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. Much like the English will all move to Scotland when the ice caps melt and London drowns. Driven by climate change (which gradually reduces fertility in the Northern provinces as they freeze), the huge hunter-gatherer populations of the nomadic tribes can’t live off their traditional lands any more and forced to move south, displacing those before them. The majority of the other barbarous factions are similarly brutal. Playing as them, their inability to fortify or settle or ambush, and their bonuses from razing and being at war, mean constant battle is pretty much their experience. For Attila, the wealth of a city, the lives of its people, even the fertile land they rode through, were all tools for the huns to accrue more riches. Factions in the previous game had different units, buildings and appearances, but they all followed the basic civilized elements-they used their provinces for farming, their cities for manufacture, and they didn't attack each other on sight.īy contrast, Attila and his Huns do really embody Total War, in the original meaning from Clausewitz-to mean nothing was civilian, everything was a military target. Attila might not appear to be that different to Rome II, but it’s a somewhat structurally different game, most noticeably in the asymmetry of the factions.
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