Meeky

[Meeky]

Contract-related business again:

I’m trying to play a goodie-two-shoes playthrough. My standing with this given noble house is Allied, and my overall fame is Legendary. I’m Neutral as far as my reputation goes. But…

I’ve only gotten three kinds of jobs from this noble house:

A) Go patrol.
B) Kill orcs.
C) Kill peasants (refusing to do this).

So, why can’t I get anything more interesting? I thought inter-House warfare and politics would come up. Are those type of contracts not out yet?

[Meeky]

har101 wrote:

Not knowing my new map all too well, I am presented with a mission to bring a package somewhere… The conversation box covers most of the screen, and I cannot zoom out to try and see how far I must go to reach the city in question. I think we should be able to zoom out, or have some ability to see where to go, before starting negotiations (as I’ve said before in some other thread, you can’t say no to a contract after you’ve negotiated, only ‘think about it for some time’).

This would be awesome to have.

[Meeky]

Huh.

I’ve gotten plenty of +3 and a few +4 rolls for melee attack bonus in my present game. Ranged attackers typically have higher attack than my other guys – they do seem to roll a little higher – but I find that melee has the advantage of weapon variety. Whether you’re going two-handed weapons guy or shield guy, you get the choice between weapons that can break armor, ignore armor, break shields, make you a counter-attacking beast, stun enemies, etc. A crossbowman is a one trick pony.

[Meeky]

Something I noticed:
Some faction reputations are displayed vertically rather than horizontally in the Factions & Relations page. Like this:
NORMAL: Very Friendly (##)
ABNORMAL:
Very
Friendly
(##)
And the worst part about the abnormal setup is you can’t actually see the ## because it’s hidden. Let me show you.

Attachments:

1. 

   Battle-Brothers-Relations-2.jpg
   

[Meeky]

One thing I’ll say concerning the purchase of weapons and armor: keep an eye out on the general market. You sometimes get good gear there for prices that WAY beat whatever the armorsmith/weaponsmith offers.

Case in point: passed through a village today. Opened the marketplace. Damaged (40%) mail hauberk (150 armor / 18 fatigue) available for 402 crowns. Yeah, I bought that real fast.

[Meeky]

Yeah, now that I’m able to play with the faction relations known: this is visibly a problem. Finished a job for a noble house; had 76 reputation. Travel northward to get another job from the same house. It’s a patrol. Do patrol. Get back to castle; fulfill contract. Result? 76 reputation, right where I started.

Patrols are the worst culprit as far as noble houses are concerned. Most of their other quests seem a lot more direct, fast, and worth the time in gold and reputation. Villages are hard to keep reputation with because they only have ONE hub from which to give you missions, and they’ll only ever have one job for you at a time, after which there’s a period of no available contracts. This is exacerbated by only being allowed to take one job at a time, so if you’re on a patrol mission for a noble house and pass through a village you want to build up, you can’t take their mission at that time.

So, my suggested changes:

1) Let us have more than one mission at a time. You can give certain missions deadlines to encourage us to focus on them (like patrols).
2) Make patrols worth more reputation if they send you traveling long distances.
3) Please, PLEASE reduce the speed at which reputation degrades.

[Meeky]

Bleeding damage? Certain weapons cause bleeding, and that can kill.

[Meeky]

Out of curiosity, can you tell us what your present art project for Battle Brothers is, Psen?

[Meeky]

Well, the undead should still have vampires. Vampires + necromancers + ghosts + fallen knights = a really dangerous battle. I’ve fought something similar to that before. I couldn’t beat it at the time. But in my current game (which is over 80 days now), I haven’t fought any vampires, ghosts, or fallen knights, and those are the most dangerous things in the present undead retinue.

It’s ghouls specifically that need some sort of ringleader. They’re easy to kill / drive off, which is good, but there should be situations where they’re incredibly dangerous, and I really haven’t seen a situation like that crop up.

I can’t say whether or not goblins need rebalancing right now. I’ve fought them lots of times before this update, but in my present game I’ve only encountered wolfriders.

[Meeky]

Yeah, goblins are probably the worst thing to fight in such large numbers. In normal numbers (12-15) I’d argue they’re way easier than orcs, but 27 of them? The debuffs would cripple any army into oblivion.

I HAVE stumbled across a hideout with 30 ghouls, by the way. That was a little too easy. It’d be more fun if ghouls had some sort of ghoulish leader that could rally them, give them higher attack bonuses, etc.

[Meeky]

TIDM2 wrote:

The relation fall is definitely too steep. With the amount of time it takes to travel and complete contracts you basically have to be doing constant quests for one faction in order to maintain/increase your relation with them. 99% of the time this isnt possible because they dont have a steady stream of contracts, sometimes there are none for that particular faction.

It definitely needs to degrade slower by far, please dont keep it the way it is

Yeah, having played Battle Brothers a little longer, this is still my assessment. If I can’t keep more than one faction at Friendly – I’d expect to be able to keep a village and a noble house at friendly – then I’m pretty sure there’s a problem.

IMO, slow down the current degradation speed to 1/3 or 2/5 of what it is.

[Meeky]

So, I know others have mentioned this, but since we have even more travel missions it’d be very nice to have some sort of slider for global map speed. Perhaps a range of 0.5 speed to 2.0 speed, with 1.0 speed being the current movement speed on the world map?

Patrol missions can be kind’a boring when no enemies spawn and you have to travel halfway across the map and then back again in a circle at the current speed with no encounters at all. They’re fine when there’s bad guys, but otherwise…

[Meeky]

Have to disagree. Daggers actually CAN practically ignore armor (AFAIK) with their special ability. This actually makes them vital: they’re useful against orc warriors, but also for recovering armor from enemies who have equipment you want. If you want werewolf armor from a bandit, for instance, you should save that opponent for last and surround him with daggers / similar weapons. Otherwise, you might destroy his armor.

I forget if the basic attack ignores any armor, but Puncture definitely should. (The one dagger type that has a sword-like attack definitely won’t penetrate armor with its basic.)

[Meeky]

Sky wrote:

As someone already said in BB the only real limit is your imagination for tactics, almost anything works if you can play it out.

^ Pretty much this.

I had a playthrough that absolutely decimated in which I used 0 shields, but it was very much a brute force band: several two-handed-weapons guys, two Weapon Masters with nimble builds to tie up orcs / similarly tough enemies, a horn blower, a few crossbowmen, and a Confident stick with a crossbow. It worked pretty well, though I eventually tried it with two horn blowers and found that to be satisfying. Point being: even though the shield wall is the go-to tool to have, there are lots of other ways to fight enemies.

I’m personally a fan of two handed weapons. I always start my brothers out using shields, but slowly transition toward carrying pikes, two-handed swords, orcish axes and warbrands. The only weaknesses with such a setup are fighting folks with crossbows or fighting goblins. Outlaws are generally too weak to be a threat and orcs are pretty much mincemeat once pressed with enough two-handed weapons. I might keep a couple guys with spears around to contend with leaping orcs.

[Meeky]

The devs mentioned in another thread they were going to look into this. It definitely feels like a problem for me. I cited an earlier situation where by day 70 I was incredibly famous (Glorious) but only Open with a single House.

Agreed on the settlements. I feel like they degrade way too quickly when they only give 1 contract out at a time. I once got a settlement to Friendly, but it degraded back to Neutral because I couldn’t get contracts for it.

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