How to get good?

[hruza]

I have some advice regarding challenges. These shouldn’t be underestimated and correct selection of right challenges can really help you out at the start of the game. You should select challenges that you know can fulfill fast and are adding something useful to your play. Fulfilling challenges quickly raises your fame and thus getting you better prices for contracts.

Some of the more useful challenges (but not necessarily ones to pick early) are:

-Allying with noble house -unlocks quests from noble houses and turns castles in to sources of the quests. It fulfills when you reach about 950 fame so take it once your already have it.

-Increasing inventory space.

-Getting sergeant -will reward you with sash (bonus to resolve).

-Getting standard.

-Raiding 4 goblin/orc/undead camps -rewards you with very useful trophies. Easiest one is undead one since there are many retrieval quests which send you to undead locations. however you shouldn’t take this challenges too early.

The best starting challenges in my opinion are befriend settlement (takes about 2-3 missions) and raise your company to dozen guys (12 actually).

[Taito]

Hallo again

In last days I had a few hours and tried to use some of the tips. Thanks hruza for your in deept description of your way of playing. My problem is I had three games and never made it past day 20. So 200+ armor or even buying a falcon is something I don’t even get close to. Still I tried some of your first tips. At first I had 6 brothers against Hogard the Weasel and was able to get his armor. After that I hired 2 additional brothers. Now in the current attempt I am at day 12 and had no loses so far. Also with 1000 crowns, 40 tools, 25 medical supplies and 8 brothers in 50+ bodyarmor and 40+ headarmer things don’t look so bad. In this case I will go without meatshilds and with a quality approach. Hopefully it will work.

In the fist try I got ambushed by direwolfs in the middle of the night in some woods at day 7. I had no chance to position my brothers and because of the movement penalty and the initially disastrous positioning the direwolfs killed my ranged fighter in turn 2 and after that two other fighters. The rest did think that running away was a good idea and got slaughtered. While going through the woods I looked cautiously, but still the direwolfs attacked me before I could react. Well maybe this was just bad luck.

In the second attempt I did pretty well at first. Did not lose a single brother in the first 20 days. I also tried to have hire new brothers with cheep backgrounds when I had the armor and weapons for them at hand. What I realized is that the game seems overly punishing while scaling the difficulty up when hiring new guys. With 6 guys I did fine. With 8 guys I did okay. But after that … I took a contract to recover an artifact and kill some ancient auxiliary in the process. It should pay 420 crowns. I did quests in this prize range before without to much trouble. But those skeletons whipped me totally. I used flails to go for the head, used axes to break shields, had the 3 guys with the best melee skill in the backrow with hooked blades and pitchforks. The frontline did shield wall them while the backrow tried to cause havoc. Well that did not work out at all!

What I learned from those tries:
1. The combination of axes and shields for weak frontline brothers and polearms for more skilled brothers in the backrow works nicely! This tip helped me a great deal!
2. The quantity approach did not work for me. The scaling up of the difficulty for hiring new brothers made the game more difficult than with fewer brothers. Those extra brother could not nearly negate the rise in difficulty that occurred.
3. Most of the time I do alright and my tactics work. There seem to be just some contracts that screw you over completely, with no option to know which those are. Maybe it is just experience. Like those delivery contracts where enemy mercenary bands are showing up past day 30. I did really think I could take those 10 skeletons with my 9 brothers easily and got whipped. But I do not know if I have enough tolerance in me to get through those vast amount of frustration until I have acquired that experience. I just wish there where more informations like when hiring guys what background give which bonuses or a way to more reliable estimate the difficulty before tacking a contract, neither the crowns nor the skulls help much in that regard.
4. There are indeed missions at the start with thugs only. I just got unlucky in my last attempts. So I take back what I said about there being no thugs. I still think it is rather harsh that the games only spawns roaming bands of raiders and not also thugs. Never seen a roaming band of thugs in veteran. Because of that the first 20+ days consist of a lot of running away on the world map for me.

Sorry for all the whining, but I am really feed up right now!

Best regards,
Taito

[Taito]

Hallo hruza,

I just saw right now, that there is a second page on which your advice regarding challenges is located.
The first challenge I always pick is befriend a settlement. After that comes either hire 12 brothers or get 2000 crowns for a standard. Later on I do the sergeant quest, because a sergeant is needed in the band anyway. Increased inventory space is also nice after the first challenges. The trophy challenges I did do rather late, at least I did in my beginner playthrough. But it is nice to know that I did not to much wrong in this section of the game.

Maybe I just have to start a beginner run again to try out all those tips. As it stands now I just get horribly beaten on veteran despite changed approaches and okay tactics. (At least my tactic looks okay when I compare it to the playthroughs I have watched on youtube.)

Best regards,
Taito

[Namespace]

Hey. It looks like your problems are mostly of economical nature, also contracts scale heavily with the amount of days passed so having only 9 guys at day 20 or so will be very difficult unless they are very talented and decently equipped.
Do you repair weapons before you sell them? Do you trade with goods/food? Especially early when your daily upkeep is not that much, trading will make you rich.

Retrieving artifacts are always very difficult in the early game – it’s usually best to avoid them or “cheese” them if you are not certain that you can take the fight. By cheese I mean just doing an orderly retreat after you get the artifact. You don’t have to fight the enemies to fullfill the contract.

Against auxiliaries you should use flails, but not to go for their head. Auxiliaries have almost no body armor but sometimes wear those 95dur helmets.
Also, without flail mastery the 2nd skill does not ignore the shield bonus and it builds up way too much fatigue to use consistently.
Splitting shields is extremely dangerous as they will then attack you twice with double grip. Only split the shield if you know that you can kill the enemy before he gets a turn to attack and kill one of your guys.
Especially against skeletons you want greater numbers to get more surround bonuses.

Anyways, I would recommend you stick to veteran and just try again. The game has a steep learning curve and beginner will not teach you much. Sure it is nice if you want to have a casual experience but if you want to improve you should just play on veteran :).

Also, maybe you should play veteran without ironman mode for now. Ironman will help you learn to optimize your early game and resource management but playing without it will probably improve your combat strategies. If you get beaten or take losses you can try again and figure out a strategy to win.

Maybe check out some streamers on twitch and let them advise you or check out their strategies. Everyone has a different approach to the game so it is nice to see how people tackle it from different angles and maybe you will find someome with a playstyle that suits you.

[Taito]

Hallo Namespace

I don’t think that my problems are only of economical nature. Sure it is always nice to have more crowns, but I never run so low that I have real problems. I repair goods before selling them and also do a lot of trading with goods and seldom with food. Most of the time I do okay or even good until one contract goes south and I get either whipped or left so weak that I have almost no chance to recover. Most of the time it happened if I misjudge how strong the enemy is, like in case of the ancient auxiliaries and the hedge knight or I got ambushed and have no way to run. Otherwise I do okay. In one playthrough on veteran I got to day 60 and still did okay. This was just lucky I guess.

When I get that crucial underdog perk the game becomes suddenly way easier. Then I can bind several enemies to fewer guys and shield wall them while surrounding and killing of the rest. But this strategy does not work without underdog. I will check out some other players at twitch. Didn’t know about that before, thanks for the information! Maybe I can get some new helpful ideas how to tackle the game. On the bright side it can not get much worse than right now XD

Well maybe splitting two shields while not being able to kill them instantly was the mistake. Thanks for the insight! The flails I used on those without a helmet, otherwise I didn’t go for the head. So I did alright on that front.

Playing without ironman seems to be the only option short of returning to beginner. So I will try that.

Actually after reading guides, those tips and attempting to get better I am under the impression that I just don’t share the vision of fun with the developers. Like this loosing is fun thing. For me it isn’t exactly fun in itself. It can be fun when I learn enough through it to actually win in the next couple of tries. How many tries did you guys need until could do it?

I know myself good enough to guess that I have maybe 20 tries left until I become so frustrated that I drop the game completely. Therefore before trying again I will check out how other players do it and hopefully come back stronger!

Best regards,
Taito

[Namespace]

Hey Taito,

I was thinking you had a lack of crowns because auxiliaries usually don’t really pose a threat when you wear mail shirts or better.
At day 20 your company should wear at least worn mail shirts, maybe a few mail hauberks if you did well or have cheap armorers.

And yeah, misjudging enemies happens a lot. Especially if you’re new to the game, but you will learn that with time.
Battle Brothers has a very steep learning curve but I also find it rewarding. As for losing not being fun, I totally understand that.
I usually try to do perfect runs and not lose any brothers but sometimes it’s just inevitable. Especially in the early game when your defenses are still lacking. I find that I lose most of my brothers in the first 15 days, then not anymore.

Basically, once you get heavy armor (200+) and battle forged perk + underdog your brothers will be almost invincible. Orc weapons, 2-handers and such will still be dangerous but you can practically farm raiders without any risk.

Honestly, 20 tries will be more than enough for you to get competent on Veteran difficulty. Usually having a good map is the most important thing IMO.
I am currently playing on 9840c3 map seed. You start out with really decent companions, the only downside is that there is just one hunting cabin, so getting good ranged brothers can be a bit of a pain.
Still, the map has lots of plains and good trade routes in the south for an easy early game. I hope you don’t get discouraged as it is definitely possible to “not lose” :).

[hruza]

Taito wrote:

I took a contract to recover an artifact and kill some ancient auxiliary in the process. It should pay 420 crowns.

I did really think I could take those 10 skeletons with my 9 brothers easily and got whipped.

The skeletons are enemy which I would not dare to engage unless all my front line have +-100 durability gear and level 2 weapons. They are very dangerous, their “poor” look is deceiving. May be if I had 2:1 advantage, but not otherwise and I still wouldn’t recommend it to player who still does not feel comfortable at the difficulty he is playing.

Trick with retrieve artifact missions is that quest does not require you to fight. You only need to bring artifact. If you pay attention to the text before the battle, it should say that you or one of your mercs got the artifact, then undead appear. If that’s the case, you can just retreat from battle and you will still have artifact and would be able to complete the mission.

be careful, because sometimes you get option to also grab the ancient weapon. If you take it and it results in to battle, you will need to win the battle to complete the mission.

[hruza]

Taito wrote:

(At least my tactic looks okay when I compare it to the playthroughs I have watched on youtube.)

Did not see you play so I don’t know if your tactic is good or bad. If your team of 9 mercs with 40-50 armor got wipped out by 10 skeletons then it’s not because your tactic is bad. I would have likely lost that battle to. Your mistake was to fight that battle in the first place.

Direvolves can be pretty dangerous if you fight them unprepared. Even later on in the game. So that was simply bad luck.

One thing that I believe helps in combat is to approach it sort of like a chess: Don’t think just in terms of skills and hit chances. Think in terms of weaknesses too. Try to use your advantage against his weakness. For example in the battle with auxiliaries. First look which of them have shields and which does not. Position your flails against skeletons with shields and concentrate everybody else against skeletons without shields. Take the out first. They are easier to hit and they are more dangerous because they will attack 2x, while those with shields are likely to attack only once and then shield wall.

Also pay attention to the turn order. By using wait order you can manipulate beginning of the battle to maximize your advantage. For example, enemy poachers and marksmen have high initiative and will move first in combat. When enemy turtles, his crossbows will be out of the range, so AI will order wait on them. If you will move on your turn towards his line, they will take a shot at you at the end of the turn. However if you will wait your turn as well, they will run out of their turn right after without being able to fire. Then you can move your units while enemy crossbowmen will get one less turn to fire at you. That one turn might be difference between you taking or not taking casualties in that fight, because enemy will get to fire 2x right in the row. First at the end of the turn one and then at the beginning of the turn two. You won’t be even able to move your badly injured mercs out of the range if they get hit in the turn one.

In general, moving last in the first turns of battle is advantage, because you want to close the distance at the end of the turn and thus deprive enemy of one round of combat. On the other hand you want to have last move in the turn enemy reaches your line. It works both against ranged and melee (ranged obviously does not need to reach your line in order to initiate the fight). Of course there might be exceptions. Anyway, always pay attention to the move order. Try to deprive enemy of the first round of fight if you’re the one attacking and prevent enemy from doing the same to you if you’re defending.

[Taito]

Hallo hruza and Namespace

Before I thought I did quite good economically but after reading your posts I have now a new point of reference. At day 20 I certainly was not even close to everybody wearing a mail shirt. I had a few padded armors and some gamebesons. So now that I know what should be the standard at day 20 I have to admit I had big economical problems!

The map seed I am currently play is 7b591d. The starting brothers have nice perks and in the south there are awesome trading opportunity’s. Around a city, that pay’s good money for salt, wood and dye there are villages that produce all these things. It also has not to much mountains, swamps or water, just one solid landmass, just how I like it.
Map seed 9840c3 does look nice. Many trading opportunities and there is not a cluster of settlements you have to stay close to all the time. It is nicely balanced and spread out. Still I like 7b591d a little bit more and think I will make do with it. But thanks for the seed! Maybe I will try it in the future.

If I ever come I across skeletons again, which is very likely, I will be way more careful. Thanks for letting me know that this was indeed a difficult battle I should avoid in the future! From beginner I got the wrong impression that those auxiliaries are kind of the thugs of the undead faction. But man was I wrong. Before I was only discouraged by legionaries but now I know better. Nice to know that I can just grab the artifact and run. I will certainly do that the next time and be true to my new mercenary motto: If you don’t get paid to fight or win for sure you leg it!

Maybe I did not give the attention that was needed to details as injuries and double grip, while in battle. I will try to be more cautious in that regard. Waiting to manipulate the turn order I do all the time. It is just to rewarding to not to do it. On some video’s on twitch and youtube I saw some of the players to go to almost excessive amount of planning and rethinking every turn. While this is certainly kind of amazing in it’s own right I hope this is not necessary all time. In close fights or crucial rounds I wouldn’t mind to do so. Bit if it is all the time the game would be quite a drag for me. Guess I just have to try and see for myself.

I will be back and report after I had time to play tomorrow.

Best regards,
Taito

[hruza]

Taito wrote:

Before I thought I did quite good economically but after reading your posts I have now a new point of reference. At day 20 I certainly was not even close to everybody wearing a mail shirt. I had a few padded armors and some gamebesons. So now that I know what should be the standard at day 20 I have to admit I had big economical problems!

I don’t think this is necessarily true. Game scales with your equipment too, so better equipped your brothers are, the more difficult fights will you face. In my experience you can advance slower and game with adjust. Difficulty does not scale with time, at last time does not play major role. I even had first crisis postpone on the play through when I was bit slow in improving my company. It have only kicked on the day 130. Other people had reported the same experience.

Taito wrote:

From beginner I got the wrong impression that those auxiliaries are kind of the thugs of the undead faction. But man was I wrong.

Auxiliaries are somewhat on par with brigand raiders in difficulty. They have crappy equipment, which is deceiving, but their fighting stile and skills makes up for that. Especially if lot of them have shields.

Taito wrote:

On some video’s on twitch and youtube I saw some of the players to go to almost excessive amount of planning and rethinking every turn. While this is certainly kind of amazing in it’s own right I hope this is not necessary all time.

No, it certainly isn’t. I don’t spend ours to think each move 10 turns in advance. That said, it’s good to plan at last 1 turn in advance, unless battle is easy and you can use routine.

Good luck :)

[Taito]

Hallo again

It is nice to know that the game scales somewhat slower, if the company develops slower. Maybe I have a chance after all.

I’m back to report on my latest run’s. In my first run I did a little bit better than before. On day 10 I had 11 guys in ~50 body armour and ~40 head armour with 700 crowns to spare It is not great, but it is better than before. Sadly there were a band of undead with a necromancer, a band of raiders and some werwolfs that joined forces to encircle me from all sides on the worldmap. They forced me into battle. In this battle the direwolfs stalled me till the undead could gave me the rest.

On the second try I decided to play veteran without ironman. Ironically in this playthrough things look bright without reloading even once. I might not have everybody in mailshirts, but some of my guys have them. The rest of the band has 65+ bodyarmour and 40+ headarmour. Also with a bladed pike, a standart, a crossbow and two hooked blades in the hand of brothers with 65+ skill at level 4 my backrow is solid. I had also no loses, which is more than I hoped for.

There is only one thing that annoyed me a bit. The game spawns tons upon tons of groups of enemies that are way stronger than my guys. Therefor half the time at the first 20 days I spend with running away. In those 20 days I had to run away from 8 bands of raiders, 1 band of undead with a necromancer and a band of goblins, that followed me 2 days straight! If a settlement is near I go there and look if there are guys that can help with those pesky raiders. Once there were and I got some loot from that fight. Two other bands of raiders I took down without help. Still the amount of running away from enemies seems a bit too much. Maybe it is my map or just bad luck. Is it similar on other maps?

One question: Are werwolfs, raiders and the undead allied? I know this is a weird question but once I had a band of werwolfs follow me and also a band of raiders. They didn’t start fighting each other on the world map, although they easily could do so. In another fight there were 4 ancient auxiliaries and 8 raiders. Even though I ran instantly away from the raiders they did go after my brothers instead of the skeletons.

Thanks for all the help! I think I can do it now :)

Best regards,
Taito

[Namespace]

Hey Taito!

Glad to hear you’re doing better. Three-way battles are a bit of a gamble. Sometimes it pays off, but in my experience it usually ends up being bad for the player.

In the first playthrough I think hruza is right when he says don’t hire as many guys. I would probably aim for padded leather (80d) on my frontline before going up on the number of recruits. Try to find leather tanners or the big trading cities, they often have half repaired padded leathers for 100-150 crowns or so.

As for your second Playthrough it sounds a lot better. Ancient Bladed Pike is pretty much the best early game weapon you could hope for. Hit bonus and huge effectiveness vs armor. I agree that roaming parties are kinda OP at the beginning. They spawn groups of orc berserkers, many brigand raiders etc on day 1. I hope this will be addressed in update 1.1 so we have more roaming thugs in the first 15 days or so.

As for your question: Direwolves are allied with Nachzehrers but thats about it. I believe Nachzehrers and Undead in general are allied as well. Maybe Brigands will be allied with Undead if they have a Necromancer but I am not sure about that. Brigands, Orcs, Goblins aren’t allied with anyone unless you have the greenskin invasion.

I think what will help you the most is to learn how to effectively dagger Raiders for their armor. This will boost your early game considerably.

[Ioci]

about thugs:

i think thugs will keep showing up until day 20 or even later, i play expert and i saw thugs a lot at early stage, the thievery mission with payment of 400 crowns or below will always leads you to around 7 – 10 thugs.
of course if you are not lucky, you will meet a fort with 5 well equip raiders inhabit in your very first mission after dear old Hoggert, but you could just simply abandon that mission, and go travel to other area of the map. sometimes i met mega ghoul in 1 skull beast hunting mission, but it means nothing other than bad luck.

also, the new patch gives us a progressing friendly combination of bandits, means you will find some bandit crews with very few raiders, which helps you to upgrade your gear even easier. i met a lot bandits group with 7 thugs and only 1 raider, they still looks like a pure raider set, but if you use your mouse hover over them, haha! surprise! they suddenly turn out to be the perfect farming targets at the moment.

[Taito]

Hallo Namespace and loci

To know when and how I can dagger raiders for their armor seems to be a reasonable thing to learn as the next step. My problem is that I most of the times don’t get the timing right. Those raiders either flee and get hit while trying to do so and therefore lose their armor or could hurt my brothers still and because of that the risk is to big to try. I tend to wait to long to attempt the dagger kill. Way easier are wiedergänger in that regard. Those guys don’t flee and also attack just once per round. Most of my mail right now I got from them.

Thugs indeed show from time to time in the first 20 days. I am always happy when I see a group of thugs with just a few raiders. Sometimes I can steel the armor of the raider, which is quite a happy coincidence. But this occasions are seldom for more most of the time the bands that I have met in the first 20 days consisted of at least a few raiders with poacher or a marksman and a few few thugs or just raiders. Once I saw a band of 5 necrosavants at around day 15. Luckuily I could run away from them. I always use my mouse to hover over them to know what troops they actually have. But thanks for the tip! This could have been a huge help, if I didn’t have done so already.

Currently I still roam the lands with the band of brothers which I described in my last post. Now we are on day 40 and I lost one brother, but still gained so much in this battle that is was totally worth it. But once I had to reload because of geists showing in one ancient ruin that I was trying to raid. Those to geists just screamed once and three of my brothers failed every possible morale check. They started to run away instandly. My right flank was in shambles. Even my sergeant with more than 100 resolve and a battle standard couldn’t rally them. I tried again after reloading. In this case the geists split up. This was way easier! Nobody ran and I could easily consolidate my brothers through rally the troops and killing wiedergänger. But whatever I should learn through this battle I don’t get it. I did nothing different in the second try. I just got lucky that the geists decided to split up. Well maybe enlightenment comes later.

Best regards,
Taito

[hruza]

As much as I know, only Nachzehrers are allied with Wiedergangers, but all other factions are hostile to each other. Don’t take me for word on it however.

That of course changes during greenskin and undead invasions when Goblins/Orcs or Wiedergangers/Ancients unite.

There might be exceptions in certain quests, for example when you encounter thugs meeting necromancer.

I am not aware of Direwolves being allied to anybody. However Direwolves are one faction which you absolutely don’t want to have in the multi side fight. The purpose of those fights is to let others fight while you wait it out, then finish what remains. This means that you want to retreat at the beginning of the battle in a way that will lead two enemy groups in to each other. Or most of them at last. Problem with Direvolves is that they have high initiative and lot of AP and many of them will reach your line at the beginning of the first turn, thus not letting you to retreat. Same is true for Goblin wolfriders. So avoid combining fights with these.

But otherwise I have lot of good experience with making two enemy groups fight out. I was able to clear locations which would have being impossible otherwise.

As for gheists:
You need sergeant with about 100 resolve.
Your front line should have 45-50 resolve or more.
Your backline should have about 40 resolve at last.
Effect of standard and rally ability depends on range, so you want to essentially turtle around your sergeant. Don’t spread out.
Having second sergeant is not essential but can be very useful.
You should select dedicated guy with high melee attack and give him spear to serve as a gheist killer. Give him undead necklace if you have it already. If not, get it asap.

If you don’t have those things, don’t bother to fight gheists. They’ll destroy you.

[Author]

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