Rally Point 24 – Total War: ATTILA Historical Battles Revealed

[Will CA]

Hey all,

In this month’s episode of Total War video show Rally Point, designer Simon Mann lifts the lid on his 5 greatest hardcore challenges in Total War: ATTILA. Craig and James play through the historical Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, featuring a full 13 minutes of gameplay, and we recap the incredible Total War Showcase, celebrating 15 years of Total War and looking ahead to what comes next.




http://youtu.be/WMNH9ry4V-0



Strap in, buckle up. It’s Rally Point 24.



-Will CA

[Altimis]

Thanks for posted it Will

[IGdood]

James Given is a beast with that micro. He certainly is a lot better at playing than the other CA staff.

[.Mitch.]

James Given is a beast with that micro. He certainly is a lot better at playing than the other CA staff.

Considering last year we had Al Bickam doing the battle playthroughs.. oh how times have changed.. and the skill level.

[Darios]

Really cool episode of Rally Point. Seeing the historical battle of Ad Decimum gives me hope that there will sooner or later be a Justinian era DLC campaign)

I also really like that Rome, Ravenna, and Constantinople will get unique city models. It's going to help ALOT with immersion. Hopefully CA will manage to create as many unique battle map models as possible for various cities. That would be insanely epic.

[Butan]

Total War Kingdoms sounds lame, I hope they dont invest too much time in that "stronghold kingdoms" kinda spin-off.
Total War Arena sounds cool. Might bring more 3v3+ (up to 10 a side they said) custom battles people. Having a small amout of troops to manage in huge battles could be real trippy, if the cooperative tools are there.


The designer "5 big things" summed up a lot of things we already see in R2 and/or R2 mods: not really amped up by what he said and no real news. Even the part on siege escalation was still very vague (siege escalation enabling ramparts to be built above parts of the first tier of the constantinople's walls? so siege escalation doesnt only destroy, but it builds too?).


3 things I liked in the historical battle (except from the fact there is 9 available right off the bat) :

- the retreat icons on the battle map and the radar map: finally you can see where routing units are (though it seems to be the same design for allied/enemies)
- Loose formation button seemed to be on the command bar of most units, and I saw no magical abilities
- if they didnt lie about "historical battles arent scripted", I saw some nice moves from a not totally stupid BAI

3 things I hated (moddable):

- casualties rate
- speed rate (always on the double)
- morale rate

[MathiasOfAthens]

Was that Simon playing? Do all of you guys just randomly click everywhere. I swear he gave orders to some units and then changed his mind ONE SECOND later and clicked somewhere else. Too Arcadey.

[Riekopo]

9 historical battles. That's a decent amount. I'd always like to get more in the future though. I hope the narration for them is better than it was in Rome 2. I also hope you can choose which side to play as. I'd like to play the historical battles in multiplayer too. I'm not sure about the scripting thing though. Historical battles should play out as they did historically otherwise it's just a skirmish battle.

[Nelfe]

Catalaunians Plain, Soissons, River Frigidus, Adrianople... A good choice !

[SirGerakul]

Was that Simon playing? Do all of you guys just randomly click everywhere. I swear he gave orders to some units and then changed his mind ONE SECOND later and clicked somewhere else. Too Arcadey.

Yeah, I've seen all his streams and he always does that. He just randomly spams orders, and cancel them by giving more random orders.

[crucify_ego]

Was that Simon playing? Do all of you guys just randomly click everywhere. I swear he gave orders to some units and then changed his mind ONE SECOND later and clicked somewhere else. Too Arcadey.

I really hate watching other people play total war. A lot of people do that on the campaign map too, click, click, click...

[The Wandering Storyteller]

Does the total war artbook reveal anything about China?

If it is any thing Asian they go, they MUST go and DO CHINA.

Big land, big battles, great novels, excellent armies.

CA must do CHINA.

[IGdood]

Does the total war artbook reveal anything about China?

If it is any thing Asian they go, they MUST go and DO CHINA.

Big land, big battles, great novels, excellent armies.

CA must do CHINA.

Song Dynasty best dynasty!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Mikelus Trento]

Looks good, Anxious to give it a stab.

[Garensterz]

It's the end of the beautiful authentic banners which we had before, and replaces it with horrible icons of different unit types just to candy coat the kids.

[InferiorBeing]

Someone should re-upload the battle footage with the Benny Hill-theme playing. Would be several times more appropriate.

[MathiasOfAthens]

In other news, what is this 3rd modding summit coming up? More of the same?

[Linke]

In other news, what is this 3rd modding summit coming up? More of the same?

Still if we get the same tools as we did for Rome II it opens up alot of more possibilities.

[RGA]

Love how AI cavalry always formed a wedge when charging

[Matamoros]

If I didn't knew it was Total War I'd swear he was some kind of asian teenager playing Starcraft.
I've never seen anybody playing TW like this, click here click there click the same unit to go to random places 30000 per second. It is the way TW it is supposed to be played now? It's so sad. Maybe it is what kids want, but me as older veteran certainly not, and like me there are thousands other TW veterans that wished the series had evolutioned to something strategically deeper but still engaging gameplay-wise, in keeping with a paramount art style.
Unfortunately there is no other company to be a serious competitors to CA in terms of real time battles. Besides they really never got punished for Rome 2, rather the contrary (with boosted sales + dlcs etc). So that's what we have now.