Improving Total War: Attila - Deployable Equipment

This video is part of a series where we look at the current features of the next Total War title and offer improvements that Total War Attila can proudly claim to be a standalone game. In this episode of Improving Attila we're going to be covering deployable equipment. One of the big new additions to Total War Attila is going to be the deployable barricades specifically in sieges. So far what we know is that these are going to be large-scale objects which can be mounted by troops and which block movement through cities. They are restricted to being deployed at pre-designated locations in sieges and you can choose where these are located by going into the toggleable map menu and then basically clicking on them, thus activating them. You do however have restricted amounts so you have to be strategic with your approach. The barricades must be destroyed to get past them and they come with both fire and base health meters to know when they're about to fall. Now the good and the bad. The good for this development is that it's going to improve battlefield detail and immersion. It really seems like the defenders are putting up a fight and that they've concentrated their manpower to hold back the attackers. It also allows for more strategy in sieges. You can create choke points, channel attackers, and also provide a safer place for weak units to be stationed without being run over. So for instance you could place your archers on here without having to fear an immediate calorie charge. Now the bad part is going to be this has potential path fighting issues for the AI. So for instance how will the AI consider whether to go around or to go through these particular barricades. If the AI is going to go through them anyways then the idea of channeling the AI and the attackers is not going to work so well. But maybe it'll be different when you play against human characters. But again this is so much unknown we don't know how the AI will handle this. Another potential issue that these roadblocks could cause is let's say for instance your defenders are stationed in front of this wall they start routing and all of your routing troops typically in sieges will go back towards the city center. What if these barricades is in front of your city center? Does that mean that your routing troops will now be bottlenecked here? Will it glitch out the game? Will they climb over? What is the case here? Will they rally in front of the wall or will they just be kind of stuck running their heads into the wall waiting to be killed or waiting to rally? So those are going to be the good and the bad parts thus far. Before we offer some ideas for how to improve it let's go ahead and look at a retrospective of what we saw from past Total War games. So the evolution of defensive equipment has started with deployables that were more restricted to use by individual units. So for instance back in medieval 2 you had special for instance the English longbowmen they could basically put stakes and deploy them on the battlefield. From there Total War titles have expanded on that concept to the point where now the entire army comes with a set of deployables on them. And the types of deployables we've had it's sort of trended from flimsy static defenses to more robust and versatile placements. Examples include stakes, walls, trenches, spike traps, flaming objects and all of that that we can see in Rome 2 really is a culmination thus far of those deployables. And I think these have done a lot to help the battlefield because they add versatility to battles and they also make them feel more dynamic. It makes you as a defender feel like you can really compensate for your lack of troops and again it adds more immersion. Now let's talk about actually improving Total War Attila's deployable equipment system. So I am going to have a couple suggestions for doing this. First is going to be the most plausible one the one that basically just starts off where CA seems to be right now. So at the moment I think CA is being a bit too restrictive on the barricades. In order to make this a really good system they need to expand on it. So the way I recommend doing this is by giving us more flexibility and versatility by creating three types of barricades that you can deploy. So those are going to be light, medium, and heavy. The light category is going to function much as it does in Rome 2 and as it has in previous Total War titles. The light barricades will have low health. They'll be able to be placed anywhere in your deployment zone but they'll be much more versatile. So you can have traps, you can have smaller spikes and stakes and different sorts of archer cover but these will have low health and they can be placed anywhere. Now the next two are going to be medium and heavy. Both of these will be restricted in their deployment and they're going to function much in the way that CA has presented thus far. However when you instead of just activating a barricade you're going to have to activate and then select do you want it to be a medium barricade or a heavy barricade. Now these two are going to have trade-offs. The medium barricade is going to be the one that's been presented to us thus far. Namely it's a barricade that has health and it can hold out for a decent amount of time but you can put your troops on it. So I think that's good if you want to sort of contest an area but also station troops in that certain position, get some shots off and whatnot. But I think there really needs to be a heavier alternative and that would be if you really want to lock down an area without committing troops to it. So it's almost like putting down a wall, it has a lot more health. Now the drawback of this approach means you can't actually station troops on top of it so it's more defensive as opposed to offensive. Whereas the medium one is going to have a little bit of mix of defense and offense with medium health and the heavy one is going to take a lot more time to strike down. Whereas if you go all the way down to light it has more of the ability to kill, maim and slow down the opponents but it doesn't have basically any defensive health. So those are going to be the three trade-offs that I recommend that should be implemented to have more strategic variance and to allow us to really pursue what CA has said of having barricades that will serve to channel the enemy. I think that's why you really need the heavy and then also to contest certain areas and I'll talk about this later when I do a video on the escalation principle. Now continuing on I think CA also needs to add more flexibility when it comes to bastion defenses. So not only should you be able to go on your map and click which areas you want to blockade the streets I think you also need to be able to have more defenses, more active defenses. So for instance in Rome 2 it already exists the principle that in large cities you're given not only internal barricades but also you're given sort of mounted manned equipment such as artillery and you can choose you know you have a limited number and you have to choose to put them in specific areas of your map. I think that's a system that should continue in Total War Attila but I think they should be able to do that maybe inside of your city. So for instance if you want to blockade a certain plaza maybe you should be able to deploy one of those catapults or one of those scorpions inside of your city and CA can get creative with what kind of other emplacements they want to add in order to have attacking. Maybe you can even change which towers are activated in your city, which ones you actually garrison. So there's a lot that they can do with that but I think the bastion defensive system has a lot of opportunities to be improved and allow you to really strategically do not only defense of your city but also bolster some of the killing potential of your city and different plazas. While we're in siege mode and talking about siege battles I think this whole principle of activating or deploying certain large features should also extend to the attacker. The attacker should not only have movable siege equipment but he should he should also have the ability to place palisades, stakes, cover for his archer and maybe even have ramps that can scale up to certain parts of the wall so you can crest them more readily and also if there's ditches around the city maybe you should have the option of filling in certain ditches as you make your approach. Now this is details that I will go into later when we talk about escalation in another video I'm just throwing my two cents and a little bit of a teaser of that principle here now but as you've seen in the video that was released at EGX it does seem that there are some of these principles in terms of palisade stakes and cover already on the map however they're more sort of detritus they're more ruined stuff it's more part of the map that's just built into the scenery and I think it should be something that the defender actively gets to decide where it is. Now my final suggestion will be extending the deployable feature principle to not only be specific to sieges I think they need to extend it to other types of battles so for instance you know a natural improvement would be to go to forts. Forts right now in Rome 2 are really basic and frankly pretty boring it's a little square where the entrances are just blown wide open and it really doesn't feel like a fort at all. I think what you should have in forts is sort of a scaled down version of a siege where you can really infiltrate it and I think in this case the defender of the fort should be able to place down certain features so maybe where he wants to add moats or ditches or barricades or archers screens I think the defender should really have the ability to customize his defensive strategy and really change it that'll make these battles not only more variable because right now sieges are all this are port battles are all the same attack on a square if you add more variability it'll make this much more interesting. Now another thing that I think they should extend it to is going to be ambushes. So far in Rome 2 I think the ambushes were used pretty effectively they're fun I like the fact that the attacking faction is forced to move along while the defender the ambusher that is is allowed to move and sort of plan his attack. Now I think you should also have deployables in this so right now we do have deployables but it's really really limited to just having the flaming fireballs what I think they should add is the ability to zoom out look on a map and really plan out the route of the attacker or the the person who's going to be ambushed and you should really be able to plan out all sorts of features around here so maybe you'll trap you'll put down a a set of traps in the ground in one area that can kill people when they walk on them maybe in another area you should be able to activate you know chop down a tree that tree will fall down maybe squash some troops and then it'll be a feature that effectively blocks the road thus separating a moving column that'll be really cool and it's highly realistic to what was done you could also for instance if the like say a Roman army goes under a cliff maybe you should have the ability to instigate a landslide or a rock slide so rocks will kind of tumble down similar to how the graphics look like when a rock or when a when a stone wall collapses with all the pieces falling down you can do that for a cliff side collapsing on troops so I think there's a lot of potential for these types of deployable features to be done in ambushes and really make the ambush a potential killing ground I'll go into specifically ambushes and how those should be improved in the future but again this is mostly going to be pertaining to improving Total War Attila's deployable equipment so thanks so much for paying attention those are my ideas so far please go ahead and leave your feedback below we'll talk about those and maybe in the future as CA releases more news or you guys have more ideas we can do a follow-up video on this so thank you so much I hope to continue this series and I really hope that we can work with CA to make this next iteration of Total War really feel like it deserves to be its own standalone game