Against a darkening background of famine, disease and war, a new power is rising in the great steppes of the East. With a million horsemen at his back, the ultimate warrior king approaches, and his sights are set on Rome…
The next instalment in the multi award-winning PC series that combines turn-based strategy with real-time tactics, Total War™: ATTILA casts players back to 395 AD. A time of apocalyptic turmoil at the very dawn of the Dark Ages.
How far will you go to survive? Will you sweep oppression from the world and carve out a barbarian or Eastern kingdom of your own? Or will you brace against the coming storm as the last remnants of the Roman Empire, in the ultimate survival-strategy challenge?
The Scourge of God is coming. Your world will burn.
Nope. Never again. I’m never buying one of these at launch again. I’m waiting until all the crap gets fixed first and I see/hear that everything is cool.
They’re keen to frame it as both an evolution of the imperfect Total War: Rome 2, as well as a grimmer and potentially more difficult prospect. Exactly how difficult depends, of course, on whose historical boots you shoehorn your way into. In a presentation where he swoops his view across a sickly and shrinking empire, communications manager Al Bickham says his Romans are making the best of a bad situation. “Playing as the Western Roman Empire is going to be a very challenging game,” he explains.
“Diseases were a key feature of the period,” Bickham continues. “We’ve decoupled the squalor/sanitation balance that we had in Rome 2 from public order. It’s now directly related to the health of your city. If you don’t keep a city clean, it may suffer disease.” These diseases don’t just fester, either, but spread. They can be spread during sieges, by friendly armies, by enemy armies or even along trade routes. Bickham says that city populations will decline, armies will suffer attrition and, unsurprisingly, sick soldiers fight very poorly.
“From the third century, the climate was changing, getting colder and colder,” says lead designer Janos Gaspar. “As you begin the game, the seasons will be normal and the campaign map will be the one you know from Total War: Rome 2, but as you go further and further into the campaign, the snowline begins moving more and more to the south. In the north, there’ll be multiple turns that behave like winter. It’s going to change food production and economic output.”
That continent, which is bigger than ever and now stretched as far as the Urals,…
New region overlays give at-a-glance reports on details such as region wealth and also religious disposition.
“We’ve brought back the family tree, as that’s a feature that it turns out fans really missed,”
Now, buildings can burn and fire spreads like honey on a hotplate, which sounds delightfully destructive. “At this time, a lot of buildings are made of wood,” says Wojs. “If one’s burning, it’s probably going to spread to the other. This can happen as a result of siege weaponry, flaming arrows or even one of the new special types of unit, the raiding unit.”
Yes. This looks really cool and Rome 2 was eventually patched into a very nice game, imho. However, I’m not preordering this nor buying it until word on the street is that’s it’s not broken.
Well because Total War, Paradox, and Sid Meier games comprise probably close to 90% of my gaming time. They are my favorite types of games. I don’t necessarily play all of them to full, often I’ll only dabble in an entry, but they are so totally my thing as long as they do something different.
Speaking of different the feature about razing your own towns in advance of the Hunnic invasion is neat. We’ll see if it is actually strategically useful, but a strategic retreat to a more defensible location would be quite a different flavor.
i keep buying these, though i know they are often afflicted with sprawl and feature creep. i cant remember the last time i actually finished a total war game.
It’s amazing to me they’re going to do family trees in Attila yet the lead game designer and producer on Rome 2 thought it wasn’t important during its development. Crazy. The politics and family stuff in RTW2, even after latest patch… stinks. However it is really nice to see CA change some priorities based on user feedback as family trees will be great fun to have again.
I’m eying the preorder on Greenman Gaming… $35 with the code. I’m very tempted… Been having a lot of fun with Rome 2 recently. I need someone to talk me down.
I will say this. CA’s record on the standalone expansions seems to be pretty good. The vanilla Total War games are hit or miss at launch, but the standalone semi-sequels have all been much better because the team just builds on the stuff the core game has struggled through.
I’m still not getting this until at least a year has passed. I’m only recently getting into Rome 2 now that it’s stabilized.
