To the north and northeast, perennial all-barbarian first-teamers the Vandals and Visigoths flee from the Huns' onslaught-straight into Roman territory. The Roman Empire is in its death throes, bloated and harried even after being cleaved into Eastern and Western halves. Total War: Attila is centered on its turn-based Grand Campaign, a broad representation of the military situation Europe found itself in around 400 A.D.
Finally, something to upend the dreary peace! In the beginning, there was "interface." And it was just OK. But someone playing Total War: Attila has more in common with the former-there's no fun in watching civilizations, to hear Paddy put it, "float about as lonely as clouds, expanding across the map as imperceptibly as damp or mildew." And so in that limited sense, the Huns are a welcome arrival to Total War's late antiquity. Probably less so to the Quadi and the Marcomanni. The sudden flurry of activity is a welcome change of pace to Fermor, a 20th-century student with wanderlust. "Everything starts changing place at full speed! Chaos!" "And suddenly, at last something happens," exclaims the polymath, invoking Attila and his horde with a slash of graphite through the Viennese classifieds. For Fermor's benefit, the older man sketches ancient civilization out on the back of his copy of the Neue Freie Presse-the Marcomanni tribe here, the Quadi there-little circles of semi-permanent existence alongside the Danube's sinuous line. He falls into conversation there-as Paddy is wont to do-about regional history with a local polymath. In his travelogue A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor describes a stopover at an inn along the Danube, en route to Istanbul in the winter of 1933.
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