Battle Brothers Pre-Release Thread

[Agesilaus]

Quick question: is it possible to speed the overland map up? How?

join a caravan. Or sit in a tent all day.

 

[SirSingAlot]

i really hope that this game will sell to 0815 retardos after release as well, so the dev does get a nice return in money.
i mean its awesome that its liked by the elitists over here, but after all you have to sell copies and i hope there will be a hype train coming, taking the unaware players by storm

 

[Andnjord]

i really hope that this game will sell to 0815 retardos after release as well, so the dev does get a nice return in money.
i mean its awesome that its liked by the elitists over here, but after all you have to sell copies and i hope there will be a hype train coming, taking the unaware players by storm

As long as the devs don't compromise on their vision of the game, low magic, realistic medieval central Europe (I would still love it if they did an expansion in Arabia...hum curved swords, djinns..) and hard combat then I would be delighted to see the storm of Steam threads about ragequitting after the first encounter with orcs.

 

[Serus]

And ragequit they will... they will. <insert Yoda picture>

I can already see with my mind's eye all those posts: "The game is shit, because it is too hard !", "I can't win a single battle after the intro one"... etc... :D

 

[JarlFrank]

Once you git gud, orcs are no problem anymore.
> spearwall
> bows and crossbows in second row
> once orcs get past spearwall switch back row to polearms
> rape

 

[ᚱᚨᚷᛖᚠᚢᛈ]

I wonder if the devs actually calculated the worth of their perks.

Like the very first one, +7% cth on misses, is pretty much impossible to evaluate with the gut.
And hard enough to evaluate formally, with varying base cth and sequential cth depending on previous result.

I mean, its like what, +3.5% overall on the second hit and then on the third, you'd have to ask if you wanna evaluate overall improvement or just the improvement to land one hit.

 

[vonAchdorf]

I wonder if the devs actually calculated the worth of their perks.

Like the very first one, +7% cth on misses, is pretty much impossible to evaluate with the gut.
And hard enough to evaluate formally, with varying base cth and sequential cth depending on previous result.

I mean, its like what, +3.5% overall on the second hit and then on the third, you'd have to ask if you wanna evaluate overall improvement or just the improvement to land one hit.

They use pro tools for that:

 

[roshan]

Dev Blog #91: Miscellaneous Improvements

Are these updates already live? Or are they already implemented in the beta branch?

 

[agris]

roshan neither. I think the features in the past ~6 updates are too intertwined to release piecemeal. We've got a big update coming, which will essentially be a beta of the full feature complete game.

 

[Infinitron]

Battle Brothers makes RPS's Premature Evaluation: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/12/12/battle-brothers-review-early-access/

Premature Evaluation: Battle Brothers
Brendan Caldwell on December 12th, 2016 at 9:00 pm.

Every Monday we find Brendan sulking in a tavern and recruit him into our brigade of early access mercenaries. This week, the tough, turn-based strategy of Battle Brothers[official site].


The life of a sellsword is not a forgiving one. But don’t take my word for it – ask José the Dog Whisperer, who has just been pushed into a narrow hole by a gang of heavily armoured Orcs and savagely sliced to bits from all sides. Oh, I suppose you can’t. Well, you could ask Fibs O’Hanlon, but no, now that I think about it, he was also stabbed until death. Let’s see, what about Dietrich With No Surname? Yes, he’s the one without the head. Oh, oh I see what you mean.

Battle Brothers is set in a world of grimy fantasy, where goblins and bandits and goblin bandits assault you on the road, demanding your money and your life. You play as a posse of armed mercenaries, travelling between towns and taking contracts, but once you get into combat you really see that you are just a bunch of weird medieval busts, taking turns to die on a multi-layered hexagonal grid. It’s like a swords ‘n’ shields version of Jagged Alliance. But I haven’t played those games. Are they difficult? They must be difficult.

My first band of merry murderers took odd jobs of bandit-cleaning, concluding that this was a better-paying task than the mundane delivery quests offered in most towns. You can get 200 gold for escorting a caravan along a boring road but 500 gold for clearing a bunch of highwaymen from their hideout. We set forth to Dagger Den, where two of my five mercenaries promptly died in a melee with the robbers, who weren’t even particularly well armed or well co-ordinated. It was all down to the fighting.


There’s a bit to learn for this. You have action points, of course, and both movement and combat will eat these up. But your combat abilities depend on each man’s equipment and loadout. Those with a shield can perform a ‘shield wall’ for instance, increasing defense against the next incoming blow, and stacking with all other shield wallers in adjacent tiles. A warrior with a two-handed axe can perform a round swing, slashing at everyone in a circle (even at your own dudes if they are in those spaces). You can get rope nets to throw on people and disable them for a couple of turns, and for ranged combat there’s bows or crossbows or throwing axes or javelins.

The tiles themselves have multiple heights and there’s usually an advantage to be had on higher tiles, but they can also cost more AP to reach. If you and an enemy are facing off, tile to tile, any attempt by either man to move will result in an automatic free swing for the other fighter. And if they successfully land the blow, the stricken person’s attempt to move is cut short. This means when you sidle up to an enemy, you are usually there until one of you dies. There are some ways out of this, though. You can stun enemies with blunt weapons, or knock them back a space if you have a shield, freeing you up to move away. In summary, there are lots of small micro-tactics and strategies to be used in combat. Your enemy will probably use them all better than you do.

So we limped away from Dagger Den and I collected my reward and recruited some more men. The extra coin did not go very far. You have to buy lots of stuff to keep your band in good shape – food is used every day, medicine is important to have on hand, and expensive repair tools are needed to keep equipment ship-shape after every fight. On top of that, all your men have their own daily wage and they will not stick around if you cannot pay. I would learn this last thing the hard way.


I gathered the men and equipped them as best I could. This time, I would not make the mistake of going into battle for anything less than a very good wage. I travelled between the towns, all with very German-sounding names – Brunwald, Stohlhoven, Kargburg – occasionally buying my men a round in the tavern, which has a chance to either put them in high spirits or get them drunk and useless. The towns only had caravan escort missions available. I spat at the offers. Perhaps if I traveled into the shroud of unknown space, we would find a new town where the gold was over-flowing. We stepped off the carefully set roads and went into the wilderness.

On the first day, we reached the sea. There were no towns.

On the second day, we made it through a desert. There were no towns.

On the third day, we ran out of money. Reynhart the Hound, our greatest warrior, deserted us. There were no towns.

On the fourth day, Arnold Axefella left and never came back. We walked through a fetid swamp, where the remaining men got sick and vomited. That night, Gustav the Quick, the only soldier who was not inflamed and vomiting, abandoned the group. There were no towns.

On the fifth day, there was a town. It was called Hurgash Ghaal. It was full of deadly orcs.

Knowing that this was the end of the brigade unless we got some money to keep the last four men happy, I decided to make a desperate raid on the orcs. I knew this was a mistake before I had even clicked on the town with the little sword cursor, but there was no alternative. We were running out of food and I was 123 gold pieces in debt to my own employees. Ten orcs rampaged out of the shadows of the combat screen and viciously enveloped the men, tearing them apart within four rounds of turns.

Be at peace, Cowardly Joe. I never saw you land a single hit. Rest well, Heinrich the Historian. You did absolutely nothing of note.

My second gang of mercs fared better. I had played the first game on Iron Man mode, meaning every bad decision was carved in autosave stone. For the second group, I did the same, but vowed to play a little more traditionally. I certainly didn’t turn my nose up at any simple delivery jobs this time. It went much better.

The map had changed, generating new lands and new German-sounding names – Lichtburg, Hattlund, Harkenstadt – I hit the poorest town I could find and hired every cheap fisherman, pilgrim and farmhand that would come along, arming them with bargain bucket knives and straw hats. One of them used to work in a kennel and could command attack dogs. I called him José the Dog Whisperer. I wouldn’t say he was a good fighter, but he did survive right up until the end.

Things started going wrong because of goblins. We had been swanning around the same five or six towns, patrolling roads, hunting direwolves, drinking in the taverns of Grunforst, visiting the kennels of Wolfswall, replacing dead dogs with other soon-to-be-dead dogs, when one of the councilmen of a town offered us a whopping 1050 gold to kill some goblins. It was the highest contract we’d seen so far. I was not going to turn it down. Perhaps I should have. It transpires that goblins are fond of poison.


We came out of the battle alive, but I had lost two men, including my best and most reliable berserker, Wotsit Skullman, who was the best shieldbreaker in the group, but also liked to wear the skull of an indeterminate animal on his head. We got the gold from this job and made even more money from the piles of salt we had looted from the goblins, but the gang never recovered from the loss of its best fighter.

I had a decision to make now. We had money but only five men. They weren’t bad men, but some of them, the archers particularly – José the Dog Whisperer and This Man Looks Like My Brother – couldn’t hit a damn thing. The low chance to hit for all rookie-level fighters is probably the most punitive thing about the combat. But you can level your men up to increase this chance, while also giving them other useful perks, like making them a shield expert for extra defence points, or boosting their resolve so that they don’t start running away in the middle of a fight. Grassy Knees Lee loved to run away during a battle, until he died in an ambush by bandits.

Anyway, the archers were still hitting nothing but air. I decided rather than hiring new men, who would probably only die in a few turns, just like Jaws the Wardog, Fang the Wardog, and Rags the Wardog, we would instead invest in better equipment.

I gave all five men the best armour I could find, equipped four of them with strong shields and gave the last man an impossibly expensive two-handed axe. It was Dietrich With No Surname, and he would swing this shining axe exactly twice before being summarily beheaded by an orc gang we had been employed to destroy.

José had been pushed into his death hole, and the corpse of Fibs O’Hanlon lay bloodied with stab wounds. Naggy Larry was the last to die, surrounded by angry green men who once again ended my game. This time we lasted nine rounds, which is what I meant when I said that things fared much better for the second group.

Battle Bros is a tough game. Soldier improvement happens slowly but their deaths happen quickly, giving battles the same feeling of peril as an XCOM skirmish, if not more. And despite constant scraping for gold and loot, it never feels like you have enough. Your mercenaries’ lives become not so much about profiting, but just surviving the next job and the next job, living long enough to level up and perhaps get a better helmet. There’s a precise crowd who will love this, and I suspect you’ll already know if that’s you.

You can get Battle Brothers on Steam for £14.99/$19.99 or directly from the developer for the same price. These impressions are based on build 1373002

 

[Grunker]

There’s a precise crowd who will love this, and I suspect you’ll already know if that’s you.

a ringing codex endorsement if I ever heard one

 

[Kuattro]

He doesn't have the first clue how to play the game, but he doesn't seem to diss the game for it either, so I guess it evens out.

On the other hand, I doubt anyone reading this that doesn't know the game already can get a real idea of what to expect.

Maybe that's why is called "premature", but he might as well have delved a bit into the game and then talked about the process of learning to play so that people would see what's in there. Of course he is after all a game "journalist", so learning to play may be out of the question.

Meh, we all went in blind and got murdered in our first playthrough, but some of us saw the promise and allure of the game. I expect it's going to be the same if anyone who reads this tries the game. Many are called but few are chosen, I suppose

 

[Lithium Flower]

He doesn't have the first clue how to play the game, but he doesn't seem to diss the game for it either, so I guess it evens out.

On the other hand, I doubt anyone reading this that doesn't know the game already can get a real idea of what to expect.

Maybe that's why is called "premature", but he might as well have delved a bit into the game and then talked about the process of learning to play so that people would see what's in there. Of course he is after all a game "journalist", so learning to play may be out of the question.

That is the state of modern RPS articles unfortunately. They consist of about 45% of simply describing the game, 45% of inane humour, and 10% of (sometimes) substantive analysis.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Eyestabber]

So, I've been playing BB non-stop lately, after a long absence (so forgive me if some of the things mentioned here were already discussed). The game is shaping up to be great! I do, however, have some suggestions for improvements, so without further delay:

• Hits to the head aren't always a good thing for the attacker. Sometimes you're facing an opponent with low HP and destroyed body armor, but an intact helmet and your next attack, instead of being a killing blow ends up damaging the helmet instead of killing. Since hits to the head are BB's critical hits, I think it's fair to assume they should never result in reduced damage. So my suggestion is simple: add a new button to the command card after the last attack option that is a simple "checkbox" where the player can disable hits to the head (and re-enable them on the next attack). That way, when the box is checked the soldier will always attempt to hit the head (default behavior) and when it is unchecked the soldier will always aim for the chest and hits to the head don't occur. This should also be applied to enemies. I've seen many soldiers survive because they got hit to the head instead of the body, which is...silly. The current crit. mechanic is also very bad for hammer wielders, because a "headshot" with "destroy armor" deals almost no damage if the helmet is already gone. Again, my checkbox idea would solve that.
• Greataxe AoE attack is very, VERY impractical. Maaaybe greataxes could get the half-moon swing from the greatsword? Currently, the greatsword is a much better "AoE dmg" weapon, with the axe being good for single target only. Not exactly bad, but...
• Ranged needs more love. I remembered saying earlier in the beta that ranged attacks were useless. They got improved so that's no longer the case, ranged attacks work really well now. However, there is only one ranged exclusive perk (Bullseye!). High level archers/xbowmen end up taking defensive perks since there is nothing else to choose. BTW, I like the perk rework. Great job, guise! :D
• Indomitable needs longer duration. As it stands right now it is a very mediocre perk, despite being at the bottom of the perk tree. Huge fatigue cost for a single turn duration. Either increase duration or allow stunned characters to remove the effect by activating indomitable (that is, don't auto-skip their turns. Let them see a command card that only allows "indomitable" to be used).
• I like the new "gold star" system, but I think it needs better balance. As it stands right now, there is no reason to hire expensive soldiers, since they have the same chance to have gold stars. IMHO Militias, Squires, Knights, Raiders etc should have a guaranteed additional golden stars. Just add a "better melee progression" to the Hedge Knight, for instance.
• Speaking of gold stars, everyone and his mother seems to have gold stars on ranged attack, but gold stars on melee attack are pretty damn rare. I find this to be weird, since melee weapons are the most common weapons in the game. I think gold stars in melee should be more common. Also, I have yet to find a guy with 3 star melee attack.
• I think we need "reinforced" shields or something. Shield progression seems very, very...short? I really wish I had a Heather with extra HP. I had a magical one, but orcs broke it
• PLEASE add a way to speed the game up during overland map travel. Pretty please? I remember earlier versions had a "increase speed button", no? What gives?
• Last: aren't we missing a tier 3 crossbow? Since we have 3 tiers of bows and all...

Anyway, when is the next big update coming!?!?

 

[Dr Skeleton]

• I like the new "gold star" system, but I think it needs better balance. As it stands right now, there is no reason to hire expensive soldiers, since they have the same chance to have gold stars. IMHO Militias, Squires, Knights, Raiders etc should have a guaranteed additional golden stars. Just add a "better melee progression" to the Hedge Knight, for instance.

That's the exact thing talents are supposed to do, give the cheaper background some viability late game. And expensive recruits are still usually better than cheaper ones because of higher initial stats, I had a historian with 2 starts in melee and 3 stars in ranged but his starting stats were something like 45 melee and 30 ranged, an average sellsword with no talents in melee/ranged beats that easily even if he rolls badly on level ups. I will agree that there should be some correlation between backgrounds and talents, e.g. brawler should be more likely to get melee skill/defense, hunter ranged attack, monk resolve etc, like some backgrounds are more likely to get some traits.

 

[oscar]

For a tier three crossbow hunt down a goblin overseer. The shield perk also halves shield damage.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

This reminded me of those times when I was playing Pirates! in C64 without any clue what to do.
Hit me straight to the feels.

 

[Alienman]

Probably the worst ending. Getting slain by Orcs seems much better than once a strong mercenary soldier end up begging on the street in medieval times.

 

[agris]

Its the game's way of shaming you for picking a stupid option.

 

[Sundevil96]

On my list. After seeing the next update and the QoL fixes, it will be torture to wait to play the game until then. Thanks OCD.

 

[Agesilaus]

I was playing this yesterday, too. My current playstyle is just to go on the highest difficulty with self-imposed ironman (the current ironman system sucks, it autosaves constantly and slows the game down).

Anyway, incredibly successful run and my party is still alive. In fact, all three original members are still alive, which is very rare for me.

The last battle was surprisingly difficult, though. How do you guys deal with those dog riding goblin shitheads? It's like they had some sort of morale-effect whenever they landed a shot. Also, they were incredibly hard to hit and had very high melee skill.

 

[Andnjord]

The last battle was surprisingly difficult, though. How do you guys deal with those dog riding goblin shitheads? It's like they had some sort of morale-effect whenever they landed a shot. Also, they were incredibly hard to hit and had very high melee skill.

Use spears. Spears have the highest bonus to the chance to hit and their low damage and armour penetration won't matter because gobos have low armour and low HP. You can even use spearwall to dictate where they (won't) go as they almost never charge into it.
Maces would be good too to stop them running around and blasting you with all their attacks but if you're having trouble hitting them already then don't bother but use nets instead if you have some lying around

 

[vonAchdorf]

The last battle was surprisingly difficult, though. How do you guys deal with those dog riding goblin shitheads? It's like they had some sort of morale-effect whenever they landed a shot. Also, they were incredibly hard to hit and had very high melee skill.

Use spears. Spears have the highest bonus to the chance to hit and their low damage and armour penetration won't matter because gobos have low armour and low HP. You can even use spearwall to dictate where they (won't) go as they almost never charge into it.
Maces would be good too to stop them running around and blasting you with all their attacks but if you're having trouble hitting them already then don't bother but use nets instead if you have some lying around

Is there a reason for this? It's the same in Mordheim, so I start to assume that it's either become a topos or that there are real world statistics supporting this.

 

[Agesilaus]

The last battle was surprisingly difficult, though. How do you guys deal with those dog riding goblin shitheads? It's like they had some sort of morale-effect whenever they landed a shot. Also, they were incredibly hard to hit and had very high melee skill.

Use spears. Spears have the highest bonus to the chance to hit and their low damage and armour penetration won't matter because gobos have low armour and low HP. You can even use spearwall to dictate where they (won't) go as they almost never charge into it.
Maces would be good too to stop them running around and blasting you with all their attacks but if you're having trouble hitting them already then don't bother but use nets instead if you have some lying around

Good suggestions. I spent so much time beating the crap out of bandits that I am totally ill-equipped to deal with goblins.

How high do you lot like to raise your melee skill? Once I get a character into the 60s, I stop pumping it. Some of my characters get to the 70s if its important (two-handed weapon), but otherwise I'll focus on other stuff.


Also, why is the morningstar such an expensive weapon? Allegedly the regular attack ignores the shield, and you do get an option to target the head, but... it just seems like such a dog-shit weapon. I have never had much success with it; I prefer 2nd tier axes and maces, and I'll hand out swords depending on the circumstances.