As a Total War veteran I was able to get to grips with most of these mechanics without too much difficulty, however I would hesitate to recommend Attila to someone who has never delved into the series before. You actually need to understand how all of the different machinations of your empire work in order to succeed, whereas in the past these elements have existed in the background and didn’t usually require much attention outside of the occasional crisis.
One side effect that all of this tweaking and rebalancing has is to greatly ratchet up the difficulty level. If there is one complaint I could level against the real-time battles it is the dedicated naval encounters they remain slow, clumsy affairs, but this is partly a function of the ship technology that existed during this time period. Thanks to these tweaks sieges, combined land/sea battles and making use of the terrain now actually seem like important strategic variables compared to Rome 2 where battles ended so quickly that these elements never really came into play.
