Hi Drew,
first of all thanks for all the praise, we’ll give our best to not fail the high expectations :)
Concerning the issue of flanking and backstabbing there are two reasons we decided to use the “overwhelm” mechanic instead.
I quote one of our earlier blog entries here:
—“Battle Brothers does not have a Flanking mechanic per se. We toyed around with the idea, but two points irked us: A combatant in real life can turn around in a split second, so determining that any combatant would be attacked from the back only for the fact that he couldn’t turn around because it isn’t his turn currently seemed very artificial. Second, it would require a very clear indicator of what direction any character is currently looking at – in other words, we would have needed character busts for every one of six possible directions. Sadly, our resources are very limited, and we’d rather spend them on more important things.
What we came up with instead is the Overwhelm mechanic. The more individual characters attack any defending character in close combat within a single round, the easier it gets for them to score a hit. Or in other words: We’re granted a to-hit bonus for each character that attacked our target previous to us in the current round. This way we simulate the difficulty of defending against multiple opponents that attack from multiple sides without the need for any fixed character headings.”—
We really had long discussions on this topic and even experimented with direction indicators on each character (I think telepath tactics has something like this). In the end it felt smoother and easier to understand to us to go with the overwhelm.
My personal thoughts on this: I admit flanking would add tactical depth, but I also think flanking applies more to regiments of soldiers fighting each other. An individual combatant doesn’t really have a flank, because it takes him only a split second to face another direction. The only situation where you can’t turn around to face your opponent is when you fight against multiple opponents.
Anyways, welcome to the forum!
Cheers!
