I don't look at the code. The code in Total War games isn't even viewable.
Even so, there are just far too many things which are absolutely impossible to ignore in Attila. Rome 2 has some annoying, contradictory mechanics (as do all the total war games) but Attila inherets those and takes them to an obscene level. I am stunned that so many players aren't driven to insanity dealing with them. Here are some of the worst, but there are literally thousands of them. I could talk about everything wrong with TW Attila for 5 hours.
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Agents. Agents have never been good in Total war, but in Attila they are able to perform infuriating actions against the player every single turn, with no way for the army to react without using agents themselves. The agents are chance-based and the AI gets ridiculous bonuses to their success chances. They spawn with top-tier agents and will invariably send agents across the entire map to harrass you, slowing your armies down, wasting turns and wasting your IRL time. It is impossible to keep up with the amount of agent spam the AI unleashes on you because even on the easiest difficulty, they get bonuses.
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The Campaign AI is utterly HOI4-tier retarded and is designed from the ground up to be superficially challenging, declaring war on the player even when in other wars. I've seen players get declarations of war from minor factions with enemy armies on their doorstep, and nothing to gain. If you're a horde, the AI will send armies across desolate territory to fight you for no gain at all. All of the AI's behavior is player-centric, and very often nothing of interest happens in the Fog of War. The Huns can often march straight through province after province of hostile AI territory if they're gunning for the player.
If you disable the FOW via a mod, you'll see how broken and buggy and impossibly stupid the AI is:
https://forums.totalwar.com/discussion/149355/all-knowing-and-obsessed-ai
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The unit cards and building cards are the hardest to differentiate since Shogun 1. They are all in different poses, sometimes with their primary weapon blocked behind their body or shield, and always far too dark to make out more than their basic silhouette. Don't tell me you can easily tell these two apart:
The building cards are worse because they are meaningless screenshots of parts of the building. In Rome II, there was a very basic silhouette, perhaps an icon, to show exactly what the building does, along with a category colour so you could tell in five seconds what was inside a settlement. Conversely, tell me what this building does:
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Graphical errors and visual messups. To date, there are still: Missing or misplaced textures, trees without LOD models, floating fences on just about every map, unit armour clipping galore, awful, amateurish colour composition compensated for by a brown postprocessing effect straight out of a crummy Skyrim mod, horrible optimization on many machines, nonsensical faction colour choices (especially the sassanids), excessive glossy shine on some things (roman helmets for example) with a dull glow on the same material on others (some barbarian helmets and armour).
You finna tell me these units look passable? FOH
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Unit upgrade system. The game decides that you are not allowed to recruit the old unit, leaving you with a tiny roster at all times throughout the game. Ironically the game clearly wasn't designed this way. Some upgraded main line infantry units have the "encourage" passive ability which gives nearby units higher morale. But if your main line is made up of these units, (cavalry and archers don't count because 1. cavalry are bugged to where they generally don't rout at all, and 2. archers will rout in melee regardless) what is the point of this ability if you cannot field anything else?
What's ridiculous is that the developers implemented this deliberately late in development to make it harder to get money. The developers actually came out and admitted this. Some of the upgrades are marginally more effective than the units before them, but they can end up having triple the upkeep cost. Often the stat increases are meaningless, like melee defence for horse archers or 3 bow shots for a shock cavalry unit.
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Turn based mechanics. Total war has had this issue since Rome 1 where the turn based system works against the mechanics, but it is really horrible in total war Attila.
Most calculated actions are activated at the end of
EVERYBODY'S turn. The player always has their turn first, so the AI can and will exploit this to gain an unfair advantage, without giving you
any chance to retaliate. For instance:
-- When you siege a settlement for one turn, you do damage to the buildings and render them useless for a turn. This is a dumb mechanic anyway, but if the AI besieges your settlement, you will receive damage at the end of everybody's turn, before you have any chance to react. Even if the AI besieges you with one unit, your entire city is out of action for a turn.
-- Generals. The AI can recruit a new general in some situations where it's not actually their turn.
-- Buildings/repairs/recruitment. The AI can build things and repair them in less than a single turn. For example you can besiege a settlement on your turn, and the AI will still be able to recruit, repair and build anything which takes a turn to do. The player cannot do this.
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The battles had so little QA testing that their quality level is worse than just about every mod for Rome II. Here is a playlist of videos documenting everything wrong with battles and how nothing is balanced or even QA tested. This barely scratches the surface. A guy with an anime avatar spent the best part of a year testing everything and found literally hundreds of unintended developer messups, like horse archers with hidden frontal shields and dozens of typos in the Unit stats file which made certain units completely useless.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLr7HLoRrUHO6uGlmahSbTCe4TPTd_BX2E
I get that you would be unlikely to notice these if you just play the battles "blindly", not paying attention to stats or even what is happening to your units, and instead just devising a defensive strategy and sticking to it (this is the way most people play). But it broke multiplayer beyond playability, and was never patched in any meaningful way. Here is HeirofCarthage a few days after the game came out, explaining some of the issues:
In conclusion, gaem sux lol. There are definitely worse games, but what enrages me about Total War Attila is that they had no idea what they were doing and screwed up in a million ways. The game has no cohesive mechanics and they are all game-y, static, uninteresting and actively work against the player in a completely unfair manner.
