Rap's Replies
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Great! What would help us the most right now is if you could help spread the word about the game and get people to give it a try. Like you said, there is not a lot of traffic here and few people seem to even know the game exists.
As a token of my appreciation, here is a work-in-progress preview of two new ways for Battle Brothers to die. Losing your favorite veteran guy should feel even more devastating this way. Decapitations can occur with some weapons on a killing blow to the head, and will prevent the poor guy from being raised again by a necromancer. This applies to many enemies as well.
Thank you guys!
Thanks for the kind words. I am impressed the demo kept you entertained all weekend – now that is encouraging for us to hear
1) Larger battles. Will there be an option to control more than just 12 battle brothers? I really hope so, even if it’s 14 or 16 max would make a big difference. Bigger the battles the bigger the fun
The current limit is set at 12 per battle because at some point managing more people could really strain the player’s ability to keep track of everything, not to mention rounds taking forever. That number is not set in stone, though, and we’ll see how it plays for a while and whether we should keep it like this.
2) Battlefield types. As the game progresses and the player travels to ruins, will we be able to go and fight inside dungeons for example? Will there be any fighting done indoors at all? Might be a nice change of pace!
Definately! Once we have all the basics in place we’ll add more terrain types for tactical maps, including indoor terrain (dungeons, caves, etc).
3) Release date. A big portion of the game is already done, about when can we expect to see the final game? I can’t wait! Any opportunities to beta test the full game?
The release date at this point depends heavily on when and how we can secure funding to go into full production. We’re aiming for a finished game in about a year from now. However, in all likelihood we’ll have an early access version quite some time before that which will allow you to play the game with most features in place and some content still left to add.
4) I have one idea that that might make things more interesting. During a battle the battle brothers are quiet, while different enemies growl or howl, ect. I’d like to see Battle Brothers yell out things at different times during battle. Maybe when a Battle Brother kills an enemy with one blow of his two handed sword he gives a victor yell! Maybe another can call out “charge” or some other words of encouragement to motivate the others. Different yells or screams when seriously injured during a battle can spice things up.
I think that’s a great idea. It has actually come up in our internal discussions before, but would obviously require a substantial amount of additional sounds. It’s not a high priority for us but something we’d like to do as we progress further on in development. A rich soundscape like that, imo, is important to have the battles feel lively especially in light of us having only very limited animations.
Thank you for the encouragement and feedback!
Can the player view the “special” abilities of enemies?
It didn’t make it into the demo, but we’ll have an information window that can be opened for every opponent, giving a text description of the enemy, as well as descriptions (and not just those mildly obscure icons) of all current status effects, similar to how it is for Battle Brothers in the character screen.
The two status effects from your picture are “Enraged” (which gives the zombie in question additional action points for the duration of 3 turns, allowing them to make two attacks per turn or move a bit further) and “Swamp Terrain” (the same effect your guys get if they move onto swamp terrain).
Is a minimap planned? Or will maps never be much bigger than the ones in the demo?
Maps will never be much bigger than the ones in the demo; we think this is a size that works well to give some room to maneuver without the player getting lost or easily bored. We have no minimap planned, but you can zoom in and out using the mouse wheel to get the big picture.
The player can move the main view by either mouse scrolling or using WASD. I am using an Azerty keyboard, meaning I use ZQSD. Key rebinds would be handy, but I imagine that is something for further down the road.
We’ll add key binding functionality in time, but as you guessed, it’s not that high a priority for now. What we could add easily for the next version is to have the Z key work the same as the W key, and the Q key work the same as the A key on WASD keyboards. Would that help you until we have user configurable key bindings?
Is there a way to minimize trees or remove them from view? Sometimes, a tree hides an open tile just behind it. So, a way to minimize the trees (by shrinking them or removing the crown of the trees) could be handy. Right now, using the 180° rotator is a bit cumbersome.
Left-clicking an open tile behind a tree will temporarily hide that tree (and, in fact, all other trees hiding the path that leads onto that tile). There is no global toggle to hide or minimize all trees, though. Is that sufficient or still too cumbersome?
Right now, once a Battle Brother uses an ability such as Spearwall or Shieldwall, his turn doesn’t automatically end. He’s still able to move, but nothing more. Does this mean that an agile BB (one with a lot of movement points) will be able to for instance to enable a shieldwall, move over and still attack the enemy?
No. We decided on the same amount of action points (currently 9) for every Battle Brother for balancing reasons. The way it is now, the player has two actions available with one-handed weapons (e.g. shieldwall + an attack) and one action with two-handed weapons, which really helps to distinguish them. Adding just one or two action points more would, for example, allow the crossbow to fire two times in a single turn, greatly changing the balance of power for weapons.
Will there be something like a “kill-sheet”? Perhaps even an event-log (Brother Bernhard, killed 3 goblins on date X, killed 4 zombies on date y, …)?
Definately. We keep statistics for every Battle Brother, including a kill count, and noteworthy feats like slaying an especially powerful enemy or being the sole survivor of a battle gone wrong. They can be browsed in the history tab that can be seen briefly in the recent video on the inventory screen (but they aren’t implemented yet and won’t be featured in the combat demo).
Are all Battle Brothers “normal” men? Or are there nobles (meaning, people with titles and properties) as well? Can we give battle brothers a title? Perhaps one can recruit an experienced and well-equipped character called Herr Friedrich von Hohenstaufen?
All Battle Brothers can not only earn titles but potentially also character traits (i.e. actual gameplay effects) for achievements, both good and bad. A character having slain dozens of undead, for example, might earn a title (“the Undead Slayer”) and a character trait that makes him less prone to morale failure when fighting undead again. Titles will probably be freely editable by the player, though, and are considered to be more like suggestions based on what the character experienced (and his peers know him for).
Since we’ll probably also allow for hiring a few more experienced men to join the player’s ranks (for a higher fee), I think it’d be a cool idea to have some of them come from noble backgrounds, already have titles like you suggested, and perhaps come with some non-crappy equipment. However, noble men would, at least for as long as they’re part of the Battle Brothers, relinquish their noble privileges, and the gameplay effects of their noble birth would be limited to some character traits that are mostly for flavor.
Will we be able to have a “hall of legends” or a “memorial wall”? Just a list that shows all your battlebrothers that died and where you can view their stats and background (and “killsheet”)?
It isn’t high on our priority list but I agree with you that it would be a cool feature down the road.
But will there be some allowance for intra-group relations? The title refers to battle brothers, a band of soldiers/militiamen who fight alongside one another and forge a special bond because of it. This could translate to increased morale bonuses when two “veterans” fight close to eachtoher, a strong decrease in morale when one of the old soldiers dies, … Perhaps there can even be a trait-influence of some kind (a good “friend” dies due to a zombie, his surviving buddy becomes a “zombie-slayer”)? Or isn’t this something that is planned for BB?
Simulating character relations for individual characters within the group isn’t within the scope of Battle Brothers; we just assume that all members are more or less equally close. That said, we do scale morale loss depending on who it is that falls in battle (recruit or veteran), and we have passive skills in our leadership skilltree for veterans that give a morale bonus when fighting near them. Like I mentioned above, we also intend to hand out character traits on special occasions, like seeing countless brothers die. It’s just that these traits don’t depend on the relationships of individual characters to each other.
Thanks in advance!
Thank you for your interest in our game and welcome to the forums! (:
And traits don’t have to be all beneficial or all bad. For example there might be a tactical benefit to being fat – there’s a bigger chance you’ll block a missile fired by an enemy into a brother who’s standing behind you. Triple that if a character hiding behind you is himself tiny.
They aren’t necessarily all beneficial or all bad, just the example ones are. Still, you make a good point even with them. I didn’t think about it this way before.
Will you start a crowdfunding campaign at some point? Or can we just somehow preorder?
We’re currently weighting our options on doing a crowdfunding campaign. We really have to get this game a budget somehow in order to have it move forward with pace, and crowdfunding seems a good candidate. If we’ll do it, it will be only after the combat demo is released, though, and we get some more public attention.
And another question: When shall we see some battle sisters?
Not anytime soon, I’m afraid. Allow me to copy-paste a previous reply from me regarding this (sometimes controversial) topic:
It’s not like we’re opposed to having female characters in the game. However, our resources are stretched so thin that we can’t even afford our characters legs – adding female characters in a proper way would burden us with a lot of additional work like new heads, female versions of all light to medium armors, extra sound effects and all texts refering to both genders. Since early medieval battles were predominantly fought by men, and adding females to the game, while offering more variety, would add nothing to gameplay we decided that we’d rather focus our energy elsewhere (like more unique types of enemies). Should our resources allow, we might re-evaluate this in the future.
