Meeky

[Meeky]

So, couple things.

Firstly, since I didn’t comment on it earlier: that swamp background is actually looking pretty darned nice. I know it’s not final, but I like what it’s shaping to be.

– Random Banner (the Charge of the banner actually refers to the character of the house. A warlike house will sport smth ferocious like a ram, axes, lions a bull or antlers. A Benevolent house will sport smth noble like Crowns, Horses, Eagles, Acorns or Fleur de Lis).

And I was hoping to hear something like this. Very nice.

So, here’s another question since I’m thinking on it:

Are there different styles of castles planned for the worldmap? Different village looks? As in, if I see Castle “A”, might it have a different outward appearance (not mentioning attached locations) from Castle “B”? Might this depend on the region they’re in (swamp vs. snow)?

[Meeky]

It is quite easy to get unlimited fatigue yourself. Just have two brothers with high resolve and take turns spamming the refill fatigue skill. Keep the other brothers in a circle around them and you can fight indefinitely.

It’s not quite unlimited fatigue, especially if your army uses Perfect Focus a lot. My Brothers usually do.

Note that in previous patches I would have agreed with you without question.

Going back to my previous example, I’ll probably have pikemen and archers and guys with greatswords all with Perfect Focus. I’ll have a couple of guys blowing horns if I go that route, yeah… But the problem is having two hornblowers standing next to each other won’t actually benefit the team as much as it did in previous patches.

Previously, your two hornblowers could blow in the same turn, grant their benefits in the same turn, and refresh each other pretty consistently. Now, though, as you’re limited to only one horn toot per round (every character can only be affected once), you’re far more limited in how much fatigue you can regain, and a guy that blows his horn can’t get the benefits of a horn toot that round.

Factor in how Perfect Focus works. For one turn, I can make sure that everything around me is laid to waste. Archers with Perfect Focus + the perk that regains fatigue upon killing an enemy, pikemen and swordsmen that are Farmers, Wildmen, Hedge Knights laying smackdowns all around… but after that round of righteous fury, their energy is spent, with very little fatigue left. You blow the horn and they should regain enough fatigue to keep fighting another round, sure, but a few turns later both my hornblowers are out of breath and need to take some time to recover. And woe betide me if I need to swap out one of the frontliners with one of my hornblowers thanks to a near-fatal injury, or worse, a fatality.

It’s not the same as having unlimited fatigue.

Again, undead are typically easy for me to fight, but if there’s a whole, huge mess of undead – overhwelming numbers with Fallen Heroes and Ghosts and Necromancers and anyone I happen to lose in that fight risen as a zombie – well… I could very easily lose a few men, or lose the fight if I make mistakes.

Show me a battle where you killed 10+ Orc Warriors. Screenshot, video, anything.

So, once the next big patch comes out, I’m looking at making a Let’s Play or similar series for Battle Brothers. I’m in a bad situation to record right now, but by then I should have some relative peace and quiet. It will be a no reloads game, so I’ll be careful and afraid in the early and mid game, but tackling a really powerful orc camp is on the list of things to do.

When I do, I’d actually love to get feedback, especially if I use tactics that seem unwise or the like. My level-up schemes aren’t perfect, I know that. But I’ve beaten odds like that before, as I mentioned earlier.

[Meeky]

PS A duck banner will be coming as well :)

…yes. YES. The Mighty Ducks will rise again!

[Meeky]

I guess it’s a debate between costs and rewards. I’m willing to shell out the 100-300 gold for a dead dog in return for the extra XP on a Battle Brother once I get to the mid-game. Late-game… It feels like a no-brainer. If a battle brother isn’t max level, I’m gonna throw a dog out there and keep it distracted until he gets there to kill it.

But you are right. Ambushers have a high melee attack rating, I think, and they stab dogs to death.

[Meeky]

Well, concerning Fallen Heroes: I think it’s because the Undead aren’t nearly as aggressive as the orcs typically. You’ll see armies of orcs rushing at villages pretty quickly, but the undead seem to bide their time more and play the waiting game before they start moving in. That’s my experience.

That said, Fallen Heroes also aren’t as deadly to me as Orc Warriors. The main strength of Fallen Heroes is they have no fatigue. They have good stats, but coupled with that they have absolutely no fatigue whatsoever. So, when you fight them, you need to kill them fast, before they can wear your Battle Brothers down by just having more energy than you.

And my armies tend to be very much focused around hitting the enemy hard and fast. As I said before, my favorite army setups involve two-handed weaponry in bulk. I can keep a couple tough guys in front (nimble tanks or shieldbearers) while having pikemen stab from the back, or while having a two-handed swordsman perform a wide sweep or cut before stepping back once the dudes adjacent to him are dead. They’ll wear out fairly quickly, but they’ll kill quickly, too; and I have a captain/commander behind them blowing his horn every turn to keep them hale and hearty.

So, for me, Fallen Warriors aren’t that much of a problem. At least, they aren’t a problem until you starting factoring in the enemy having a necromancer or two, ghosts, and overwhelming numbers. Those kind of fights are terrifying problems.

[Meeky]

I wouldn’t mind seeing some expensive, very strong breeds of dogs, but I don’t think they should be the norm. Having one really amazing dog in your army would be nice, though, and maybe they should get better the more they kill things. Not sure.

Concerning goblins: I use them as distractions against goblins to keep them attacking the dogs instead of my troops, OR to keep them from running away so my troops can reach them. Simply put, if a goblin ambusher is attacking a dog, he’s not shooting your men, and he’s not running away. That means he’s easier to engage with and make a non-threat I.E. a corpse.

I tend to be a little stingy and careful with armored dogs, but I’m more than happy to waste the lives of non-armored hounds just to be certain that my Battle Brothers themselves survive. They’re also useful to fill in gaps and totally encircle dangerous enemies, giving your Battle Brothers a to-hit bonus against them.

That said, I don’t use dogs all that often right now, at least not in the early and mid game, though I keep a few in my inventory and pull them out when fighting goblins. The strain on my Brothers’ fatigue and initiative is really the most detrimental thing about using them. I think they’d be better if the fatigue/initiative loss wasn’t as huge.

[Meeky]

As a small note onto my last post: the point is that most solid builds are really good… except in a few circumstances. Shieldbearers aren’t so great against orcs; archers aren’t so great against vampires and skeletons; two-handed specialists are pincushions when fighting goblins. Etc. It’s all about having a good mix of troops with perks and skills that suit the role you want them to serve in your army.

[Meeky]

Next time you fight 30 Orc Warriors and Berserkers please take a screenshot, or better yet make a video, i would really like to see that.

I’ll do my best to make it a video. I only did that once, because it was a REALLY risky thing. The enemy’s army comp was something like…

9 Orc Young
6-8 Orc Berserkers
12-14 Orc Warriors
1 Orc Warlord

And it was a darned nasty fight. I actually played the battle several times to see if I could get better results (keeping the result of the first encounter as the canon one). I varied from losing 1/2 my company to losing just 2 guys. I think the first fight had me lose 3 or 4.
Doable, but DANG was it tough.

EDIT: Oh, and there were a couple rounds where I outright lost that fight. Badly.

To my advantage, though, the terrain was incredibly swampy (so I fought the orcs in places where they were at disadvantages), I had a lot of polearms, and my guys were mostly level 11 with really good gear. At that point in the game, orcs are the only challenge that really remains.

Just take archers for example. Make a dedicated archer, and you got yourself a pretty useful character, until you run into Vampires and Orc Warriors. Then it becomes almost useless, and pretty much needs melee and utility skill (swapping weapons) to be of any use / have any hope of living.

I won’t argue with that. You’re absolutely right. It’s when when I fight vampires I tend to keep a guy with a shield or a REALLY big sword + perfect focus near the back lines to protect them. Shield-bashing vampires away and then pelting them with arrows can make your archer contribute a little more. Outright killing the vampire with a big axe can be better.

I hope the devs let us have more than 12 guys, but only let us field 12 troops at a time. It would be nice to be able to, say, replace our archers with our spare pikemen when we’re fighting vampires, or to swap out wounded guys with healthy but inexperienced troops. If I could even just have 18 troops so I have 6 slots to rotate, I’d be incredibly happy.

[Meeky]

Please, please, please add a speed-up function, yes. Battles feel very slow when you already know all the moves you’re going to make (an “AHA!” or “EUREKA!” moment where you systematically move your troops in a way you know will secure your win, etc). Then you have to wait for the enemy’s turn and it seems to take ages because you’re so excited to get to the next part…

Yeah, I’d definitely love a combat speed option. And I’d also love an overworld map speed slider, too. Maybe a couple of + / – buttons a la speedup / slowdown options from The Sims, for instance. Press one way or the other for speed adjustment, with a “normal” speed button in the middle (0 being normal, -1 and onward being slower, +1 and onward being faster).

[Meeky]

Out of curiosity, do you have any more sweet town screen art samples to show us?

[Meeky]

As an aside, I hope when we eventually get support roles added to the company (camp followers and cooks and such), we also get Fletchers. It’d be nice to have someone making Ammo while we’re on the road, especially if we’re passing through a forest.

[Meeky]

Some ways are definitely hard ways, but a lot of ways are viable.

In another thread, I just talked about this sort of issue. My favorite band of Battle Brothers thus far has been a group of two-handed weapon specialists where there are a few archers and a few shieldbearers, but the majority of the group wields two-handed weapons. They’re very effective at killing things, and they can wear some darned heavy armor, but they aren’t so hot when it comes to “not being made a pincushion.” Still, it’s very fun. I recommend trying it.

An all archer group would be really, really awkward to play, though I could see having mostly archers + some hybrid archer/melee combatants with Nimble and stacking Melee Defense. They could hold the line in emergencies.

I think Danubian has the right of it, though. You can run with an archer heavy group (even as many as 8, I think) so long as you have enough dedicated melee to support them as defenders. You need to carry a BUNCH of ammo, though.

One though I personally love doing in groups with several archers (say, 4-6) is killing goblins for their nets so my melee characters (with Quick Hands of course) can hurl nets onto approaching enemies, slowing them down and allowing the archers to brutally murder them. It’s funny watching bandits struggle to get out from those nets as arrows pelt them from your back line.

[Meeky]

Game can be made interesting and challenging without every decision being a 1 or 0 situation where one is survival and other is doom.

I’d like to take a moment to discuss this, as I think it’s important: there ARE multiple ways to play the game. It’s not just a 1 or 0 situation.

While there are some perks which presently just outclass others, I still see variation in how people build their armies and how people build their characters. For instance, I only touch the defense tree if I’m making a Nimble tank. I’ve played games where my army was archer-heavy, where my army was shield-heavy, and where my army was two-hander heavy. Frankly, all three playstyles were viable, though I had the most fun in the game where roughly half my troops wielded two-handed weapons and had Quick Hands.

Not every decision is a 1 or 0 situation. Oftentimes there are drawbacks and benefits to a lot of decisions, but there are also some plainly bad decisions available as well.

Look on a preparation level first. People build their characters and armies in very different ways, as I’ve said. Yet most people I talk to have seen the end game and wound up with cadres of level 11 soldiers despite these different playstyles. So, on a preparation level, you’re not damned for not having a perfect build. You might be damned, however, for maxing Initiative / Melee Attack / Ranged Attack on a guy because now you’ve invested nothing in his defensive stats or his fatigue (which doubles as a defensive stat thanks to armor fatigue). That’s an outright bad decision. But how you build your characters can vary quite a lot without being automatically bad.

On a tactical level, you can make small “mistakes” and not lose a guy immediately. When I first fought a goblin shaman, I didn’t know how their entangling spell operated, so I marched my dudes together in a tight squad and got them all entangled. I still survived that particular fight with only one casualty because I made other decisions in that fight that made up for the bad one. Plus, there are times when there are multiple good decisions (releasing a warhound to chase an archer or moving in to fully encircle an enemy, for instance), and both will have favorable outcomes for you. You just need to decide what’s more important for you in that fight, and what risks you’re willing to take. There are definitely matters in battle that aren’t 1 or 0.

And sometimes you will face a situation where you WILL lose a Battle Brother no matter what you do. Say, for instance, that you’ve chosen to fight a battle where you have 12 level 9-11 Battle Brothers facing an army of 30 orcs largely consisting of Orc Warriors and Orc Berserkers. Doable? Hell yes, that’s doable. I’ve won that fight before. But you’re going to lose somebody unless you load the game over and over and over for a perfect ending. Through your actions, you can determine who lives in that fight. You can make sacrifices to save your most important guys. You can mitigate the enemies’ effectiveness by fighting where they’ll be standing on swampy terrain, or by using rotating your wounded troops to the back of the line.

And once again, I’d like to state that there are lots of “right” ways to play the game. I love having armies filled with greatswords and pikes rather than sword-and-board setups. The damage potential is crazy, especially when backed with a horn-blowing commander and Perfect Focus. But that doesn’t mean that shields are the wrong way to go. Shields are, in fact, way better for certain situations. it’s just a matter of preference and circumstance.

TL;DR: The only 1’s and 0’s are in the code. The game itself has lots of decisions in each circumstance that are perfectly viable ways of handling a battle.

[Meeky]

I’ll add my own two cents on the fighting ten orc warriors issue: that’s the sort of thing I do toward the late game. Toward the mid game, I prefer to only do that if I can get villagers or patrols to help me out, and usually that means “The village is under attack so I’d better risk defending it.” Heavily defended orc camps are definitely a late-game threat.

It’s pretty easy to wait for small squads to come out of a camp, and pick them off one at a time. After a while of taking out smaller parties belonging to a single camp, the rating of the camp itself will fall, and your odds against it will improve pretty substantially.

This is good advice. I’ve done this quite a bit.

The orcs are the only remaining challenge after you get decent equipment and five brothers to level 11. I’d like them to remain that way.

Basically, this point is also my opinion. Besides vampires, orcs are the only threat that’s really DEADLY late game. If they were suddenly made weaker, I’d feel cheated, honestly. They SHOULD be tough. They SHOULD be really dangerous. I SHOULD lose Battle Brothers fighting them.

As for fights, deny your enemies the high ground. Shield bash them away from high positions and take the ground for yourself.

A note of caution, though: in my experience, you can’t shield bash orc warriors off of high ground. I’ve tried it extensively and it never seems to work. I think they’re just too darned heavy to shove around. Young orcs and I think berserkers are a different story.

[Meeky]

The thing about Battle Brothers is you need to go into the game knowing you’re going to lose some guys during play, and I think it’ll be easier to do that once the devs expand our company size.

Once you can have more than 12 guys in your army and can choose who will fight on the battlefield that day, it should be considerably easier to have battle brothers that are your sacrificial lambs, or battle brothers that are specialized at fighting orcs – etc. But as the game is now, I never go into a fight thinking “I’m going to come out clean,” because all it takes is a brief spurt of bad luck or bad positioning to ruin your day… and that’s kind of the point.

I understand the concept of glass cannons (no defense, all offense), and i have no problem with it in games.

However the issue here is about what the balance should be.

It is about that. And the way that berserkers are balanced is they’re easy to kill if you snipe the ones that are going to be deadly (the ones with the two-handed axes) first, and you can stop their charge with some fairly basic tactics (such as spearwalls and supernimbletankdudes). This isn’t to say those tactics will make you immune to losing a guy to them. It just means you’re not as likely to lose a guy to them.

Also, always keep in mind what sort of weapons a berserker is wielding. If they’re wielding a two-handed weapon (besides warbrands and jagged pikes which I’ve never seen Berserkers wield), you’ll be able to keep them from hitting you by stepping back, essentially. It takes 6 or 7 AP (I forget which) for them to attack you when they’ve got a two-handed axe, for example. Shift your lines and let them come closer, then swarm them all at once, killing the most dangerous targets first.

That heather shield was destroyed from 1 shield breaking hit done by that orc standing beside the green armor guy, i believe it was wielding the common Orc axe.

Yeah, that’s… not good. I don’t remember that happening, but that’s a thing that shouldn’t happen.

I wonder if this is meant to encourage players to go down the Defense tree? Because right now I only use the Defense tree on specialized tanks like the Nimble Tank. I’ve seen orc warriors with one-handed axes break a heater shield in two hits, though. But one? That’s a bad day.

And I agree, that should not happen with a one-handed axe. I can see a two-handed sword or two-handed axe doing that… but a one-handed axe? Unless maybe it was an upgraded, rare axe?

They do drop, by the way. Sometimes you’ll see an orcish weapon that looks exactly like the other orcish weapons but has better stats. I’m pretty sure that can apply to shield damage. You might have gone up against such an enemy.

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