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Looking at what other folks do in their games have been very helpful – thank you all for that. I think I’m improving my game, bit by bit. I’ll probably be happy restarting yet another time trying to get my own battle line combinations right, haha. I’m even more surprised that someone was able to make spearwalls work in the late game!

So an update: Looks like I’ve reached the point in the game where I can stop relying on patrols to do the heavy lifting on behalf of my Battle Bait… I mean Battle Brothers. *cough* I do occasionally pull the odd deadly orc group to town militia and patrols for support, but my party has grown strong enough that I can even raid the occasional bandit hideout. I’ve even started investing in high grade troops since I have the finances to pull it off. I guess when the party grows in

I kind of wish towns always had quests waiting to be completed. I running around from town to town hoping for a worthy task but drawing absolute blanks is just a little frustrating. Not a big problem, but just mehhhhhh.

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GOD wrote:

I thought they already tweaked this by making the last survivors more agressive? Catching people has been far easier than it was in the demo. As for archers, it makes sense for them use hit-and-run tactics. Just wait until the Goblins get introduced…

I’d argue the current AI makes the experience of chasing them down less immersive, not more. What usually happens isn’t a case of hit and run; instead, the bandit runs away at tops speed, not taking a shot, to the edge of the map and then only finally stops moving and starts shooting anyway. If the bandit took a quick shot and then moved instead, we don’t have to be reminded that there is an artificial boundary to the battlefield.

Edit: Holy, that smiley face exploded!

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I like the confirm button idea. Admittedly, I’d be fine with the attributes being left as is even if I’m not totally satisfied with the current system (Random gains? Meh.). Just not high on the list of things that bother me.

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Sky wrote:

Here is a ss that shows the elevation representation in the tooltip.

…OH. THAT’S what that thing is for! @.@ Right, now I know. Wish I knew that a little earlier lol. Thank you Sky.

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GOD wrote:

I’m expecting this to be less of an issue when quests are made more diverse, with greater variety in the amount they pay. I think that holding multiple contracts is also planned, though I might be conflating it with UI design.

Enemies spawning for quests is something I’d definitely like to avoid if possible, since one of the game’s strengths is how it plays fair like that.

Spawning enemies which target the caravan isn’t unheard of. M&B does that as well… just that the enemies will usually run when they see your large army, haha. (Gosh, need to stop comparing to M&B)

It could just be that the costs of maintaining the army are too prohibitive right now, at least for the game as is. I think that’s pretty valuable feedback for the dev team. We’ll have to wait and see if there are supports introduced to help maintain that army in the later versions of the game.

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Rap wrote:

We’ve just implemented that parties on the worldmap actually get slower the larger they are. Like you said, this makes it a bit more feasible for the player to outrun large armies, especially at the beginning. Also, AI parties are now less likely to chase each other forever, as one will either catch up in time or the other will lose the party chasing it. It’ll be included in the next update.

Not unlike Mount & Blade we also want to introduce parties on the worldmap leaving footprints. This allows the player to both track down parties and follow them back to their base, and to stay clear off of larger parties in the vicinity without them needing to be in visual range.

Finally, as others have already said, we the way we’ll go about worldmap utility upgrades is probably with non-combat followers, not by making the player decide between combat and non-combat perks for Battle Brothers.

I really enjoyed Expeditions: Conquistador btw.

Hey, now I’m impressed. I guess it helps that there are some examples from other games that you can use for yours.

Your team seems to be pretty on the ball when it comes to design, so please humor me giving a few suggestions. I’d recommend a strategic support skills which are specific to your game’s themes. The easy examples are lowering tools/medicine/food use and speeding up repairs/healing. For your setting, you could consider a character who can conduct rites of burial to help offset the negative effects of the death of a brother on Resolve for instance, since the deaths of brothers is something of an ongoing theme. Someone who can give a rousing speech to improve Resolve, perhaps cast little rituals to ward off undead/protect against magic/mind-affecting skills, set bait to attract werewolves.

…or not. Eh, I’m encouraging feature creep on unnecessary features that have no critical impact on gameplay now. Hrm, I should shut up.

[mrbunnyban]

I won’t force people to use the highlights, gimme options “Highlight elevated terrain” in the options menu. Think the tooltip giving info on elevation is easy to implement.

I’m not big on immersion in general, especially for a tactical games where you don’t even have a character that represents you the player on the battlefield. That’s just my personal feelings though, I get that the realistic weapons/armor and skills are there to cater for players who want immersion.

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Rap wrote:

Different qualities for weapons was something we were discussing a while back, but we’ve decided to go instead with distinct tiers for every weapon type. So instead of having a Masterwork Handaxe with a few points more of damage or similar miniscule differences, we’ll have a clear progression from Hatchet -> Hand Axe -> Fighting Axe where it’s very apparent from just looking at the weapon how good it is. You’re equpping 12+ people in this game, so comparing a dozen items looking almost identical and having only very minor differences probably wouldn’t work out to the player’s favor in the long run. If you take into account the fatigue costs, it may even make sense to deliberately go with lower-tier weapons as backup as not to overly burden yourselves, just like you wouldn’t necessarily go with the heaviest of armors all the time. There are quite a few gaps in weapon progression currently in the game but we’ll fill them up as we go along.

This sounds sensible to me. Personally, I’m not a big fan of different quality of the same weapon (crude-normal-fine-masterwork) because it becomes a huge grind-fest or hunt for that elusive Masterwork Full plate of the Whale or King’s Broadsword of Haste. That’ll get pretty tedious when you have 12 people to equip. There’s plenty of progression and rewards within the game as it is.

A top tier Noble sword breaking against two orcs sounds a bit brittle too me. I couldn’t kill anything with my spears before they broke against the undead hordes in the Defending the Hill, but apparently undead are supposed to be like that since they self rezz and come in large spawns.

Keeping on topic, anyone else want to give their 2 cents on the current weapon durability?

[mrbunnyban]

Hey folks. We want this game to be successful, right? So give people more options to play it in ways they find more enjoyable. I can enjoy this game as is, but I can’t recommend this game to my friends. I can’t – it’s just too unforgiving. The easy difficulty setting is a good solution for this but currently the easy difficulty setting does nothing for the difficulty of combat.

I’d recommend one simple addition to easy difficulty: a trait which adds +10 to all defenses and +10 to hit for all brothers. It’s right there in players’ faces so they know they are playing with an unfair advantage, and thus are encouraged to move up to normal difficulty once they are more comfortable with the game. I hope that is a good compromise to you ‘hardcore’ gamers.

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