So finally someone is actually talking about the game with me instead of just being a fanboy prick? (but only after they've rated every single post of mine, of course) Ok, let's see how that works out. Are 'incliners' actually capable of 'incline' discussion? Or is the reason that discussion is so hard for these guys precisely because they are the opposite of 'incliners'...
I feel like you need a little slack cut, since you're coming into this blind and all of us in the thread have been playing it for years... things we take as a given are maybe not obvious to you. Let me see if I can at least illuminate some issues you have and try to change your perspective.
And as a reminder, not only did I go in blind on Ironman first time out, with absolutely zero game knowledge spoiled, but it only took me 12 hours and my third party to 'work out the game' in every regards except Bullshit Events and the Bullshit Loot System. Both of which will be discussed below & this will be important information to bare in mind while reading anything I write here. To which, I did not lose the game nor feel disappointed with any battles I chose to participate in with the third party I played, the reason I felt disappointed was for reasons that had nothing to do with Battling... in Battle Brothers.
(1) Events can have wacky outcomes: agreed. But, in the vein of AoD, if you think about them for a bit they almost all make sense and are forgivable in hindsight. The Killer on the Run events kind of suck, and have been addressed already, so I'll leave it at that. To balance out stuff like that, you have the Cultist events (reward best armor and hat in the game), Miner events (reward 1-3 uncut gems), the farmer event (one-time permanent +10 melee skill boost), fisherman event (feeds your party), the shitload of monk events (they're indispensable once you start using Hedge Knights, for instance), Hedge Knight events, Wildman events (the one involving Unholds is potentially fucking hilarious) etc. IMO they're a large part of the game's charm, I LOVE seeing events pop up. You also get different ways to interact with certain events if you have different origins in your group (a Historian can read ancient maps you find/buy, for instance).
In the vein of AoD? AoD is not a combat game. It's a game which has a large part of its mechanics highly specialised around dealing with dialogue screens. Battle Brothers is not a dialogue game, it's a combat game. Sure, you can have flavour events happen if you want, but it's all stuff that detracts from the purpose of the game. You consider them a LARGE part of the game's charm and LOVE them, but they are a big part of why the combat side of the game sucks, they are/were a complete waste of development resources designed to attract the wrong kind of players. People who like combat do not care for regular pop-ups of paragraphs of flavour text, they only give a shit about them if they result in boosts to your character's stats in some way. Oh look, you list only the positive outcomes from some events & all the ones you LOVE are ones that provide a positive boost to you team's stats. What a shame most of them can screw you as well as help you, rendering most of them useless for Ironman runs & just savescum events for non-ironman runs.
And it's this last part that no amount of "I love them though" can brush under the carpet. The events are a distraction from the Battles, both in game and in development, they are the exception that proves the rule, in that if you'd find the game too boring without them then you're basically agreeing that the actual meat of the game, the whole point of the game, The Battles, are, in fact, too boring to function by themselves and live by their own merits.
The game has about 100 different 'events', an awful lot of which have many downsides AFAICT, and just playing ironman one does not have the TIME to learn them all one-by-one over the course of 100 runs at the game. TIME being the gradually reducing enthusiasm for repeating the exact same content over and over again just to see what the next 'hilarious' event pop-up dialogue screen has as it's 'fuck you or hug you' result. Combat, however, can be easily figured out in a couple runs and will not alter from game to game aside from the point at which you face a new enemy who might or might not be too strong for your party.
With combat however, going out by defeat in a battle one has chosen to participate in does NOT feel cheap and can ALWAYS be retreated from, and if there are situations where this isn't the case then there's probably something wrong with that specific combat encounter rather than with the whole system.
(2) No usual roguelike charts: sort of. You don't get them at the end (which I agree would be nice), but you do get to see a variety of the stats you want during the actual game. It keeps per-brother track of: total kills, time with the group, most powerful mob killed, means of death etc.
Yeah, I don't ever look at this in-game, I'm busy playing the game. Hey, maybe if they'd spent less time writing up 'events' they could have spent some time on post-game information records. You see, it's about what aspects of the game have been given the most attention, that's the point being discussed. We're talking about why things that no-one was expecting nor asked for are so prominent and why some basic expectations are completely absent.
(3) The grind to build new chars during mid/endgame sucks: agreed, this is probably the most common complaint we have about the game. All I can say is that it kind of sucks but the rest of the game makes it a bearable issue.
AFAICT, the whole game is a loot grind. Which is a disappointment, because the game was supposed to be about Battles. Again, the developers seem to be more interested in making sure you progress at the pace of a crippled snail than spending that development time devising interesting and tactical battles that gradually increase in challenge the further you progress. It's great that the game has real death and that one is managing a roster, however, the obvious flaw to that is devising a way to make new recruits less of a 'grind' to "get back to" where one needs to be. If this is still a common complaint after all these years, then, again, it suggests the development was not focused in this aspect. Again, this is a Core component of the game, a part of the Battle aspect, and yet this is an aspect that has been 'neglected' during development?
(4) No prior indication of threat/danger: working as intended. As already stated you're meant to get your shit pushed in while you get your feet wet and figure out how to deal with different enemy types. However each type generally makes its method of dealing with it clear fairly quickly; it's quickly seen that Goblins, for instance, get absolutely wrecked in a standup fight, so the obvious solutions revolve around holding them in place or forcing them to fight in conditions where they can't move around a lot. Dogs, mountains, etc.
As has been pointed out earlier in the thread by other people, the issue here isn't one of being afraid to die during battle, the issue here is finding oneself in combat where one has not chosen to be in combat, that of ambushes that result in either 'suck-it-and-see' confrontation or 'retreat immediately'. I have not complained about my team that died to goblins, I have agreed already that this was a case of me sucking it up just for the experiment and I had no problem with this.
However, this is an issue that get's extremely boring over time upon restarting new ironman games. As if the game isn't already slow enough, sludgy enough, one has to spend god knows how many hours walking towards a destination, then walking all the way back again because a bunch of ambushers are blocking one's path. It feels like a time waste. Likewise, if they do manage to catch up to you for whatever reason, then manually retreating from combat is extremely tedious & if even one of your team finds themselves 'locked-in' by some high movement-rate critter then it just makes one ever more twitchy to hit the 'oh fuck it I quit' button should the locked-in character be your dude with the good armour etc.
So, again, the 'game over' moment has not arisen as a result of losing a Battle that one chose to participate in nor was expected to participate in, it is the result of some cheap 'gotcha' moment, only in this case it's more a case of "it's got boring now" because it's your 5th run at Ironman & you are just trying to get on with the Battles & having all these OP enemies scout the countryside is just another Sloooooow doooown. The threat indicator would just help 'speed up' a process that will happen anyway with experience. In effect, not having threat indicators is just a time padding tool, as we have seen, much like most of the game's mechanics & intention.
Again, its a mechanic which reduces player tactics and increases the 'gotcha' aspect while also reducing the speed and pacing of the game. I can understand the initial reasoning behind not allowing a threat indicator, but I can't understand why the lead developer allowed 'that guy' to get his way as it has little long-term benefit to the game & hinders Combat minded players more than it attracts 'masochistic' minded players.
(5) Gear harvesting: this is a dev-driven deal. They specifically went more simulationist then gamey with gaining weapons/armor. Basically, the more damage an item recieves in a fight the less likely it is to drop at the end of it. There are two highly-used ways to deal with this: give everyone in your band a dagger for their belt, and then have them surround someone you want armor from and shiv them to death (this is immensely satisfying once you get the hang of it by the way... nothing like watching a hedge knight take half a dozen injuries and then start screaming like a little girl as you're pushing the knife in), or give a couple people with high melee skill flails, and go for continuous headshots (also very satisfying... you'll generally lose their helmet though). Flails are great for orc young/berserkers and bandits in particular, since they almost never wear helmets, or their helmets are low quality.
Again, you can apply words to paper that sound like they justify something, but the actual in-game effect of that philosophising is what actually matters. The result of this decision is one-fold only, it slooooows down the game and your progression. What's worse is it slows down your progression while at the same time leaving open a cheese mechanic that 'those in the know' can pretend makes it OK, in that killing XYZ with a specific end of Battle 'grind' cheese allows a 'greater chance' to loot what should be lootable to all by any rational interpretation. There is nothing either interesting or tactical by the current method of implementation. Yes, it's dev-driven & by being so shows what's truly at the heart of development, a desire to do everything possible to slow down progression and increase grind while offering short-cuts to people that have 'earned' the right to shortcuts by providing the game with 100 hours of in-game experience. Player skill at Combat tactics and Battle savviness has again been sacrificed in favour of fans of metagaming and grind masochism.
You're welcome for the fact you don't lose your armor automatically when it's destroyed in a fight; thankfully the devs were smart enough not to push the simulationism too far :D.
This simply proves that the mechanic has nothing to do with reasoned philosophy and is just a deliberate attempt to slow the game down & increase player-time in-game. Which is cynical, and that cynicism gets transposed into the player. Obviously not all players...
(6) Lasting consequences for choices in events: what can I say? I love it that you can piss off an entire faction when you thumb your nose at them. Remember however that faction standing is never permanent. It always tends toward neutrality. Give it 10 days or so and they'll be willing to deal with you again. OTOH you can be full allied and if you don't keep performing missions for them, eventually you lose status in their eyes.
Again, all metagame knowledge stuff that has nothing to do with Battles or tactics. Savescum in non-ironman & loses all value if you have that knowledge going into ironman. It would be fine if I made some kind of decision to piss off a house or if I fucked up too many of their missions or whatever, but a random 'gothca', sorry bro, cheap as fuck. If only one'd spoiled themselves completely on the game before playing Ironman then you wouldn't have a problem etc etc etc. Again, just proves that the base gameplay loop of Battles and tactics by itself isn't enough to carry the game by itself.
(7) The game has level scaling: it does. I don't like this. It's also easily manipulatable however; for instance as long as you stay at 8 bros or less the game will never trigger an endgame crisis, which makes it useful to build up a core party. The scaling also has limits and is simulationist; camps will grow in power, then split off patrols to make new camps. And towns will send out patrols to wipe out enemy patrols and nearby camps.
In my third game I had already worked out that 8 team members was ideal, though not from metagame knowledge, it just seemed to work. I guess I'm a quick learner. Which I guess is why I quit the game so quick.
General hints:
- Pay attention to what different weapon types do. Each of the major groups has uses in different situations, it takes awhile to get used to it but eventually you'll develop a feel for what's suited to what situation.
- Learn the mechanics of trading. If you don't particularly like hunting down Bandit Leaders and Hedge Knights to shiv their armor, trading is a great way to make the money you need to buy high-end weapons and armor.
- Once you have a team you feel comfortable with you should set your priorities to picking up some flails and farming Bandit Raiders for second-tier weapons and chain-level armor. At that point you can start branching out and go for the really good stuff.
- Pay attention to map layout. Find a route (preferably circular) of towns you can visit in regular succession to build up faction relationship and get to higher-payout quests.
- Nets are your friend. Dogs are your friend. Eagles are your friend. Find them and use them.
- Don't ever, ever, ever take an Alp contract (it will ask you to stay overnight). The recent rework fucking sucks and imo they should now be avoided at all costs.
Yes, I read and understood what all the weapons did. Yes, I saw the trading stuff, but never had the money to experiment with it. Yes, all my 6 meat shields carried proper metal flails and I was farming Bandits, it was on the way back from one of these that the SHIT event happened. Yes, I managed my town travelling between towns I liked & were cheap/useful. Yes, I had nets & was getting close to earning enough to buy animals. No idea what Alps are or were, but they sound like more bullshit by the sound of it.
So there you go. In conclusion, this game rocks and you should reconsider all your life choices~
I uninstalled after 21 hours & you should consider being less gullible to
shineys turds rolled in glitter.
