14 DAY TRIAL // Total War: Attila is set to deal with one of the darkest periods in the history of mankind, when the solid civilization built by the Romans in the Classic Age is crumbling under pressure coming from invaders and Europe is in the precipice of a decline that will only be fully reversed by the Renaissance.
And the developers working on the title at The Creative Assembly are leaving no element of the historical period out of the game, which means that players will have to deal with diseases that spread fast, especially in war ravaged zones, and with climate-induced famine.
Al Bickham, a community manager, tells Eurogamer that “Diseases were a key feature of the period. We've decoupled the squalor/sanitation balance that we had in Rome 2 from public order. It's now directly related to the health of your city. If you don't keep a city clean, it may suffer disease.”
Armies will be able to move disease around, but they can also be spread by trade routes and other forms of contact.
It’s unclear whether gamers who pick up Total War: Attila will have a lot of quarantine measures to limit the impact of disease or whether they will simply have to deal with the fact that they will lose population and soldiers before the plagues burn themselves out.
Climate change can affect wars
The Creative Assembly also has plans to simulate the way climate change affected historical events, pushing some population to move towards the heart of Europe and to put even more pressure than before on the Roman Empire, which is already affected by corruption.
Lead designer Janos Gaspar explains that “As you begin the game, the seasons will be normal and the campaign map will be the one you know from Total War: Rome 2, but as you go further and further into the campaign, the snowline begins moving more and more to the south. In the north, there'll be multiple turns that behave like winter. It's going to change food production and economic output.”
It’s unclear how affected the Huns and other invaders will be by climate change or whether just the civilized factions will have to deal with its effects.
The Creative Assembly wants the new title to be focused on the destruction that armies can create and the way people react when faced with desperate situations.
Total War: Attila will be out in 2015 and will be offered only on the PC.
