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Thank you for the encouragement. We wondered if some of our earlier blog posts might have been perhaps a tad too technical and lengthy for the reader, but I’m glad to see you’re enjoying them.

The AI is one of my favorite topics and I’d be happy to talk about it in detail in an upcoming blog article. Let me know if there is anything in particular you’d like to see included.

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Enemies don’t rush into battle once they’ve been discovered (they have, in fact, no idea whether they’ve been discovered or not) but once they themselves discover the player, are being attacked (which reveals the attacker to them, just as it does for the player), see their allies rushing into battle, or have vision to an ally which knows of a player position and shares that information. That is, assuming the enemy thinks that attacking is a good option given the tactical situation; a bandit wouldn’t rush to attack 6-8 men on his own, and even skeletons right now often prefer to retreat to a more defensible position or towards allies if the player has a clear numerical advantage that the skeleton knows about (again, limited vision!), or at the very least play more defensively (use shieldwall, spearwall, etc). Zombies don’t care for these kinds of considerations, though, which is one reason why they’re easy to outplay.

If I understand you right, you’d like enemies to rush towards the player from all across the map once a fight breaks, though, on the basis that they should hear the sound of battle no matter how far away they are?

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What you describe is something the game inherited from its X-Com roots; in some scenarios enemies are just placed randomly all over the map, roaming until they see something to attack, or see their allies being attacked. Enemies have limited vision just as Battle Brothers do, and unlike for the player, their individual vision isn’t aggregated into vision for the whole group. This pushes gameplay slightly more towards careful advancement and exploration. On the other hand, in the “Defend the Hill” and “Line Battle” scenarios all enemies know of your position and will attack in concert, which puts an immediate focus on fighting it out.

Both feel slightly different to play, and we’ll probably have both in the final game, weighting more towards battles that play out like in the “Line Battle” scenario, with two armies directly opposing each other once they engage on the worldmap. Certain battle conditions, however, like attacking a bandit camp or arriving late to defend a town that is being raided, would have enemies more randomly placed around the map, without every single enemy being aware of your presence from the start. We’ll try to find a good balance for the final game.

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I’d hope so! While the game punishes mistakes with individual Battle Brothers quite heavily, losing even most of your men does not mean you’ll have to lose the campaign. You’ll often be able to recover from losses and defeat, especially in the beginning of the game. Since you’ll have up to a dozen Battle Brothers in battle, and more than that in reserve, losing some of them won’t be as impactful as in e.g. the new X-Com game where you have just 6 men and where losing just one of them can really cripple you and send you into a downwards spiral to lose the campaign later on.

We generally also try to avoid game mechanics that boil down to pure luck and which can be beat simply be reloading. Everything should be beatable with the right strategy from the start. For example, we don’t have critical hits that do massive unavoidable extra damage on completely unpredictable random occasions. Instead, in Battle Brothers, there is a 25% base chance to hit the head instead of the body for 50% extra damage. Essentially, we flattened the curve to make this less of a random game; you’ll do critical hits way more often, but you also do less extra damage than in other systems when you do. Enough to still be relevant, but in a way that is more predictable. Importantly, you can also actively counter critical hits by equipping your Battle Brothers with headgear.

If you accept that you can’t win every battle all the time and that sometimes fleeing from battle is the right option, I think the game should be completable in ironman mode. That certainly is our goal.

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Indeed we plan on having events! I, too, liked the events of Expeditions: Conquistador. They’re a great tool to bring some variety for gameplay and support the atmosphere. On the other hand, we have to make sure that they’re no hindrance to our open world gameplay and replayability; randomizing them to some extent, like you said, seems a good option. At this point we’re still pretty much at the “it would be cool to have events” stage and just bouncing ideas, so I can’t tell you how our events will work exactly yet. They probably won’t be as dialogue-heavy as the Conquistador ones, though, not least because none of us is a writer.

Also, nice example event you have there (:

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There’ll be a rusty/old variant of some of the weapons for skeletons to use, the regular one already in the game, and one or two named and possibly magical ones hidden in the world. So I guess that’s three tiers. We won’t do extensive quality levels (well made, finely crafted, etc), though, or do D&D-like +1, +2 tiers. Generally speaking, low level equipment will remain kind-of-viable all through the game in the sense that it will never be completely outleveled or entirely ineffective. Getting hit with a rusty Greatsword on the head can still kill any man.

None of the enemies get a to-hit bonus when you leave their zone of control currently, it must have been bad luck ;)

Thanks for the feedback regarding the werewolves. There’s still a lot of work to be done with the AI, especially as we get to more intelligent enemies than the undead mob.

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Welcome to the forum!

The player won’t be creating any characters from scratch at the start of the game. You’re given a few low level characters at the beginning which you can tailor to your tactics as they gain experience and levels. However, every character comes with a background and character traits which you can’t change, and which sometimes makes characters more or less qualified for certain roles. You’re free to replace your starting retinue with men you hire yourself if you feel that they’d be a better fit.

The worldmap plays in pausable realtime, somewhat similar to Mount & Blade.

Yes, different factions have different strategies and abilities also on the worldmap. The undead, for example, will recruit a portion of all enemies slain in battle as zombies to add to their ranks. Unlike with other factions, undead armies can therefore actually grow from battles, assuming their army wins the engagement.

All armies can in theory set up ambushes and this doesn’t require a special ability. The type of terrain an army is on determines from how far it can be seen – while an army on open plains can be seen from afar, an army in a forest will be spotted only when relatively close. Also, the type of army and faction determines how far it can see – for example, human armies have reduced sight range at night, while undead armies will see just as well. Hiding in a forest, especially at night, then, allows an army to ambush another simply by engaging it without giving the other army enough time to react. The ambush condition will probably determine the starting position of any troops in combat, with the ambushed party starting in a disadvantageous position (i.e. not in battle formation), but we haven’t finalized the details on this yet.

Currently, we don’t have a design for a boss that takes up more than one hex, although we might end up with one later. That said, even bosses that take up only one hex will be clearly recognizable as such, and we already have a boss that, while only taking up one hex, is visually quite a bit larger than common opponents to reflect its physical prowess.

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Thank you – seeing you guys enjoying the game really boosts our motivation =)

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Yes. Although there is a chance they get slain whenever they attack anything on the strategic map (like a village) without the player’s doing.

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Unfortunately not. We set the minimum resolution at 1024×768 (common for older monitors) and planned the UI layout accordingly. At just 720 pixels of height, things wouldn’t fit anymore. I just gave it a try, and the inventory screen is cut off at the bottom at that resolution.

Perhaps you could record at 1920×1080 (since that is the same aspect ratio) and downsample (or let youtube downsample for you)?

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Thanks, man!

tomme25 wrote:

Will the game have a lot of flavor content? You know extra content like nice background stories for characters, areas, special weapons, stats for diffrent things (like kills on specific characters), you know stuff like that? To me, stuff like this makes a game go from good to great. Having small tidbits of information to discover really broadens the lore of the world.

Yes! We’re big fans of all those little details that come together to give a game that extra bit of atmosphere, sense of wonder and exploration. It’s one of the reasons I personally liked both the original X-Com and Jagged Alliance 2 that much. We’ve talked about handing out short randomized backstories to every Battle Brother, but it’s still undecided for now. We’ll definately have special named weapons to find that come with a paragraph or so of backstory (similar to how it is in Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate), and we’ll keep a healthy amount of statistics (like the number of kills, battles, injuries, special foes vanquished, and such) for every Battle Brother in the history tab (that can already be seen in the demo but is empty for now). Every Battle Brother also has some character traits of his own and may earn additional ones based on what he experiences – you can read more about them here.

tomme25 wrote:

I’m also wondering if the game will allow you to take prisoners instead of just having to kill everyone? I understand that you will have to kill undeads and other foul creatures like that, but from what I understand you will also be able to fight other humans. So, will you be able to take some of the alive? Maybe convert them to your side, or maybe if you are evil enough torture them to reveal special locations? Jagged Alliance 2 had this great thing – actually you couldn’t take prisoners yourself, but if a battle went sour some times the enemy would offer you the option to surrender, and if you took that option your men was imprisoned. The coolest thing about this was that you could rescue them later on. The world had a actual prison that you could raid and from a gameplay perspective this was really awesome. Because instead of you loosing all your men in that particular battle that went to hell, you would be given a chance to see them all again if you could survive the challenge of rescuing them. Idea and question combined into one I guess

Good question. I’m afraid I don’t have a good answer yet. We’re still in the process of designing the strategy/worldmap part of the game as we implement it, and we’ll see where it takes us. I really like the idea of being able to rescue your captured Battle Brothers, though, assuming the enemy you’re fighting is taking any prisoners at all. It’s something we may want to consider once we’re further along with the strategy part and see if it would fit well with everything else.

tomme25 wrote:

3. So when I played a skeleton destroyed a shield of mine. I’m wondering, will that shield be permantly destroyed, or can I repair it later on after the battle? Personally I hope that it gets destroyed. It gives you a incentive to gather shields and other items, instead of all that loot just becomes… vendor trash. But that is just what I think, I want to hear what you have planned for this

Yeah, that skeleton destroyed the shield using the “Split Shield” skill of his axe. It’s permanently destroyed and will have to be replaced. Looking at it this way, shields are a kind of consumable. However, a shield that is merely damaged and not completely destroyed can be repaired outside of battle and won’t have to be replaced.

tomme25 wrote:

Last question. Will I be able to set up ambushes with archers and other ranged troops using some kind of overwatch system? Like, if I save my AP will they be able to shoot at a enemy that comes into range?

You’ll definately be able to set up ambushes – both on the worldmap and on the tactical map. The AI plays by the same rules of limited vision, line of sight and fog of war as the player (safe for perhaps a few special enemies that have an in-lore justification not to). However, we won’t have an overwatch system like in X-Com; it wouldn’t work well with the initiative-based turn system we use. You’ll have to let loose those arrows once it is actually your turn (;

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=)

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That’s great to hear, welcome aboard!

I think the perception of ranged weapon damage at least might be somewhat skewed by the fact that the demo so prominently features skeletons as enemies who have a high resistance against ranged attacks (they only take 20% of the damage), even though they’re pretty fragile in melee (they take the full 100%, like all other enemies). Ranged weapons should work reasonably well against necromancers and the other non-skeleton enemies in the demo, also because none of them wear shields. A hit to the head will usually outright kill a necromancer and the weaker zombies.

Regarding ranged weapon accuracy, for the demo we just went with the same slightly above average value as the ranged skill for every Batle Brother. In the full game you’ll be able to specialize your Battle Brothers upon levelup by increasing their ranged skill and selecting from perks that synergize with their role and thereby increase their effectiveness in ranged combat. That said, being able to attack an opponent without him being able to retaliate can obviously be a huge advantage, one most melee weapons don’t have. The mechanics of a blocked line of fire then are also a way to keep it balanced and reward the player for good positioning.

The player won’t be able to command a magic-user in the sense of a wizard or similar. However, since we will have some magic items, and some of them will come with active skills, a Battle Brother could be specialized to be a magic-user this way. In general we want to keep the player side relatively down-to-earth powerwise. They’ll always be a bunch of regular mercenaries and adventurers – a few of which might just happen to carry magic artifacts. Magic aside, we’ll also keep expanding the player’s tactical options by adding more specialized weapons. This week we’ve added the Warhammer, which excels against armored opponents with two new and mechanically unique skills.

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Now that you mention it :D
I played that game a lot on my Amiga 600 when I was young. Couldn’t ever beat it. But it certainly left an impression on my young mind with its gruesome deaths.

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Yup, we have contacted them and several other publishers.

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