In the sixth year of my nomadic campaign as the Visigoths, I realized Total War: Attila

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The dynamic, driving forces of the campaign are the strongest rallying points for recommending this iteration of Total War. From the East comes the onslaught of the Huns; from the North come increasingly harsh winters that will eventually make large portions of the map almost uninhabitable. My Visigoths - one of 10 playable factions - were flung into the resulting barbarian pinball machine, bombarding the weakened Roman Empire while battling other tribes for the steadily vanishing fertile land. Where most Total War games see your empire expand ever outward, Attila instead forces you to keep a foothold on a shrinking island of safety and prosperity.

Having no home province to defend at all costs, and being beset by unstoppable elemental forces changed the way I thought about waging war, and created dire situations that forced me into a ruthless, survivalist mindset. When a blizzard caught my nomadic band in the Alps and killed a third of my men, I knew I needed to find food and shelter, now. It didn’t matter how much blood I had to spill, nor whose blood it was. For a moment, I felt like I understood the perspective of these ancient people, notorious for raiding and pillaging. This was a matter of becoming savage or becoming dead, the finer points of morality be damned. It’s a fresh feeling in a genre that usually revolves around the question of “Who should I conquer next?” The map itself had the initiative, and I knew I would rise or fall based on my ability to react.

My efforts were easier to manage than in Rome 2, because the campaign interface in Attila is an across-the-board improvement. Instead of trying to cram things into the bar at the bottom of the screen, Creative Assembly has realized that it’s okay to hide the map sometimes, giving us bigger info panels like the easy-to-understand family tree diagram. When a Roman spy (who had taken issue with my burning of the whole of Northern Italy) assassinated my heir, Theoderic, I actually had a firm idea of who Theoderic was. For an ultimately replaceable general lacking in context, I might have let the slight slide. For the young man who was supposed to carry on my legacy, I would settle for nothing less than unleashing a dozen flavors of hell on the perpetrators. Loading

Internal politics and diplomacy are still pretty impenetrable, though. Control over your faction is a sliding scale from Insignificant to Absolute, with both extremes putting you at a high risk for civil war. The system does its job in that you can always see internal turmoil looming, but attempting to steer away from it remains a huge chore. When my family grew so influential they threatened my stability, it was easy enough to grant offices or important commands to members of other sub-factions and restore the balance. But when my badass warlord died, taking most of my political clout with him, I was left with very few tools to stabilize the situation. Bizarrely, actions like political assassination can only be carried out against members of your own family. So that jerk who wanted to overthrow my young, newly-crowned High King was hard to get rid of, which made sending him off to charge headlong into an unwinnable battle seem like a good idea instead of a terrible one. This method really feels like an exploit, which is never a good thing to be forced to rely on.

Diplomacy is just as frustrating. If I have Iron and Fur resources in excess, and the nearly destitute tribe in the next province has a “Friendly” opinion of me, it makes no gods-damned sense that they would repeatedly refuse a trade agreement which benefits us both and costs them nothing. Even when I offered upwards of two seasons’ harvest in gold as a signing bonus, they still turned their noses up at me. The worst part about this is that the negotiation screen gives you no indication of why the AI deems a deal unacceptable (unless they propose a counter-offer, which they usually don’t). This is a long-standing issue in the Total War series. I may have let it slide in 2006, but with every passing game it becomes a less excusable weakness. Loading

Of course, the real-time battlefield is still definitely Total War’s main focus, and it’s been enhanced in a lot of small ways for Attila. The pacing is much improved, thanks to units taking longer to rout, and often regrouping afterwards rather than fleeing the field after one setback. New raider-type units are able to capture gates, towers, and control points faster. They also set fire to structures, which encourages defenders to waver from their lines to prevent persistent damage to buildings that carries over to the campaign map. This adds an extra layer to the choice of army composition for the wandering hordes that Attila places in the spotlight.

Outside that spotlight, there are some discouragingly rough edges. Most notably, the so far non-playable Celtic factions in Britain use Nordic or Roman units, disappointingly lacking their own roster or models. I’d bet my bottom denarius this will eventually be rectified with DLC, but one of the era’s major culture groups should’ve been adequately represented up front.