Amazing game: Some suggestions for improvement

[Invictus73]

Anonymous wrote:

My main problem with the vision penalty for helmets is how it stacks/interacts with fighting at night. Either vision penalty for wearing helmets should be removed, or the night time vision penalty should only affect *max* vision range, not your actual vision range. At night, my characters with full helms literally cannot see anything unless it’s in the square next to them. They can’t even use javelins at night and that makes no sense whatsoever. Having the nighttime vision penalty say that the maximum vision radius is 5 tiles, before factoring in any traits, would be a significant improvement I feel. Alternatively, not having vision penalties for helmets would fix the problem.

I agree wholeheartedly; night battles represent another nightmare (pardon the pun).

[ManaSeed]

>> At night, my characters with full helms literally cannot see anything unless it’s in the square next to them.

Fact: Wearing sunglasses increases coolness but reduces your vision.

Quiz: What happens if you wear sunglasses at night?
A) bsolutely increase your coolness further
B) est fashion of the year
C) ooler than you can ever imagine
D) evil may cry

It doesn’t make sense if penalty of darkness and full helm can’t stack together. But I wonder if full helm greatly reduce vision in reality. At medieval times, how does a templar chase an underwear thief at night? He can’t be sniffing all the way to justice, right?

[Anonymous]

ManaSeed wrote:

>> At night, my characters with full helms literally cannot see anything unless it’s in the square next to them.

Fact: Wearing sunglasses increases coolness but reduces your vision.

Quiz: What happens if you wear sunglasses at night?
A) bsolutely increase your coolness further
B) est fashion of the year
C) ooler than you can ever imagine
D) evil may cry

It doesn’t make sense if penalty of darkness and full helm can’t stack together. But I wonder if full helm greatly reduce vision in reality. At medieval times, how does a templar chase an underwear thief at night? He can’t be sniffing all the way to justice, right?

The vision penalty from helmets is presumably because it obscures your vision. When it’s dark it’s harder to see further – why would those two penalties stack together?

[ManaSeed]

>> The vision penalty from helmets is presumably because it obscures your vision. When it’s dark it’s harder to see further – why would those two penalties stack together?
Eh??? Σ(゜ロ゜;)
Weird…. I was thinking why wouldn’t these two penalties stack together. Did I miss something?
Let’s assume full helmet does obscure vision seriously， like what it suggests in game. I thought it would be something like this
wearing glasses with wrong prescription (-5 vision) + being in dirty water(-5 vision) + at night(-5 vision) ≈ vision penalty 14~16
The three factors are independent factors thus the final effect should be more or less simple addition?

EDIT
Narrow sight of view(full helm) should has nothing to do with brightness/darkness of the environment, right? So can they stack?

[Jago]

Anonymous wrote:

The vision penalty from helmets is presumably because it obscures your vision. When it’s dark it’s harder to see further – why would those two penalties stack together?

ManaSeed wrote:

Narrow sight of view(full helm) should has nothing to do with brightness/darkness of the environment, right? So can they stack?

Actually they shouldn’t stack. Instead the highest penalty applies. If your helmet allows you to see 3 tiles, but the darkness obscures everything withing two tiles, you can only see 2 tiles ahead.

On the other side, darkness and a full helmet increases the overall difficulty to see stuff. I think, if I had to fight in the dark with a closed helmet, I would completely loose my orientation.

Visit the Battle Brothers Wikia

[Rap]

The vision attribute is an abstraction that includes view range, field of view, depth perception, the ability to hear, and general awareness – all of which can be negatively impacted by wearing helmets to some degree. For why limited peripheral vision would additionally limit the ability to see at night, I direct you to this article. Wearing a heavy helmet when fighting at night certainly does not make any easier a task that is impractical to this day outside of specialized equipment.

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[Anonymous]

Well, I guess it makes sense then. I still wish brothers with full helms could at least see 2 squares at night instead of literally only the square next to them, as that completely makes them useless for javelin and pike purposes.

[ManaSeed]

>> Well, I guess it makes sense then. I still wish brothers with full helms could at least see 2 squares at night instead of literally only the square next to them, as that completely makes them useless for javelin and pike purposes.
I’m no optic master but it’s weird if you can’t even see the enemy at distance 2, which is also the attack range of your spear, even it’s at night.

You know why it’s weird? Because you’re so stupid that you‘re not allowed to won’t take off the helmet! щ(ºДºщ) It really pisses you off when your comrade tells you that you don’t have time for such thing in an intense battle, after seeing him reload the crossbow again and again.

It could very hard to land a javelin at a specific target in pitch dark forest, without the guidance of moon goddess or torch salamander’s blessing. But it is possibly no one use tor- salamander’s blessing because no one wants to be an obvious and eye catching target.

To be honest, I’m kinda curious how medieval guys fight a night battle. It’s so dark when there’s no moon, and nobody lit a torch at all? If yes, wouldn’t a moving torch attract all kinds of flying objects?

[Invictus73]

ManaSeed wrote:

I’m no optic master but it’s weird if you can’t even see the enemy at distance 2, which is also the attack range of your spear, even it’s at night.

Exactly; I understand that the game uses “abstractions,” but even abstractions have to have some interface with reality. No one doubts that helmets do inhibit your vision somewhat (though peripherally mainly) and nights do that more. But not to this degree, and that represents a failure in abstraction. It also hurts gameplay needlessly.

[Jago]

ManaSeed wrote:

To be honest, I’m kinda curious how medieval guys fight a night battle. It’s so dark when there’s no moon, and nobody lit a torch at all? If yes, wouldn’t a moving torch attract all kinds of flying objects?

There were probably not many fights at night, at least none that I ever heard of. Probably on a smaller scale, raids and the like, but not large battle between armies. There were probably even less fights in the night, in a forest, which is quite often the case in Battle Brothers.

Visit the Battle Brothers Wikia

[Invictus73]

Jago wrote:

There were probably not many fights at night, at least none that I ever heard of. Probably on a smaller scale, raids and the like, but not large battle between armies. There were probably even less fights in the night, in a forest, which is quite often the case in Battle Brothers.

There were quite a few small scale “ambush” type of engagements, if not major formation battles.

Anyways, I simply avoid fighting at night and in forests, if I can help it. The current AI ranged behavior and the sight radius deficiency all make such situations more painful than having my colon removed (well, this hasn’t happened, but you get the idea, since a friend who’s had it done says it’s horrible).

[GOD]

PsenBattle wrote:

I personally would consider Tolkien (the books in this case) as low fantasy, despite the epic scale and elves/dwarves. As well as the Witcher.
High fantasy would be something like D&D where you have bikini armors, flying castles and magic portals.

A lot of this has to do with the visual design of the world and its assets and the overall atmosphere. It all depends on how you implement it, not what you implement.

I’ve seen this come up a few times and I think the confusion is based on how the term low fantasy is used in games and how it is used when applied to books. People tend to mix these two when talking about games, so it can get really confusing what people are trying to say.

In videogames and tabletop role-playing games, low fantasy is used to denote a fantasy setting that tends towards the realistic. That’s it really. You then get into quibbling about what does and does not count as fantasy and what is and isn’t more or less realistic. To compare though, D&D would be high fantasy and the Thief games would be low fantasy.
It gets more complicated with literature, as there are multiple definitions you can use. You’ve got the one where everything that takes place in a different world is high-fantasy (generally with an epic scope) and everything that is in our world or a close equivalent is low-fantasy. Here Lord of the Rings is the quintessential example of high fantasy, while Harry Potter would actually be low fantasy. Another is that high fantasy is more about saving the world, while low-fantasy focuses more on personal journeys. So again Lord of the Rings again, compared to A Song of Ice and Fire. There’s way more ways of looking at high and low fantasy, but you’ve also got sword and sorcery, which puts the focus on the battles (Conan), or heroic fantasy which is about heroism and everything that that entails. Then there’s medieval fantasy, dark fantasy gothic fantasy, romantic fantasy and so and so on. Fantasy doesn’t get taken very seriously as an area of literary study, so you have to rummage around for definitions that sort of fit like this to get anywhere. It’s like how the only fantasy that is seen as having any literary merit is quickly declared to be magical realism.

As a game, Battle Brothers is probably closest to low-fantasy despite the fantastic elements, as most of them are treated in a relatively grounded manner. By the more literary definition and using Tolkien as another example, both take place in different worlds. Tolkien is about saving the world (good versus evil), while Battle Brothers is not (not in the good versus evil way, at least). Both are meant to be medieval. Keeping it simple, Tolkien would be high heroic medieval high fantasy, while Battle Brothers would probably be high medieval fantasy + sword and sorcery and some dark fantasy. This is why you can end up with some people thinking that it is a low-fantasy game, while others think it is high fantasy.

[CommanderData]

Here are some suggestions of my own that I would like to get some feedback on from the forum community. I’ve only recently started playing so please tell me if I am wrong/ignorant of a feature.

Quests:
Going back to the OP, I will agree that one quest at a time is limiting. Especially considering the slow rate of travel.

Also would like the game to prevent two quest givers in the same town to request the same quest. I’ve only seen this happen two times so far.

Quests should also tell you the danger of the location (Deadly, Challenging, etc.)

Towns:
Castles, villages, and towns should have a inn or something of the sort to allow sanctuary for a night or if being chased by a stronger force.

Another option would be a camping item that you can buy from the town merchants. The campfire would provide a small source of light while slightly fastforwarding the time.

Scouting Report/Pre-Battle:
The scouts should give you a number or range of numbers describing the enemy units. Some and Many are pretty vague ranges. A better implement could be like 5 – 10 Orc Youngs. I understand that a scout’s job is dangerous requiring them to only get rough estimates while evading enemies but a number would be helpful for players, at least me anyways.

My final comment will not have anything to do with in-game stuff. Today I was browsing twitch to see what gameplay was like before I bought it, but it wasn’t even on the list of games. I don’t know how you would get twitch to do that but it would obviously broaden your player community.

Thanks for taking time to read this.

[Author]

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