Total War: Attila - The Overall Guide

For all your Attila: Total War needs.

Introduction

Hello and thank you for visiting this guide created by experts on Attila total war. We hope to handle all your questions on the game, from which faction to play, army management, tactics, politics, and migration you will learn a lot about what to do in Attila.

Is the game worth the buy?

Most definately, after the poor release of Rome II, it doesn't suprise me that this would be the first question on most peoples minds, that being said, there are significant improvements to ATILLA. The game as a whole works (and runs) very well, a much better release this time round, and certain aspects have been implemented and fixed to bring a much better Total War experience, one that alot of us expected from Rome II. Firstly, the politics has been repaired, expanded, and is immersive - you can assassinate, marry off, gain support, ensure loyalty and many more. This can be done by anyone in the reintroduced family tree, even the women! The AI - both battle and campaign - is significantly improved, from my experience, I have been presented with plenty of challenges in the many campaigns I have briefly played, the AI also doesnt do the same things from one campaign to the other. As the various different migrators and barbarians, I have seen the WRE and ERE fall, survive, expand and even destroy each other.

That is just a taste of what awaits the owners of Total War: ATILLA - the game is definately worth a try, it is already level pegging with Rome II (and in some ways exceeds it!) and with the promise of future patches, DLC's/FLC's, ATILLA is definately shaping up to be a fantastic game.

Demoli5h4

What faction is best for my level?

If you have never played a total war game before, are an average player, or are an expert, this section will help you find a faction that fits you.

Beginner:

• The Prologue: the best option if you have never played total war as it functions as a tutorial.
  
• Sassanids: a good beginners faction as they start with a strong economic and military base. They are also surrounded by a buffer zone of client states so it will be awhile before war comes to your homelands.
  
• Visigoths: this faction is great for learning horde mechanics because they start with very strong armies capable of easily sacking most cities, even walled cities, in the early game.
  
• Picts: the Picts start in a walled city surrounded by friends giving them a fairly laid back start, allowing you to take your time in expanding. Plus every general gets night battles and guerilla deployment which makes battle so easy.

Average:

• Geats: start in a walled city with a port, but you will have to overcome poor fertility.
  
• Saxons: start in a walled city with trade goods, but there is no port.
  
• Burgundians: start in a small settlement, but has easy access to ruined settlements to resettle. They also start on solid political ground within the faction.
  
• Langobards: start in a small settlement with no food, bad buildings but starting with a very cheap and effective early unit "Young Wolfs" makes for quick and easy expanding. Poltics wise they only start with the faction leader in your family tree with two children and only two under other nobles.
  
• Ebdanians: the ebdanians have bonuses to sacking which makes them easy to fund early game. They also have guerilla deployment which is a fantastically fun gimmick.
  
• Caledonians: the Caledonians start with a resource that allows them to start optimizing their settlement from turn 1. They also have guerilla deployment.

Advanced:

• Alamans: start in a walled city with trade goods, but are at war with the Vandals who have two large stacks within 2 turns of your starting city.
  
• Danes: One of the Viking DLC factions, they start of with low enemies and high standing is easily possible with the Saxons. Prove your worth as you fight to survive against your fellow Viking tribes.
  
• Jutes: The Jutes are in my opinion the most difficult to play as out of the viking DLC factions. This is not form personal experince but from multiplayer campaigns.
  
• Alans: Starting of on the hunt for survival the Alans are a horde tribe that can be easy to use but at the same time difficult to those with less knowledge on Total War. Watch out for famine, desease and war as you look for a place to settle.
  
• Franks: Not to be confused with Anne Frank the Franks are a strong tribe and a thorn in the Saxon side. They start of with one city with a port, not walled but certainly easy to defend. Strong position to attack the Saxons or the Western Roman empire are available and friends beow the Saxons can be found in the Alamans and Longobards.

Experts:

• Vandals: start as a horde with no good targets and no siege equipment. You are at war with the Alamans, who start in a walled city, and will try to destroy you. Other factions will often join the Alamans in war against you, making this a difficult start.
  
• Eastern Roman Empire: One of the greatest Empires in the world. This nation will provide you with countless hours of enjoyment as you fight the sassanid empire, visigoths and other barbarian nations crawling within your boarders. There is no doubt this is a difficult nation to play as, the only question is are you tough enough?

Masochistic:

• Western Roman Empire: The strongest military in the world, there is no doubting Roman power in Europe. Though over in foreign lands your enemies linger, looking for a time to strike at your empire. You will face the huns, the Vandals, the Saxons and the northern British tribes. In addition to all of the foreign enemies you will also find your own generals ready to backstab you, rebellion around every corner and independance sapping your land mass. Can you survive this onslaught of change?

If you are a Total War expert, and managed Rome II on Legendary with one eye closed be warned Attila is a much harder game, you may want to bump down the difficulty first time round ;)

Demoli5h4, Gaius Julius Caesar, Voth

The Huns - Basic description

http://allempires.com/article/index.php?q=huns

http://wiki.totalwar.com/w/Total_War_ATTILA_huns


In 376 A.D. the barbarians Huns north of the Danube turned to their civilized rival, the Romans, and begged for protection. For a far more barbaric tribe was coming. Perhaps no other people have struck greater fear in the west than the Huns. In the end of the fourth century the Huns seemed to have materialized out of nowhere and crushed they way into the Hungarian plains. From there they extended their domains south of the Danube River, into Gaul and then northern Italy, leaving a trail of destruction and terror wherever they went.

As far as what we know the Huns are this devastating tribe, you will find them razing cities to the ground and subjugating tribes for their own purpose. Their diplomatic disposition is that they severely hate Great Empires such as the Eastern and Western Roman Empires. They also hate Western Romans and this will affect the outcome of the game greatly.

The Huns start with one small tribunal state under their control and shortly after you will find that state getting attacked, this will cause the Huns to either betray their ally or go into a war which should hopefully keep them busy so the Western Romans can prepare for the invasion to come.
As the game is set before 400AD Attila is not yet born and there for you have time to prepare anyway, use this time wisely to solidify your rule within your tribe / nation and to defat your rivals. As the Western Romans this is very important. Defeat the small hordes that are your enemies and then destroy or subjugate the Saxons. Pay off the remaining tribes and you should be able to start getting ready for more war. Just because you have gotten rid of your current enemies do not expect peace to last long. Watch out for your Britannic settlements as the Scots and Irish ill invade, causing your old enemies to gather confidence. You must always stay vigilant. Avoid making new enemies and do your best to gather new families members through adoption.

Of course if you are the Huns it is different. It might be best to not help your allies and just go straight towards your mortal foe the Western Romans. If you do this while getting adopted family members for your ruling tribe you should be able to last very long and do well. Strike when your enemy is weak as Confucius says!

Gaius Julius Caesar

Difference between Co-op and Head to Head

Difference between multiplayer and single player

Most people do not like a head to head match because they seem to think they will be at war with the other player from the start and the truth is the opposite.

Head to Head

On head to head mode you start of with the same agreements and relations with other factions as in the grand campaign. The other player is not at war with you unless your faction normally starts at war with that faction he / she is playing as. You can make agreements and become allies with the other player. Though be aware it is possible for others to declare war on you while in head to head, not saying they will but they probably will. Use diplomacy to prepare for war against your rival and trick him into being weak from helping you.


You can also play as the AI while in head to head, if your rival is attacked and you do not have an agreement then when a army attacks the other player you can choose to spectate like in co-op or play as the AI. I personally like this because when you're doing a Roman faction head to head the Eastern Empire doesn’t even have to declare war to weaken the West. I destroyed an entire Western army using the Quadrians. No losses on my factions part though. Yet another good thing about head to head is that you have your factions normal victory conditions so if you're playing as the West and the East you will either have to remain allies or declare war on each other to win.

Co-op

Co-op is a campaign where you are forced to be military allies with the other faction, you cannot break the agreement and you cannot declare war on each other, this is good for new people to try out if they are nervous but a pain for those who are in a tough spot and are forced to help out their ally. I had a Eastern and Hun co-op campaign and since the Huns are hated by everyone I ended up getting invaded by all the Huns enemies and it made it impossible to make a peace treaty… Not good for the East!

So basically a co-op is a campaign where you are forced to help each other out in wars, cannot play against each other and cannot declare war on each other. You also have a smaller amount of victory conditions that will cross over between your faction and your allies. Say if I was Eastern Rome and my ally was Western Rome the objectives are to own about 80 settlements between you so that would be a tick already.


Gaius Julius Caesar

Migration: What is it?

Migration is where a faction has been driven out of its homeland, becoming landless. When all your cities are lost your armies become known as migrating "hordes". This is not something to be afraid off as migration has it's perks.

The main question is should you stay as a migrating nation or move on to take some settlements.

How long should I migrate?

• The first clue is in your chapter 1 objectives. Most nations that start as migrators have a goal of staying in migration mode till chapter 2.
  
• Some nations have chapter 1 and 2 goals to settle into specific provinces. Yet these provinces are not in any of the victory conditions. This insinuates that you should migrate, settle, and then migrate again.

What are the perks of migration?

• Mobility, having a settlement give your enemy a hard target. A horde can stay on the move.
  
• Massive income. Thanks to the fact your armies are self supported you can move from settlement to settlement sacking them without needing to defend a home base. This means income without excessive upkeep.
  
• The ability to starve a rival faction. Your horde reduces the food availibe in provinces where they are present, compounding this with raiding to further reduce the food and the target faction can starve to death. An army suffering from heavy attrition is an easy target.
  

What should I expect when I take my first settlement?

• The first settlement will be your capital.
  
• Your food and income will be at massive negatives.
  
• Your armies can no longer encamp.

Why is my income and food negative?

• All your hordes building that provide food and income are gone.
  
• Your new settlement needs to be repaired and is not generating food or income.

Voth, Gaius Julius Caesar

Where should I migrate?

The best place to migrate is subject to your personal purpose.

Historic Accuracy:

If this is your purpose then you likely already know where you want to settle.

Objective Based:

Objectives that the game lay out have a historic leaning but also reward gold for achieving them. Just look in your objectives tab to determine your destination.

Fertility:

Settle to maximize profit by heading to places with the highest fertility level and resources for trade. Fertility and resources can be checked in the strategic overlay.


Voth

How do I stop Attrition?

What you need to do is look at key factors of desertion.

• Food: to find your food supply check top left of the screen, if it is negative you will lose troops to attrition.
  
• Winter: winter causes attrition to armies outside of settlements. Put your army if fort stance or encamp, if you are a horde, to counter this.
  
• Income If you are losing money each turn and run out of money youwill notice your men will desert you due to not being given a wage.
  
• Beseiging This is when you attack a settlement, each turn you will lose an amount of men, this will decrease with technology. You will also lose troops if defending from a seige.
  
• Terrain This will mean that if you are in a deep part of the ocean with a navy you will get attrition, same for armies on land.

Income, food, and season.

Gaius Julius Caesar, Voth

Which alliances mean what?

Now some of you might not truly understand what alliances mean. First look up what the word alliance means and then laugh when they don't include different forms of alliance.

• Non-Aggression-Pact: this means that any act of aggression (declaration of war, trespassing ect) is not allowed, of course you can break this treaty but at a much higher diplomatic penalty than before. This is the first step of a long road to friendship, or a way to trick an enemy into a false sense of security... Of course that is if you don't care about how people think of you.
  
  
• Defensive Alliance: will mean that if you get invaded they will defend you, if they get invaded you can defend them. Depending on your relationship with the faction will determine your chance of success in having your allies help you. This is a great way to make your enemies afraid to invade, if you ally with a strong faction then a weaker faction that is still stronger than you might not invade, a great way to prepare for war is to make allies!
  
  
• Military Alliance: is a different sort of alliance, they will join you in a war if you invade another and vice versa. This is a great way to increase your chances of winning a war but the thing people forget is that a military alliance is not a defensive alliance and your allies will not join you if you get invaded so the question is can you afford for a defensive ally to become a military ally? Sometimes when I have a defensive ally that I am using to keep an enemy at bay my ally asks me become a military ally but this I have to deny as it will ruin my own plan.
  
  
• Make Tribunal State: means that they are basically a client state or subjugated. They will do whatever you say,defend you and pay you taxes. I do not believe they go to war with you if you invade, for that you need to subjugate by taking the last settlement. Rome did this a lot in Gaul.

Gaius Julius Caesar

Western Roman Empire survival guide

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=395194476

Ostrogoths survival guide

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=415631046

Saxon Survival Guide

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=416615976

How does imperium work?

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=395862210 A short guide to imperium.

The political system

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=395973576A detailed guide to the political system.

Diplomacy

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=407258491Everything you need to know about the mechanics of diplomacy.

Army make up, formations, and tactics

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=404969412The basics, complete with examples.

Religion in Attila

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=400449944 Here is a detailed guide on how religion works, to long to go into this guide but certainly worth adding a link!

Sack, Loot, Liberate, Occupy, or Raze?

In this section I will go over the uses of the various post siege options.

Sacking:

• Sacking heavily damages all building in a settlement and generates gold for the attacker based on how many building there were and what level. The bigger and more developed a settlement is, the more valuable.
  
• When migrating sacking is a great way to generate extra cash without occupying and losing your migration status.
  
• Sacking is also useful when you do not want to over extend an empire or don't have a governor for the provice, but want money from it.
  
• Sacking is also useful is generating XP for a general as you can revisit the target settlement many times.

Loot and Occupy

• Loot and Occupy is most useful as a way to regenerate troops for an army that has suffered casualties when deep in enemy territory. After your army is full you can abandon the settlement to raze it, or simply ignore it and let it rebel. This action is not a good idea if you want to keep the settlement as it will cost more to repair than you made off the action.
  
• If you plan to loot and occupy be aware of your food especially late game as this action can be a large drain on your food. If you have less than 100 food income it may be better to sack.

Subjugate

• If you have a firm understanding of how diplomacy works, Subjugation is fantastic of expanding your empire. Subjugated factions count toward victory conditions, allow you to levy a variety of units, and pay tribute.
  
• Be aware of leader traits if you plan to subjugate a faction, leaders with "Rebellious" are more trouble than they are worth.
  
• You can only subjugate a faction at their last settlement, some may refuse outright, choosing death over subjugation. In this case subjugation is not an option.

Liberate

• Liberating a faction forces into a military alliance with you. This faction will count toward victory conditions as long as you stay allied to them.
  
• Liberation is a great way to remove a chunk of an enemy empire that you do not have to defend and will often help you fight the enemy they were liberated from.
  
• Be aware that liberating certain factions, such a Roman Empire, will make other factions angry with you.

Occupy

• If you want to bring a settlement into your empire this option is best, your army will not do extra damage to buildings and has reduced public order penalties.
  
• Be aware of your food status when you occupy especially late game. With tier 3 or higher city buildings having a cumulative drain of 200+ on your food, it can induce attrition.

Raze

• A razed settlement costs a lot of gold to resettle and often stay desolate a long time.
  
• Razed settlements reduce the overall fertility of a province by 1 to a minimum of 1.
  
• Razed settlements causes immigration to surrounding provinces which in turn causes public order problems.
  
• If you are looking to cause massive economic and public order problems for an enemy empire, razing is the way to go. It is very hard for them to recover from for many years. It can cause attrition to enemy armies through starvation and bankruptcy.
  
• Razing looks great, ;)

Voth

Province Optimization

In this section I will discuss how you can get the most out of a province by bonus stacking.

Province Specialization:

Buildings:
Certain buildings have bonuses that allow you to make use of synergy. Carefully plan your province to get the most out of it.

In the pic above you see an example of buildings that stack well to get the most out of bonuses.

Resources:
Certain resources have bonuses that prompt you to specialize a province one way or another.

• Olives: bonus to commercial income.
  
• Iron: bonuses to agricultural and industrial income.
  
• Gold: bonus to tariffs or a very high raw industrial income.
  
• Marble: bonus to cultural income.
  
• Lumber: bonus to industrial income.
  
• Lead: bonus to industrial income.

Governors and Households:
Even characters and households can give bonuses that help specialize a province even further. Choose a governor carefully as some may have a bonus to industrial, agricultural, or cultural income. Once your governor is in place choose households that further optimize him. A household that grants +5 sanitation and public order would greatly help in your industrial province. Some households even effect the income or construction costs of certain building types.


Good household items for specialization.

Agents:
Your agents can also have a trait that will optimize a province, tho they are less abundant, so keep an eye out for these gems.

The above example shows a scout that should be deployed in an industrial specialized province.

The pictures reflect a province with 85% bonus to industrial income, with careful planning this can get even higher.

The Military Province:

Having a single province with all the military buildings necessary for a full roster of options is a good idea. This prevents the need to shuffle units between armies, or go on long treks across your lands to recruit what you need.

In the provinces you should also construct buildings that give bonuses and experience to your new recruits. The Iron resource is the only resource that grants military buffs that I know of, making Iron provinces good provinces for military specialization.

And just in case you prefer the video format:

Voth

Disease and Sanitation

Disease will drag your economy down as it lowers production. It will cause public order problems and can even lead to rebellions or civil war if it gets bad enough. It will slowly kill your armies that have contracted it and give them debuffs.

Now the bad news is, there is no cure for disease. You must wait it out. It can drag on for 10, 15, or 20 plus turns killing you slowly. The good news is, it is so easy to prevent!

How to tell what province is in danger of disease:

Mousing over the sanitation indicator will allow you to see what exactly your levels of sanitation are. At a glance green is good and red is bed.

• Current Sanitation: this is the sanitation your current buildings are providing. There are buildings that allot sanitation to all settlements in a province. By default a province has 0 sanitation.
  
• Current Squalor: this is the squalor generated by the buildings in the province you are inspecting.
  
• Total Sanitation: This is "Current Sanitation" minus "Current Squalor". This is your surplus sanitation that can be used to cover the construction new buildings that produce squalor. If it is negative you are at risk or disease. If it is 0 or higher there is no chance of disease.

When does disease happen:

A sanitation deficit causes there to be a percent chance for a disease to break out, each turn, in the corresponding settlement. The chance starts at 2% and may cap at 4%, I have never seen it higher than 4% at least.

The main way to control sanitation:

Buildings have the most impact on sanitation.

• Construct sanitation buildings to increase your "Total Sanitation".
  
• Do not construct buildings that exceed you current "Total Sanitation".

All buildings that effect sanitation will have the little fountain icon indicating such. It should be noted that when upgrading a building, if both tiers have squalor or sanitation, the totals increase by the difference. That is to say, if tier 1 has +2 squalor and tier 2 has +4 squalor, your total squalor would increase by 2, not 4. (4 - 2 = 2)

Other ways to help sanitation:

• Households of your governors are always a great source of modifiers to help with various situations, even sanitation.

• The tech tree can assist in controlling sanitation, so be sure to choose your tech carefully based on your need.

• The Sassanids have a cultural bonus to sanitation.
  
• The Roman Paganism religion has a bonus to sanitation.

Voth

How to keep units in formation while attacking.

Surprisingly this is something most people who are new to Total War have difficulty grasping, it is why I will include this in the guide. To keep your army in formation when attacking a singular enemy unit is simple. Select the troops in a formation and click behind the enemy unit. If you click on the unit then your army will run at it and merge into a big blob which can become very frustrating and devastating if the enemy surround your soldiers.

To gain charge bonuses and precursors, such as javelins, you will still need to give attack orders for the last few yards.

Gaius Julius Caesar

How to rename settlements

How to rename settlements

This is a simple task that most people do not know is possible. All you need to do to rename your settlements are click on a settlement, click on the province information icon and then move to the pencil icon next to the settlement name. This will allow you to rename it to whatever you want.

Do not get confused with the province information icon and the settlement information icon. The province information icon will be located further left on your screen.

Gaius Julius Caesar

Why use Barracades and how

Barricades are a great way to concentrate enemy forces where you want them to be, make them take a long way around so that your archers can weaken them, or to just delay them while you gather your men. This can also work both ways and the enemy might want to lure you into a trap or be rallying his men behind the barricade so be careful!

Now how to use barricades is simple, you will notice a barricade icon in certain areas of your walled settlement and all you need to do is click on it. You only get a certain amount of barricades each battle and you need to place them carefully. They will not have much health early on either so they might seem useless but every second the enemy is distracted is a second you have gained. To check how many barricades you will have just look at the information given before the battle starts (will be at the top with the barricade icon next to the number).

Gaius Julius Caesar

Modding Attila vs Rome 2 (My experiences)

Well for certain Attila is an entirely different beast than Rome 2 and comes with a host of cool new features, and some not so awesome ones. The combat mechanics are a little more fun and have a few more things I can do with abilities and such (e.g douse fires on ships, repair ship damage and even up the unit count at a press of a button if I so wished). Horses now stop dead in front of spear and pike infantry while missiles seem to be a lot less powerful and accurate by default. This is where the problems for me start to arise however, as the little tricks and fixes I used in Rome 2 to create spectacular battles didn't work here.

Hello everyone, I am Petellius, and I have been modding Total war games since november 2013 (just after the release of Rome 2) while my mods have mainly been overlooked due to their smallness in size I got picked up by a Major Overhaul team called Ancient Empires. You may have heard of us, we are at this minute working on an overhaul of Attila to set it in the ancient period around 200 BC. Working with this group I has been the most amazing experience I have ever had in my PC/gaming life. The guys there are helpful and very easy to work with and with absolutely no idea being ridiculed and as such many new and interesting things have been discovered that no other mod has done. In Rome 2 we managed to achieve a great deal, and continue to find and complete more work everyday, yet Attila completely changed our game plan.

Attila and the immediate responce by the team
When Attila was announced the team lead (ABH) was skeptical about the game as I'm sure a lot of you were and we all disregarded it until further information started to come out. This information was very important to the team. Information such as a family tree and governor system, horde mechanics, fire mechanics, sanitation, army degredation, fertility, razing... oh the potential that had been unleashed! At once we immediately planned to port what we had over to Attila, not such a difficult task due to everything in Ancient Empires being made from scratch and hardly anything of vanilla Rome 2 was left. Furthermore, the announcement of battle map editing and campaign editing, to a small extent, got us as excited as a small child is at christmas. The endless possibilties for a battle map editor is seriously untapped... and editing the campaign could be useful yet the pitfalls there were disappointing. The problem was that, even if we changed the terrain, adding cities and completely changed the landscapes, it wouldnt necessarily mean that it would be reflected by the game mechanics themselves. As far as we are aware for now, the campaign editor is aesthetics only. Yet the battlefield editor gives rise to having more complex and interesting city designs instead of the mundane ones of Rome 2, we could even make realistic roman camps with earthern banks and stakes and towers and gates and wooden pallisades, and can these battlescapes be transported over to Rome 2? Unfortunately none of these questions could yet be answered.

Attila and modding the battles
Battles were, upon release, a major downfall to me. They were too fast yet again and I was impressed by the improvement yet still upset by the lack complexity within it. It was again the same fast paced, better troops are a million times better than levies, button mashing, special abilities... argh! But that was soon fixed, me and philip started work and the mod started to take shape, every stat was much reduced and the ui was overhauled so that the smaller numbers worked better in the stat bars. We even ended up removing morale as a stat bar for that little bit of uncertainty in battle, now having to rely upon the text 'poor morale' or 'high morale' to guess the morale of your unit.

The problems started to really begin when I tried to implement the slower, yet more interesting battles that I had created for Rome 2. You see the main part of my mod relies on the first instance of battles, the initial clash and screams and crashes of swords on shields ringing throughout the battlefield, were supposed to be quite fast and ferocious. Yet once I had done that and tried, through the fatigue system in the same way as I had in Rome 2, to reduce kills as time went by I found that a still large amount of casualties were coming in when the unit was tired or very tired. This still hasnt been entirely fixed, and I had to reduce the speed of the intial casualties to compensate. This then led to cavalry being overpower, and then underpowered, and then missiles were a problem, then they couldnt kill a thing. You see the thing with creating a battle mod is not so much the actual creation, so much as the fixing. Everything you create, or fix, or improve in turn makes something else unbalanced or broken.

This story does, however, have a happy ending and the mod has now been released under the name of Warriors of Faith Extended, on the Total War Centre. Furthermore, I had managed to take a large section of the morale and fatigue system that I had tweaked for Attila over to Rome 2. This meant that I had managed to improve some things that now make for very cool battles (in my opinion). The effects in Attila are a little less spectacular right now, but the idea is that most units will be far more effected by all types of morale penalty through all fatigue steps, not just exhausted like in vanilla. This meant that units started to slowly peel away from the battle once things started to go a bit wrong and those units too tired to give a damn just walked off. Yet the most amazing thing is that I managed to engineer a way that, unless light units or still fresh, all infantry units could not catch those enemies that fled from battle so that cavalry were needed to chase down routing enemies. This meant that casualties tended to be much lower in both victory and defeat. This leaves armies free to recoup and return in campaigns. This further means that taking somewhere in campaigns meant having to beat an army two or more times so as to fully be able to take on the cities. With the CAI being improved as it is, this makes taking enemy territory that much harder than it is in vanilla Rome 2 and Attila.

Attila and modding the Campaign
When we first looked at the game we realised a large problem with the map. It was missing large sections of urban sites in Illyria and Greece in particular. This meant that any sort of representation of Athens or Sparta was basically impossible, meaning the origional start date of our mod didnt really fit for Attila's map. To fix this we moved the time frame up so that the player begins in the final stages of the macedonian wars, before the decisive victory by the Romans at Pydna and the interference from Seluecia. We also worried about the amount of factions, only 117 in Attila compared to the over 200 we had implemented in Rome 2 for things such as different rebel factions for almost every region.

However, ABH managed to figure out how to add in factions, something no other modder had either found out or bothered to use in great detail. This meant that that was one less problem standing in our way.

Work continues on the mod and as yet we have no other answers for our questions but hope we will soon. Thanks for reading this and if you wish to give AE a look over the forum and battle mods can be found on our hosted mod section: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?2095-Antiqua-Imperium-(AI)

Decisive battles!

Here are some great decisive battles for you to get you into some killing mood!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYm_4N0GFQw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVspjo22a5Y

I would alos like to add a link to my group where peopel can view new and recently published work by myself. If you have any work you want advertising then just go ahead and advertise, the group is always looking for more steam comunity contributors looking for more viewers.

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/GaiusJuliusCaesar#

Did we miss something?

Let us know in the comments below if you need help with anything that is not covered in this guide. It is a work in progress with plans to add sections for faction overviews among other things as needs arise.

[gs-schwedenhaus]

so well done , guess spend a lot of time .-0

[Voth]

I'm porting a diplomacy mechanics guide I wrote for Rome 2 over to Attila and updating it. Probably have it added sometime this weekend.

[TYE]

thanks

[Gaius Julius Caesar]

@ TyeDragor - Will make sure to add something about the Huns when we are done slightly editing what we have now. This weekend we are improving two sections and then deciding what to improve next week.

@ Brandonlott938 - Thanks. We worked very hard on this guide, especially Voth who did the layout after the typing was done, I myself got everyone together and I have to say it this was great to work on.

[Gaius Julius Caesar]

@ MG - Well if you move your units just behind an enemy they will attack when they meet the enemy, not walk through but those who do not come into contact with the enemy will just carry on until told to attack. If you do decide to attack them keep them at slow speed if you want them in formation. To just pullout a unit with low health click on them and click away form the skirmish. They might not listen so just tyr until they do, they will lose more troops while retreating though.

@ WCKGAMES - We hope to expand the guide on how to survive as nations, we are trying to get into contact with people willing to help who have the time. We did actually include how to survive sections but removed them due to the time we had. We are currently expanding the guide so expect an Ostrogoth survival / information guide in the future.

[brandonlott938]

good guide

[TYE]

Huns?

[Bob]

Why doesn't anyone do a Ostrogoth guide?

[MG]

Great guide thanks very much.

Regarding battle formations; will units auto attack enemy forces if you click behind them? I was under the impression you HAD to click attack orders in order for them to fight or they will run through/past enemies, getting slaughtered in the process.

Also, if units auto attack, how do you pull out units with low health? won't they still just auto attack when you click to move them back? Not sure how mechanics work with regards to different intentions, ie. attacking vs. running etc

[person‽]

The very first campaign I did was as the western Roman empire on hard difficulty.