What’s more, you’ll be faced with other situations where you can show toughness, leniency or leadership. Throughout the game you’ll be keeping them sweet – or stifling their grumbling – with a mixture of promotions, marriages, get-rich opportunities, threats and assassinations. Suddenly, your generals and officials aren’t just anonymous heads, but members or close associates of a ruling family, with their own ambitions, demands and squabbles to settle. For another thing, all these Hordes have an anarchic effect on the Grand Campaign map, spoiling your cautious expansion plans with unpredictable incursions and attacks.īeyond this, Attila introduces a new aspect to the campaign internal diplomacy. For one thing, they’re not the only faction that can take advantage of the Horde mechanics other barbarian tribes that lose or abandon their last settlement can operate as a Horde instead. The Huns and their Horde behaviour also affect the game when you’re playing against them. An army that isn’t out slaughtering and looting is just a drain on the feeble Hun economy, so you need to keep them out there and nose to their bloody, gore-spattered grindstone. What’s more, the Huns aren’t what you’d call an economic powerhouse. You’ll need to encamp to rebuilt your armies and climb the tech tree, but sitting still for too long makes you weak and prey to every faction that’s grown tired of your sacking and pillaging (which will be pretty much all of them). It’s no longer a game of cautious expansion, but one where you need to play more aggressively, steamrollering vulnerable neighbours, looting or razing their cities, then moving on to the next. Playing as the Huns transforms the pace of Total War. Like armies, Hordes have generals and units, but like settlements they have facilities and upgrades. That’s why our new chums, the Huns, operate in Hordes a sort of combined mobile settlement/army that can switch state between encamped, raiding and migrating modes. They’re the sort of people who roam around, attacking anyone who sits still long enough, sacking their cities, then putting their people to the sword. Attila’s Huns aren’t the sort of people to build settlements, work on their defences and think about establishing trade routes or advancing knowledge. However, there are a few big new ideas here that add new layers of detail to Attila, and bring a slightly different flavour to the game. You’ll still find yourself raising armies, conquering settlements, building facilities and researching new upgrades, while handling trade and relations with rival factions and doing your best to maintain a working treasury. And everyone else? Well, that’s where things get difficult.Īttila doesn’t shake up the existing formula too seriously, once again splitting the gameplay between turn-based movement, action and diplomacy on the Grand Campaign map, which inevitably leads to real-time tactical battles when your forces and enemy forces clash. If you’re a Total War enthusiast who has already mastered the basics, you’ll be impressed that what’s old is so solid and playable, and that what’s new spices things up a little. It takes a new, less familiar era – the collapse of the Roman Empire and the heyday of the Goths and Huns – and brings it to life, while mining it for interesting new ideas and game mechanics. While it’s still, on day one, prone to the odd crash here and there, it’s generally a solid, intelligently conceived new chapter.
This latter group should be better pleased by Total War: Attila. In recent years, however, Total War has lost a little of its grip, losing its mainstream audience while struggling with AI, balance and stability issues that have upset some of its long-term fans. From the original Shogun through to 2009’s Empire, Creative Assembly successfully combined impressive 3D graphics with exciting, tactical warfare and an approachable but satisfying framework of conquest and diplomacy. For a while Total War vied with Civilization as the PC’s most essential strategy series.
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