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[umiman]

12th Day of Festag: A screenshot of King Louen Leoncoeur and a short animation video.   I'm assuming the model has been updated but I haven't played enough with Bretonnia to pick out any differences.

the current model has Leoncoeur's eyes doing crazy things.

[Teneb]

12th Day of Festag: A screenshot of King Louen Leoncoeur and a short animation video.   I'm assuming the model has been updated but I haven't played enough with Bretonnia to pick out any differences.

the current model has Leoncoeur's eyes doing crazy things.

He's seen some shit.

[umiman]

I know this is not related to Warhammer Total War or Total Warhammer or Total War Warhammer or whatever it's called but I can't find the other Total War thread so I'll put it here.

Attila is on sale for a pretty hefty discount so I picked it up. I originally ignored it because I despise frigging horse archers and a game about just horse archers makes me want to throw up. However, I've been playing it for the past few days and well...

It's really good. I think it's one of the best Total Wars and I'd put it at better than Warhammer. Maybe less than Shogun 2 but not by much. It's basically what Rome 2 should have been.

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I mean, first you've got the soundtrack.

Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh9HI4eudR8

Don't tell me that's not good. Rome 2's was incredibly forgettable. Even Warhammer's pretty boring.

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Two, the sieges in this are easily the best in the series. Yep, better than Medieval 2. Mostly because the AI actually uses combined arms in this now unlike how they didn't do shit in Rome 2.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So you've got so many combined naval + land battles everywhere. It's so damn good. And they made the villages and towns and cities actually fun to fight in with great differences in elevation, natural choke points, a reason to defend more than just your town center, etc. It's kinda the only Total War game I know of where you're actually incentivized to have layers of defense beyond "I can't fit all my troops in the middle so I'll put them everywhere".

But seriously, the naval + land shit is so much better in this. They improved everything about it. For example, transport ships don't just mindlessly take up landing spots any more so you don't have to split your army up across the entire map. Additionally, seasick land troops lose horribly to even a handful of marines so your defending naval garrison is super important (instead of how transports basically defeated everything in Rome 2). Things like that just make it so much more compelling to play these battles.

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Let me tell you a story about what I consider my favorite, most memorable battle I've ever played in a Total War game.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I was playing as vikings trying to unite Scandinavia, attacking a fortified village. The enemy had a full stack army and a navy in its garrison. I had a small army attacking from land, a navy attacking from sea, and a third full stack army invading from sea as well.

So already we have a battle with about 7000 men on the field. The map is a village with a large harbour, layers of housing across a bunch of hills culminating in a long winding hilltop climb to the chieftan's hut kinda like what you see in Whiterun. Except with a harbour.

I open with my navy sailing up. Numerically less than the enemy's navy, but we have artillery ships. The enemy's navy is blocking access to the harbour. I have no clue where the enemy's land forces are since I can't see inside the town but I assume they're waiting in there. My land forces are coming in from the border's edge while my naval invasion force is sailing in as well.

The navies clash, I use the artillery ships to sink the naval commander and after a short bloody affair where basically everyone except the artillery ships and two bow ships sink to the bottom of the sea, I clear out the harbour and move my invasion in. The first phase of the battle is over and there's nothing to stop my ships from landing. I move the artillery to cover the landings as we slowly dock all our troops in the harbour. I frigging love how transport ships will leave after depositing their load now, seriously.

In the meantime, I move the land forces up towards to village's entrance. It's relatively small with around 10 units of men. Nothing special. No trouble so far.

At this point I'm wondering where on earth the enemy is. I've landed on the shore and other than the watch towers shooting potshots at me, there's nothing on the shore or the vicinity. I move some troops up to destroy the watchtowers (you can't capture enemy towers in this, which is fine I guess). We encounter some light resistance so I take my time.

Suddenly, I notice a gigantic blob of red on my minimap. The enemy sortied almost all its troops to annihilate my land forces. They sallied forth under the cover of a forest and mountain to ambush me as I approached. It was too late when I noticed and I had to scramble to get them to not completely rout instantly. I commanded that general to withdraw immediately as I didn't want him to die, but I had the rest of the troops just buy time as they were completely boned. I also sent the artillery ships to try and help out there.

I now rushed to capture the village hut on top of the winding hill ASAP. The enemy did leave some troops here and there to delay me so it was extremely infuriating as there was no way to flank them due to the nature of the map. Additionally, there was another massive problem. See... with the reinforcing land army getting wiped out, I was now at a significant numerical disadvantage.

I managed to take control of the settlement just in time. I now positioned all my troops to block entrances to the village and our positions were now reversed. Now I was defending this village (with no watchtowers left mind you) against a massive army.

This shit does not happen in Warhammer.

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The graphics are significantly better in Attila than in Rome 2. It's like a completely different generation of game.

Shadows are better, the maps are better, the designs are better, there are actual female soldiers interspersed among certain units like hunters and brigands and such, textures are significantly better, etc.

Here's a comparison screenshot:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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There are civilians running around on the map. Yes. Civilians. Just like in Rome 1's settlement viewer. Except you can kill them now and they panic in the face of the enemy.

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You can set entire settlements alight. It's amazing. Just frigging torch the entire city in the battle. The fire effects in Attila are just great in general as you ignite entire forests, fields, and so on. It's not just cosmetic too, as doing damage to a settlement like this affects the defenders very dramatically, but also makes it way more expensive to repair after.

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There are so many different unit types. It's like playing with Radious mod or something.

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There are problems with it though. The climate change mechanic is stupid and I highly recommend you mod it somehow. There's still a few bugs such as pikes disappearing after you order them to pike wall (a mod fixes this too). Things like that. The AI still cheats like a motherfucker, but that's to be expected.

However, all in all, if you haven't gotten it already, I highly recommend you get Attila while it's cheap as balls. I was really quite surprised at how good it is.

[Teneb]

There are civilians running around on the map. Yes. Civilians. Just like in Rome 1's settlement viewer. Except you can kill them now and they panic in the face of the enemy.

Civilians can actually get lucky and kill one of the invading soldiers. It is rare, but it happens.

The climate change mechanic is stupid and I highly recommend you mod it somehow.

Climate change was one of the Big Things in that time period, and one of the main reasons the whole clusterfuck that was the Great Migrations happened.

One thing you forgot to mention is that Attila brings back meaningful and involved family mechanics like in Rome 1 and Medieval 2. And now having your internal faction hold too much power can lead to problems.

The game, however, is probably one of the harder total wars. Sure feels apocalyptic though, which is nice.

[umiman]

There are civilians running around on the map. Yes. Civilians. Just like in Rome 1's settlement viewer. Except you can kill them now and they panic in the face of the enemy.

Civilians can actually get lucky and kill one of the invading soldiers. It is rare, but it happens.

The climate change mechanic is stupid and I highly recommend you mod it somehow.

Climate change was one of the Big Things in that time period, and one of the main reasons the whole clusterfuck that was the Great Migrations happened.

One thing you forgot to mention is that Attila brings back meaningful and involved family mechanics like in Rome 1 and Medieval 2. And now having your internal faction hold too much power can lead to problems.

The game, however, is probably one of the harder total wars. Sure feels apocalyptic though, which is nice.

I wouldn't mind the climate change thing if it made sense, but the way they implemented it is pretty frigging dumb.

I mean, by the end of it, the entire world is basically the Sahara Desert in terms of fertility and it never recovers. There's literally no way in game to revert or improve the conditions, which makes no sense whatsoever. I understand why they did it, as they want to force you and the AI into conflict, but it just breaks my suspension of disbelief too much.

I recommend the mods that let you build irrigation or at least increase the fertility level by 1 so you're not stuck in the Fallout universe but at least you still have a reason to not stay in the less fertile areas.

Or if you like it... then you can just leave it. The power of modding.

But yeah, it's pretty frigging hard and the mood is great. Yup, I forgot about the family trees because that part is so good too. They got so much right with this. It actually makes me even more annoyed that sieges in Warhammer are so stupid.

[Majestic7]

So I caved in and bought this in the winter sale. The DLC cash grab and power creep from new LL's is beyond stupid, but I guess it captivates the authentic "milking money with both hands"-feel of Games Workshop. The game is very fun, but other than those two things my main beef so far is:

1) AI concentrates on player beyond anything else, which gets a tad ridiculous. Playing as Beastmen, I've been hunted by a major enemy stack through five realms. Meanwhile, the enemy realm is getting razed by their local enemies. Playing as vampires, I had Chaos focus exclusively on me, forgetting everyone else. Not only is it foolish artificial difficulty, it breaks the immersion.

2) Wood Elves rape everything. They've destroyed Altdorf and wrecked the entire Empire in both of my games. I thought they were supposed to be isolationists and stuff? Why haven't CA learned how to make an okay campaign AI?

3) Most of offensive magic seems useless. Lore of Metal seems extra useless.

[Grim Portent]

The magic balance has if anything managed to emulate current edition 40k psykers better than 8th edition Fantasy wizards. 

Buffs are better than debuffs which are better than damaging spells. As I understand it Fantasy generally had such potent magic that it was foolish not to cast the big Vortex spells when you could, since several of them could nuke entire units.

[umiman]

Magic is... Unintuitive in this game. It takes a lot of external knowledge just to know what to cast and when.

For example, vortex spells are brutal against units that are immune to knock back such as chosen and Giants and cavalry as units are immune to damage while ragdolling around.

And not all spells are created equal. The lore of shadows's vortexes are significantly better and more damaging than others.

The greenskins's buff spells like 'ere we go are like 100x better than the lore of metal.

Also sometimes you want the knock back of a spell more than you want the damage. Knock back destroys momentum and unit coherence which can easily change a fight. But the game doesn't tell you this and you may be left wondering why a push spell even exists.

Even the various "fireball" spells are all different from one another.

One of the more annoying things is how the game won't tell you what the damage numbers and type of damage is for certain spells. For example, there are damage spells that do really crappy damage as a base cast but when overcasted, do huge amounts of armor piercing damage.

Stuff like that. It's just unintuitive and excessively complicated.

[Neonivek]

It would be a lot less annoying if many of these "issues" felt intentional on some level...

But rather they show a sort of carelessness in the design process. a sort of "they won't mind" mentality.

[Tack]

-Attila snip-

Damn. I never bought it because I was... content? With Rome II and saw Attila as an overpriced expansion.
Turns out it's got all the stuff Rome 2 needed in the base game.

Maybe next time it's ridiculously price cut I'll get it. I already am quite bored with the tiny complement of maps TW:W has (although that's my only true gripe still), and fighting in settlements again could be fun.

[umiman]

-Attila snip-

Damn. I never bought it because I was... content? With Rome II and saw Attila as an overpriced expansion.
Turns out it's got all the stuff Rome 2 needed in the base game.

Yup, that was basically the exact same thought I had, except with the "oh god it's just Rome 2 with more horse archers".

Turns out it's more like Rome 2: Xtreme Legends Return of the Horses Bugaloo Hyper EX Tournament Edition.

Also, Charlemagne is basically Medieval 3 more or less. Or the early parts of it.

[Mech#4]

I do think the mechanics in Attila work better than those in Rome 2 as well as the atmosphere and general theme seems stronger. However, I think Attila has a lack of factions which can give you a simple campaign. Hordes require careful relocation and choosing of battles, the western and eastern roman empires have a lot of enemies, low moral and high income deficits so the only "vanilla-as-possible" factions are some of the eastern ones without any DLC. There's not many factions that give you a low stress campaign.

The medieval and Lord of the Rings mods being made for Attila are worth keeping an eye on though.

[umiman]

However, I think Attila has a lack of factions which can give you a simple campaign. Hordes require careful relocation and choosing of battles, the western and eastern roman empires have a lot of enemies, low moral and high income deficits so the only "vanilla-as-possible" factions are some of the eastern ones without any DLC. There's not many factions that give you a low stress campaign.

Yup. If you don't have the DLC, this game is basically halved. Which is why I only recommend buying it when on a big sale or something like previously (or right now? I dunno).

On another note, Total War Warhammer is apparently in Steam's "platinum" ranked most-sold games of 2016. It's also #3 on Angry Joe's top games of 2016 even though he never reviewed it.

Pretty happy for CA.

I just wish they'd fucking do something about the DLC prices. They never go on sale and they're all so expensive!

[Wiles]

I am thinking of picking up Atilla before the sale ends. Are there any of the DLCs I should avoid?

[Teneb]

I am thinking of picking up Atilla before the sale ends. Are there any of the DLCs I should avoid?

Not really. Viking is the weakest of them, but that's it. If you are short on money, you'll want Empires of the Sand at the very least, and maybe Charlemagne.