Attila tips and un-/under-documented features

**Bramborough** · 03-24-2015, 21:37

Same experience with Ostrogoths (and Saxons before that). Huns (and other enemies for that matter) perfectly happy to swoop in and trash a garrison-only minor settlement...but (almost) always stay away from army-defended minors, and walled cities with decent garrisons.

Huns cannot be destroyed during campaign chapters I-IV; their stacks simply respawn. Attila dies a scripted death at the beginning of Chapter V (445AD), and at that point the Hun stacks stay dead when you kill them off, and their faction can be destroyed.

As far as I can tell, Attila cannot be truly killed before Chapter V. I've "assassinated" him tons of times; my agents always had their typical chance of wounding, but always "0%" crit chance for the kill. I've also never seen him die in battle; even if the rest of his army is annihilated and I've gotten "Their general has fallen!" message, his 8-person bodyguard manages to escape.

I've read elsewhere that he must be be wounded a certain number of times (7?) pre-Chapter V, and the becomes actually kill-able...but I don't know if that's true or just "TW folklore".

Footnote: one can get the "Attila the Dead" achievement by merely wounding him...which seems rather anticlimactic to me.

**Paradigmatic** · 03-24-2015, 21:54

Yeah Attila can be killed. I've killed him in my 2 WRE campaigns. In the first I wounded (killed) him in 2 different battles and some northern faction actually killed him. In the second one, I killed him twice in 2 different battles. I don't know if any other faction had killed him in between. I never saw him die from a script.

**Bramborough** · 03-25-2015, 00:44

Originally Posted by Paradigmatic

Yeah Attila can be killed. I've killed him in my 2 WRE campaigns. In the first I wounded (killed) him in 2 different battles and some northern faction actually killed him. In the second one, I killed him twice in 2 different battles. I don't know if any other faction had killed him in between. I never saw him die from a script.

Maybe I used a poor choice of words, and should have said "permanently killed". Sure, Attila can be assassinated or felled in battle, multiple times. My spies popped him at least 4 times during Ostro campaign. But he keeps coming back; Attila will continue reappearing until after Chapter IV is completed. At least that is my experience thus far.

**Paradigmatic** · 03-25-2015, 09:09

I mean permanently killed. There's a little pop-up saying he's dead and the Huns are cutting their faces, tears of blood and all. You just have to kill him several times in a row to make him truly dead as of the moment he becomes king and appears on the campaign map.

**Bramborough** · 03-25-2015, 09:33

Ah ok. Based on that, kinda sounds like successful agent assassination attempts don't increment towards his eventual "perma-death", only battle kills.

**Paradigmatic** · 03-25-2015, 16:50

To be specific: you kill Attila in battle once during a single turn, his campaign avatar will retreat. If you kill him again during the same turn (not sure if it makes a difference, but that's how it happened to me), you get a message about Attila fearing defeat more than death and his campaign avatar disappears like a wounded general/agent. He eventually respawns out of sight (can be a few turns I think, like a wounded general/agent). If you kill him again after that, he's permanently dead.

Maybe the number of times he has to be wounded varies with difficulty level? I can't say I paid attention if this happened differently in Hard and Normal. But I'd say, off the top of my head, no.

**Philippus Flavius Homovallumus** · 03-25-2015, 21:18

Originally Posted by Paradigmatic

To be specific: you kill Attila in battle once during a single turn, his campaign avatar will retreat. If you kill him again during the same turn (not sure if it makes a difference, but that's how it happened to me), you get a message about Attila fearing defeat more than death and his campaign avatar disappears like a wounded general/agent. He eventually respawns out of sight (can be a few turns I think, like a wounded general/agent). If you kill him again after that, he's permanently dead.

Maybe the number of times he has to be wounded varies with difficulty level? I can't say I paid attention if this happened differently in Hard and Normal. But I'd say, off the top of my head, no.

I've heard everything from two to seven times but I suspect the truth is you have to annihilate his army twice, which would likely mean "killing" him up to four times.

**Philippus Flavius Homovallumus** · 03-24-2015, 23:06

Originally Posted by Bramborough

Same experience with Ostrogoths (and Saxons before that). Huns (and other enemies for that matter) perfectly happy to swoop in and trash a garrison-only minor settlement...but (almost) always stay away from army-defended minors, and walled cities with decent garrisons.

Huns cannot be destroyed during campaign chapters I-IV; their stacks simply respawn. Attila dies a scripted death at the beginning of Chapter V (445AD), and at that point the Hun stacks stay dead when you kill them off, and their faction can be destroyed.

As far as I can tell, Attila cannot be truly killed before Chapter V. I've "assassinated" him tons of times; my agents always had their typical chance of wounding, but always "0%" crit chance for the kill. I've also never seen him die in battle; even if the rest of his army is annihilated and I've gotten "Their general has fallen!" message, his 8-person bodyguard manages to escape.

I've read elsewhere that he must be be wounded a certain number of times (7?) pre-Chapter V, and the becomes actually kill-able...but I don't know if that's true or just "TW folklore".

Footnote: one can get the "Attila the Dead" achievement by merely wounding him...which seems rather anticlimactic to me.

Wait...

He's scripted to die in 445? Well that's a bug because he died in 453 in real life.