And Attila was more than just a random warlord; he lead a tribe that caused wholesale migrations, leading to the "Barbarian Invasion".
No, he was exactly just a random warlord.
The rest of that is...well, I'll just restate it in a better way.
Many people associate the fall of the Western Empire with "barbarian migrations". The
Völkerwanderung, or Migration Period/Era, is a commonly used appellation for the period now. It is a uniquely poorly substantiated case, however. Statistically, fewer people migrated during this time period than during some others in not far off European history: for instance, perhaps several millions left Italy over the course of the centuries immediately surrounding the birth of Christ, as part of the colonization of Rome's newly acquired provinces. Even the most generous estimates of pro-migration scholars place the number of "barbarians" that entered Roman territory during this time in the low hundreds of thousands.
Some people choose to circumvent this statistical problem by claiming that the "barbarian migrations" were the key thing that brought down the Roman Empire in the West. There are plenty of historians who disagree: for example, Guy Halsall, Michael Kulikowski, and Walter Goffart, who reverse the causation, locating the cause of barbarian migration at the fall of the Empire, not the other way around.
Nevertheless, there is modern scholarly support for your contention that Attila "led a tribe that caused [...] the barbarian migrations", in a roundabout way. Peter Heather, for example, has claimed that Hunnic migration into Europe set off a chain of dominoes, forcing other tribes to move as well and sparking the most famous examples of migratory activity. Both Halsall and Goffart have logically demolished this case - not that that has stopped Heather from continuing to teach it.
Of course, your grammar is still problematic, because it implies that Attila was the leader of the Huns
when, Heather claims, the Huns were "pushing" barbarians westward. When Attila was in charge of the Huns, migration was in fact quite low on the agenda: migrating people are hard to keep in an army, and Attila preferred to keep his army together so he could use it to raid Roman territory and extort the Roman government of valuables. The 440s and early 450s, Attila's period of ascendancy, were times when migration over the borders into the Empire is said by Heather and other pro-migration historians to have slowed to a crawl.
So, even if one gives the Huns a protagonist's role in the breakup of the Roman Empire in the West - and that is something that only bad historians do, in my opinion - then one would not be giving
Attila that role, because Attila wasn't in charge of the Huns when they were doing their most historically important work, in the 370s and the 400s.
Instead, Attila ruled the Huns and a coalition of other groups and was unusually successful at extorting an already weakened imperial government for about a decade. Eventually, he squandered much of his power in two large-scale, flashy, but ultimately fruitless campaigns in the West, and died shortly thereafter. He did not kill the Western Empire, much less the Eastern Empire. He did not even contribute meaningfully to its eventual demise. Even Heather argues that Attila was not so much a threat to the West alive as dead, because when Attila died, Heather claims, the tribes he had kept in thrall resumed swarming over Rome's borders.
There is, to be fair, a great deal of apocalyptic drama surrounding the events of 451 and 452. Most of it was manufactured after the fact, naturally. What made Attila's failed war against Rome any different from that of Radagaisus? Why emphasis Gaul in the 450s instead of Gaul in the 400s and 410s? Why not highlight the massive civil wars against Honorius - a far more plausible causative factor in the fall of the West than the activities of the Huns - which came replete with their own cast of compelling characters?
I stand by my description of Attila as a flashy, transitory irrelevancy and a random warlord. Compared to Constantinus "III", Magnus Maximus, or even Alareiks, he cuts a rather poor figure.
My main complaints were that the family tree was gone, there were way too many factions, it took forever for the faction list to finish (sometimes 15 minutes), and apparently their were random crashes (that I never had).
I agree with everything you said, and to expand on it:
The game had way too many factions without enough flavor differences between them. Instead of focusing on the top level of classical states, CA chose to split everything up into satrapies and governorships, decentralizing everything. This helped to give the player a feeling of constant expansion throughout the game, even if they started as the ruler of a vast empire - first the player would conquer her own satraps, then the rest of the world. Unfortunately, that didn't actually balance the game at all. And the differences between these satraps were trivial at best. Units were differentiated chiefly by name and little else. Historical accuracy suffered (and that always gets my goat) but more importantly, replayability did.
Tactical gameplay suffered very badly as well. RTW and its ilk were always arcadey, with compressed-time battles and greater lethality, but TWR2 took that to a ridiculous extreme. It did not help Rome 2's case that insofar as tactics did exist, they rarely if ever resembled actual classical tactics: good luck finding the Diadoch oblique order or a quincunx anywhere.
Retour en haut
