To me, many of the horde mechanics don’t make sense. You end up sending your hordes around in groups of two or three, as losing one is such a huge blow. And those tents get damaged easily in battle, which means costly repairs are common. Each horde is both your city and your army, comprising a huge mass of tents with specialist functions, as well an army that has the same levelling up abilities as a normal Total War army. The barbarians also have all their heads in one basket. I even had fun watching marines leaping between ships like monkeys, and though sea battles are still messy, they definitely work.) Similarly, the disembarking problems for ships seem to have been fixed. (On which note, it’s worth mentioning that Creative seem to finally have got to grips with the persistent problems with sieges, where units had trouble moving from one flat surface to another. Indeed, an army of horse archers firing flaming arrows is a delight to watch, if you’re not on the receiving end-though I played most battles entirely in slow-mo, as the Hun’s horsemen are just too fast to manage otherwise. But the great advantage of the Huns are their cavalry, which are useless in breaching walls, but amazing in on-the-field battles. For a siege you need towers, rams, ladders and so on, which requires infantry slowly moving them to the walls. Horse archers are totally unsuited to protracted sieges. Part of the difficulty must be because playing a horde is relatively tough. I’m finding it impossible to keep any of the horde capable factions alive as a horde, rather than as a traditional static faction. I’ve restarted over and over, loaded save games galore, only to find myself butting up against the same tough factions. What happens beyond Attila’s childhood is a mystery to me, because the game is so damn hard. If I could have done, I would have reduced my domination, to trade money for growth. Though it’s much easier to manager than CKII’s equivalent, there are perhaps not enough tools to manage your powerbase-I found myself in absolute rule of the Huns almost by accident, which increased my army integrity and tax rate but heavily reduced growth in the horde. Though I never had a factional event go badly wrong, the new family system (which borrows heavily from Crusader Kings) adds welcome complexity to the game, so much so that it’s hard that it’s not always been there. It’s worth pausing on the factional politics. This has been a problem with Total War for years and one which only seems to be getting worse - we suspect its core to the engine and insoluble. Yet, though battles and the main map are often solid (and indeed beautiful, if you turn all the HUD off with ‘k’) as soon as it gets to the end of turn phase, the game chugs badly as it simulates the AI turns, with the framerate dropping from high 40s straight to 0. Graphics options AA, textures, DoF, particle effects, screen space reflections, unit details, building details, unit sizeĪttila mostly runs as smoothly as a Hunnish horse. Reviewed on Intel i7, Nvidia GTX 970, Windows 7 64, 8GB RAM It’s a much more in-game representation of history than Napoleon Total War, though I lament the loss of that game’s more structured narrative. As you go along, the game reveals more of his story through cutscenes, trying to build up a theme of him being the doom of the world. Attila’s predecessor, Uldin, always seems to go blind, and Attila always survives to adulthood. Though much of the family structure, dilemmas and events are randomised, certain events always seem to happen. The Huns historically really did this, and the other hordes did to a lesser extent.Īttila himself does feature in the game, especially playing as the Huns. Especially as the game goes on, and you start exploring properly, and you find whole swathes of the map that are burning, depopulated rubble and soot. Playing it, it’s striking how often cities get razed, and the way the map changes from stability and richness to poverty and desolation. Thematically, the game reflects the era well. And that’s it-a small number of factions for a Total War game, despite the number in-game, which makes me suspect they’ll all unlock as DLC as time goes by. And the Sassanids are strong and really only under threat from the Huns and the Eastern Romans. The Eastern is rich and aggressive, but surrounded on all sides by enemies. The Western Roman Empire is massively wealthy at the game’s start, but with few armies or military buildings, which makes it impossible to defend. Of course, there are the three remaining ‘civilised’ Empires.
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