10 issues with Attila and how to improve them for the next iteration of Total War
So, having sunk a measly 100ish hours into the game since having bought it several months ago, I thought I might suggest some possible improvements for the next historical iteration of the franchise. Don't get me wrong, I think there are a lot of great new features in Attila, but sadly the only reason I still play the game as opposed to Medieval 2 mods is that CA never bothered porting Medieval 2 for mac. I Would happily buy it now if they did and wouldn't give Attila a second glance.
Issue 1: End of turn wait times desperately need fixing. My system specs are as follows and it is not unusual for me to wait 1 min+ for turns to end, particularly as the number of factions discovered increase as game progresses. For a £2,000 laptop, playing on lowest possible settings this is really shockingly bad and is without a doubt the single largest barrier to my enjoyment of the game.
MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015)
Processor: 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory: 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Graphics: AMD Radeon R9 M370X 2048 MB
Issue 2: Research trees really need changing/updating. When I play the game, I seem to spend 90% of turns insta-ending as I wait for a 30 turn research timer to tick down. Might be to do with the fact that I play on legendary with small 1 town/city factions, but I think the CA team could learn a lot from the med 2 mod scene. Mods like Europa Barbarorum linked unit upgrades, reforms, etc to in game faction progression & were a much more interesting way of creating a sense of accomplishment behind technological advances. Having to win 5 land battles against armies with 5+ units to be able to upgrade your levies to spearmen is a much more interesting mechanic than researching a 3 turn thing, then a 5 turn thing, then a 12 turn thing, etc, etc, etc. It also allows you to progress on multiple fronts at once, as opposed the rather gamey military or culture choice thing you have at the moment. For me, this basically entails 150 turns (or 2 and a half hours with turn times as they are) waiting around to upgrade my military then another 150 while i fix my economy to be able to recruit more than 1 stack without going bankrupt because I can no longer recruit cheap low tier units. By this point Attila will have come and gone and I'm just getting ready to get started on my offensive campaigns as the game is coming to an end.
Issue 3: Unit upkeep and stats are in serious need of balancing. It's a bit of a joke once I've got my fully upgraded military tree that I'm left with a choice of either elite spearmen/infantry/huscarls, etc with an upkeep of 300 per turn, or as the next cheapest infantry(ish) choice I can have some skirmishers with an upkeep of 50ish. Either the AI spams low tier slingers and archers which seem to comfortably kill 200 of my elite troops per unit even when they're in shield wall mode when playing as the Jutes, or alternatively if I play as the romans, I can just dump one crappy limitanei unit close to all the archers in testuedo formation and lose maybe 5 or 10 men while they unload their whole quiver on them. All factions should have cannon fodder levy melee units like this to supplement the main army, even after you have unlocked the higher tier units. Finding the right balance between cost vs army strength was always a big part of the earlier TW games, but with Attila I'm often left with the choice of Elite super expensive warrior or the dirt cheap very light skirmisher with no happy middle ground between the two to form the bulk of my army from. Also several mercenary units have higher upkeep costs than their initial recruitment cost, which makes zero sense whatsoever. Similarly, if my unit has taken a beating in battle and has only 10% of its troops remaining, upkeep should reflect this, not stay at the same level as if the unit had 100% of its troops.
Issue 4: 20 unit army sizes. I suppose the issue here isn't so much the number of units (since the AI will use this as the basis for stack forming), but the difficulty in deploying multiple stacks in battle. If I place 3 stacks side by side on the campaign map, having moved all 3 in unison only to be attacked by 5 stacks of huns, it becomes basically 5 stacks vs 1 as my other 2 will just be butchered by enemy reinforcements while trying to make their way to my main army. On legendary without a strat map or the ability to issue orders while the game is paused, this becomes increasingly tedious to manage. Similarly just moving multiple stacks across the campaign map is something of a drag. A suggestion to improve on this would possibly be the stacking of armies (like how you can stack 20 land units onto 20 naval units for ocean travel, but only need to move the navy).
Issue 5: AI micro management of units. While people have been clambering for more sophisticated AI for a long time, and it is admittedly tougher than on other total war's, I feel the balance has shifted too far from the reality of pitched field battles. At present, the AI does't seem to get the concept of a cohesive army, and instead micro manages each and every unit on the field. While this does make for a tougher fight, I find it becomes increasingly tedious, as all the enemy ever does is micro manage it's infantry/cavalry to smash your flanks/rear, regardless of if they are already engaging another unit, how wide your defensive line is, and in spite of any guards on your flanks, which are never quite fast enough to respond to the cavalry's hyper-sensitive movements, which allow them to go from a full on charge to a 180 degree turn in under a second. The battle should really be won or lost in the set up of your lines and troop roster, not because a skirmisher cavalry unit cancels its charge several times over after you counter manoeuvred before finally smashing into your general from behind while you've turned to focus your attention elsewhere.
Issue 6: Battlefield maps. At the moment, every single battle basically takes place on an open field with some scattered bits of hill and forest in no kind of helpful defensive position. The only real exception is river crossings, which can serve as choke points for the enemy. I'd love to see some historical locations thrown into the mix, providing natural chokepoints inside of the map, like the gates of Thermopylae, a Hadrian's wall that actually appears on the battle map, or even just a hill at Hastings that would make for a useful defensive position. The same is true for cities, where it seems stupid to me that there are some really great choke points to be held, but they are made redundant by the fact that your troops morale will have crashed to nothing because the AI burned a bunch of peasants houses before getting there. Places like the Athenian Acropolis were designed specifically with the intention of being defensible choke points on high ground inside the city, so that even if the rest was burned, it could be held. In Attila, if you try to deploy in one of these choke points, you can watch your 2000 strong army occupying high ground with 1 hillside approach mass rout with barely any casualties because of this morale mechanic. Fair enough they shouldn't go back to the no routing town square of early total wars, but it makes zero sense for an army with equal numbers to the enemy holding the strategically superior position to surrender (to be slaughtered) just because a few houses/watchtowers were burned (particularly when the army isn't even from that town!).
Issue 7: City building just sucks. I'm not really sure what inspired the change from the earlier iterations of total war, but to me the current 6/4 building formula per town/city really detracts from the fun and simplifies the game in a really undesirable way. Combined with the arbitrary squalor and public order penalties, you managed to completely ruin what I used to find a very enjoyable aspect of the game. Not that it's hard to find the right balance in order to keep public order (even with the -30 insta penalty for legendary difficulty), but you basically have your village slot, a food slot, a sanitation slot and then 1 free slot to pick something else from (provided you don't have a harbour in your village that isn't being used as your food slot). At the moment you just upgrade everything, everywhere, until you can't upgrade any more in every town/city you own. On previous iterations there were serious considerations to be made about what would be built where, and how long this would take to accomplish, how useful it would be vs money spent, etc, etc. On the old games, the only times I would typically have say 12000 gold was having saved for a few turns for a specific building. On Attila, I'll find myself sitting on 60k that has been building up over time despite owning only 1 city and which I just end up blowing in a turn or 2 recruiting a stack which will put my monthly income from +1000 to -4000 then using that to sack/raze an enemy town or 2 until my army is dead or I have to disband them to prevent myself going into Bankruptcy.
Issue 8: Resources are ridiculously rare. I think it's a great idea having different resources such as iron/wood needed to build certain structures, but in the entirety of Western Europe, I think I saw only 2 towns capable of producing iron and maybe 3 capable of producing wood! I mean seriously 90% of the continent is made up of forest and only 1 or 2 specific towns can build a bloody lumber mill! Despite having trade agreements with the Saxons, The Franks, the Angles and a bunch of other European factions, salt is my only import and I'm the sole exporter of wood to all these factions. The only iron producing towns were both razed long ago and are yet to be reoccupied on a campaign roughly 200 turns in.
Issue 9: Starting faction variety. Like 99% of other gamers, I would obviously prefer not to have to pay to play with my favourite factions, but I think it is perfectly possible to achieve a balance between the two systems of paid DLC and decent starting rosters that CA clearly haven't found yet, or have wilfully ignored in search of greater profits. I would recommend that the game starts with at least 1 faction (preferably a popular one) from each of the different cultural subsets. If I want to play as the celts, it seems reasonable that the Caledonians for example would be a free faction in the game from the start, and then the Ebdanians and Picts would be optional extras for DLC. Why spam us with 20 germanic factions at the start, then charge people to play with Celt or Viking factions, which are obviously going to be highly desired by most of the games players? DLC should be an optional extra for people who have already gotten their money's worth from the initial game and are hungry for more, not a mandatory additional purchase to play in your desired starting location or with your desired culture.
Issue 10: Unit sprites when zoomed out. Once again, like 99% of other players, I typically play battles from a birds eye view (at least for the vast majority of the battle). It's painful to see the ugly blobby sprites moving around the battle with graphics that are most definitely worse than Medieval 2 was at that zoom despite the game being 10 years older. There's absolutely zero point in me cranking my graphics up to max, when these low resolution sprites still appear the second i zoom out far enough to get a strategic view of the battlefield. There's no sense of an epic battle between several thousand troops, just a lot of blobby masses colliding with one another until i zoom right in for a close up and get to see the blood and gore and unit textures which I paid for.
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Originally Posted by Bingbangbong
