detection like the previous generation engine so the basic problems and resultant displeasing formation/combat dynamics are still there. Honestly after playing modded Rome 2 for quite a while I'm so sick of Warscape I can't bring myself to stomach the idea of playing another game in that engine. The strategic layer in Rome 2 and especially Attila seems so promising but the core of the TW gameplay experience has always been, for me, the battles (back in the days of Rome 1 I would just play quick battle after quick battle while ignoring the campaign as it seemed a shoddy distraction from the defining point of the series). Even though the gray rebel-infested campaign maps of previous TWs (Due to hardcoded faction limits) are a lot less appealing the battles just feel so much more satisfying on every level. I really wish CA would move on to develop a battle engine actually competent to model melee combat well (or just go back to the one of the previous generation of games...), but given their fixation on nickel-and-diming every faction and feature I somehow doubt they'd have the interest in sinking the money into a new battle engine.

I

 

[tuluse]

I want to see armies that are about half the size of the reported numbers instead of 1/2 (or less).

Tired of seeing 50k strong armies represented by 2k troops. Get that number up to 20k. I'll take the shitty unit collision if they could do this.

On that note, I wonder how many dudes their own 2D engine could handle on modern computers.

 

[KoolNoodles]

I want to see armies that are about half the size of the reported numbers instead of 1/2 (or less).

Tired of seeing 50k strong armies represented by 2k troops. Get that number up to 20k. I'll take the shitty unit collision if they could do this.

On that note, I wonder how many dudes their own 2D engine could handle on modern computers.

There are several mods at least for various versions of TW that bump up individual army size to around 5-10k, so with multiple armies it gets a little nuts(20k troops in some battles). The limiting factor are the small maps, in the end. Some mods help with that. In the end though, the difference between a 10k unit battle and a 20k is pretty negligible, both from a visual perspective and how we can actually perceive those numbers. Their whole battle system would probably have to be overhauled to take advantage of multiple armies on a large map. Think the Napoleonic Wars for example. If they could separate out units into brigades/regiments/corps/armies, etc., and had a better more nuanced command structure at the heart of their "RTS", then maybe that could work. A lot of PCs have trouble handling those higher numbers also(10k etc.), because the engine isn't really optimized for that.

 

[kris]

Second DLC with factions already released.

 

[Muty]

Does it have a blood and gore dlc?

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

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

For a moment I thought you were writing about the first RTW because it fits perfectly.
Glad to see nothing has changed and CA has been making the same shit for the last ten years.
I abandondend this series after Rome and never looked back.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Beastro]

At first I got a boner for this game but then...

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/09/25/total-war-attila-announced

Attila and his forces are not a faction in the traditional sense and can’t be played. They’re more like a force of nature that sweeps across the map, destroying and spoiling everything they touch.

bwahahahahahahahaha

Seriously? In a game where I'm trying to blob across the map anyways why not just let me do so? You can actually make that shit challenging, I'm sure it was not just some walk in the park for Attila in the first place...

I guess I leave my TW experience with Empire and Shogun II. Only played Empire due to interest in the time period. Only way I'll play a new TW is if it takes place sometime in the 19th century but all signs point to that not being something feasible in the first place.

I was done after Napoleon though I played it for only a brief period.

I did my best to work with ETW for the same reasons you had, the time period, but the lack of growth in the series really hurt where it's just shallow conquering of increasingly fewer and fewer regions of the map. What really killed things for me was France and Spain proper being reduced to two provinces each (Gibraltar being Spains second one).

It was after that I dropped them and finally learned Paradox games, which despite their issues, provide enough depth to make up for the shallow combat mechanics.

I'd imagine it would be fairly difficult to actually balance Atilla in the game. I haven't looked at the period for awhile, but the only reasons I can remember as to why Atilla was thwarted from actually conquering the Western Roman Empire was the fact that they were much more valuable as an intact golden goose (at first), a combined Goth/Vandal/Roman alliance which beat them a grand total of once, and by the end of it, simple logistical limitations (they were nomads, and as such did not have any real supply lines to keep their armies fed, instead choosing to forage off of the land, which eventually grew unsustainable), disease, and essentially being bribed by the Roman Christian Church to just go away.

Guess it could work if you implement all of this into the gameplay: make food gathering a much more limited and difficult-to-maintain tech tree than the other factions, maybe do what Alexander did and have Atilla being routed/killed an automatic game over, maybe tie army morale with just how much plundering and looting they're doing, so if they spend X amount of turns not killing shit they'll start growing restless and either rebel or desert, etc.

Everybody lived off the land back then as a given. A logistic trail was limited to the Romans and even then it was relied on when on the march.

What prevented them overrunning the WRE was simply Attila's death and how it sparked both a succession war (something with Attila possibly faced in his youth himself with his brother Bleda) amongst his sons and a general rebellion of their thralls that were only kept in line by the power and personality of a strong Hunnic leader. It was a terrible moment for him to have died while the Hunnic Empire and its conquests weren't consolidated yet a reason why Attila backed off from taking Italy, it was too much of a bite and he'd need time to order his realm before expanding again, and besides, Italy wasn't going anywhere and the WRE wasn't going to get any stronger in the meanwhile, time was on his side until it he choked to death or was murdered.

The fundamental problem with the Hunnic Empire was it was too large. Nomadic empires always had tribal thralls underneath them, like the Avars who later down the line that kept Slavs, Bulgars and others underneath their rule and was actually the reason they came to rule Pannonian, the Byzantines paid them to take over the region to order it for them (The Avars themselves were most likely vassals fleeing the rule of the Gorturks in Central Asia or defeats foes trying to avoid vassaldom).

The Huns had vassals that were as large as most large, independent powers at the time, like the Ostrogoths, so when a rebellion hit it wasn't just a small pack of tribes getting out of hand but sizeable kingdom-sized powers fighting against them while the Huns themselves were divided between Attila's three sons, who all lacked his qualities and were very short sighted. Whether Attila killed his brother, aggressively or in self-defence, or that he simply died from disease while on campaign, both of them and their antecedents were a least wise enough to keep moving against one another until their rule was firmly established and the dangerous stages of succession were years behind them.

Slightly OT:

The last TW game I played was Medieval 2, and I didn't like it much because of the braindead AI and repetitive campaign, even though I did play Rome a lot. Are any of the later games any better and if so, what's the best one?

The issue is the gameplay is so one dimensional. You can only the paint the map and not really play balance of power much because you cannot release powers to revive them like in Paradox games, unless you take over a region and then let national rebels take over that region (who'll then be at war with you and hate you for liberating them).

TW games are arcade crap without a bit of depth in realism or verisimilitude that even Paradox is able to pull off to some extent.

They should just stop making the series until they seriously overhaul the campaign map gameplay and bring it up to a level approaching Paradox depth before releasing any more games, and that doesn't even touch on the the what is severely lacking in the battle mechanics (which cry out for a return to the old engine and individual sprites not being tethered to their units like they are now, units themselves effectively being the new "individuals" with each member of a unit having the depth they once had that made Rome1s and Med2 combat make the games as a whole tolerable).

 

[spectre]

They should just stop making the series until they seriously overhaul the campaign map gameplay and bring it up to a level approaching Paradox depth before releasing any more games

Careful what you wish for. Unless unplayable mess is what you're after.
And I'm not even referring to the fact that their battle engine is shit at what it's supposed to do, or that they cannot program AI for shit.

I said it before, and I'll say it again. The last time the total wars were any good was when the campaign map was simplified and boardgamey.
What made the game tick were the tactical battles and developing them any further is directly at odds with more in depth campaign map mechanics.
You just can't have it all, either you start autocalculating most of your battles, or your map painting slows down to a crawl. The bloat first became noticeable around Medieval 2 (didn't help that the game was broken on release)
with all its shitty witches, inquisitors, heretics, merchants littering the map, making each end turn a nightmare.
I would also argue that total war works best for smaller, regional campaigns (which is why Shogun 2 was pretty tolerable), it collapses uder its own weight when it charges you with conquering the whole world.

The series is "big" at the moment, which means concessions will be made to favor the casuals. Lip synced battle orders and kill moves. They dig that shit and expecting anything else is just inane.
What bothers me is the fact that the series is not even good at delivering what used to be its forte

 

[kris]

I said it before, and I'll say it again. The last time the total wars were any good was when the campaign map was simplified and boardgamey.
What made the game tick were the tactical battles and developing them any further is directly at odds with more in depth campaign map mechanics.

i reckon it would work really well with how I wanted battles in my design document for a never to materialise MoM-like game. Basically that you dont move around your armies, battles are set up after adventure like questions. Wars are some series of battles.
that way iy is easier to control and set up interesting battles, because in its current form the Total war games seldom have interesting battles. (Shogun did have it until you got tired of them due to limited unit choice and mostly full armies clashing) With what I had in mid you can have battles with strong smaller armies against big weaker ones, balanced battles and when one participant is clearly stronger the other will try for an ambush or will be besieged. Also battles could easier be said to be meaningful, as all are objective-based.

 

[spectre]

I think the strategic layer needs to serve two puposes; one, it lets you take a break from tactical battles without making you go totally off track; two, everything you do directly supports the tactical meat of the game.
An ideal example in my view would be Dark Omen, you get to manage troops, make choices, listen to dialogue that provides important background and throws atmospheric fluff at you.
The TW formula promises that you'll be able to make all the decisions for your figts - where and on what terms you fight them, I think it's important to preserve this aspect.

I am not at all opposed to the 3d campaign map offered by the Total Wars, as long as it doesn't cross the line of detracting from the meat of the game.
My major concern here is that while the game has all the tools to make it interesting (zones of deployment with different shapes and sizes, units that can be placed outside, traps and fortifications, various army stances, reinforcements, ambushing, night fighting)
it's all of little consequence as the AI clearly cannot work the system. The solution is no freaking rocket science - simpify it to the point that the AI can be competent at it and teach it to work the system. Why is it not a priority, I do not really know.
(It needed to fucking conjure up armies from thin air in Shogun 2 just to keep things interesting - if you gotta pull shit like that, at this point you might just as well make it an adventure game or interactive movie played between combats, because it's just as retarded as level scaling in RPGs).
I would ber glad if they distilled every choice you make oustide tactical battles to its core and present a uniform system that directly supports the tactical combat. Let's take Rome 2 for example here (I don't know Attill, because I'm still wondering if its even worth it) ,
the whole faction mechanics are very poorly done, do not have enough influence on the main game and its not possible to see the most important parameters for making important calls at one glance (at least I can't). Same goes for tech research, numerous trees taking many turns to unlock, offering "significant" improvements like +5% to something. And building trees, do I really need to go into the intricacies of building a +1 happiness +10% research vs. +1 happiness +50 denars vs. +2 happiness vs. +1 happiness +1 food shrine?
While I wouldn't ditch these mechanics, I don't really want to spend too much time on them and I want every choice to feel immediately relevant.

 

[A horse of course]

Ancient Empires mod pre-release trailer, which is basically Rome 2 in Attila engine.

 

[Hoodoo]

So with more lag and unnecessary grim?