Total War: Attila - Slavic Nations Culture Pack Review (Nikolakis)
There have been some errors in the early stage of the game when it comes to map development and the provinces of hercynia, sarmatia-germania, hyperborea, scythia and sarmatia europaea. It's quite clear to me that these provinces were designed to help breed nomad hordes and were not really considered as suitable for settled faction gameplay. The towns are too far away (2 or 3 turns on forced march) from eachother to mount any reasonable defence. Which is why when I'm playing as slavs I typically opt to migrate sooner or later.
Would I recommend this DLC to a friend? I would recommend it if you want to play as an underdog faction. Slavs start off in basically desolate provinces with an 11 unit stack. The Vikings start off with enough income to support a full stack and 1700 money surplus if I recall correctly. In my opinion the DLC brought a completely different type of gameplay to a region of the map that was obviously not designed to be played as a settled faction. Neverthless it was very intrinsically satisfying to take a faction that starts off somewhere in the 40s in the strenght ranking to kill off the maraunding nomads and then proceed to invade Persia. Hehe slavic persia. I'd rate this DLC at 8/10. If what I described is not your cup of tea then I'd recommend getting it on sale.
Some improvements that I could think of and would LOVE to see implemented one day are:
-Cavalry units. Although I managed to do perfectly fine using skirmishers as melee cav and steppe lancers (well priced mercs) I'll be nice to have some melee cav.
-Voice lines. Get someone with a slavic accent (Polish, Russian whatever) to say a couple of new lines. It cannot be underestimated how much voice lines helps to immerse you in the world you're playing in. Even something as simple as shouting out the unit name ''Slavic Spearmen!' 'Veles' Chosen!' etc. Default army names need to be tweaked aswell. Replace the voice lines which shout out germanic gods with slavic gods
New voice lines for the units. Something as simple as ''Slavic warriors' ''Warriors of glory' or ''Glorious axes'' (slava is the slavic for glory - a nice little pun that most slavs would understand and love). I don't know how much it costs to hire a voice actor to say 10 sentences but I imagine it isn't too much to ask
-Maybe utilise the legend of Lech Czech and Rus, one for each faction?
-Remove Spear Wall from the general unit which is an axe unit
-Slavs have a unique building chain, the zadruga. Pretty cool but don't think they have anything special horde wise.