The latest of the popular Total War series makes its appearance on Linux today along with its newest expansion. Total War: Attila will let strategy-minded penguins enjoy the mix of turn-based and real-time strategy that the series is known for against the backdrop of the barbarian invasions of Roman Europe.
This is a game that I've been looking forward to playing since it was revealed to have been coming to Linux way back in March. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Total War series, the game is divided between a tactical real time portion where you can command hundreds of soldiers in battle and a more strategic turn-based mode where you manage your empire, build things, engage in diplomacy, recruit units and march armies around a large map. We'd previously gotten Empire: Total War on Linux and the style of game is largely similar. What I'm personally most excited to eventually try are the coop campaigns which the older games don't have.
This is a period in history that's rather interesting with the Roman Empire split in two and coming under attack by successive waves of migrating peoples such as the Huns, Slavs, Goths and Vandals. This is a time where Christianity has taken a hold over large parts of Europe but pagans still exist in significant numbers. Attila allows the player to play as most of the big names on the map and it should be exciting no matter what faction the player chooses. Realism is often secondary to fun in Total War games so the game has plenty of units and things that aren't quite true to history.
Attila appears to be an internally-developed port and, sadly, it seems that only Nvidia cards are currently officially supported. I can't currently test if the game will run on my AMD card regardless but I'll reach out to Creative Assembly and see if there's any hope. I'll update the article if I get a reply.
A large expansion has just been released for the game, bringing the timeline forward to the age of Charlemagne. The best part of Total War games are the mods made by the community but it's nice that the game is still getting patches and expansions.
Hopefully with this release it'll mean that we'll get the remaining Total War games soon enough and that the upcoming Total War: Warhammer will be a day 1 release.
You can get Total War: Atilla on Steam. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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This is a period in history that's rather interesting with the Roman Empire split in two and coming under attack by successive waves of migrating peoples such as the Huns, Slavs, Goths and Vandals. This is a time where Christianity has taken a hold over large parts of Europe but pagans still exist in significant numbers. Attila allows the player to play as most of the big names on the map and it should be exciting no matter what faction the player chooses. Realism is often secondary to fun in Total War games so the game has plenty of units and things that aren't quite true to history.
Attila appears to be an internally-developed port and, sadly, it seems that only Nvidia cards are currently officially supported. I can't currently test if the game will run on my AMD card regardless but I'll reach out to Creative Assembly and see if there's any hope. I'll update the article if I get a reply.
A large expansion has just been released for the game, bringing the timeline forward to the age of Charlemagne. The best part of Total War games are the mods made by the community but it's nice that the game is still getting patches and expansions.
Hopefully with this release it'll mean that we'll get the remaining Total War games soon enough and that the upcoming Total War: Warhammer will be a day 1 release.
You can get Total War: Atilla on Steam. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Quoting: HoriQuoting: maodzedunI only played Rome 1 and Medievel 2 but I think I agree. I tried Shogun 2 as one of the first games when I bought my laptop and it was unplayable (under Windows) and it was a really expensive laptop. Most games ran very well, except for that one. I didn't even bother trying Rome 2.Quoting: lvlarkApparently it doesn't perform much better under Windows, so it's probably going to get performance patches. How much those will affect the Linux version remains to be seen.
The series is notoriously sluggish, but judging from Phoronix's tests it's almost unplayable on Linux. I'd recommend people to abstain from buying it for now.
Rome 1 and Medieval 2 ran exceptionally well on my very old desktop PC. Yes, I know they are old games but the PC was even older and medium budget
I think they got lazy after those...
Also tried Empire on Linux and it was pretty laggy. But I only tried it for a brief moment, haven't even got to messing with the settings too much. Maybe it's fixable, I can't really say... I hope it is, because I want to play it someday. I also don't know how it performs on Windows so I can't compare it
Haven't played it, to be honest, but a quick Google search shows that even on Windows it drops below 30fps on most cards if you crank everything up on 11. Still, what Mike at Phoronix found was just unacceptable. The Linux performance is crappy for an alpha release, let alone a supposedly finished product. Devs should learn from GTAV - delay it twice if you have to, but put out a polished product. Gamers will be grateful.
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Mountain Man Dec 11, 2015
Quoting: Segata SanshiroHow would you say the transition is from something like EU4 or Civ to the total war series? Looking to broaden my horizons :DI've only played Empire: Total War, but it's basically two games in one. There's the turn-based world map where you manage your empire, then there's the battles which play out in real-time and have you commanding an army of hundreds of soldiers, but they're split up into smaller battalions that you control as a group to make it manageable.
The turn-based portion of the game is fun but nowhere near as in-depth as EU4 or Civ5, but the real-time battles are awesome, and you have to pay close attention to types of troops, positioning, battle stances, and so on. No other game really offers anything comparable.
Last edited by Mountain Man on 11 December 2015 at 9:20 pm UTC
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Mountain Man Dec 11, 2015
Quoting: BTREBattles can be autoresolved if you're ever bored...I refer to this as the "auto-lose" feature. I've had instances in Empire where the odds were clearly stacked in my favor, but the computer still managed to hand me a loss when I auto-resolved the battle. Do that once or twice and you quickly learn your lesson: never auto-resolve battles.
Last edited by Mountain Man on 11 December 2015 at 5:25 pm UTC
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Mountain Man Dec 11, 2015
Quoting: lvlarkApparently it doesn't perform much better under Windows, so it's probably going to get performance patches. How much those will affect the Linux version remains to be seen.The Total War games have always been performance pigs going all the way back to the original. This is not surprising.
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Attila seems to have big software bottlenecks just like COH2. In Attila on the highest graphics settings in the benchmark, I'm seeing only between 35-40% GPU utilization, and just about 25% CPU usage per core spread across 12 cores. This gives me about 19 FPS average, which looking at the low hardware load is hardly surprising...
Hardware; i7-5820k, 16GB, Geforce GTX 980Ti, with Ubuntu 14.4 and 355.11 Nvidia driver.
Hardware; i7-5820k, 16GB, Geforce GTX 980Ti, with Ubuntu 14.4 and 355.11 Nvidia driver.
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In the actual game, I'm getting solid (I don't think it has ever dropped below 30ish) FPS with "quality" settings (except AA and unit size turned to max) even in the largest battles. FPS would probably fall off if I started zooming in but with fast battle pace of Attila that's not something I've done, particularly in those more intensive battles. With GTX760 and i4670 I'd expect to be able to turn the settings up a notch while keeping up with decent framerates, but it's not too bad.
Edit: I now have 53 hours played according to Steam. During this time the game has crashed twice (both in turn resolution so likely not a platform-related issue) and despite fighting a number of 40vs40 unit battles (6~8k troops) I can't really complain about performance. Actually, considering Attila doesn't run well on Windows either (perhaps they're upset about not being to play on ultra they justifiably might expect to, but I have seen people with better hardware than mine claiming the game is unplayable for them) compared to how it looks (part of it is aesthetics, but Shogun 2 for example is better looking in a number of regards while having superior performance), I think this is a pretty good port actually considering it wasn't super-optimised to begin with and there unfortunately is some almost inherent drawbacks in porting (and Linux gaming) right now.
As for the game, after awful Rome 2, I'm very much pleased. There's still a number of things that I don't like (for example, the UI isn't as efficient as it is in Shogun 2 even though some improvements like the overview map as well, and the way governors/generals work is quite convoluted when you could have just done what Rome 1/Medieval 2 did and had generals inside cities running things while troops could move without being tied to generals) but things that outraged me in Rome 2 are either not present (like absence of family tree and completely meaningless faction system) or I don't mind them (like army number restrictions, the balance just happens to be such that I haven't felt restricted) and it's a generally polished game. Since Total War features a rather unique formula (TBS+large scale RTT hybrid) I'm not going to compare it to other series but Attila returned my faith in the series (thanks for the Linux version, I probably wouldn't have given it another chance otherwise after being put off by the abysmal Rome 2 launch) and alongside with Fall of the Samurai I think it's the most polished and generally speaking the most enjoyable iteration of the series.
Last edited by KimmoKM on 24 December 2015 at 8:57 pm UTC
Edit: I now have 53 hours played according to Steam. During this time the game has crashed twice (both in turn resolution so likely not a platform-related issue) and despite fighting a number of 40vs40 unit battles (6~8k troops) I can't really complain about performance. Actually, considering Attila doesn't run well on Windows either (perhaps they're upset about not being to play on ultra they justifiably might expect to, but I have seen people with better hardware than mine claiming the game is unplayable for them) compared to how it looks (part of it is aesthetics, but Shogun 2 for example is better looking in a number of regards while having superior performance), I think this is a pretty good port actually considering it wasn't super-optimised to begin with and there unfortunately is some almost inherent drawbacks in porting (and Linux gaming) right now.
As for the game, after awful Rome 2, I'm very much pleased. There's still a number of things that I don't like (for example, the UI isn't as efficient as it is in Shogun 2 even though some improvements like the overview map as well, and the way governors/generals work is quite convoluted when you could have just done what Rome 1/Medieval 2 did and had generals inside cities running things while troops could move without being tied to generals) but things that outraged me in Rome 2 are either not present (like absence of family tree and completely meaningless faction system) or I don't mind them (like army number restrictions, the balance just happens to be such that I haven't felt restricted) and it's a generally polished game. Since Total War features a rather unique formula (TBS+large scale RTT hybrid) I'm not going to compare it to other series but Attila returned my faith in the series (thanks for the Linux version, I probably wouldn't have given it another chance otherwise after being put off by the abysmal Rome 2 launch) and alongside with Fall of the Samurai I think it's the most polished and generally speaking the most enjoyable iteration of the series.
Last edited by KimmoKM on 24 December 2015 at 8:57 pm UTC
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Quoting: maodzedunQuoting: HoriQuoting: maodzedunI only played Rome 1 and Medievel 2 but I think I agree. I tried Shogun 2 as one of the first games when I bought my laptop and it was unplayable (under Windows) and it was a really expensive laptop. Most games ran very well, except for that one. I didn't even bother trying Rome 2.Quoting: lvlarkApparently it doesn't perform much better under Windows, so it's probably going to get performance patches. How much those will affect the Linux version remains to be seen.
The series is notoriously sluggish, but judging from Phoronix's tests it's almost unplayable on Linux. I'd recommend people to abstain from buying it for now.
Rome 1 and Medieval 2 ran exceptionally well on my very old desktop PC. Yes, I know they are old games but the PC was even older and medium budget
I think they got lazy after those...
Also tried Empire on Linux and it was pretty laggy. But I only tried it for a brief moment, haven't even got to messing with the settings too much. Maybe it's fixable, I can't really say... I hope it is, because I want to play it someday. I also don't know how it performs on Windows so I can't compare it
Haven't played it, to be honest, but a quick Google search shows that even on Windows it drops below 30fps on most cards if you crank everything up on 11. Still, what Mike at Phoronix found was just unacceptable. The Linux performance is crappy for an alpha release, let alone a supposedly finished product. Devs should learn from GTAV - delay it twice if you have to, but put out a polished product. Gamers will be grateful.
It seems to me the slowdown is most prevalent in large battles when zooming in. The things is, while the benchmark might do that, that's not a realistic gameplay scenario. You might zoom in to your troops on smaller engagements when nothing much is happening but in the larger ones you'll obviously be directing forces from afar rather than holding the "cinematic view" button.
Yes, considering games like Shogun 2 from the very same series have definitely proven you can do better, this is not performance that the game should have. And I suppose it's worse on Linux than it is on Windows (even though there's a LOT of complaints there as well). But it's far from unplayable or looking like crap and relative to Windows performance we've got far worse ports before.
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Performance compared on SteamOS & Windows (heck, Wine too):
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View video on youtube.com
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