Tomorrow will be the first day of proper work on new NLP series in Total War: Attila, 'Fields of Mars' - a name decided on during a fun period of sleeplessness last night. It's a reference to the Field Of Mars, the place where troops would gather outside of Rome before a campaign, and to the fact that Britain (a place with lots of fields) will be the only place left worshiping Mars, making the fields there his... or something...
So it's a modded campaign, using a mod that makes Britannia its own separatist Roman faction, making for plenty of interesting campaign situations. There's one big problem though: it's hard. 'Very Hard' in fact, as the game itself admits in the 'starting difficulty' rating for the campaign.
The difficulty meant that the campaign wasn't actually guaranteed to succeed. But I had two counters for this: 1) I would use a mod that added powerful old-school Roman units, which could turn the balance in my favour and 2) I wasn't doing live commentary so I could scrap a campaign if it went badly early enough for starting again to be an option.
As it turns out, it was number 2) that would be invoked for the most part, and not just for reasons of difficulty.
You start the campaign stuck on the British Isles with three barbarian factions that hate you but aren't at war with you, and a fleet of hostile Saxons inbound for southern England. In my tests I found that it was possible to effectively lose the campaign in the very first turn if all three of the barbarian kingdoms attacked, which they often did.
Knowing this, I began my first real attempt at the campaign optimistically, for not only did I repel the Saxon invasion in a port defence battle (that I have re-fought nearly 10 times now for various reasons), but only 1 of the 3 barbarian kingdoms attacked me, meaning action early on but not too much (I wanted to start the series with a land battle that included the faction leader, if I could).
A comically annoying problem arose though. The hostile faction, the Caledonians, would send a small (beatable) force to besiege my main force inside Eboracum every single turn. Each time I sallied and beat it, but the repeated sieges cancelled recruitment and replenishment, meaning that after a year of game time I hadn't recruited a single unit and had only a beaten up starting army to work with when the Picts and the Ebdanians decided they wanted in on the action. Oh dear.
Pic related shows how things ended up by the end of the second in-game year.
The faction leader and main character of the series was dead, the north was lost and in the south I had invasions and rebellions to deal with using my half-stack of terrible spears. Suffice to say, I ran from the battlefield in what some critics described as a shameful display.
So I tried the campaign again, with a plan: keep the main force outside of towns so that sieges didn't cancel recruitment, but stay near them so the enemy didn't feel like doing siege assaults against the smaller garrisons.
That method really does work (you'll see me using it in the series), but on the second attempt I didn't need it. Something very strange happened. The Saxon fleet, which ALWAYS attacks in the first turn in my experience, just went home. None of the barbarians made any moves. I was free! Immediately I started recruiting the first of the superior old-school troops so that I would have an army able to repel the three-stack pain train coming my way.
But turn after turn, nothing happened. The usually very aggressive barbarians just sat there, even letting me conquer and subjugate one of them in an easy auto-resolve. Horray, the AI died! Issue was all this made for terrible gameplay footage, as there was no drama happening, no threats to battle etc.
Here's the situation in the second campaign at the same point I showed for the first.
Got a nice big army that doesn't even need to be near the front-lines, since everything is peaceful, and the Caldeonians are my puppet state, keeping the lands north of Hadrians wall rather safe. From here I can just work on economy and overpower my smaller neighbors as I grow stronger. Great campaign situation to be it, but again not the best stuff for a narrative.
Now if fables and the like are anything to go by, the third attempt should be perfect! Unfortunately not though; it wasn't too bad, nor too good, just too boring. Went middlingly smoothly, getting wins at moderate costs and looking like it would progress to eventual victory.
I wanted the start of the campaign to be a little more dire. I wanted to get screwed over a little to start with so I could make a comeback.
Finally on the fourth attempt, I got something closer to what I wanted. The Caledonians fielded better armies, and the Franks declared war and launched multiple naval attacks in the first few turns, which really added to the pressure Britain was under. Plus, the Ebadanians didn't do anything to begin with, which is really important since if they invade Wales the difficulty ramps up a lot - I had nice, stable, steady wars to work with. Nice! Then after a Heroic Victory at Camuldunon that introduced a new general very nicely, I settled on this run for the series.
Who knows where it will go from here. Maybe it will be too easy. Maybe I'll get streamrolled the next time I sit down to capture footage. We'll just have to find out, and craft a narrative to fit whatever happens!
Hopefully the many hours wasted trying to get things off to an interesting start will pay dividends as we go on. And hopefully you, by reading this, can appreciate the otherwise invisible behind-the-scenes consideration that goes into getting cool gameplay! Laters.
