Battle Brothers Pre-Release Thread

[lili]

Nine Lives: a god-send

 

[Thonius]

Nine Lives: a god-send that has saved my bros about ten trillion times.

Colossus: helps you avoid injuries, which given the price of medical treatment... still, I only put it on bros who reach around 70 health naturally.

Crippling Strikes: don't know, never use it.

Fast Adaption: I have started experimenting with it because I fucking hate skeletons. If I can increase the odds of landing one shot each turn around those shields, then it's very valuable.

Bags & Belts: I don't use it much (if ever), but in previous versions it eliminated the fatigue penalty for carrying extra items. Which is quite valuable when you want to bring a bucket of throwing axes or whatever.

Pathfinder: agreed. solid perk. I hate Swamps/Snow/Forest.

Adrenaline: Don't know, rarely use it. I guess if you have a person out on the wings in the smaller battles, it would be helpful for racing towards the archers/necro with a lone wolf bro.

Recover: I have started giving this to a couple of bros in order to survive the long battles against the undead. Sometimes my bros just get tired, not every 200 gold scrub is a professional athlete.

I use adrenaline on guys with big guns- halberds etc. Helps prevent damage from enemy, and deal with enemy pike users.

 

[Alienman]

Is it possible to make a barbarian kind of character? What kind of perks, stats and weapons should he have?

 

[Skittles]

Is it possible to make a barbarian kind of character? What kind of perks, stats and weapons should he have?

All 2H troopers should have Berserk and Killing Frenzy, IMO, which is half the distance. If you feel really ballsy, pumping both kinds of defense, running naked with an axe across the battlefield, then Underdog, Reach Advantage, Axe Mastery (ofc), Nimble, and probably Indomitable would be flavourful and might keep him alive longer than 30 seconds.

 

[Kayerts]

Skittles, I don't think I agree with your perk analysis.

Adrenaline's really good in a ton of situations, offensive and defensive:
* Really good in fights where you can take out a portion of the enemy line in two rounds. (Advance, hit, adrenaline, hit twice again. Recover next turn; it's totally worth it.)
* Good against elusive enemies (geists and Necrosavants), especially on a mace master or netbro who can lock them down.
* Good on assassin specialists to take out the enemy Necromancer or disrupt their archers.
* Good as an insurance policy to enable aggressive rescues of injured comrades by bros with rotation. (Lets you first try to rescue the injured guy by killing his assailant, and then rotate him out if that doesn't work.)
* Good on backline polearm users with Overwhelm, especially if you decide to start giving them somewhat heavier armor.

Recovery's quite nice in some midgame fights, and becomes nicer in prolonged late game slugfests, especially against undead. Agree that it's not too useful early and probably shouldn't be a tier 1 perk.

Bags and Belts was a lot better when the slots didn't cost fatigue, and also when it was part of the utility tree. (RIP) Agree that it seems really bad now.

Colossus is supposedly good because the injury threshold is calculated as a percentage of total HP, but I'm skeptical. In theory HP is the counter to armor-piercing weapons, but the 10% reduction to armor-piercing from armor means that the real counter to armor-piercing on frontliners is MOAR ARMOR. (Because it's more efficient to level up fatigue and wear heavier gear.)

Nine lives is scary on enemy Necrosavants, but they can get their health back up. Your own tanks are going to be relying on either armor or dodge, both of which are neutralized by the time you're near death, so I don't know. Maybe pick it up on backliners if you don't know what else to do.

Fast adaptation is a very niche perk. The corner case where it's probably good is on bros with return attacks who prioritized defense over offense, so spear or sword specialists. Seems really bad on everyone else.

Levels 2-3 are pretty well-balanced, as befits a game endorsed by the Hierophant of Balance himself. Nothing is too awesome, but everything's decent. A lot of perks' value can be quantified in how many stat-up points you'd have to spend to get a comparable benefit. E.g., Gifted is clearly 9-10 points. Fortified Mind will end up being 10-12 on most bros, more on your sergeant(s). Shield expertise is 8-10 passively (to your defenses, which are typically the most important stats on frontliners), and 16-20 with the active, though you only want it if you're not going to become a twohander or duelist. Anticipation's 8-10 points. Backstabber's usually 10-15 points on polearm users and 5-10 on frontliners. Underdog's 10-15 on flank guards.




Agesilaus, there are two ways to grind uniques. One is to raid lairs and ruins, as far away from civilization as possible. The other and more efficient way is to take a caravan contract to a settlement with a weaponsmith or armorer. After completion, the town will be "well-supplied," and the chance of a unique showing up will be higher.

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

Skittles

Agesilaus, there are two ways to grind uniques. One is to raid lairs and ruins, as far away from civilization as possible. The other and more efficient way is to take a caravan contract to a settlement with a weaponsmith or armorer. After completion, the town will be "well-supplied," and the chance of a unique showing up will be higher.

Well.... except that caravan quests tend to be few and they usually end up in towns that only have tavern and temple or something. :D At least in my games.

 

[Rellin]

In conclusion, I actually dont know if I would give a non-apprentice merc the XP perk... Trending towards Nope.

You're ignoring the fact that there's only one other good perk you can take at level 2 and it's one that is less useful in the early levels than in the later levels, at low levels you're usually advancing only slowly, if at all, across the battlefield. The benefit of being ahead of the level curve by only a handful of battles isn't huge, but 1) every little bit helps when you're training raw recruits up, 2) there's not a lot of competition for decent perks; do you actually feel behind a perk?

To illustrate what I'm saying from the lens of melee combatants:

Fast Adaptation: The CTH bonus is almost inconsequential and this perk becomes more useless the better your bro becomes. It'll be utterly useless at level 11, but Student gives you a perk back, at least.

Crippling Strikes: I like this one as a higher level debuff perk, but your lower level guys aren't going to benefit from it much and it doesn't contribute to their survivability.

Colossus: A trap. It's terrible if you have low health. It's okay if you have high health. If the latter, why waste a perk on health? Besides, more than 60-70 health is redundant.

Nine Lives: I guess it improves survivability, but 9/10 when it triggers, your guy's going to go down anyway. It's very, very rarely useful. I guess it's nice for people who are frustrated by archers?

Bags & Belts: Hahahaha. Fatigue over everything. 2 slots is loads already.

Pathfinder: A solid perk, but it's not so necessary for low level guys who'll be fighting in formation and moving little, if at all, during a line battle. Much more useful on 2H troopers and as such can wait a bit.

Adrenaline: Costs too much and is only useful in limited circumstances. You're better off stunning the shit out of targets rather than trying to jump them in the initiative queue.

Recover: Another trap. Most useful for guys with low fatigue, but the lower your max fatigue, the more useless this is.

I have trouble coming up with 3 essential melee bro perks by level 5: Pathfinder, Brawny, and Weapon Mastery? Others are occasionally useful, but not so good as a straight level advantage in a few battles per level after level 3, none that can't be delayed a level, and none that refund at level 11.

Considering his analysis, I may start skipping Student going forward. I would pick Pathfinder over it after reading his post, but also Colossus or Crippling Strikes would work. I don't want to wait to level 10 to realize the benefits of a perk. I wish bags and belts removed fatigue penalty only. no additional slots. If that was the case I would it. I really dislike having spare weapons because of the fatigue penalty.

 

[Elim]

Well, from my experience I can tell that picking up Student in the first tier made my campaigns somehow harder. I'm no longer taking that talent.

 

[Polanski]

I almost exclusively take Colossus, Student, Nine Lives and Fast Adaption (in the order of preference, depending on the bro of course) from the 1st tier, since I find the others not worthwhile.

I really like Quick Pockets from the 2nd tier, for the bros with decent range and melee skills. I makes a big difference I think, and enables building backliners that start with bows/x-bows and switch to polearms when it gets tight.

I also take Gifted a lot, as it seems the stats bonus of 10-12 to the 3 most important stats outperform most other perks at the lower levels. I even often go back and take it at level 4, if I took Quick Pockets on one of those MMA bros mentioned above.

For the 3rd tier I have gotten a lot of mileage out of Backstabber, especially on melee bros with mediocre melee skills. Since I think it is mostly correct to try to surround and quickly take out dangerous enemies anyway, this lets bros have 80% hits against shieldwalls, which makes a big difference imo.

I am in doubt about the usefullness of the weapon specialization perks, but I take one for all bros with a set weapon/build, if nothing else than for rp reasons. I also believe that the 25% fatigue discount is quite good regardless of the various other bonuses.

 

[Urthor]

Picked up game again, ran into 7 goblins ambushers, died, hex edited my entire party to have 50 ranged defence.

10/10 best non-Zelda RPG of 2017 to date.

Also I take the student or w/e the nerd perk is on 100% of my characters because pretty much all of the final 4 perks are worth it and 20% experience gain is actually really good for getting your characters from lvl 1 to lvl 7 fatigue/melee attack/melee defence ASAP.

Also having pathfinder in the snow levels is especially important, unless you want to limit yourself to the bottom half of the map putting pathfinder on your strongest dude is especially important.

 

[Andnjord]

I really like Quick Pockets from the 2nd tier, for the bros with decent range and melee skills. I makes a big difference I think, and enables building backliners that start with bows/x-bows and switch to polearms when it gets tight.

On that note, I've started giving dagger mastery as well as overwhelm to my backliners. This allows them to give a nice 30% debuff to those pesky orc warriors who think it's a good idea to push through your line. Give them duellist and fearsome too for some added hilarity. Seriously, most orc warriors who try to do that end up at least breaking if not fleeing straight away, which means they suffer from 40% to 50% debuff to their stats.

 

[Agesilaus]

Agesilaus, there are two ways to grind uniques. One is to raid lairs and ruins, as far away from civilization as possible. The other and more efficient way is to take a caravan contract to a settlement with a weaponsmith or armorer. After completion, the town will be "well-supplied," and the chance of a unique showing up will be higher.

I did the former and found 0 unique in the last few games. I'll keep trying.

In terms of caravans, it's not affordable. On expert difficulty I can barely afford scale armour (5,000+ gold) let alone a luxury unique for 15,000+. The heaviest armour I have is just ancient honour guard suits, nothing else is economically feasible. I basically roll around in mid-level chain with a few nice helmets.

 

[Andnjord]

I did the former and found 0 unique in the last few games. I'll keep trying.

In terms of caravans, it's not affordable. On expert difficulty I can barely afford scale armour (5,000+ gold) let alone a luxury unique for 15,000+. The heaviest armour I have is just ancient honour guard suits, nothing else is economically feasible. I basically roll around in mid-level chain with a few nice helmets.

Focus on getting the Reinforced Mail Hauberk (the one with 210 durability) first. In allied settlements you can get them for only 2200 crowns and they only have 30 less durability than the scale ones.

 

[Andnjord]

Also massive Brofists to rapsdjff and your team. The new updated fixed my save which crapped out this afternoon during a 'break orc siege' contract before I even got around to make a bug report

 

[RK47]

Wish there's an option for your men to ignore the head when the target's body armor is already wrecked.
I always find it annoying when the target is at very low HP, but the next hit grazes the full plated helmet.

Other quirks:

• In-Game ambition should not be set by the player, rather - it's a check list of stuff the band can achieve that spread its fame in the world. It's gained organically through the game, not through a 'pick a goal' event. Have 2000 gold? Time to get a banner? Slaughtered band of 12 ? Wiped out a goblin camp? Have 3 Master Bowman? Trigger the events and award the reputation/mood accordingly.
  
• Don't un-pause the game when I exit the city.
  
• Destination and pathway marker on world map please.
  
• There has been instances of me attacking a city guard while trying to enter a city - what triggers this? I swear I'm not holding on to the CTRL key when it happened.
• Caravans insist on traveling on the road, but they never stop between cities. This is pretty harsh on some brothers who need to resupply or temple treatment on the road. Either boost the caravan pay and increase the penalty for failing - or at least allow stopovers between cities.

 

[Dr Skeleton]

I did the former and found 0 unique in the last few games. I'll keep trying.

It seems to be pretty random. Last time I got to day 75-ish and got zero uniques despite going out of my way to attack random ruins in the fog, now I'm almost at 100 and have 2 helmets, 4 armors and 1 billhook, two times I even got 2 from 1 fight.

• In-Game ambition should not be set by the player, rather - it's a check list of stuff the band can achieve that spread its fame in the world. It's gained organically through the game, not through a 'pick a goal' event. Have 2000 gold? Time to get a banner? Slaughtered band of 12 ? Wiped out a goblin camp? Have 3 Master Bowman? Trigger the events and award the reputation/mood accordingly.

This would be nice. At least let us have 2-3 active ambitions at a time, I got the one to get to allied status with a noble house and it took forever despite me only doing contracts for them and their towns and already being at friendly when I started.

I mostly take student late in the game when I want to level up a new recruit faster or when I don't know what other perks I want to give them yet.

 

[Polanski]

So I just had a protect the town against raiders mission. When the raiders arrive they are immediately attacked by Direwolves. Fine by me, I guess, and I let the wolves do the dirty work. After the wolves killed the bandits and no other groups were left, the game tells me that the outskirts were burned down and I failed the mission ...

 

[Nahel]

Some consumables really need to be improved. The antidote for example. It cost 6 ap to purge the poison but you can still be poisoned again at the beginning of the next round making it useless. I can't decide if I hate ambushers or orc warriors the most.

 

[Zdzisiu]

Some consumables really need to be improved. The antidote for example. It cost 6 ap to purge the poison but you can still be poisoned again at the beginning of the next round making it useless. I can't decide if I hate ambushers or orc warriors the most.

What if there were ambushing orc warriors? With crossbows!

 

[Reinhardt]

You just accused orkz that they are some sneaky gits?

 

[Salvo]

Some consumables really need to be improved. The antidote for example. It cost 6 ap to purge the poison but you can still be poisoned again at the beginning of the next round making it useless. I can't decide if I hate ambushers or orc warriors the most.

What if there were ambushing orc warriors? With crossbows!

Ork Kommandos that charge you from shrubbery? Have mercy.

 

[Dr Skeleton]

How do I trigger some sort of final battle event during the greenskins invasion? I'm at (winning), I've been hunting raiding groups, burning camps and doing rescue the prisoners contracts for like 30 days, it was great at first but it's getting old when I run into the same 15 wolfriders group for the 20th time.

 

[Kayerts]

Agesilaus, there are two ways to grind uniques. One is to raid lairs and ruins, as far away from civilization as possible. The other and more efficient way is to take a caravan contract to a settlement with a weaponsmith or armorer. After completion, the town will be "well-supplied," and the chance of a unique showing up will be higher.

I did the former and found 0 unique in the last few games. I'll keep trying.

In terms of caravans, it's not affordable. On expert difficulty I can barely afford scale armour (5,000+ gold) let alone a luxury unique for 15,000+. The heaviest armour I have is just ancient honour guard suits, nothing else is economically feasible. I basically roll around in mid-level chain with a few nice helmets.

Yeah, the balance for expert could stand to be tuned. I had a war chest of 30,000g by day 100 of my expert campaign, which is fine and means I'm not going to have to pass up any opportunistic finds in hiring or loot, but you can get funds like that by day 30-40 in veteran. I realize that complaints that the hard mode is too hard have an obvious response, but this seems like a bad sort of difficulty in that it makes the few determined players who try it adopt degenerate playstyles. (Viz., grinding lots of easy contracts, long past the point where it's interesting. The player understands the efficient ways to beat more difficult enemies, but it's taking a while to get the gear that will enable them to do so.)

It does sound like you specifically are poorer than you need to be, if you can beat up groups with ancient honor guards. What sort of rewards are you getting from contracts? It seems like a few 1500-2000 bandit contracts or the nobles' 2k greenskin marauder contracts would be enough for some gear for your bros. (Scale, certainly; if you've already got enough scale, you're probably well outfitted and can save up to 20k for luxury purchases.)

 

[jungl]

Very hard difficulties are almost always universally shit in every crpg I played. It involves mmorpg tier grinding, cheese tactics, min maxing where you only using op shit.

 

[Dr Skeleton]

Wait, that's it?

Spoiler

Ehhh, the end game crisis could use some work, at least how it unfolded in my game, maybe it was just wonky RNG.
- I get some foreshadowing then a town gets burned down while I'm away. The noble house it belonged to and has a giant castle next to it doesn't seem to care, has no contracts.
- I did 3 or 4 "save the prisoners" contracts, other than that I haven't seen anything that wasn't there before the crisis.
- way too many weak raider groups running around, like wolfriders or a mix of ambushers and skirmishers. At day ~100 that's just wasting time.
- last fight was lifting a siege vs some goblins, a few young orcs and 1 berserker.
- at no point I've seen orc warriors working with goblins, there were very few orcs in general. 3/4 of raiders were just goblins, sometimes with young orcs or berserkers mixed in. At this point goblins can't even pierce through my armor most of the time.
- no orc warlords? I haven't seen any.
- the highlight was fighting a group of goblins with an overseer and a shaman.