Attila: What's the point ...

Attila played a decisive role in the downfall of the Roman empire, while he was not alive for it nor were the Huns leading the campaign it was his actions in the years prior that unified the Germanic tribes.

And the huns did have a civilization, after the fall of the Hunnic empire they became part of modern day Hungry and the Bulgarian Empire.

This aside Attilla was actually a strong leader and a solid field commander, not to mention a powerful warrior. I'm about to hurt some feelings but compared to "actual" civilizations that exist in the game, he accomplished more in his lifetime than entire civilizations have done.

To change history/ the world requires cataclysmic events, Atilla was the figure that allowed for the dark ages starting in the 5th century.
 
As much as the semantics of Attila are debated over, they made his units incredibly powerful early game and he makes for a really potent dominant strategy early-on.
 
Yeah, not sure why these trumped up barbarians got a civilization. It's a very odd choice. I flatly refuse to play them.

Because of their historical significance maybe....1500 years later the French and the British referred to the German troops in the Great War (WWI) as the Huns. The Huns ruled a huge empire. It would be as we should just dismiss Alexander the Great as an upstart Macedonian as his empire only lasted 10 years and was then divided between the diodochi.
 
As much as the semantics of Attila are debated over, they made his units incredibly powerful early game and he makes for a really potent dominant strategy early-on.

They really arnt that bad to defend against, i find Monoglia and the ottomans to be much more fearsome but maybe that's because i play honor with military civilizations. The rule of attilla is that you need to match his military power and/or play defensively or you will be steamrolled. There is nothing wrong with this it's mostly a learn to play issue.

TBH horse archers should require horses...

Edit: Just as an add in i think city defenses scale a bit too well atm, They've made the game much too easy to turtle.
 
Personally, I especially like the flavor of Attila world. When he gets on a roll, you end up with cities few and far between and barbarians everywhere, just because half the cities in the world get destroyed. Very hostile place to live.

The city name thing is just... meh. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's not like its a big deal.
 
They really arnt that bad to defend against, i find Monoglia and the ottomans to be much more fearsome but maybe that's because i play honor with military civilizations. The rule of attilla is that you need to match his military power and/or play defensively or you will be steamrolled. There is nothing wrong with this it's mostly a learn to play issue.

TBH horse archers should require horses...

Edit: Just as an add in i think city defenses scale a bit too well atm, They've made the game much too easy to turtle.

I mean he's a huge threat in the hands of a player. The AI doesn't make him as much of a threat. The AI spamming horse archers is defensible bc the AI will just spam units and then use no strategy... what u said of him goes for any militaristic AI really. But in the hands of a player, the ability to spam a ranged unit with incredible speed not limited by horses from essentially the start of a game when you have battering rams and superior human tactics at your disposal is just not fair. Make them require horses and slow that down a bit and Attila will be a bit more balanced.
 
I played Attila for the first time... sent my warrior out scouting and got the upgrade to battering ram in the first few turns. Next turn I took over a city state NP. Battering ram is super powerful against cities and upgrades to trebuchet with a huge bonus against cities. two battering rams can make short work of just about any city so long as they can pull off an attack or two.

It seems like whenever I have a lot of cities early the AI has outdone my expansion, at least in points, every time... at least so far in GaK. My starting position was ridiculous with tons of luxury resources in the surrounding lands. I don't remember ever expanding so rapidly with such a surplus of happiness... but somehow Washington was outdoing me...
 
I mean he's a huge threat in the hands of a player. The AI doesn't make him as much of a threat. The AI spamming horse archers is defensible bc the AI will just spam units and then use no strategy... what u said of him goes for any militaristic AI really. But in the hands of a player, the ability to spam a ranged unit with incredible speed not limited by horses from essentially the start of a game when you have battering rams and superior human tactics at your disposal is just not fair. Make them require horses and slow that down a bit and Attila will be a bit more balanced.

I dont see how he's unfair, you basically countered your own argument by saying "Superior human tactics" when you yourself can play defensively and counter the army he would field. He's really only outstanding against the AI or players who refuse to build a standing army.
 
I dont see how he's unfair, you basically countered your own argument by saying "Superior human tactics" when you yourself can play defensively and counter the army he would field. He's really only outstanding against the AI or players who refuse to build a standing army.

Well the issue he's had in multiplayer is that his warriors upgrade to battering rams and and he can suddenly roll them up on a player by like turn 20 and bc the players have stockpiled enough told to buy units, they're screwed if they can't recall their warrior from scouting.

Like I said, he's OP in the hands of a player vs. the AI bc he allows you to spam armies and use battering rams effectively. Against another player, he still can be effective by spamming, just not as much so bc players are more judicious in their counter-attacks. The early AI will generally either not have anymore than 2-3 units or whatever units they have will get cruched by hit-and-runs from horse archers. Player vs. player, he's about the same as any other civ except for flukes like I mentioned above. AI vs. player he's a bit more dangerous than other AI, especially bc he'll burn your cities, but AI is still AI. Maybe at Deity levels he could be crazy stupid powerful against a human, but again... few AI can compete with a human one-on-one stategically.
 
It weirds me out. I don't insist that everything be RP-friendly (I'm not one of those people who gets pissed off about every little thing that isn't 100% realistic) but this really puts me off for some reason; there are some things that can really ruin the immersion factor, and this is definitely one of them.

I'm 100% with you on that. There's actually civs I won't play because I can't get fully immersed in playing them. I'm sort of picky when it comes to playing Civs that have been wiped out...I get that in my head and think "what's the point, they never even made it to the renaissance era in real life" :lol:
 
Well the issue he's had in multiplayer is that his warriors upgrade to battering rams and and he can suddenly roll them up on a player by like turn 20 and bc the players have stockpiled enough told to buy units, they're screwed if they can't recall their warrior from scouting.

Like I said, he's OP in the hands of a player vs. the AI bc he allows you to spam armies and use battering rams effectively. Against another player, he still can be effective by spamming, just not as much so bc players are more judicious in their counter-attacks. The early AI will generally either not have anymore than 2-3 units or whatever units they have will get cruched by hit-and-runs from horse archers. Player vs. player, he's about the same as any other civ except for flukes like I mentioned above. AI vs. player he's a bit more dangerous than other AI, especially bc he'll burn your cities, but AI is still AI. Maybe at Deity levels he could be crazy stupid powerful against a human, but again... few AI can compete with a human one-on-one stategically.

The only real issue you mentioned aside from horses is the ruins tech upgrade, that allows for kamikazee battering rams.
 
Because of their historical significance maybe....

Yeah, yeah, the barbarians overthrew Rome and all that.

But they were still barbarians.

Civilization is an urban phenomenon. The huns weren't an urban people. It's very telling that they don't even have their own city names. They don't make a lick of sense as a civ. They were significant, but mainly as a destructive and uncivilized force. The game already has barbs. We need not pick any tribal grouping at random from these, throw them some abilities, and call them a "civilization." They are the enemies of civilization.
 
I find it funny how personal people take the inclusion of Attila and the Huns. People are more upset about the Huns than they are Polynesia, even though I think the Huns could be considered a 'true civilization' much easier than Polynesia. Regardless, there is no strict definition of what a "civilization" is like so many people want to pretend.
 
I couldn't care less about all the crap people make up to have an issue with The Huns.

He is one of the civ the AI play funnily, in my current game he keeps going all the way across the continent and raze one of Egypts towns, then he goes back home and es at me, until Egypt has rebuild a town then he goes back over and raze it.

The funny part is Sweden has been in a 1000 year war with Egypt without accomplishing anything, where Atilla manage to kill a town every time he tries.
 
Yeah, yeah, the barbarians overthrew Rome and all that.

But they were still barbarians.

Civilization is an urban phenomenon. The huns weren't an urban people. It's very telling that they don't even have their own city names. They don't make a lick of sense as a civ. They were significant, but mainly as a destructive and uncivilized force. The game already has barbs. We need not pick any tribal grouping at random from these, throw them some abilities, and call them a "civilization." They are the enemies of civilization.

By this logic the Germans shouldnt be in the game, they didnt become a unified people until the late 1800's. The huns had seperate tribes or kings that ruled over a people in Hunnic lands. And as i mentioned the Huns eventually became part of the Bulgarian empire as well as what would be modern day Hungary.
 
The German civilization predated their nation considerably. (Possibly by a good millenium, depending on how you define these things.) The two things are not synonymous.

The Huns never became a civilized people and in fact disappeared largely without a trace, leaving behind little or no art, architecture, literature, and their language itself remains a mystery. They were a flash in the pan, a momentary barbarian eruption from the steppe and nothing more.
 
Quisque est Barbarus Alio

This pretty much. Attila decided to move against the tide instead of with it, he couldve "civilized" the Huns but that would require them to be the lapdogs of Rome.

Like it or not the Huns did make a significant contribution to European and global society. And they now live as Hungarians and as other eastern europeans.
 
Well, not quite. The Hungarian state, language, etc. derive from a later group of steppe raiders of very similar culture and configuration to the Huns (in terms of being Turko-Mongol styled steppe raiders) and were comparably the terror of Europe for about a century, but modern Hungarian populations are genetically indistinguishable from surrounding populations. Moreover the bulk of the Magyars represented Finno-Ugric speakers originating from the urals and not turkic peoples originating (distantly) from the region of the Mongolian steppe, as Atilla's Huns did. The tribes comprising Attilla's confederation scattered across the steppe across Russia and the Black Sea following the demise of his empire, and their descendants are I believe thought to have comprised part or whole of groups such as the Bulgars, Khazars (both of whom are incidentally much more coherent as turkic steppe raider civilizations based in eastern Europe), and the other notable steppe-barbarian groups.

As the Magyars are known to have allied with and intermarried with various Turkic groups (and there's some speculation that a large part of their military or ruling elite may have been comprised of such) there's probably also a distant Hunnic connection there, but tying the Magyars to the Huns in any real sense is only a little bit less tenuous than tying them to the Scythians (an Iranic group of steppe raiders). [It's worth noting that I'm saying this as a Hungarian- the ethnic historiography and self-identification of that region of Europe is very much tied into delusional national myths on all sides] Honestly given the sizes of typical steppe raider populations relative to the groups they conquered, you probably aren't going to find very much genetically traceable to the Huns etc. in most modern eastern European populations- conquering steppe raiders like the Huns were almost invariably vastly outnumbered by the sedentary peoples they subjugated.

However, what the Huns should truly be taken as representing is not so much the specific short-lived confederation of Attilla as being a general stand-in for the Turko-mongol steppe cultures and peoples and their tremendous impact on Eurasian history. The Mongols of Genghis are perhaps the best-known and most successful eruptions of these peoples across Eurasia, but I suppose because they established a massive and distinct empire and were coherently lead and organized by exceptional generals, they aren't as representative of the general case of these steppe barbarians as the Huns or other more transient groups are. People forget that beyond the Mongols, these peoples were still the terror of Europe and Asia for millennnia, constantly pressuring and sometimes destroying, overrunning, or usurping many of the greatest and most cultured civilizations. Time and time again groups such as the Huns conquered vast swathes of Asia and or swept through the Russian steppe- Avars, Gokturks, Pechenegs, Epthalite Huns, you name them.

The specific nature of the strategic threat posed by these peoples is not at all adequately represented by the standard barbarian spawns in the game, nor is there penchant for forming short-lived empires of great size and occasionally for developing reasonably sophisticated civilizations or cultures (Khazars, Uighurs, Seljuk Turks etc.). Admittedly one could simply have implemented specific groups that actually attained some level of long-term coherency or culture as was obviously done for Western civilizations derived from the flavor of barbarian horde particular to western late antiquity (Germans etc.), but most of those entities save for the Mongols aren't really well known or distinctive in easily represented ways (although this isn't entirely true as the Ottomans and Persians can trace their ancestry to Turkic and Iranian steppe raiders groups as well etc., but they really don't have very distinctive associations with them the in the popular consciousness or, in the case of the Ottomans, at all at the time they actually became a distinct power from the rest of the Turkic factions in Anatolia). Atilla's Huns are the most familiar of the general case of "unwashed all-conquering horse archer mass" (the Mongols again being very much extreme and exceptional) to a western audience owing to their contact with the Roman Empire. Honestly it would probably make more sense to replace the foot-barbarians that spawn with endless hordes of Horse Archers and Keshiks.


tl;dr the Huns can be thought of as representing a pretty big and important general case of Turko-Mongol(-Tungusic -Iranic -Finno-Ugric) horse archer nomad barbarian that habitually conquered large swathes of Eurasia and for the reason of their geographically extensive prominence and power throughout a very large part of Eurasian history. Admittedly it probably would've made more sense to use known place-names from a range of different Turko-mongol empires or tribes (I'm sure that some of the more developed ones could yield something) or just random words that would be plausible as place-names from Hunnic or related languages, but the use of foreign city names does sort of mockingly emphasize the penchant of these peoples (and the Western image of the Huns in particular) for vast and brutal conquest (THEY'VE CONQUERED CITIES YOU DIDN'T EVEN KNOW WERE THERE).

Admittedly I'm not sure if any of this justification went through the developer's heads- after all, the Huns of Atilla are to the Western mind just a pretty iconic steppe raider empire associated with the downfall of one of the powers of antiquity (the Western Roman Empire) most closely associated with Western cultural identity. They're fundamentally a pretty obvious and easily recognizable choice for a more "savage" civ with very strong aggression for the very early game with a distinct military style (owing to the emphasis on using horse archers over conventional infantry).
 
Back
Top Bottom