Total War: Attila - Age of Charlemagne Campaign Pack (DLC)

Age of Charlemagne is a campaign pack DLC for Total War: Attila, which means you need the base game to run it, but once you're in it operates almost like its own product. The setting jumps forward roughly 300 years from Attila's apocalyptic decline-of-Rome scenario and plants you in 790 AD, the period when Charlemagne was consolidating Frankish power and rewriting the political map of Western Europe. Eight playable factions cover the major powers of the era: the Franks, the West Saxons, the Saxons proper, the Danes, the Asturians, the Lombards, the Avars, and the Abbasid Emirate. Each has distinct unit rosters, start positions, and victory conditions that make replays genuinely different rather than cosmetically reshuffled. From a systems perspective this is where Attila's engine actually gets to breathe. The smaller number of mega-stacks that plagued the base game's late-period campaigns is less of an issue here because the faction count is tighter and the map, while large, keeps pressure focused. Religion mechanics return and matter a great deal: converting pagan Saxon tribes or managing the tension between Latin Christianity and local traditions is a real strategic variable, not window dressing. The tech tree has been reworked to reflect Carolingian administrative and military development, so you're researching things like feudal levy reforms and monastic scholarship rather than recycling the late-Roman trees. Diplomacy feels slightly more predictable than in the base game, which is either a relief or a complaint depending on how much you enjoy chaos. The military side is sharp. Frankish heavy cavalry and Carolingian infantry feel appropriately dominant when upgraded, but the Danish raider roster gives you fast, hard-hitting units that can punish any exposed coastline. Viking-era naval raiding is represented, though Total War's ship combat has never been the series' strongest feature and that hasn't changed here. Siege mechanics are the same as the base game, so experienced players will find nothing new to learn but nothing broken either. The AI handles the mid-game reasonably well, though it still struggles to manage multi-front wars without making questionable stack-splitting decisions around turn 80 or so. For newcomers, the campaign's tighter faction pool and more geographically bounded map actually make this a more approachable entry point than the base Attila campaign. You're not immediately drowning in migration events or watching Rome disintegrate in 15 directions at once. Pick West Saxons for a defensive, build-up experience, or the Franks if you want an aggressive campaign with strong economic underpinning and the best late-game unit roster. The tutorial infrastructure is whatever you got from Attila itself, so if you skipped that, spend 30 minutes with it before loading Age of Charlemagne. The mod ecosystem on Steam Workshop adds reskin packs, unit variety mods, and a handful of overhaul mods that extend replay value considerably beyond the vanilla content. Where it falls short: the 790 AD period is narrower in scope than some players expect, and if you were hoping for a true Viking campaign with longship invasions as a core mechanic rather than a side feature, this will feel like a partial answer. The settlement graphics and UI are also clearly Attila assets retextured rather than rebuilt, which is a legitimate criticism for DLC at any price. At 82% positive across a large review sample, the community consensus is that it delivers more than expected for a campaign pack, even if it stops short of being a full reimagining.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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