Epic!
Oh, oh! Add me next! I can’t wait to see in what horrible way I’ll die!
Day 14
Bertolf has changed his name to Belouski. This seems to be a repeating pattern. We win and get a little hyped, half the crew wants to change their names, and I’m forced to make new nametags for their underpants. Except for Dan the Streaker - he wears none. “No Dan, I didn’t want to know you go commando.”
Though we did well in last nights assault we didn’t come away unscathed. Mok took an arrow through his bicep (2-4 days), Belouski took an arrow to his thigh (2-5 days), and Miguk is still nursing a severed ligaments (2-5 days).
We’re in Hammerden and I don’t want to come back here again, at least not til we’re rich with tons of food. We had to swim across a sea channel, cross a swamp, and then climb a small mountain to get here. A drain on both Crowns and our food reserves. The overall plan is to work our way back to Tanndorf to see if there’s any way we can get access to some ranged soldiers again. Still kicking myself for not hiring the named fletcher on that very first day. I scrawl out the plans for the Knights of Neeeeeee so they can better picture why their lives are toast.
We’ll pick up quests along the way to feed and pay the men. Hopefully enough Crowns will remain to fix our weapons/armor. We’ll pick up our 12th man too. Our latest 4 or 5 recruits - how do I say this nicely? They su… just picked up a sword for the first time this week.
We get to Eisenwall and the Contracts are locked. It’s night so we don’t stick around. Not much here anyways. We’ll have to get on the Nobles good side to get contracts opened up there. By the time we get to City of Grafenhaven we’re down to 400 Crowns. Not enough money to get the guys patched up.
Those carefully scrawled plans I drew above? Yea, throw them away. Got a caravan contract that fits our needs perfectly I think. It’ll take 3 days to get there, but will cost us no food, and we’ll come out 300 crowns ahead in the end since we negotiated for half the payment up-front (enough to keep the men paid on the way). Hopefully we won’t get ambushed. I was going to hire someone here, another apprentice, but we’ll play the odds and hope we come out clean.
Woops. That took 4 days. Our caravan leader decided to not stick to the trails, and now we’re way up in the Arctic. There’s a named Vagabond here. I simply can’t refuse with such an odd moniker and we need a 12th.
OK let’s see what he’s all about.
Juuussssst great. Another guy who has never held a sword, runs away at the first whisp of danger, and has low HP. At least he has an iron jaw. I’m sure that will be put to test real soon. With 12 men our first Ambition is now fulfilled. Missions are locked in this fortress (did I mention it’s a huge Citadel with with tons of everything? - Too bad it’s so far out of the way - didn’t even show up on the maps above).
We head South to Wolfhaiden.
We take a 2-skull 670 Crown contract to clear out a Woodcutter’s home of Brigands. Everyone is healthy and we have 12 men. We need another ranged man, but not come across one yet, so we’ll have to stick with our hodgepodge assortment of trainees.
Can’t see anything but it said “some raiders”.
I was going to run if “some raiders” turned out to be all of them, but we may not have the chance. Oh, and it’s raining too.
Hmmm… run away?
Certainly not, we can take 'em.
uh… watch out for those billhooks.
It’s all about freedom of movement, you see… very important in combat!
The front line better hold. I don’t want to find out just how fast I can bleed.
No way were we going to win that battle. Half our men have less than 52 melee, most have armor made of paper, and they’re seasoned raiders with 2x-3x the armor and 3x the penetration and killing power of our weapons. We run away!
The men are not happy with my leadership, but I remind them we had better people against fewer raiders when we got annihilated before. “Don’t worry” I tell them, “As soon as we have half the matching weapons and armor of a group like that we’ll take 'em”. “You do like being alive right?”
To my surprise I don’t get an answer.
The village of Wolfhaiden is also unhappy as we canceled their mission. Thankfully we didn’t take any money up front or they wouldn’t be just “cold” to us.
We take another 2-skull mission for 500 Crowns. Go to graveyard and dig up some relic. Will be taking on skeletons, probably with lots of shields. When we get to the site we refit everyone with as many pickaxes and axes as we have available to us. One of the axes is at just 30% so we set camp for a few hours so it can be fixed when. Oh no! We’re attacked by 22 monsters!!!
Sheesus.
In addition to what you see there are 4 Wisps. Most of our guys are chickens to begin with but as the Wisps Scream the will scare and run even easier. Worse, you need extremely high melee to hit them which only 1 of our guys has. We runnnnnnnnnn.
As we run away, I see there’s a group of 12 pursuing us. Interesting. So it might have been the crypt group plus a wandering group together that assaulted us. We run as fast as we can but they catch up to us. It’s the zombie and wisp group, but thankfully the wisps play dumb and delete themselves on our prepared spearmen. Nice job men! And almost no one got hurt. Now we know what’s in the crypt as well - shielded skeletons.
Time to go clean out the graveyard. Mok, Geggis, and Belouski have leveled thanks to that battle so we’re in even better shape now.
Gruesome battle. I knew we were under-armored but didn’t think it would be this bad. Those Ancient Legionnaires are just so deadly.
The Wildman Dan and Geggis the drunk will be sorely missed. This is the point where I’d go on to an earlier savegame but no such fantasy option exists so we soldier on. We did come away from some decent helms and a few weapons. But unless we get some new hires that can hit the enemy, we’ll be stuck equipping them with spears.
We have some major injuries to attend to. Lancelot has a sliced up leg, Theubodald had his face destroyed, and Woodlance’s arm got filleted. Feels like we’re circling the drain. We need some easy missions that reward us with lots of money. Ha! Like that’s gonna happen.
We leave Wolfhaiden and head for Hellehovel where there’s a barracks. Hopefully we can get some good recruits there.
We stop in Gunnheim and find a named brawler there. His nickname is “Ironfist”. It will cost half the rest of our Crowns to hire him, but we’d down to 10 men and we need someone solid.
O’Malley tells me he needs a bit more than the normal pay at 13 Crowns per day, but as I don’t tell him he may not last longer than 2, I say “no problem!”
He looks like a pretty solid hire too. He can hit, has decent HP, but is still a bit on the fearful side. No doubt, he’s heard of our track-record. (click image below for full stats)
We got ton the Citadel of Grunberg but find all their missions locked. With only 1 day’s worth of pay left, we will have to take the first mission we find.
We get to Tanndorf and get a mission to drive off Brigands. The location means we won’t have enough money nor food to get there and back before we run out. But it’s all we’ve got. This will be interesting…
We get there before food and money runs out. It will be a tough battle. If we can come away with half our guys I’ll be happy.
Sadly it wasn’t meant to be.
We beat them down to 4 men, but those last 4 included their leader and several well armorer raiders. I tried to run with one guy left, but he was butchered before his feet took hold.
And as a cruel footnote, Battle Brothers has one last thing to say, “You suck and earned 0 points”.
The end…
Not bad. That lasted 10 times longer than it would if I was in charge.
Nice adventure. Maybe next time, you can hold off having 12 people too early, the game bump up the scaling when you do that.
Edit: The brothers should carry knives (later daggers) for puncture for armours. The team had pretty bad equipment :(.
I did not know that. Yea, that would have made a big difference. Having no lower tier missions was not good. If we had access to them we may not have made money, but the company would have been gaining experience and loot.
I also wonder if we’d gone with the fletcher early on if having that second ranged asset would have made a difference.
My opinion was that it’ll probably not change the outcome much. The income could not match the costs of hosting so many guys.
I’m thinking a baby step approach would work better in Ironman. See if this works.
- Get around 8 men, with a couple carrying daggers or knives. Surround and puncture that last few guys with low resolve.
- Upgrade their armours to at least 80 asap, picking 1 stars and low paying (400-500) jobs.
When the team gets upgraded armours, it makes a HUGE difference.
excellent adventure!