Attila: Total War

[MengJiao]

[Attila is not fair. It is not reasonable. There are no pretty pitched battles against the Hunnic Empire. Attila is coming, and he will reach you, and you will have to deal with him. Yet the horde may seem endless, and certainly when possible they will push on you and strain you to your very limits. The real question is how will you survive against the Hunnic multitudes? Or indeed, how long?



Anyone else have a better/different understanding of history?

  I won't claim a better understanding, but I can provide a number of counter-examples:

  1) there were a lot of supposed "Steppe-barbarian" incursions all over the place.  The Mongols were the most massive, but not the most typical and even they were squealched by Tamerlane (who destroyed the Mongol city mentioned in the OP).
  2) The Chinese turned most of them back
  3) Most were not particularly massive
  4) Some (the Hungarians) were beaten precisely by the first armored knights.  You might even say that armored knights originally evolved to defeat steppe archers
  5) The Hunnic empire was a temporary patchwork, mostly of Germanic tribes or clans and collapsed pretty fast when Attila died.
  6) like many "well-known" things about history, massive hordes of steppe archers are exaggerated from one spectacular case and read back into earlier cases that were actually very different 
  7) (Added after checking Wikipedia:  Also the Persians defeated Attila around 442 in Armenia as did the Visigoths, Alans and Romans at Chalons in 451.)             

[LongBlade]

Thanks, Meng.

Definitions always matter :)

I'm not sure anything I read contradicted what you say, and in any case it's been years since I read that book. I very well could have lost a lot of detail. It's probably more a matter of what we'd consider a "Mongol horde." I can certainly imaging smaller incursions being less successful/memorable. These would certainly make for more variety in a game. I guess we'll see as more information is released.

[Nefaro]

Chicks never dig short guys so it is my duty to be a bewb snob. What's right is right.

  Attila was supposedly rather short and rather homely.  This aspect of his nature may have been somewhat exaggerated.  I was just reading the first blog about the game and it seems to rehash every last cliché in the history of the world.  You just have to wonder about what absurd versions of history find their ways into imaginary gamer's brains:  Tiger tanks, blah, blah blah, decadent empire blahblah blah and it seems to have been that way for decades.

Here's some of the blog:

Attila is not fair. It is not reasonable. There are no pretty pitched battles against the Hunnic Empire. Attila is coming, and he will reach you, and you will have to deal with him. Yet the horde may seem endless, and certainly when possible they will push on you and strain you to your very limits. The real question is how will you survive against the Hunnic multitudes? Or indeed, how long?
Well, there are many ways you may survive against Attila in the game, and many new and old gameplay features besides to aid you in your struggle, in ways both familiar to staunch Total War players, yet also in ways that may surprise even the most stalwart of you.

You could just take the Sangiban the Alan route and go right through the middle of the horde (which at that time was mostly rather chewed up Germanic levies).  That's a surprise.

Anyway, I hope the game is better than the mindless blather of the blogging about the game:

http://blogs.sega.com/totalwar/2014/10/15/total-war-attila-developer-blog-1/

Agree that they've been spouting some exceptionally mindless blather about it.

Frankly, I'm not very stoked for a TW game focused on Attila.  All the CA yammering about Attila The Honey Badger just rankles me more because of that.

[sandman2575]

All the CA yammering about Attila The Honey Badger just rankles me more because of that.

Aw, c'mon.  That's kinda funny. 

He pretty much was the Honey Badger of history.  "Attila don't care." (historical note:  was printed on all Hunnic coinage.)   

[MengJiao]

Agree that they've been spouting some exceptionally mindless blather about it.

Frankly, I'm not very stoked for a TW game focused on Attila.  All the CA yammering about Attila The Honey Badger just rankles me more because of that.

  I'm interested, more because of things that aren't easy to turn into blather than because of Attila's weirdly inflated reputation.  It's kind of funny that the gaming blather seems to have backed itself into doing something interesting more or less by accident in this case.  The start point of the game (395 supposedly and the supposed birth year of Attila) is also the official birth of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires (or the last time the Empire was in a state coherent enough to be split).  Leaving aside the apparently necessary marketing of Attila as the ultimate foe, in 395 there were a lot of options for the Western Empire and its collapse less than 100 years later could have been managed very differently.   Moreover, while Attila himself is not very well documented, there is pretty good documentation for the period.  We even have original documents signed by Theodosius from about this time -- not apparently that much real documentation will have much impact on the titanic need for massive blather -- but it is there, and available and (as I noted elsewhere) there is even St. Ambrose who has been sitting in situ since this period.  So in a way, 400 AD is a world much closer to the present than you might think, which gives the whole Attila thing a more interesting flavor than say Caesar in Gaul -- which could have been much more realistically marketed as the end of the world (Caesar is  coming and he can't be stopped -- and he wasn't) than the unstoppable Attila (who got stopped at least 4 times: Constantinople, Armenia, Gaul and Italy). 

    Plus, if presented with some aspects of realism, Attila himself is potentially a lot more interesting than say Julius Caesar in Gaul, since Attila is not taking a relatively advanced army into a moderately quaint and shaky set of poorly-organized protostates, oh, no, Attila is somehow assembling a powerful (if extremely fragile) set of allied tribes and exploiting the interfaces between steppe and forest, Roman and non-roman, urbanized and pastoral.  Could be quite interesting.

[Nefaro]

All the CA yammering about Attila The Honey Badger just rankles me more because of that.

Aw, c'mon.  That's kinda funny. 

He pretty much was the Honey Badger of history.  "Attila don't care." (historical note:  was printed on all Hunnic coinage.)

I'm not disputing the history.  Just the terrible wordplay the CA people have been using.  I saw some digital advert for it which was the epitome of the term "blather". 

"Attila is coming.  Attila cannot be stopped!  You will fear Attila!" etc etc.  It sounds like something written by a twelve-year old.

[Sir Slash]

Well I'm hoping it's the second coming of Barbarian Invasion myself and they can call it anything they want. Playing the Huns in BI was a real challenge. You could kick everybody's ass but then try to rule them--- nobody liked you, your culture, or your gods. Nobody would trade with you and your only navy was, "Large Boats". And in order to win, you had to control Constantinope and Rome.

[sandman2575]

"Attila is coming.  Attila cannot be stopped!  You will fear Attila!" etc etc.  It sounds like something written by a twelve-year old.

I can't argue with you here.  That is indeed lame.

[Gusington]

I am also counting on a second coming of Barbarian Invasion. In the meantime the mindless blather doesn't really bother me. Reminds me of dialogue from The Terminator.

[Nefaro]

I am also counting on a second coming of Barbarian Invasion. In the meantime the mindless blather doesn't really bother me. Reminds me of dialogue from The Terminator.

LOL.


Attila the Honey Badger Terminator.

I think we need a photoshop done for CA.


Anyway.. I also hope it's another Barbarian Invasion if nothing else and the Attila situation isn't so OP that it overshadows everything during most of the campaign.

[GDS_Starfury]

the scorched earth feature looks interesting.  depending on the campaign map I can see a Eastern Front mod. 

[Sir Slash]

Yeah, I might just use the Scorched Earth feature on my own people just for the fun of it. You know, keep them in line.

[MengJiao]

Yeah, I might just use the Scorched Earth feature on my own people just for the fun of it. You know, keep them in line.

  That might make your average Aetius or Theodoric unpopular.  We know the Huns were perfectly capable of totally erasing towns.  Luxeuil for example.  Not so sure about cities.  Oh...Acquaelia?  So ...cities too.

[Martok]

A new, longer trailer has been released. 

It's more of that ridiculously bombastic narration, but it does hint a little more at features & gameplay. 

[Sir Slash]

Thanks for the video Martok. He kind of looks like your avatar.