Total War: Attila is a game I have dreamed about for decades: a grand simulation of a period of history that is all too often neglected. Even as late as the 450s and 460s, had the Vandals been driven from Africa, a task which should have been far easier than it was made to look, the west might have found its feet again, though things were already quite far gone by this stage. There were many turning points and missed opportunities. Clumsy policy, poor leadership, lack of responsiveness, in-fighting were all factors which had plagued the Empire throughout its history. The unique combination of internal and external pressures faced by the Western Empire, some of which were all too deliberately deflected from the east, were not insurmountable. Yet it didn’t collapse then, and it needn’t have done so in the fifth century. Had the Empire collapsed during the third century “crisis” we might have assumed, with historical perspective, that this was no less inevitable. The what-ifs and may-have-beens are innumerable and incalculable, yet there was certainly nothing inevitable about what happened. The fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century is a problem I’ve spent far too much of my life thinking about, including doing a PhD on the subject.
