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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. Control over your faction is a sliding scale from Insignificant to Absolute, with both extremes putting you at a high risk for civil war. Internal politics and diplomacy are still pretty impenetrable, though. 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. For an ultimately replaceable general lacking in context, I might have let the slight slide. 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. 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. My efforts were easier to manage than in Rome 2, because the campaign interface in Attila is an across-the-board improvement. 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.

This was a matter of becoming savage or becoming dead, the finer points of morality be damned. For a moment, I felt like I understood the perspective of these ancient people, notorious for raiding and pillaging. It didn’t matter how much blood I had to spill, nor whose blood it was. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. The dynamic, driving forces of the campaign are the strongest rallying points for recommending this iteration of Total War.