Total War™: ATTILA Announced

[barry12]

The first thing I will do in this game is raise a full stack and send it to my enemies' borders. If I see the slightest hint that the campaign AI is still like Rome 2 and will refuse to fight you, instead retreating to the Atlantic or enemy territory, I am done with this series forever. I shouldn't have to go looking for fights in a game called Total War.

It seems the AI in Rome 2 is totally petrified of full stacks. It won't make any of its own and when it does, it will not group them together to make large armies. Instead, it will run away to the most pointless places and give up all their territory and cities to you without a fight. Totally gamebreaking and disappointing considering they had this aspect of the game right in previous titles. This is Total Peace, not Total War.

[Dicer]

Well said

[AzureNight]

The first thing I will do in this game is raise a full stack and send it to my enemies' borders. If I see the slightest hint that the campaign AI is still like Rome 2 and will refuse to fight you, instead retreating to the Atlantic or enemy territory, I am done with this series forever. I shouldn't have to go looking for fights in a game called Total War.

It seems the AI in Rome 2 is totally petrified of full stacks. It won't make any of its own and when it does, it will not group them together to make large armies. Instead, it will run away to the most pointless places and give up all their territory and cities to you without a fight. Totally gamebreaking and disappointing considering they had this aspect of the game right in previous titles. This is Total Peace, not Total War.

It really is absurd how bad the AI programming is. They came out with the stupid general system where you can't spawn units in cities anymore, only in armies, and yet I remember facing a lot more stacks in previous games than Rome 2.

[AnonMilwaukean]

Here's my basic approach to Attila:

1. Go into custom battle immediately after purchase/launch and look at rosters. I've done this with every TW game I've ever had, usually to start looking at what units there are for each faction. It's an old habit I never broke despite in-game encyclopedias and what not. And if Attila has fewer or the same number of units per faction compared with R2, then something is seriously wrong. My #1 complaint with R2 was how bad some of the rosters were. A great deal of the fun in these games is seeing all the different toys to put out on the battlefield, and R2 was not exactly the worst game as-a-whole for rosters, but some factionsnever got nearly enough to work with. Pontus is the worst offender, which yet today has the worst roster of all despite being in the game on or right after launch. Suebi eventually got fleshed out with both freebies and DLC. Arverni are lackluster but playable. Greek States are probably historically accurate in some ways but incredibly boring, and, worse, are centered on a unit type (hoplites) that never got implemented correctly. For all of R2's problems, rosters were the first thing that made me try using mods (and I say 'try' because when patches were twice a month at one point, I quickly backed off on mods and even just stopped playing for a while). So, Attila will be interesting, because they re-used many assets and should hopefully have more units in the rosters because of this, since a lot of other stuff is already done for them and/or just needs tweaking or fixing.

2. Send a spy out to check on AI armies. As someone said above, R2 had a very poor process of constructing AI armies and using them. The R2 campaign AI always loved building large armies of bottom-tier units: slingers, spear levies, celtic swordsmen, etc. And this happened even well into campaigns when the AI should have teched up and had enough money to add more than a single elite unit per army of theirs. And the AI programming still has this problem in R2 to some extent, where the best enemy army maybe has a elite unit or two, and then mostly junk. So in Attila, I really hope they had figured out a way to ensure that I'm not slaughtering 3 20-stacks of slingers and spear levies with my single army every time I fight a war against someone with two settlements. Seriously. When I play on Hard or higher, the AI in R2 would rather take its bonus income and build 3 full armies of junk rather than 1.5 of solid units. Just nonsensical.

3. Look at agent success % probability with my opening agent targeting a city or army. This was the most startling error in the game, in some ways, because all it takes is a relatively tiny bit of coding to fix compared to other problems R2 had. Agents, for the price of each action, were way too likely to succeed or survive. I recently went back and played N:TW, and agents without levelling up often die on the first failed attempt at an action. In R2? The odds of being wounded or just failing the action without other consequence is still sort of high. Now, I know Attila press and info has made good mention of agents being tweaked and skill-trees being added back in (why they were absent from R2 who knows, other than running out of time). But it remains to be seen if they balance agents correctly, which will matter all the more now that agents won't die every 50 turns or so.

These are the big question-marks for me, still. Stuff like siege AI, naval AI, turns-per-year, family trees, and a few more we know one way or the other (siege AI is unlikely to be that different from R2 EE, turns-per-year is definitely better, family trees exist, and so on). Assuming the other stuff is fixed, then these three are the biggest issues yet to be decided for me, though more info could still come out in the next ~3 weeks, I guess.

[Huberto]

The issue for me is consumers have to vote with their wallet, but this cuts both ways: they clearly listened to complaints about R2 and realized the next game needed a family tree, skill trees for agents and generals, loyalty/integrity like Shogun 2, true nomadic factions (with a migration phase), better naval mechanics, etc., which are all in Attila from what I've seen. But have they listened enough, and can I really put aside the R2 debacle so (relatively) quickly? Everything has to be weighed.
It's really a tough spot. I love Total War games, and in the past would have pre-ordered the newest game the same week it became possible to do so, if not the same day. And I still haven't ruled out Attila since this time around we are getting gameplay videos and much more information as the final month before release is about to start. But R2's release just makes it very, very hard to weigh what to do with Attila, obviously.

I actually don't think it's that complicated. If you like the EE of TWR2, if you enjoy the battles and campaign, and want more of all that with a few extra features like a family tree then you'll probably enjoy Attila. At the end of the day, it looks to be very much the same game. But I would never pre-order because of my responsibility as a consumer to resist shady business practices especially when it's so easy to do so.

The first thing I will do in this game is raise a full stack and send it to my enemies' borders. If I see the slightest hint that the campaign AI is still like Rome 2 and will refuse to fight you, instead retreating to the Atlantic or enemy territory, I am done with this series forever. I shouldn't have to go looking for fights in a game called Total War.

It seems the AI in Rome 2 is totally petrified of full stacks. It won't make any of its own and when it does, it will not group them together to make large armies. Instead, it will run away to the most pointless places and give up all their territory and cities to you without a fight. Totally gamebreaking and disappointing considering they had this aspect of the game right in previous titles. This is Total Peace, not Total War.

This very thing used to drive me bat crazy. Try DeI or Rome 2 Total Realism and see if you experience the same problem. What I wouldn't do is go out and purchase the sequel to the game that is driving you nuts unless the developers have specifically singled out this behavior for improvement AND you have reviewers noting that CAI doesn't run away and is much better. Until then, avoid TW:A until it's 75% off and well modded.

[BroskiDerpman]

I would say since Attila is like a slight enhancement of R2: I'm going to wait until bargain bin price unless someone gifts me it. The melee combat isn't really good, this is why I preferred Napoleon and FoTS.

Personally for me there is no use buying every new Total War release plus DLCs like it is Call of Duty.

[First Citizen Gallienus]

Well quite frankly I'm buying it cause it has to do with Rome and just that time period in general.