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My thoughts exactly. The vet. hall is very disappointing imo. I’m not even talking about balancing or cost here but what it does is underwhelming to say the least.

As for training new recruits. I would say, give them a polearm and put them in the backline, but we all know how bandit marksmen like to kill them.
I used to take only a few guys to easy battles like ghouls and direwolves but now.. if the enemy has 4 large ghouls and they can just swallow up a brother for no reason, taking less than 12 guys seems kind of suicidal. Same for direwolves with overwhelm now.

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Yolan wrote:

I assume that the way the Battle Brothers world worked in earlier versions was more like this. As I recall, you were more likely to run into all kinds of nasty creatures that were spawning around and marching about. Is this something that has now been actively moved away from for some reason? I understand that the devs want to have the player enjoy a somewhat more balanced experience, but I hope more of a objective simulation approach to the game can be taken, with player strength only having a minimum influence on overall world difficulty. There are other ways of keeping the player from getting hammered by far superior forces than is reasonable. For example, using geography (few goblins/orcs or undead in human lands).

The game used to scale difficulty with renown. I am not sure if it still does, but I believe so. At first I rushed the ambitions and felt that enemies became stronger much more quickly now, I just stay at “get 12 recruits” for as long as possible to not increase difficulty quite as fast. In that respect, doing delivery missions for 100 crowns or so are actually really bad since they will increase renown but hardly give any reward.
Right now it seems the best way to progress is by trading and hunting roaming raider bands and to destroy spawned camps.

To be honest the biggest problem right now are enemy ranged units. Sure, having geists at around day5 is a “bit” early but I can mostly avoid those.
You also said late game crises at around day 90?! How is that late game? I expected that to hit around day 300 maybe, with the highest renown level possible. At day 90 I am glad if I got all my guys to lv11 and those brothers will mostly be garbage. FAR, VERY far from what I would call end game or being min-maxed.

Currently I have the most fun in the first 30 days or so where the game still feels balanced (almost too easy even). 1-skull contracts are easy but are hardly worth the time in terms of rewards. 2-skull contracts are a bit more challenging but I usually don’t hesitate to take them. Worst that will happen is I lose a guy if I make a mistake. 3-skull contracts give good amount of cash but are also dangerous. After that the game just becomes way too fast. Then there is some ludicrous jump in difficulty and you may encounter necrosavants in a 2-skull contract.

Please, guys. Just slow down. Let’s chill. I think the perfect way to describe the feeling I get from the game right now is that I feel under time pressure, very stressful.

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I think caravan contracts are the most random in the game… you can encounter no enemies at all and then you can get rekt by 30 orcs/goblins. Even more fun is when you get attacked by multiple parties at once. Just yesterday 10 direwolves paired up with 20 nachzehrers. I remember another contract where I got attacked by 5 parties after another.

I really only take caravan contracts anymore if they are going to a decent settlement, meaning either they sell trade goods or to a military settlement that sells armors on the (regular) market. It might just be my imagination but it happened to me a few times that I got some really cheap armor/weapons after finishing one of those contracts. e.g. 50% durability mail hauberk for 500c, 40% pike, stuff like that.

As a general rule, if the caravan will move through a huge area of forest/swamp I don’t take them. At least not if my company doesn’t have pathfinder yet.
Goblins in swamps are probably the most deadly thing in the game.

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Tool costs are only really a problem in the early to mid-game. Basically a single flail can afford you 20 tools. Once you have some spare coin, try buy as many as you can carry if you see cheap tools. In the early game you can reduce repair cost by using shieldwall a lot. If you kill raiders with the flail head bashing skill you will get their fully repaired armor in most cases. Then just swap your damaged armor with the new one.

Generally, repairing Tier2+ weapons before you sell them will make you a ton of profit. Armors on the other hand use too many tools to make you any decent profit. If I recall correctly, armor starts getting profitable to repair at very high levels (reinforced mail hauberks, fallen hero armor).

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Swordmasters are crazy strong in enemy hands, once again though in player hands not that great. You see an enemy swordmaster surrounded by 6 guys annihilate them. Don’t make the mistake and try that yourself :P.
Edit: I’m talking about the background here. Duelists can be very strong but Swordmasters get old and then you can pretty much just throw them away.

As for tactics/strategies: Nets and polearms will save the day. If you have a guy with really high melee defense, engage him with shieldwall. If you can spare a second guy he should be forced to use riposte which brings him down to one attack per round and should give you enough time to deal with the rest before you focus him down with poles. Don’t waste your time and fatigue trying to kill him when he is not surrounded and/or caught in a net.
#1 rule is to ignore him when he does riposte, just put shieldwall up and wait your turn.

Generally, nets are great. Catch a hedge knight and dagger him. Throw it on a bandit leader and his overwhelm is disabled (and they get easier to overwhelm). They can also be used to keep the enemy from running (if fleeing) to give you more time to surround them and dagger their armor.
Or simply to have the enemy waste their AP to break free – e.g. enemy hedge knight with named 2h-axe that can probably oneshot most of your guys with a lucky headshot.
Also heard they work well against goblins. I’m not sure if they can be used against orc warriors and warlords.

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I think Executioner might be good on heavy hitting weapons in combination with a spearwall with crippling strikes maybe. Especially against those mega Nachzehrers that seem to have about 400-500 hp.

I tried lone wolf on a guy with a 2h-axe who was supposed to annihilate everything with round swing. Even with the bonus though, round swing doesn’t hit anything even at 100 or so melee skill maybe FA would help. In the end he died and I never used the perk again.

Polearm mastery seems like a utter waste of a perk point. Even if they change it to “repel and hook will never ever miss again” it might still not be worth it.

Headhunter might work on archers, but the only decent use I see would be on some guy with a named 1h-axe (since 50% dmg bonus to head) that has an extra 10% to hit head or a flail with 20%. Also.. Enemies have 2 different kinds of armor. Headhunter would distribute damage more evenly and possibly even prolong their survivability. Against raiders without head armor I recommend to just go for headshots with flails since they are way more reliable.
Might also work with weapons that penetrate armor – named orc cleaver with duelist perk f.e.

Gifted I only use for trash troops now without talents or nothing – it is one of the strongest perks in the early game but loses it’s value as they level up. Wouldn’t a respec function be nice.. Oh what many great things the veteran hall could have been..

Recovery is definitely a decent-ish perk but then again, there is the Iron Lungs trait. In the end I will try to have people with either iron lungs or very high max fatigue and weapon mastery. Aside from direwolves the new fatigue mechanic doesn’t really seem that overpowered but still SO unnecessary

nope100500 wrote:

5. Head Hunter – flat bonus would be more predictable overall, but current model allows you to prioritize where do you want to have better probability o headshot. Not using it either way, so I guess buff is in order. Then again – enemies using this would be terrifying, at least without Steel Brow.

Easy fix: just don’t give that perk to enemies. It baffles me why enemy trash troops have as many perks as they do. Sure, bandit leaders and hedge knights, etc. make sense. But why do some random raiders have rotation skill? The player can unlock this at level 6 but raiders seem to have that from the get go. The enemy usually has numbers advantage, so WHY do they have the perk advantage as well?
When I read “Changed Bandit Poachers to no longer have the Bullseye perk.” in the 0.9.0.21 patch notes, I wasn’t really sure if I should laugh or cry because it boggled my mind that they had this perk in the first place. And I suppose bandit marksmen and goblins still have bulls-eye, yes?

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mrbunnyban wrote:

If the AI thinks you are running away, they WILL break formation and charge. Because they have higher initiative, THE MARKSMEN WILL LEAD THE CHARGE. Unprotected and often out of action points, they make easy prey to your own ranged fire.

That is a very interesting approach. My only way of dealing with them so far was attack at night, wait until their turn is done and then charge. If my 2nd line takes a bolt, they retreat out of sight. Having raiders not charge is really annoying especially if they have the high ground.
Oh yes, I once put my whole company on a massive flanking maneuver that took about 20 turns to just put them all in the right place – effective but incredibly boring.
I will definitely try your method though, thanks!

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I feel very much the same way. Especially when you encounter 3 enemy crossbowmen at around day 20-30. In the last build, combat was difficult but at least it felt fair. Having raiders just stand back, never charge and throw axes and shoot bolts and arrows in your face is definitely not fun combat.
But it’s the same for most mechanics.. nerf in perks, the whole new morale system, lower initial inventory space, vet. hall that is a joke. Just. Why?
Should have worked on modding support instead of all this. I would pay another 10-20 bucks just to be able to tweak the game to be a more enjoyable experience.

Well, here is to hoping that there will still be more balancing changes before the release.

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Wargasm wrote:

I’ve seen mercs with ~300 head and body armour (and the Battle Forged perk) and very high melee skill (and the Berserk perk), plus high hit points and resolve in case of hits, scythe through skeleton hordes with only a few scratches despite having barely any melee defence.

I was trying to explain a fairly cheap setup that would work. 300+ armor with battle forged would work too as long as you do not take too many hits, especially from guards. I still think reach advantage is the most essential perk for any 2hander build. My best soldiers can get to 100-120 melee defense with reach advantage stacks.

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My thoughts exactly. It’s a good thing I found this thread since I was just about to start a new one. Losing a settlement like this would frustrate me so much that I would either start a new campaign or back up my iron man savefile so this stuff does not happen. As long as there is a possibility to reclaim the village, be it by assault or paying 100k crowns or building a new settlement instead I would be fine with this change. As it is now it would really frustrate me.

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Contracts like this, spawned from a map are very hard usually. They do actually have pretty good loot though. I can imagine there would be 5k-10k crowns to be had there depending on how fast you can mow them down and sell their weapons. Also I feel these locations often have uniques. In your case, I would cancel and come back when my company hit lv11 and you got at least 2 heavy troopers (wielding 2-handed weapons).
To be honest, this is probably a mid-tier enemy. But they can still really wreck you at lv7. High tier undead locations is all of that and on top a few vampires and lost souls.

To obliterate this specific enemy composition I would want to have at least 2 archers with 80+ ranged skill to take out the necromancers in rounds 2-5, at the very least 2 soldiers with 200+ armor and greatswords or warbrands to kill the bulk of the skeletons in rounds 1-5 with AOE attacks (they absolutely need reach advantage and 30+ melee def. otherwise they will get killed very fast). The enemy damage comes from skeleton guards who wield 2handed weapons like polearms, greatswords, greataxes. You can use archers to whittle down their armor – usually after you killed the necromancers. Engage those with shieldbearers (at least 150 armor), if possible burst them down in one round before they can attack you.
All of this requires at least 12 people, archers and heavies lv6+.
The very first round you must charge the enemy and not wait until they reach you. Archers (in the 2nd row) need to advance 1 tile to hit the necromancers with their aimed shot, 2 for a quick shot.
Careful if you engage their archers in melee combat, since they wield daggers and can possibly kill your heavy armored guys if they dont have good melee defense and attack.

Skeletons are highly resistant to arrows (hp dmg) and, i believe spears also. My shieldbros would usually wear swords or warhammers at this stage.

12 experienced soldiers would absolutely crush this army. I suggest you come back later and go on a rampage :)

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Heyo!
Auto pause would be very nice! I sometimes go afk to refill my coffee while i run from one village to the next. Ofc, this is only necessary because there is some downtime where I got nothing to do but wait for my guys to run up there.

As for direwolves. You say your guys arent even level 3, so how many direwolves are we talking about and more importantly, how many guys do you have?
Direwolves have very weak armor but are nimble. So to counter that, you want to use spears and swords against them mostly. Archers are very effective too but below level 3 they will most likely suck so instead use some polers (even pitchforks should be fine).

The #1 rule against direwolves is to focus them down and break their morale. They are little pussies and run easily. Once they are wavering or fleeing its just a massacre.
I think you do not have enough people. 3 direwolves vs 5 soldiers can pose a threat but once you get between 8 and 10 grunts you should be fine. Always use shields against direwolves too. Direwolves are also quite vulnerable against riposte and spear wall. My main setup against them in an early scenario has swordsmen on the flanks and spear wielders in the core of the formation supported by 2-3 polearms/archers.

Hope this helps! cheers

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The fog of war feature you described would be really nice imo. Maybe an extra layer that “regenerates” fog of war and would be able to toggle on or off. At least being able to check the current view range would be very helpful when using mountains to scout a big area.

@weapon attachments certainly would be an immersive feature especially if it was dynamic. If some farmer keeps using a sword, eventually he would become better with it compared to when using an axe. I doubt that this would have high priority though, maybe a small addition after the release?

Merkwuerdigliebe wrote:

Some sort of a “farm” or temporary retirement for some of my men. A place where I could retain a couple of them and, let’s say, give them only half their pay for the duration. I can’t really experiment with different formations and tactics when the majority of my team is locked into a specific role (e.g. heavy swordman – brawny colossus shield expert and swordmaster) and I can’t let them go without permanently losing them. This again comes back to the idea of some kind of a base camp…

So far all the responses I read about this topic were dismissive. Something along the lines of “there will be no basecamp”. And I do understand why. Allthough it might not fit the lore, a storage feature would be an immense quality of life improvement. Some sort of bank where I could just drop my uniques because it would pain me to sell them. Leave some of my guys in town (say a temple or an inn) to heal while I take the rest and deliver this shady crate to the next village.
This is just speculation, but maybe the veteran’s hall will be featuring something like this?

In any case, I just want to stress that the inventory and roster are too small, especially late game. Maybe we could get a feature to expand the inventory for some crowns? I am a hoarder of shinies and nice things in all video games so having to sell my crafted direwolf hide armor really is frustrating to me. I would rather put it on a mannequinn instead.

Also I would like to suggest a respec feature for perks. It happened to me a few times that I learned the wrong perk on accident, mostly mix up dodge with anticipation because they look similar. On another occasion I tried out a 2-Handed axe build because I found this insane unique axe. Sadly my guy ended up having only 90 melee skill on lv11 which is enough for a 2h sword but not quite enough for an axe (because of accuracy modifiers). This is where changing the weapon mastery would come in really handy. Maybe generate a “respec point” every 100 days the guy is in the company.

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Wanderer wrote:

In an effort to, perhaps, help categorize the additions, there could be cosmetic additions and actual gameplay affecting additions.

I would like cosmetic additions too. More “skins” of the same armor, like Mail Hauberks in different colors. Uniques are nice but there isn’t quite enough variety yet. Usually my guys end up wearing Coat of Scales with one of two unique helmets. Unique CoS or CoP armors hardly ever pop up in stores and the lighter variants usually don’t offer enough protection for my taste. So for now I mostly use beard colors and styles to identify my brothers quickly.

Needless to say, more weapon and armor variety would surely benefit the game in any case.

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Hey! Since this is a related topic: could we get an option to limit FPS? I have a GF GTX 580 which is prone to overheating (generally). I have VSync enabled but sometimes my graphics card goes very loud in the inventory screen, escape menu and such. I usually try to avoid vsync as much as possible since it often results in fps drops, input lag etc. I much more prefer using a custom FPS limit instead.

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