Hi all,

I'd like to announce an update to Building Effects, bringing it to version 1.2, and the first-ever release of Hard Building Effects on the Steam Workshop. If you become curious about either of these while reading the below, please refer to the links I've just provided; there will be no links to the mods elsewhere in this post.

If you're not familiar with the basic mission of Building Effects, the purpose is straightforward: It's a minimal-footprint modification to Attila, creating a grand campaign experience that is faithful to vanilla mechanics while still reducing the most unrealistic deck-stacking elements inherent to the core game.

By "deck-stacking," I'm referring to the way in which the game is set up with the odds against the player, particularly when playing as one of the Roman factions.

Total War: Attila stacks the deck against you in three main ways:

  • Merciless attacks, particularly when playing as the Romans. This includes Attila himself.
  • Climate change at routine intervals, forcing strategic adaptation as the game progresses.
  • In a world of scarce resources, high level buildings are incredibly costly to maintain.

Both modifications address the third item on the list by doing the following:

  • Systematically reducing food consumption
  • Adding sensible public order bonuses to certain buildings
  • Removing nonsensical public order penalties & reduces squalor penalties

For a full description of both mods, I invite you to follow either of the links provided in the first line of this post.

Building effects was an unexpected success on the Workshop when it released a few months ago. I received a lot of compliments, for which I was and am very grateful, as well as constructive feedback on aspects of the mod that might be too easy.

I was inspired by benjy619's easier building effects mod when starting out, but often found that mod was too liberal with its nerfing of the vanilla game's public order/squalor penalties and thus made campaigns far too easy. So, when some people (not all) began to say something similar of Building Effects, it resonated with me. Hard Building Effects maintains the same kind of reductions that my original Building Effects implemented—in which a great many of us are obviously interested—but they reduce the vanilla penalties to a lesser degree, making the game more realistic and less challenging than the vanilla campaign, but more challenging than the original mod.

For those of us who prefer an easier, more casual experience, the original Building Effects mod will be kept online. As I mentioned, it was also updated in the past 24 hours to fix a few minor oversights as well as remove some erroneous descriptions of the changes it made to squalor.

I want to use this thread as an open forum for feedback on either mod. Feel free to chime in with questions or feedback, whether you are new to the mod or one of the nearly 3,000 people who have already tried out Building Effects.

Cheers, and if you do happen to be one of those 3,000, thanks for your support.

-H