We’ve talked a lot about the Orc faction so far. Now it’s time to see the greenskins in action!
Our new gameplay video covers a line battle against the orcs with full commentary from one of our devs. Expect a lot of carnage and get properly scared of the green menace! Also, we have a lot of new stuff in the video: Two-handed axes, javelins, battle statistics, and more. Go ahead and check it out:
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Looks great! I like the focus on formation disruption that the Orcs have. You mentioned spears having poor damage but good utility even if they were not that useful in this scenario. If spears are not useful against the enemies who rely on charges what are they designed to be good against?
Spears can do quite well against charging orcs, it just turned out to be a bit unlucky in this instance. As with most things in the game, this may still need balancing. It could be argued that spears are not as good once orcs have actually closed the distance and melee ensues, as their damage and effectiveness against armor is quite average. Especially so against the highly armored Orc Warriors. However, spears are hard to dodge, so they’re useful even in the hands of men with little combat experience, unlike, for example, two-handed weapons which vastly outscale them in damage but are a lot harder to use effectively.
Yup, spears should have been great in that situation thats why i decided to bring them along. With the “Spearwall” ability activated, any enemy that enters into an adjacent field gets attacked and knocked back. This way a guy with a spear can hold off multiple enemies.
Problem is: The attack he gets from spearwall has to hit in order for the knockback to trigger and all 3 of my spear-brothers missed their attack. The chance of that happening is close to zero so that was really unlucky. On the other hand, i still managed to win the fight so that is Battle Brothers, even when bad luck strikes you can still win.
Are there any more orcs you haven’t yet revealed? I’m hoping for an orc shaman or archers or something for you own archers to shoot at. It’d be a tough choice to move your archers up close behind the front line to snipe supporting orcs while trying to fend off their charges.
Yes, there is more to the orc faction than seen so far. However, orcs don’t have archers or dedicated supporters. It’s not their style in Battle Brothers. They’re all about breaking the enemy line with raw power up close. That said, Young Orcs will be able to throw short ranged javelins before engaging in melee or if engaging isn’t a good option, which gives them some flexibility.
Just dropped by to say how excited I am… again. The orc faction looks to be very different to the undead faction which is great. Noticed some of the UI changes, they are very nice! I just have to give another shoutout to you guys for the attention to detail, Paul’s art and the way you guys have managed to achieve a battle field that evolves as time progresses, despite the static units, is amazing. The detail is awesome, from the bloodied and bruised battle brothers, to the flying heads, the persistent bodies, to the arrows and shields littering the field. Keep up the excellent work guys, I am eagerly awaiting EA :)
It was interesting to watch.
BTW Do you plan to implement switch weapon button? With icon that show to what weapon you switch? It would be much faster than going into inventory screen.
It’s not currently planned since switching weapons works ok from the inventory and doing it via a single button would pose some problems; what to do if the user wants to switch between a one-handed weapon and a shield, and a two-handed weapon, but there isn’t enough space in the bags to store them, for example? Does the button refuse to work then? If it only works in special cases, not all of them necessarily transparent to the player, having a unified solution – using the inventory – is probably a better choice, even if it may take an extra second every now and then. There is also the issue of potentially cluttering up the UI with buttons which are, compared to the skill buttons, used quite infrequently but take up space constantly.
If there is sufficient demand once the EA is released, we’ll reconsider it.
Fine. Its low priority anyway.
Great work with the demo. Only few scenarios and its not updated but still lots of fun. Especially small details like missed arrows or bodies pellted with them are very impressive and please my eyes.
Keep the good work.