Dev Blog #45: Named Items

This week’s update adds named items with unique looks and randomized stats as rare loot for the most powerful opponents, fixes a critical bug with last week’s retreat mechanic, adds some new events and includes quite a few balancing changes.

Named Items

As we see it, there are two problems with the item progression currently. Firstly, the player very quickly skips the lower tiers of weapons after just the first few battles because higher tier weapons generally drop as loot and are widely available for reasonable prices. And because mid to high tier equipment is available so soon, there is also little to buy or save for later in the game. This will be addressed with the next big update. Secondly, although the selection of weapons, shields and armor is ever-increasing, there is a distinct lack of reward when prevailing against the strongest of opponents, and little excitement in the looting phase after battle. This update aims to address this.

The strongest opponents now have a small chance to both use and drop as loot named weapons and shields that offer some advantages over their nameless counterparts and come with looks of their own. Their stats are slightly randomized to excel in different areas and some of them are plain better than others. To be clear, named items are not the legendary items we plan on adding eventually – they’re just very well crafted weapons and shields and should make looting in the game a bit more interesting for now, as well as allow you to customize your brothers better with their unique look.

Looking for a Sound Designer!

Going forward we’re looking for a dedicated hobbyist or professional sound designer to join us in making the game come alive. Your responsibilities would include designing the sound effects for various fantasy creatures, general battle sounds, footsteps, ambient noise and user interface sounds. If you’re a fan of Battle Brothers and would love to work on the game yourself, read our full job posting and apply at contact@overhypestudios.com!

What’s next?

Next up is the biggest update to date – the one introducing Goblins and changing quite a few mechanics around. Getting all this done will take us several weeks, so there will not be an update to the game for a while. However, we will keep you posted on our progress and will give you some sneak peeks into the coming green menace along the way.

Unfortunately the Goblin update will break save game compatibility – you will have to start a new campaign.

Changelog

• Added named weapons and shields with slightly randomized stats as rare loot for the more powerful opponents.
• Added 4 new events.

• Changed Rally the Troops skill so that a single character can only be rallied once per round. A single character being rallied multiple times, especially in combination with Perfect Focus, proved to be way too powerful in dealing with almost any threat, which was not how it was intended.
• Changed fatigue costs of Perfect Focus skill to 30 (down from 40).
• Changed Ghouls to make use of the retreat mechanics as well.
• Changed prices of some supplies to be higher.
• Changed movement speed on mountainous terrain to be slightly higher.
• Changed the waiting action to reduce initiative by 25% for the purpose of determining turn order the following turn. This is to lessen the problem of taking double-turns, i.e. two turns in quick succession.
• Changed the Shield Bash perk to have the Knock Back skill cost 10 Fatigue less to use in order to make it more of a viable choice until it gets either reworked or replaced.
• Changed Javelins so that they can be thrown twice per turn and cost less fatigue to use, also reduced their damage and effectiveness against armor with each throw.

• Fixed retreating enemies crashing the game in some instances.
• Fixed orcs potentially charging to tiles they shouldn’t be able to reach.