Incline Battle Brothers + Beasts & Exploration, Warriors of the North and Blazing Deserts DLC Thread

[PorkyThePaladin]

Calm down Porky, the burgers are very dangerous, they don't look like it (except the biggest ones) but they are. Even at higher level a big group with big or many medium ones can be deadly. Also level 3 is extremely early, it IS a rng fest at that stage. I try to avoid everything other than thugs/cutthroats if possible at such low level.
Why would you play (torture yourself?) playing on hardest of the hard settings even if you still familiarise yourself with the game. Expert/expert is for people who are already bored with anything else because they mastered the game. May i suggest veteran/veteran/ironman instead?

I already completed a Veteran/Veteran/Ironman game, after like 70 hours with BB. What's the point of another one? Would rather beat Expert/Ironman.

And I am not complaining about the RNG, I get it, but it just does not feel like RNG to me in BB on Expert. It feels like weighted RNG, where every once in a while (not every fight, but like certain fights in every playthrough), enemies go on ridiculous dice roll runs. Here's the difference between proper (truly random) RNG and what happens in BB on Expert:

- with a proper RNG, say an enemy makes a few unlikely rolls, one gets by your bro's high defense with shield, another gets by his armor or health, and boom brother dies. That does happen all the time in BB, and I am ok with it. That's RNG.
- with BB fake expert RNG, some switch seems to be flipped in a certain fight (not all of them, just very rare ones, but they do happen once or twice every playthrough), and suddenly enemies cannot be hit, and they are hitting everything for massive damage. It has a scripted feel to it. I am too lazy to do an actual experiment, and record such rolls/instances, but I bet the probability of that happening randomly is insanely high, so there is no way you should see it happen almost every single playthrough.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Also, P.S. another way that the above could happen is if given enemies have massive star/skill ranges. In other words, if say a Brigand Raider could have a matt skill anywhere from 30 to 100, and same with other skills/stats. That would also appear like weighted RNG, but really, you might have just run into some raiders with attributes way beyond regular raiders and got wrecked.

But if that's the case, I don't think that's good design, since it would take away your ability as a player to make intelligent decisions.

 

[Lios]

I'm not a great BB player (so I'm not a member of the gitgud-ian cult) but Steam says I have around 483 hours in it, and my experience is that Battle Brothers has one of the fairest AIs around. Shit happens, and awesome stuff happens too. So chill my good man.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

I am pretty chill, I am just stating my opinion.

 

[Strange Fellow]

Gotta love the "RNG's rigged bruh, I can feel it!" post. Always cheers me up.

 

[Harthwain]

It feels like weighted RNG

That would also appear like weighted RNG

AI is scripted

- with BB fake expert RNG some switch seems to be flipped in a certain fight

In order for the RNG to be weighted/AI scripted you'd have to define when that is supposed happen in the game (so you can code it). I doubt you would find anything like that in the code, even if you knew how to look.

But the truth is much simpler: the RNG doesn't scale to your level. It just doesn't give a fuck. The engine generates a bunch of numbers and that's it. You get fucked hard sometimes, but that's pure coincidence. It happens, because with random numbers in random situations it's possible to be really, really unlucky AT SOME POINT. But, hey, if you want to believe there is a RNG-related conspiracy and the game is actively working against you, then more power to you for beating the evil scheming artificial mind, I guess? To me, however, that's starting to look more and more like some kind of paranoia - plain and simple.

 

[Kaivokz]

Probability is weird like that, and our intuition is that we shouldn’t see “runs” of luck regularly.

If you’re interested in reading about it, look up the fallacy of the maturity of chances—basically, it’s a failure of reasoning to believe that the outcome of independent past chance events affects the probability of present or future chance events. For example, if you roll a six-sided die five times and each time it comes up six, the odds of the next roll being a 6 are still 1 in 6.

That said we can look at some probabilities. An enemy who has a 35% chance to hit you has a roughly:
1 in 1.3 billion odds to hit you 20 times in a row
1 in 37,000 odds to hit you 10 times in a row
1 in 189 odds to hit you 5 times in a row
1 in 2.9 odds to hit you 1 time

What are the odds of rolling five of a kind with five dice? Roughly 1 in 1,296–so over the course of say 100 rolls and 100 sets of swings from an enemy, it’s much more likely that you’ll be hit five times in a row by a nachezar with 35% hit chance than it is to see someone roll five of a kind, yet I’m sure if you’ve played yahtzee before, you seen many people roll five of a kind.

Unless you’re very very unlucky, if you get hit chances to be 95 to 5 in your favor, you should almost never see long strings of misses (higher than 5, say) for you and hits for them (though it is, of course, possible)—but if you creep into the 20-40 range for enemies and 70-90 range for allies, strings of battle-turning luck become drastically more likely.

 

[Harthwain]

Kaivokz There is one more thing to consider: are the rolls individual for each character or are they part of a single string (shared between all characters)? Does each team has its own string/pool or is it shared between both teams?

This matters when the number generator is set to even out over time (like in Blood Bowl. Also, in Blood Bowl each team gets separate rolls, and you get separate rolls specifically for blocking and for any number-related rolls). The caveat is - when the fight is short, you (or the enemy) might simply not survive getting to the point when the numbers start to "even out". Or the difficulty of the task could be so high that by the time you arrive at that point you are going to fail either way, even if you roll relatively high.

 

[Kaivokz]

Oh, and if you thought nachs were bad, two 5% hits in a row from an orc warlord or champion can kill or severely cripple a bro, and that’s 1 in 400 odds. If he has a 10% chance to hit, that’s 1 in 100, and if he has a 15% it goes up to ~1 in 44! And that’s just to hit twice in a row, not counting if he hits two swings out of three or four.

That’s why the best strategy in a game like this is to focus on offense—you want to, as quickly as possible, eliminate the enemy before they even have a chance to get lucky. Surround an orc warlord with 2h hammer bros and it doesn’t matter that he has a 1 in 44 chance to kill one of you in two turns.

PorkyThePaladin good early game strategy vs nachs is to spearwall one flank and quickly work up from the other flank, covering corpses as you go while trying to break their morale—but the reason nachs are hard early game is that fighting them is all about control and you want to go slow, but you don’t yet have nimble or battle forged to mitigate the slower pace and you almost definitely don’t have enough m.def to get their hit chances down to 5% except maybe on a nicely rolled shield bro. This is one of the reasons I think BB is a brilliant game; they put a lower bound in hit chances (5%) which discourages overly defensive play, but then throw in enemies who incentivize you to go slowly. The beauty is in balancing what they give you into an effective battle plan. (Basic tactical advice like: don’t hit fleeing enemies, wait your turn for free hits when they run and then move forward, try to break morale of low morale enemies by stepping two or more bros adjacent, etc.)

Harthwain I am not sure how BB RNG is set, but you do raise a good point: I only know of devs who manipulate RNG to either favor the player or favor balance (and even then players think the RNG is unfair! haha). I’m sure you can find some dev who manipulates RNG behind the scenes specifically to punish the player, but most devs actually want players to enjoy their games.

 

[Serus]

Calm down Porky, the burgers are very dangerous, they don't look like it (except the biggest ones) but they are. Even at higher level a big group with big or many medium ones can be deadly. Also level 3 is extremely early, it IS a rng fest at that stage. I try to avoid everything other than thugs/cutthroats if possible at such low level.
Why would you play (torture yourself?) playing on hardest of the hard settings even if you still familiarise yourself with the game. Expert/expert is for people who are already bored with anything else because they mastered the game. May i suggest veteran/veteran/ironman instead?

I already completed a Veteran/Veteran/Ironman game, after like 70 hours with BB. What's the point of another one? Would rather beat Expert/Ironman.
...

But you said that hexe was new to you. How one plays 70 hours not encountering a single hexe? Maybe i misunderstood.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

That said we can look at some probabilities. An enemy who has a 35% chance to hit you has a roughly:
1 in 1.3 billion odds to hit you 20 times in a row
1 in 37,000 odds to hit you 10 times in a row
1 in 189 odds to hit you 5 times in a row
1 in 2.9 odds to hit you 1 time

I highlighted in yellow the relevant bit. Because what I am "whining" about is not a single bro getting killed on a lucky strike. I am talking about the entire battle suddenly feeling weird, as all my guys, despite high offensive skills, cannot hit anything for life or do the tiniest bit of damage when they do hit, and the low level enemy (natzenburgers in last case, brigand raiders in another game, etc) suddenly hitting on everything and dealing massive damage. So we are talking about a very large number of low probablity rolls happening adjacently. And again, my point is, if it happened once, ok, bad luck, but it seems to happen once in almost every expert game I've played so far. That to me seems... off?

But also, as I mentioned before, there could be other factors masquerading as weird RNG. For example, a large range of stats for enemy types. If usually natzenburgers have matt of 50, for example, but due to another type of RNG, the group I ran into had them with matt of 100, that would explain the drastically different outcome. But this kind of RNG, if it happens, is bad design imo.

I’m sure you can find some dev who manipulates RNG behind the scenes specifically to punish the player, but most devs actually want players to enjoy their games.

If it's the case that something like is happening behind the scenes, it's not to punish the player so much as to prolong the longetivity of the game. Without punishing RNG, a good player can probably beat BB on Expert/Ironman after 100 hours, but with it, you have people playing it for thousands of hours, searching for that elusive perfect run. Gambling would be a good analogy.

But you said that hexe was new to you. How one plays 70 hours not encountering a single hexe? Maybe i misunderstood.

I played the first 70-80 hours with the vanilla game. I think Hexes were introduced in Beasts and Exploration DLC, which I purchased later?

 

[Drew]

A string of 20 in a row in a sample size of 20 has those odds.
But you're looking at a sample size of five thousand rolls and seeing 20 in a row you don't like.

But you said that hexe was new to you. How one plays 70 hours not encountering a single hexe? Maybe i misunderstood.

I had played 200 hours before they added them to the game.

 

[Serus]

A string of 20 in a row in a sample size of 20 has those odds.
But you're looking at a sample size of five thousand rolls and seeing 20 in a row you don't like.

But you said that hexe was new to you. How one plays 70 hours not encountering a single hexe? Maybe i misunderstood.

I had played 200 hours before they added them to the game.

Sure as i did (>300h before any dlc), and recently i restarted from scratch. I just thought Porky played it with all the dlc.

PorkyThePaladin see above. Still the games changed drastically in terms of difficulty and complication level from early days. There like 3 times more enemy types, and most have their own tricks. So my question about torturing yourself playing ironman expert/expert still stands. But to each on its own, may the RNG be with you!

A propos ironman, i lost 2 brothers. There was a 1 skull mission to clear a cemetery that continued into a kill a necromancer one. paid 450 for each part. The second part wasn't really 1 skull and killed my 2 bros. I'm all for exchanging a bros life for something shiny but 2 lifes for 450 is not the rate i usually make the exchange. Oh well, they weren't very good so the company will live.

 

[Kalarion]

Hasn't the game's code been decompiled/cracked already? Whether or not the game is rigging the RNG shouldn't even be a debate, someone just go check the combat code (I distinctly remember it uses Squirrel, I saw someone who had decompiled the code on the subreddit a couple years ago).

 

[Serus]

Damn, i can't build any reserve, i'm at 13 bros... again. The company gets stronger because the best survive (so far) and gain levels but without reserves if something bad happens it will be really bad. And with me at the helm - eventually something really bad will happen.
On more happy note, my only ranged bros was almost eaten by frenzied direwolfs, thankfully he survived, he is a bit traumatised for life but so what. Trauma doesn't mean he can't shoot, and resolve... well, he was fearless so now he will be a fearless coward. I wanted to make him an overwhelm gunner but ill put all points in resolve instead. With a trinket he should end with ~40 resolve, not great but enough for an archer. Btw he was 2 fights from 7th level and getting nimble when this happened.

 

[Sarissofoi]

There is something wrong with RNG in BB.
I seen things that you could not even imagine.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

On day 67 of Expert/Expert/Ironman run now. Holy shit, almost wiped a couple of times, first time, took a single skull difficulty mission (trololol) to clear out some shack. Of course they didn't mention the raiders there were all chuck norris level. Lost one third of 9 bros before clearing that place out. Then, recurring issues with natzenburgers, lost a couple of bros too.

 

[Sarissofoi]

Nachos are definitely enemy not worth fighting early or ever.
Both early and late they have incredibly snowball potential and are dangerous to fight. Sure there are various ways to contain them and various ways to deal with them(CC is extremely important) but early one bad move can make them easily grow and wipe you(and you usually have no right tools to deal with them) and even late facing 20 + nachos from which 16 are large at the start of the battle is not relaxing sight.
And RNG is extremely jumpy in the game to a weird extent.
I do not tell that its only against player because I seen my troops going smooth like knife in butter where they should not but when it happen against you then it is the problem.
The worst is when player get unlucky streak and enemy get lucky one - your guys hit 1 from 10 attacks at 60%+ and enemy hit your guys 8/10 attacks with chance to hit 40%-. And sure it is possible but also extremely frustrating when its happen for 2 or 3 turns.
I get used to it to a point where I don't even look at hit chance.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Lol, just got ambushed by some alps. Never faced them before, paused the game, brought up wiki, after reading wiki, retreated right away even though i outnumbered them 10 to 4.

Those alps can go hexe themselves.

 

[Strange Fellow]

Never faced them before, paused the game, brought up wiki

what the fuck

 

[Tigranes]

I mean, dude is trying to do insane difficulty ironman without having seen some of the enemies, because apparently once you "beat" BB Veteran once there is no point

I guess it's kind of like never playing Poker after you win once

 

[Serus]

Add to that the fact: it was veteran playing without any dlc so almost a different game when it comes to difficulty. No wonder there are RNG "issues" involved.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Lol, just got ambushed by some alps. Never faced them before, paused the game, brought up wiki, after reading wiki, retreated right away even though i outnumbered them 10 to 4.

Those alps can go hexe themselves.

You don't like easy, formulaic & boring fights?

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Lol, just got ambushed by some alps. Never faced them before, paused the game, brought up wiki, after reading wiki, retreated right away even though i outnumbered them 10 to 4.

Those alps can go hexe themselves.

You don't like easy, formulaic & boring fights?

Not so much that, but it's a fight that requires very specific preparation apparently. Armor/shields/defense don't work (my current company is built around that), you need to have backup clubs or something to stun them so they don't tp around, etc. Didn't sound like something I could handle at this time.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Lol, just got ambushed by some alps. Never faced them before, paused the game, brought up wiki, after reading wiki, retreated right away even though i outnumbered them 10 to 4.

Those alps can go hexe themselves.

You don't like easy, formulaic & boring fights?

Not so much that, but it's a fight that requires very specific preparation apparently. Armor/shields/defense don't work (my current company is built around that), you need to have backup clubs or something to stun them so they don't tp around, etc. Didn't sound like something I could handle at this time.

Those preparations are merely for optimization.
Alps are easily beatable if..

Spoiler

you keep in formation and let them come at you. 4 alps have very little potential to do damage.
Their teleportation mechanic means that you don't have to chase before they start retreating.