Total War: Attila will bring out the barbarian in you (review)

A simpler interface and easy learning process

Total War: Attila is very educational, and parents will be tempted to use it as a learning tool. But the violent cut scenes are a bit graphic, even though there isn’t any blood. I like the interface because I know what to do no matter what level of the game I’m playing. With the campaign map, you simply click on a unit and move it around. When you run into an enemy army, you can choose to fight or run. You can corner an enemy so that it has to fight, and that’s a satisfying “check mate” sort of feeling.

When you do fight, you can control your units individually. But you can also highlight a bunch of units and drag them in a direction to create a whole formation. That formation will be stronger when fighting against the enemy, since soldiers fight better when they are aligned with friendly units side by side. You can tell which units are doing well and which are wavering based on the unit’s flag. If it is colorful and unwavering, it’s in good shape. If it is blinking and turning gray, the unit is about to run. You can also easily hide troops in trees and tell if they can’t be seen because of a “hidden” icon over them. That’s great for setting up ambushes.

Your aide-de-camp also shouts when major events happen, such as when one of your units routs, or if the enemy general has been slain. Once that happens, most of the enemy units will waver and start to run. Likewise, if you lose your own general, your army could be doomed. Over time, the generals gain experience and become much better able to hold the army’s morale together.

Once you take over a city, you’ll find that it is connected to as many as three others in a province. To control the province, you’ll have to take over the walled capital city. That means you can either besiege the city and starve out the inhabitants. Or you can build siege weapons and storm it by force. The good thing is that you don’t have to spend time building the actual siege weapons. You simply select them during the siege and wait until they are finished. Then you’ll have either sheltered battering rams or siege towers to assault the ramparts. Once you fight a battle, you can immediately save it for replays if you wish.

A sheer breadth of the empire that you must defend

Attila has a ton of variety, given dozens of factions. You can play the Huns, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Western Roman Empire, the Visigoths, the Vandals, the Sassanid empire, the Alans, the Saxons,  the Ostrogoths, and the Franks. A culture pack for Viking fans will be out that lets you play the Danes, the Geats, and the Jutes.

I’ve only scratched the surface of it. There are 10,000 unique battlefields available across the map, not counting battles you can fight at sea. Fighting naval battles is much more fun than in the past too. The huge map ensures that you’ll never run out of random or strategic places to meet the enemy. But the map of Europe, North Africa, and Near Asia is designed with a lot of strategic choke points such as roads through forests or river crossings where you can defend. I found that cities were the best place to set up a defense, particularly the larger cities with walls and gates. But the scars of battles are lasting for cities. If you fight in a city a second time, you’ll find the walls are still down if you haven’t had time to repair it.

The world is so vast, you could send out spies in every direction (at great cost) and not find every threat to your empire.

Better management layers

If there is a flaw in Total War games, it’s that they try to cram too many games into one game. Do we really need a complicated spy game on top of the empire-building game? Not really.

Compared to past games, the designers of Rome II have imposed some limitations to address the problem of complexity. No longer do you have tiny armies roaming the map without great leaders. Each province — two to four cities — can field no more than three armies or fleets, each led by a noble general. This limitation means that you’ll concentrate your forces in large armies and fight huge battles, not tiny skirmishes. The number of spies is also limited.

The map interface is also well conceived. You can easily see where you stand relative to another faction through a diplomacy menu or just by hovering over the faction’s region on the strategic map. That’s a smart way to communicate information to the player.

From an economic view, the player manages a province as a whole, not a region, and you only build certain kinds of specialized buildings. (By contrast, in the Civilization series, you can micromanage the construction of dozens of building types). Public order is maintained on a provincial level. That means you have to keep all of the cities in the region happy or they will rebel. If you own all of the regions in a province, you can gain economic advantages and issue edicts that bring benefits such as extra food. The management layers are a welcome relief because they reduce the complexity without sacrificing depth or gameplay. You can still do things such as engage in spy-versus-spy assassinations; you just can’t do it in every city on the map.

When your empire grows sizable, you’ll run into a variety of challenges, like how to spend money on one province but not on another or how to deal with growing corruption.

Trained units make your troops more skillful

After you’ve fought some battles, you’ll see why it pays to have trained generals in charge of trained troops. Your general levels up by gaining skills that give him better leadership abilities in sea or land combat. With a better general and troops that have seen battle, the chances are greater that a cohort will hold its ground in a one-on-one battle against another unit. A wavering line of troops can get spooked easily, and veterans can last longer than green troops. Moreover, flank attacks are more effective now as the combat system allows for multiple attacks against one soldier rather than one-on-one combat. And since veterans can execute flank attacks better, their assaults can have a more devastating impact on an entire wing of an army.

The presence of trained troops will make you think more about the order of battle. You’ll want to have strong units at the critical center and flanks.

On the political side, you also have to manage the progress of your family. You want to keep the balance of power among the different noble houses by appointing generals from each house to positions of power. You can gain and lose influence through actions such as marriage and assassination. You can assign governors to different provinces to help manage unruly regions better. In the past, you didn’t have to worry so much about the politics. But I saw the risks as time went on and the loyalty of my generals began to waver. Civil war is perhaps the quickest way to lose your empire, so you have to do what you can to hold it off.