My brief review of TW Attila and why it was a hollow experience

[Yomamashouse]

Hi all - I finally killed Attila in battle and I have mixed feelings about the game now.

I have to say that overall I really am not impressed with how the huns are programmed. If I'm not mistaken, in real life the Huns had a relatively good relationship with the WRE until the year ~1450 and spent most of the time prior to that terrorizing the nomadic tribes, ERE, and the Sassanids. In this game they show up in the Balkans and Alps before Attila is even born and proceed to hunker down outside your cities and make the game a merciless uphill battle. They generally only attack cities that don't stand a chance against them. I constructed high tier main city buildings and garrison buildings everywhere except for spain to make sure each city had a sufficient defense force, so they rarely attacked those. Instead, they sat around doing nothing other than wreaking havoc on my food and public order, and of course preventing replenishment. However, if I moved an army outside of a city, they would mercilessly hunt them down and kill them. This meant that I had to spend the first 25 years of the game fortifying my eastern cities and restricting my armies' movements to city-hopping, since ending a turn outside the city was death. This made dealing with the multitude of angry Germans and Celts annoying, because I would finally hunt down a barbarian force that had been pillaging, only to finish my turn outside of a city with no movement points left.... at which point I was annihilated. I could assemble a large force and destroy a hun army in battle, but the game simply causes that army to be replaced next season (so ultimately I accomplished nothing). Then, once Attila showed up, literally 1 year after he came of age, I had to spend my time hunting him down with overwhelming force, repeatedly killing him. Since the Hun armies spawn endlessly when he is alive, I had to kill him, or else defeating other Hun generals in the battle would accomplish nothing and I would just be spinning wheels. I finally killed him tonight in game year 428 AD, 22 years before the WRE and Huns came to blows in real life.

Overall I didn't really enjoy it. I was forced to kill Attila so early and I feel like the game is over prematurely. Because of the immediate pressure placed on you by the huns, I only got to experience a narrow sliver of the potential gameplay experience. Unless I was willing to deal with an unlimited horde of re-spawning Huns and all the negative effects they caused my cities and armies, I had to hunt Attila down and kill him early. During that time, there was no reasoning with the Germans and Celts, even though I made several attempts to subjugate them or even be kind to them and develop good relations. I would respond to german attacks by hitting their homelands and subjugating them, only for some other tribe to attack me and instantly sunder the puppet-state relationship I had started because my puppets would never take my side. As a result, the only way to take the pressure off my Empire and not have to deal with endless German attacks was to go from region to region, burning them to the ground and wiping out factions. Its 428 AD, Attila is dead because I had to kill him as soon as possible, and most of Europe east of the Rhine and north of the Danube is a smoldering ruin. The only territory I lost was Britannia Inferior, which is now my close ally (Britain faction). Now I am suddenly asking myself when I will get to enjoy the game. At this point I can easily just spend 20 years building up my economy and will be unstoppable, which isn't fun for someone like me, I need to feel like I have a chance of losing.

Overall I felt the game was an inescapable, frantic cluster for the first 100 turns, and now it is too easy to be worth continuing. I might go play as the barbarians, but I really bought this game for chance to play as the WRE.

I am curious to know what other people thought about the WRE campaign and if they felt the same way I do.

[Aenima]

Overall I felt the game was an inescapable, frantic cluster for the first 100 turns, and now it is too easy to be worth continuing. I might go play as the barbarians, but I really bought this game for chance to play as the WRE.

I am curious to know what other people thought about the WRE campaign and if they felt the same way I do.

This is pretty much exactly how I feel although I don't feel the beginning is quite that difficult; believe it or not I never had the Huns declare war on me till well after Attila was born.

As for the game becoming too easy, yeah; if you can stabilise the empire then you're pretty much guaranteed an easy campaign. Once there aren't (as many) rebellions and once your economy is able to support armies and constant building production then you're in the clear. I don't know why this surprised/disappointed me, though, since you do control a huge chunk of the world and thus have great potential.

As for the Huns I've definitely come to feel of them as a gimmick. Endless respawning stacks? No replenishment just because they're in my province? More or less the only horde that actually threatens me very much? Eh. That last point is a big problem since I'm generally able to wipe out the Suebi/Vandals/Visigoths/Ostrogoths/Iazyges/Roxolani relatively quickly and once that happens the game definitely has a hollow feeling to it. Oh, that's it? I've already defeated the masses of hordes which brought the empire to its knees? Ok.....I think it's a catch-22 situation; if the hordes go all out and attack and get killed then the game feels empty once you mop the floor with them, but if they just stand around doing nothing much it just feels boring and pointless.

Overall I've preferred Attila immensely to Rome 2, and there have even been attempts as the WRE where I've handled things terribly and have to restart....but it's only ever due to me not getting public order under control and being faced with constant rebellions that destroy me from the inside. I don't think I've ever really felt like the barbarians have beat me to my knees and are gloating about how they're going to take all that's mine. And eventually I just find myself thinking "why bother? This feels boring and meaningless" and I stop. It also doesn't help that I've tried to play this campaign so many times that I genuinely just feel like I'm wasting my time by repeating it all over again.


PS - something that just occurred to me that adds to the lack of love I have for this and Rome 2 vs previous TW games is still probably related to the encyclopedia. It just doesn't feel like as much of an immersive experience if I have to be dragged out of the game and into a TW-style Pokedex to read about up about something vs just having a scroll roll down on-screen that gives me a description of the unit or building. May seem minor but in hindsight I think that's a pretty big deal; in previous TW games I loved reading about new building and unit I came across, now I literally never do it. I just gloss over a unit or building's stats and that's all.

[Abdülmecid I]

Yeah, Attila has been implemented really badly/lazily in the game. IIRC they planned to add a more sophisticated mechanic, called the 7 seals, but apparently they abandoned it sometime before the release. It's all part of CA's obsession to provide a late game challenge (although Attila is so badly designed that usually it's an early not a late challenge), like the Realm Divide and the stackspamming of rebels in Rome2. What CA constantly fails to realise is that the best way to implement a late game challenge is by getting inspired from actual historical events and the Roman or the Persian empires stopped to expand not because a new powerful enemy emerged out of nowhere or because 20 armies spawned just outside of Persepolis. The real reasons were often logistical and financial, either because their armies couldn't be supported far away from their motherland or because underdevelopped regions like Germania or the Arabian penninsula couldn't be efficiently governed and generate a considerable profit. Ironically, Rome I had a much better represantation of these problems, partly because of the differences between the regions' wealth and mainly thanks to the "Distance to Capital" mechanic, which made remote regions difficult to be governed and demanded so huge garrisons that conquering them was going to hurt your treasury. But I understand that respawning hunnic armies are easier and faster to implement...

[bigdaddy1204]

What CA constantly fails to realise is that the best way to implement a late game challenge is by getting inspired from actual historical events and the Roman or the Persian empires stopped to expand not because a new powerful enemy emerged out of nowhere or because 20 armies spawned just outside of Persepolis.

This made me laugh out loud so hard that the other people sitting in the office actually looked round at me! Ha ha! Brilliant.

Abdulmecid, you are hilarious!

My thoughts on Attila are that I played as the following factions:

1). Eastern Roman Empire (my main choice)
2). The Saxons
3). The Jutes
4). The Visigoths.

In the case of the Saxons and Jutes, I found the conquest of Britannia was pretty cool, but once I had achieved it (without much difficulty), the game kind of stagnated and I couldn't really see the point of continuing. Both campaigns ended with me in control of Britain at about turn 60.

In the case of the Visigoths, I had a lot of fun migrating, I nearly got destroyed by a Roman army in italy and I lost my king and a whole stack. The survivors fled on boats to Africa, from where I rebuilt my strength and finally settled in Spain. The conquest of Spain was too easy, though, as I didn't encounter any Roman army during the entire conquest. It was just a case of mopping up their settlements with no real resistance.

The Eastern Roman Empire campaign was very gripping at first, I tried it hundreds of times. Eventually I managed to get the balance right and reconquer North Africa and Sicily, while holding all the other frontiers. But I did find the campaign pretty exhausting! Eventually, Persia will attack you no matter what, and you will be fighting hundreds of defensive battles in the Balkans, many of which you can't win, especially in the early game. Eventually I stopped playing, simply because keeping the whole thing together was becoming so stressful and I couldn't go on!

I haven't played Attila for ages, since about May, although I do have about 200 hours on it in total .I think it's a good game, maybe I should go back. But for some reason I couldn't really see the point of repeating the campaigns that I have already done, and those were the factions I most wanted to play. I've tried a bit with the Franks but in one campaign I got blocked by a big Roman force sitting in their capital, while in the other I faced no resistance at all and it was too easy. I've also played as the Alans and settled in the Caucasus, but then realised that this was one of the least fertile regions on the entire map so gave up.

I don't know why but I'm not as compelled to play the same campaigns over and over in Attila, as I was in Medieval 2 (and still am).

[ThorHa]

From game start as ERE until final death of Attila = 395 to 425 on average, 120 turns and some dozen hours of gameplay. Less for re-started campaigns due to knowledge of mechanics. Not bad for a game. Although an experienced player might feel less tension, after I defeated the Sassanids I took every stack of the Huns as it came deliberately (they never made it to West Rome) and quite honestly never felt seriously threatened. So for ERE it is more the first 40, 50 turns only.

But no I started another game as a horde - quite a different game experience.

Overall I will clock several hundred hours on Attila - I could ask no more from a mid price game. Really. There is btw no, 0, implemented mechanics in any strategy game where the last stage is NOT boring - a good and experienced player will overcome each and any hurdle anyway.

Regards,
Thorsten

[Charerg]

I think there are a lot of features that work better in Medieval II than Attila and ultimately mean that the games "core gameplay" that is the basis of every great mod made for that game is simply better than that of newer titles.

One such feature is the recruitment system and division of settlements to castles and cities. This adds an extra levely of management by making a distinction between civil and military settlements. Also, Medieval 2's recruitment allows restricting the availability of units based on "replenishment". For example, in Stainless Steel you can only recruit a unit of Knights every 10 turns or so. The effect this has is further amplified by the fact that units don't just magically "replenish" themselves whenever you are in friendly territory. They have to be manually retrained. All of this makes it much harder to build a "doomstack" and just keep rollin' over the campaign map with little worry over casualties as long as you don't lose any units.

In effect, in Medieval II battles feel a lot more decisive, in Attila I usually just autoresolve battles. Or if you're heavily outnumbered just fortify and bait the AI to attack, then laugh as your machine-gun towers mow down their masses.

Attila also still has somewhat 'gimmicky' agents which I'm not a big fan of, although admittedly they're no longer as ridiculous as they were in Rome II.

Added to this, is the general 'dynamic' gameplay of Attila, with the limited amount of walled cities, the overly large control zones restricting movement past settlements, and widespread access to Onagers means that the pace of the game is a lot more chaotic with armies making somewhat ahistorical "blitzkriegs" through vast areas of territory. In Medieval 2, since almost every settlement had walls and hauling siege weapons along actually slowed down your armies, a siege was typically required to take even a lightly defended settlement. This helps the pace of the game by giving the defender actual time to react (be they player or AI). In Attila, an army just waltzes up and assaults a settlement in the same turn. Add to this the forced march, the 'instant navy' feature and you have once again more "chaotic" gameplay.

All in all, I think there are a lot of small features that add up and make a "Medieval II based campaign" (meaning Med II mods) usually a more enjoyable experience. Of course, this isn't always the case. The big flaw of the Total War series is that the "sandbox" style gameplay depends heavily on the AIs ability to adapt to dynamic circumstance, which it usually fails at. Meaning that late game tends to be too easy in almost all Total War titles (including Med II). There are also definitely some features like diplomacy that are better implemented in more recent Total Wars (although diplomacy is another area where there's a lot of room for improvement).

[Lugotorix]

I have mostly good impressions of my WRE campaign. I've finished the game as the Ostrogoths, Vandals in TLR, Visigoths in TLR, the Ebdanians, Himyar, and the WRE. I allied with Attila, intermarried with Hunnic women, and he married Stilicho's eight-teen year old grand-daughter O)o. After how brutal my first Ostrogoth campaign was, I would have much rather fought everyone else, than just about everyone else and the Huns. It felt suitably epic and I felt told the story of a brutal civil war and the migration period very well. At 467 and 481 I felt accomplished. Finished in 499. Also it's worth pointing out that there comes a time where the Huns won't move further west as your ally and just squat near Mediolanum, even if you have enemies in Spain. This puts a huge strain on your food supply, something like -99 for hordes on your territory.

My alliance was so well founded that I practically had a full blooded Hunnic character in my family tree (who resembled a Western European) My main issue with them late game is the public order and problems with rebels in maintaining such a vast empire. The requirement for a minor victory is 80 settlements, which is a lot more than it sounds, when you have to put down rebellions here and there and the enemy razing things even late game. All on Hard, except the Visigoths who were on Legendary. My current Emperor (should I decide to continue for the military victory) is a 69 year old half-Hunnic grandson of Stilicho, and he's just made Honorius' great grandson his heir.

For those who are wondering, yes, the Huns will betray you at some point after Attila is dead, no matter how good your relations are.

[AaronTheGreat]

What difficulty are you all playing on? Unless you play on very hard or legendary then you are going to have a hollow experience.

[Aenima]

What difficulty are you all playing on? Unless you play on very hard or legendary then you are going to have a hollow experience.

Hard campaign, medium battle for me. Battle difficulty being medium because levies defeating my experienced troops and naval ships always being beaten by enemy transports is just pointlessly annoying.

[Yomamashouse]

I play hard campaign, medium battle. I refuse to change battle difficulty because I'm assuming they change difficulty in this game the way they always have - by adding stat bonuses. As the previous poster mentioned, that kind of immersion-breaking nonsense is stupid. My problem isn't that the campaign isn't hard enough, it just isnt the good kind of difficulty. Having a huge horde of units barreling down on your lands is a great way to add difficulty (I liked the mongols and timurids in MTW), but having them insta-respawn means that building up an army to fight them accomplishes nothing.

[Darios]

My problem isn't that the campaign isn't hard enough, it just isnt the good kind of difficulty. Having a huge horde of units barreling down on your lands is a great way to add difficulty (I liked the mongols and timurids in MTW), but having them insta-respawn means that building up an army to fight them accomplishes nothing.

I don't have a real problem with the Huns getting insta-respawn stacks, my problem is that the Huns seem to be interested in nothing but attacking/destruction. Historically the Huns were far more interested in gathering tribute rather than battle. When a Hun army comes into your territory there should be some kind of mechanic where the Huns offer you vassalage in exchange for peace. This vassalage should be crippling, forcing you to pay 50-75% of your income to them per turn. Only if you decide to stop paying should the Huns then come and burn your empire to the ground.

[The Noble Lord]

Very interesting review.

[Sharpe]

Guys I think I suck a TW games because I lose 50% of my campaigns on Attila. I get 100-150 turns in and my empire crumbles.

[Aenima]

Guys I think I suck a TW games because I lose 50% of my campaigns on Attila. I get 100-150 turns in and my empire crumbles.

Who are you playing as? Difficulty? I'm generally finding the WRE to be a cake-walk. After a few dozen turns I always find it pretty damn easy, if I'm honest. Hordes are generally easy to wipe out and the AI is passive. Lost a few settlements on a consistent basis but the AI never really keeps its advances up, generally easy to reclaim territory.

[Sharpe]

Usually VH/H or VH/N. It doesn't matter which faction you are, once you hit a certain size the AI are relentless. In my current Burgundian campaign I'm fighting the Romans who have expanded to 72 regions -_-, the Huns and their insane stacks (Attila not yet come of age) and the Lugians whose land the Huns are using to stage attacks. I just cannot muster enough troops to fight on all sides, I don't have the money. Added to that the losses of food due to raiding, siege defence losses, some I'm frequently suffering from attrition.

Money is an issue because I have to chose to spend it on troops or repair my smashed buildings, all the while my public order is plummeting and half of my population are converting to Tengri due to Hunnic agents haha.

It's fun though, you really relish those few turns when you can rebuild and prepare for war again. I did manage to bribe the Ostrogoths to my side as well

Might just be the Burgundian position though, your pretty much the first empire the Huns hit.

[Arimahn]

I've had the complete opposite experience. The early game can be hard but once you grow to 4 or 5 provinces you are the master of the world as far as things go. Only the insane diplo penalty slows me down.

[Sharpe]

How did you deal with the Hunnic stacks? I send my most elite armies, win but end up with like 300 men left.

[Aenima]

Interesting. I play H/M but I generally find it to be a breeze past a certain point. That said my game is modded (no agents to avoid spam, no sacking or raising except for nomads and no liberating) and I just find it gets easy relatively quickly. As for dealing with Hunnic armies my frontier is heavily defended (lvl 2 town building with lvl 3 guardhouse) and as such is usually able to seriously wound, if not defeat, Hunnic hordes. Add to that the fact I keep two armies around the Noricum/Pannonia/Dalmatia region and I have a sure-fire way to retake lost land and/or rout and run down individual armies.

I should also note that I'm far from a TW master as I field very basic armies that I'm sure could be better outfitted (6 Western Auxilia Palatina, 6 Legio Comitatenses, 4 foederati cavalry (or 2 Roman shock and 2 Roman medium/heavy cav) along with 3 missile units, generally archers. Sometimes I'm able to win battles fantastically, other times I lose hundreds more than I should.