Obviously not every battle is going to be evenly matched if you’re playing well on the strategic map, but when you do get into a pitched battle and you’re at that breaking points where your line is starting to crumble but you’ve just committed your cavalry to charge the enemy general is where the brilliance really shines through in Total War: Attila. At the same time though, there are these split second decisions you’ll be faced with that will often tip the balance of the battle. You want to line up your spearmen against their cavalry and such. On one hand their more ponderous affairs, where your troop placement and force dispositions matter a lot. I’ve always found the tactical battles in Total War to have this really interesting dichotomy. The tactical battles have always been Total War‘s bread and butter though. In the strategic map you’ll make all the decisions of where to move your armies, what technologies to develop, hire new troops, and what buildings to construct in your settlements, among others. Like other games in the series, Total War: Attila is split between a turn-based strategic map and a real-time tactical battle map. There’s even a whole graphic that plays when you raze a settlement of a slowly expanding fire reducing the province to a desolate plain.Īs far as the basic gameplay goes, that has remained largely unchanged from previous Total War games. Where most grand strategy title focus on the slow building up of your glorious empire – which is still here to some degree, Total War: Attila is instead more about burning it all down and this sentiment infuses many of the mechanics. There’s this immediacy to the setup that few strategy titles have there are even these great little intro videos that give you a nice primer on your faction’s current situation. With Attila coming so close on historical heels of Rome II, you might be tempted to dismiss it, but the developers at Creative Assembly have managed to infuse the struggles of this time period into the campaign. Everyone is either fighting for or trying to desperately defend this precious cradle of limited resources. Even the heartiest factions in the North are being pushed South by increasingly bitter winters, and folks to the East are being harried back towards the Mediterranean by hordes of Huns. It’s a period of time where the once mighty Roman empire, stretched thin and on the decline, has split into Eastern and Western halves and is beset by enemies on nearly all sides. Let’s face it, you don’t make a game starring Attila the Hun where everyone makes friends and wacky hijinks ensue.
It’s made further improvements on the existing mechanics and systems, but it’s still largely the same game and your enjoyment is going to hinge on whether you wanted refinement or would rather have had a departure.īy far, Total War: Attila greatest defining feature and accomplishment is its dog eat dog, kill or be killed setting.
What I’ve been getting at however is that Total War: Attila is basically Pathfinder in this scenario.
#Total war rome 2 or attila free#
Eventually Creative Assembly would wrap these fixes and features into a definitive Total War: Rome II Emperor Edition, which is where my analogy starts to come off the rails a bit because you had to buy Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 and Emperor Edition was provided free to all current Total War: Rome II owners. The issues weren’t anything too major, it was still at its core the game you knew and loved, but it was taking some updates and DLC to get it where you wanted, errata and supplement books. With a storied and lauded past, Total War started moving into a new era, and it had a few bumps along the way. You see, I think you can find a lot of mirroring between Dungeons and Dragons around the 3rd edition period and the current Total War franchise. I’ve been struggling to find a good way to condense my thoughts on Total War: Attila, but I finally struck on an analogy that I’ll admit I like for no other reason than it’s about tabletop gaming.