So I attempted to play the campaign for the Western Roman Empire and um yeah, it's really tough. Then afterwards I checked the default difficulty for the campaign and it was "legendary". I scrapped that campaign and started one as the Saxons. That one is much better and not too ridiculously difficult.

With a little help from a post at the official forum, I finally figured a work around to get the game to run properly, and more surprisingly, I am getting pretty good frame rates.

I was on the right track with the core assignment Idea, but just had not tried the right combination.

I start the game and after the slash screen fades and the lagging intro tries to play, I hit escape to eventually get the main menu up. It's pretty well frozen registering 1 FPS. Then I start task manager
and go into the actual game process and only un-tick core "0" leaving all the other cores ticked.

When I go back into the game, everything is normal plus I can exit the game without locking up.

If I combine this work around with the "bring up the Rome 2 launcher, but instead launch Attila" procedure,
I am getting an average of 42 fps. in the battle benchmark test. That's with units on large and almost half of the various settings at "quality" with the rest a step down to "performance". The developers claim that
the extreme quality settings in the game are there for GPU's that don't even exist yet.

Unfortunately, I have to go through this process every time I start the game, but the feedback from the developers on the official forum is that they are aware of the launcher and menu lag conflict and should address this in their first patch.

I got caught up in a new FOTS campaign now, so I may still hold off getting too involved with Attila until
the first patch.

I have to admit that I favor the gunpowder based TW games over the pure m�l�e based versions--especially if I get artillery---kaboom!

Cheers

I guess I'm one of the lucky ones because I've not had any issues with the launcher lag in either Rome 2 or Attila. Thanks for sharing that info though!


Speaking of gundpowder stuff, I'm still wondering if anyone would ever make a US Civil War mod for Napoleon Total War. I would love that and would pay for such a mod!

"
There are two different ACW mods for Empire. One is called the "Blue and the Gray" while the other is "Brother against Brother". The advantage of using Empire over Napoleon is that Empire actually has a map of North America while Napoleon does not. The problem being that there are no tools available to create new strat maps.

Just do a Google search for ACW Total war mods and you will find links to both of them.

Cheers

How much have you guys been playing Attila? I've got about 50 hours into the game so far and I absolutely love it. The graphics are much nicer, I like how detailed and thorough the family politics has been implemented and the 3D battles are even better implemented than in Rome 2. My only slight disappointment so far is that the dreaded Huns don't seem to be so tough. My Saxon armies have been opening up cans of whoopass on them.

The decisions you make within the family political aspect actually make sense now and have logical consequences.

Other that a few turns of the prologue, I haven't played it at all. I will get to it eventually, but as I said earlier, while waiting on the first patch, I got involved with a FOTS campaign. Then last week when the first patch got delayed for another week, I started another--also in FOTS.

This time I am trying to score my 3rd legendary win going as independent, which may be one of the toughest TW games to win, but I am hearing Attila is quite a challenge for most.

The only problem I have with Attila (besides the time period) is that it seems like it's all based on fighting some variation of Germanic, Celtic, or Hunic type tribes. Basically all barbarian/nomadic cultures.

At least in Rome there was a bit more variation with Hellenistic, Eastern, and North African cultures
thrown into the mix.

Glad you are enjoying Attila though.

Cheers

Apparently the two toughest campaigns in Attila are the ones for the Eastern and Western Roman Empires. I'll tackle playing as one of those after I finish my current campaign. I'm playing the Saxon campaign on "normal" and overall it's been pretty easy but I've been playing TW games since 2000.

Just thought I would mention that today's new (1st) patch fixed all of my technical issues. The intro movie and menu lag are all gone. In addition my in-game frame rates appear to also have improved.

I was able to set all of my options to "quality" with the exception of leaving shadows on "performance" and get an average of 41 FPS in the in-game benchmark test.

Check out your game to see if you got any improvement.

My less than state of the art system:

I7--3820 3.6 Ghz liquid cooled GPU only.
16 GB ram
256 mb SSD for OS and games 2 TB standard hard drive for all else.
GTX670 OC 4 Gb dedicated video Ram (will be ordering a new GTX980 soon)

Cheers

Thanks for that update FO! I'll get patched up tonight!

I played through the Prologue and just finished and started a campaign as the Visigoths to sort of follow on from the Prologue story.

Really enjoying it so far, and it's running well on my 970 with most of the gfx on ultra (even with GEM FX mod installed), which I had heard were only for future video cards, looks great and I spend much more time than in previous titles watching the battle from the cinematic camera, this is one of my favorite historic periods and BI was one of my favorite TW games, so I'm really enjoying it.

Hope they keep working on the bugs that are impacting folks though, and I hope they come out with some good add-on campaigns like they did with Rome2.

Played Attila for a couple of hours last night with the patch and yeah, the framerate is definitely improved!

Job well done CA.

I noticed the interesting change they made with the campaign victory levels. There's "Minor Victory" and then it branches off into "Military" or "Cultural" victory and once you achieve one of those you can get "Divine Victory".

For a second I mistook "campaign victory" for "battle victory", and was wondering how one wins a cultural victory vs military by stabbing people in the face.

I started a second campaign as the Eastern Roman Empire and I'm having an absolute blast!! This campaign is much more fun and more challenging than the first campaign I played. The damn Sassanid Empire WILL go down in defeat before me.

I bought this last week and have been playing a Franks campaign. I started off by taking and holding England while making friends with the other British tribes.
I now have most of France as well, and have allied myself to most of the surrounding tribes mainly to concentrate getting rid of the Western Roman Empire which is going well but I have the feeling that when the time comes to break one of my alliances all hell will break loose.

I am only about 60 odd turns in but really enjoying the game and finding more stuff out daily, it definitely seems a lot harder than Rome 2 though and a nice challenge, the Ostrogoths are next on my campaign choices.

How many turns have others played and do you think it a better challenge than previous TW games?

Cheers,

Mick.

Attila is most definitely a tougher game compared to Rome 2 in every aspect.

Campaigns I've finished so far,

Eastern Roman Empire - Very tough challenge but also lots of fun and lots of combat!

Saxons - Quite easy to win as them since all of the other Germanic tribes liked me.

Huns - Tough challenge mostly due to how the economics work with nomadic factions. Lots of fun decimating enemy armies with my elite Hunnic horsemen though!

Geats - This is my current campaign and I'm finding it to be too easy for the same reasons I found the Saxon campaign easy.

Western Roman Empire - I tried playing this campaign twice but I couldn't manage to get very far. Creative Assembly ain't kidding when they say this campaign is "legendary" difficulty.

In case anyone is interested, Attila is on sale right now on Steam. 25% off.

Picked it up last night, on sale, and took a look today. Played through some of the tutorial/prologue. Seems interesting, and I look forward to giving it a more in depth look when I have more time. Not sure why the graphics are so much more demanding in this title...I went from being able to run Rome II at max to running Attila on whatever the mid-level setting is called. Curious.

The first patch made some significant improvements with frame rate performance and the follow up patches will improve it even further. With that having been said, Attila does look significantly better than Rome 2.

Attila is on offer at CDKeys.com for �13.59 and you can get a further 5% off if you like their Facebook page. I'm in no way affiliated with the company, just use them for cheap digital download deals as they do PC and some console stuff and find them to be a reliable company.

That's a great price indeed. I wholeheartedly recommend the game.

Right now I'm restoring the Western Roman Empire to its former glory.