olesfal iliania yaslyn
Angelique Syria
Gameplay: 90
A.I. seems sound, and return of family lineages adds greater context and personality to the faction characters. Proliferation of mounted units, presence of civilians in battles, and emphasis on pillaging, sacking, and raiding makes campaigns and battles excitingly chaotic.
Visuals: 93
Barely maintains the series' tradition of graphical excellence with some hit-or-miss weather and lighting effects. Textures, fire, and thematic UI elevate the visuals above Rome II.
Nomadic and Migratory factions*: 77
Migration adds extra challenge to the early parts of relevant campaigns. Tutorial doesn't teach migration mechanics (or purpose) very well, and migrating seems like an absolute last resort rather than a mechanic that you actually want to use.
A few months ago, I posted an article outlining some suggestion for unique civilization themes and abilities for a possible Sid Meier's Civilization VI game. In it, I proposed a unique characteristic for the Huns or Mongolians: that they be a true nomadic empire. The idea was that they would have traveling cities that allowed them to move their empire with their army and essentially occupy any unclaimed territory or territory vacated by defeated rivals. Well, the Creative Assembly had already beaten me (and Firaxis) to the punch with Total War: Attila (and apparently Firaxis is embracing the idea with Beyond Earth's first expansion). Total War: Attila has a feature almost identical to what I had conceived for the Huns and Mongolians in Civilization. I'm a fan of the Total War series as is, so I was going to play this game for sure. Of course, Creative Assembly running with an idea that I had independently conceived of only made me more curious to play the game.
Attila acts as sort of a sequel to Rome II. While that game was all about building up the Roman empire (or whichever empire you happened to select), Attila is all about tearing down those empires. But this is a fully stand-alone game (like Napoleon Total War was to Empire Total War), and does not require Rome II in any way.
The Prologue campaign in this game is brutal! It's like a Demon's Souls tutorial that is designed to kick your ass. I restarted it once before realizing that it was designed for the player to fail in order to teach the new migration feature.
This prologue acts as a tutorial for the new features and mechanics of the game, but it doesn't do a particularly good job of teaching these mechanics. It also doesn't go into much detail of the established features of the franchise (other than telling you that a feature exists, then making you click on the button to do it), so new players might find themselves completely turned off by the fact that they are having their asses handed to them and aren't being taught much about how the game actually works, or - more importantly - why they are failing so hard. Perhaps having two separate tutorial campaigns would have been advisable: one to teach basic Total War concepts of empire and army management; and a second tutorial campaign for experienced Total War players that just teaches the migration features.
Playing as migratory hordes minimizes city management, but you do still have to develop infrastructure for your nomadic armies. Rebuilding conquered cities and defending your borders, however, is not an issue - which was always the most tedious part of the game anyway. You don't need defensive armies in your territory and are free to focus all your efforts on your eventual goal. This change works well with the requirement that all armies must be attached to generals, and is a big step up from Rome II. There were large chunks of Rome II's campaign in which I felt like I couldn't do anything because I had to camp out my armies in cities in order to replenish and improve public order. Since I was at the army cap, the campaign would stagnate because I couldn't build new armies in order to watch over my newly-conquered settlements while also pressing forward with my primary armies.
However, your hordes do still need to stop and camp every now and then in order to replenish and build up their infrastructure, so you still end up with chunks of campaigns in which you have nothing to do except hit "End Turn". This doesn't take nearly as long as you might have spent camping in cities to prevent rebellion in Rome II, so it doesn't kill the pace quite as much. The speed of the game turns also helps. Like Shogun 2, every turn represents a single season (spring, summer, autumn, and winter) within a single year. So your generals don't die of old age while you're camped in cities or replenishing your forces, and your spies don't kick the bucket halfway to the city that you want them to sabotage.
Unfortunately, the learning curve for playing as a horde is much higher. The tutorial doesn't do a very good job of conveying how managing a horde differs from managing a settled empire, or what (if any) benefits there are to starting a migration, or what (if any) benefits there are to settling in a region. In the early game, I struggled while I tried to figure out how to grow my population, keep a balanced budget, and raise new armies, and I frequently wondered whether it's a good idea to settle temporarily or not. In general, I concluded that it is not a good idea to settle temporarily, and that you should wait until you can capture territory in one of your objective provinces before you bother settling. But this required several trial-and-error restarts of the Visigoth's Grand Campaign to learn.
I'm also unclear of the purpose of the horde building chains for any migrating force except the Huns (who can never settle). If you settle (which you eventually will with every one of the great migrator factions), then your new settlement starts over from scratch. None of the infrastructure that you built as a horde converts to a settlement building, so any money that you spent to upgrade those buildings goes to waste. As far as I can tell, you're better off just stockpiling it all and settling as soon as possible. You can delete all your horde buildings for a fractional refund, but the whole thing still feels wasteful to me. The same problem holds true for starting a migration as a settled empire. Settlement buildings don't convert to horde buildings, so all that money that you spent upgrading a building to level three or four goes to waste if you ever have to abandon your settlements and migrate. Starting a migration once you're settled should, therefore, be a last resort action that you take only if you're about to lose all your settlements. But if you're doing that poorly, then you've probably given up and started the campaign over anyway...
I was also very disappointed that the emphasis on marauding hordes didn't lead to the return of countryside infrastructure (especially since they have graphics for such infrastructure on the map. Just like in Rome II, all buildings and resources are still located and developed within cities instead of out on the actual campaign map. This makes the map feel a little barren, and the "Raiding" command for armies feels underwhelming. The fact that an army may see a need to leave its city in order to attack a horde encampment stationed on the map pulls a little bit of the action away from cities, but city-sacking is still where most of the action takes place. Your horde armies can also make more money simply by settling (which also heals your units and grows your population), so I never found a situation in which raiding was more profitable than camping. Maybe if I parked an army on the road leaving Constantinople, or between the Sassanids and their client states, there might be some profitable raiding...?
For the record, I really like that the entire province can be managed from a single panel. It's very convenient. It eliminates the tedium of having to click on a bunch of farms, mines, and plantations on the map in order to build things and upgrade them (like in Empire and Shogun 2), and reduces the head-slapping frustration of realizing that you'd forgotten all about that level 1 iron mine hidden between two mountains and haven't clicked on it for a hundred years. But I don't see any reason why those objects can't still be located out in the actual world map, but simply managed from the provincial panel. Having such objects out on the map would have given delicious targets for the new hordes to plunder and raid. As a corollary, the need to protect such infrastructure from such raids would have been a great way to catalyze more open field battles and small-scale skirmishes.
Another common source of frustration for my armies (horde or not) was that if I used all my movement to sack a city, I couldn't move away from it on that turn. That army would thus get stuck in that city's zone of control on the following turn. This would force the army to have to sack the city again just to move away. This seems like something that should be considered a bug, and I hope that Creative Assembly fixes it at some point. Sacked cities should not impose zone of control the following turn. The A.I. also isn't above blatant cheating. I've lost whole hordes because the A.I.'s stacks are able to flawlessly pursue me, and there doesn't seem to be anywhere on the map that I can go where they can't see me and take the most direct path to me.
In the previous games, almost every faction started out pretty much the same. They held one or a handful of territories and had to conquer neighbors and expand. Starting a new campaign with a different faction was rarely substantially different than just replaying the same faction.
The horde mechanics and time period of Attila actually helps to add a lot of variety in the different factions available in the campaign. A couple factions (like the Saxons and Franks) start with the traditional Total War setup of having one territory and having to conquer more. But the new horde tribes such as the Huns, Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, and so on don't start with any territory and have to migrate across the map, sacking and raiding and pillaging as they go. I think it was a bit unfortunate that the Hun armies on the campaign map are still represented by a soldier walking around and fighting with a sword, rather than someone fighting from horseback.
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