Total War: Attila - Developer Diary #2

Hey what's up guys, it's Oakley and there is another announcement. Developer Diary Part 2 actually posted by CA and it's going to be called the finer points of conquest. What they're going to be doing is talking about marriage and agents. So we're going to go over this a little bit. So first they announce marriage and marriage is obviously something we've seen previously in some videos. We saw brief glimpses of it and basically here they just go ahead and outline a little bit more of how it's used in diplomacy. So they're going to say it's going to be obviously tied to the family tree system where you can take a look at that and keep track of which daughters of yours are going to be of suitable age to be married off. And they're going to say that these daughters, if you marry them off to different entities in the game, then those entities once they're married will become part of your family tree. And you can see specifically inside your family tree who's sort of being tied to whom based off these marriages. So it will allow you to see this extended family tree, not just your native family but also anyone who got married into this family tree. You'll be able to see that and you'll be able to see how that ties each other diplomatically. Now speaking of diplomacy, they are going to mention that having daughters married off to other faction leaders is going to confer a lot of diplomatic bonuses to you. It's going to be a strong incentive for other factions to go along with the deal. It's a great deal sweetener and they say here it depends a little bit on the beauty of your daughter. So I'm not quite sure if that's an actual fact or if they're just saying that, but maybe there is a stat that says just how, maybe not attractive, I think they're going to try and be a little more politically correct, but maybe see how appealing or how many skills a daughter has. I don't think they would give you like, oh, train your daughter to be 10 stars in seductivity. But I think there'll be a way to scale how sweet a daughter will be in marriage or whatnot. We'll see how that plays out. I think they will have to tread lightly when it comes to that. But the takeaway is that you can marry your daughters off to other factions. They will have a sweetener to diplomatic deals. It's very cool. It'll be a way to improve relations with other factions and stuff like that. Now you can request marriages from opposing factions, but it does say that factions will be reluctant to do that. So it seems for the most part this will be a one-way deal. But it's a cool way to craft your diplomatic relations and also your family tree as well. And now let's go ahead and turn to the next part, which is going to be where they talk about the agents. And you can see a couple of the images here. Again, they're going for multi-tiered agent second level up. And they do talk about what happened in Rome 2, where they said in Rome 2, essentially, the agents were too ambiguous. They're too all-encompassing, jack-of-all-trades. They could be too powerful at once. And they do acknowledge in this developer diary that these guys were way too powerful. And so what they're going to be doing is trying to make each particular agent type separate. And there's going to be different types of agents that you can go ahead and recruit. It's this time going to be the priest, the spy, and the champion. And each of those is going to have his particular skill traits. And at the very beginning, they said that only certain agents can act in certain directions. So I do like the fact that they're going to be returning to the more specific role of each agent. And each agent won't even be able to do everything. For instance, if you have a spy, he won't be able to do every type of spy action. You'll have to rank him up. So when you do rank up your individual agents, you'll see that actually not only can they start doing more spy stuff, but you can actually give them a little bit of overlap with other things that I think might be more familiar with other agents. So you get to make them a little bit more jack-of-all-trades as they go further along. But it seems like CA is putting a lot of care into making sure that these guys are agents that you have to work up. They're not powerful from the start. And even when you get them to be super powerful and they seem to be able to do a bunch of things, it's not going to be an overwhelming amount of things. So they do give an example here of how this kind of works in the early game. So they talk about the case where you have a priest, a spy, and a champion freshly recruited with no levels and they can act thusly. And I'll quote them. So in the developer diary, he says my priest can affect my own provinces by acting on them and can also act on other agents to try and convert slash neutralize them. He can also encourage dissent, or if he's lucky, revolution in foreign settlements. He is currently unable to act in any way on any armies, neither mine nor foreign forces. He talks about the spy, that the spy can act upon enemy armies and deceive enemy agents slowing them down. No actions can yet be used on armies or settlements. That seems a little contradictory. You can act upon enemy armies but can't act used on armies. Interesting. So there's a little bit of contradiction there. I think that's probably a typo or something. And then the champion goes on and he says can't attack any foreign character and also perform military training on my own armies. They can not act on enemy settlements or enemy armies. So you can see how there's certain restrictions from the very beginning and the actions they can do, they're not going to be super effective or have a high chance of doing it yet. So I'm really glad they're going this route. I think it's much, much, much more important to have a more focused approach to each of these agents. And it really causes you to diversify your portfolio of agents and really have them all work in coordination. That's what they talk about in this little blurb and excerpt where they talk about these. It's where in order to carry out the full level of, you know, Rome 2 type of agent actions you're going to need a whole web of very different type of agents. I think that's going to be a good thing to see. And then they're going to show another screen showing a little bit of the intrigue that you can get when you have assassinations and it'll carry diplomatic penalties and all that. But that's going to be basically it for this write-up. Relatively short and sweet and it is introducing a nice twist. I like that they're learning from their mistakes and they're really fleshing out, you know, the agent world, the diplomacy, family tree, marriage world. So I'm very excited for this. I think it's definitely a step in the right direction. I hope they don't ever step back because this level of detail and control is something we definitely need. And it especially makes sense in the shorter time frame of this game where I believe you have, is it four turns per year? I think it's four turns per year. Yeah, it's four turns per year. So the agents, you know, you'll be able to get attached to them. They'll have long lifespans and you'll be able to really flesh them out. As opposed to Rome 2, you know, a turn was a year. It was a little hard to get attached to the agents, so maybe that's why they tried to make them a little more powerful. But anyways, that's going to be my take and my recap of this brief developer diary. Hope you guys enjoyed and I will see you guys next time. Thanks so much.