Battle Brothers Hits Early Access

I like them as they are good for fighting things that scare your guys. +5 Ranged Skill, +10 Resolve, +20 Resolve at morale checks against fear, panic or mind-control effects.

They’re decent in my experience. They’re not sellswords or anything, but they also don’t cost 3k+ and are pretty good at their jobs.

Oh! I didn’t realise that! I’ll hover over every class now for the tooltip to check it out!

Yea, some of the classes are costly. And there seems to be an RNG on the cost also. Sometimes I can get them cheaper in some cities compared to others.

Any way to check out their class? Or must I hire them and hover to get the tooltip?

Quick question guys. At the beginning, do you concentrate on the equipment or getting better recruits?

I’m thinking of getting better weapons and armour because the maintenance cost of the better recruits eat into profits. So I’m considering money is best spent into making 3 of the guys (the starting recruits have pretty decent stats and starting abilities.

How many of the enemy types have you fought so far? Have you fought many goblins yet? They most certainly require different tactics, especially when they use poison and skirmishers and wolf riders. How about Orc parties that include berserkers and orc warriors? Seen any undead with legionnaires, honor guard or priests in the party yet? Hard to say what’s going on without knowing what you’ve been fighting. It sounds like you haven’t been doing any 3 skull contracts which have those types of enemies. If you aren’t seeing them, you may have a low renown issue. For comparison’s sake I currently have Renown: Great (2540) on day 97.

For me it triggered on day 75. Others have said it triggers as early as days 50-60. What is your renown score? I think when it triggers is at least partially dependent on that.

Usually weapons/armor or just more bodies till I hit 12 men.

Getting “good” recruits is kind of a mid-late game thing really. They’re just too expensive to worry much about early on and without good gear to toss on them they’ll likely die/get maimed anyway.

Sounds good. I think I’ll concentrate on the 3 companions and get weapons for them.

Another quick question: Are the Retired Soldier and Militia classes any good or just marginally better than basic recruits like farmhands, miners etc?

In my experience they’re quite good compared to farmers and the like, but there is always some randomness. Sometimes retired guys can come with some really crappy traits and the like.

So far I’ve found you usually get what you pay for when it comes to recruits.

Starting out, I take all my company’s equipment from the cold dead hands of the enemies I kill. I don’t waste any gold actually buying any until much later when I have a lot of cash and can easily afford to spend it. At first I concentrate on getting about 8 brothers in my company and having them all up to about level 4 or so before I start adding any more. That’s to keep my payroll costs down early on. When I do add more, I’m picky.

I try to fight lots of bandits early because that’s where you’ll get your free equipment. For the stuff I do buy, it tends to be bow and crossbow upgrades because those are fairly hard to get from battle drops. That and maybe a greatsword eventually if I don’t get lucky early and find one on a bandit leader or fallen hero. In my current game game I only found a greataxe and named shield on fallen heroes so I ended up buying a greatsword eventually. Now that it’s around day 100 for me, I’ve buying some heavy armor here and there.

Their cost is dependent upon the gear they have. A daytaler with a club and a leather apron may cost 160 crowns. A militiaman with leather armor and morningstar will cost significantly more as you are paying for the armor and weapons. I’ve not done an analysis between buying the cheap guy and outfitting him v. buying the more expensive guy with better gear. Nor have I compared the cost of a recruit in one city with a similarly outfitted recruit in another. Too much like work for me.

As to your question about Militia and retired soldiers. Militia don’t have bonuses to my knowledge though they have pretty good gear. Retired Soldiers have higher combat bonuses, but since they are aged they are slower, easier to hit and fatigue faster and they have good weapons and armor which makes them pricey.

Looking for bandits seems like a hit or miss. I cannot seem to find them when I have lots of people in my group. But when I have less brothers, they appear on the map.

They don’t have a special “status” or anything, but their base combat stats tend to be better than most farmhands in my experience, though maybe I just been getting lucky.

I think an improvement to the game would be to allow us to see some of the recruits’ offensive and defensive stats before hiring them. It would be like asking an archer to hit a target before offering him the job.

But traits should be revealed later. How would you know someone is a coward or brave if you had never met them before?

Maybe so. I’m going from the developer blogs and they say the Militia don’t get bonuses to their stats, but it stands to reason that their training and experience would make them better fighters than a farm hand. Though I’ve known some pretty bad ass farm boys.

The skeletons with pikes. OMG. Holy crap they are wicked awful. By far the most deadly things I’ve encountered in the game. I was taking out 12+ of any enemy sets with ease, and I had to redo a battle a ton of times with 7 skeles, 3 with pikes and yikes. I do not want to go against them again. I could kick myself for selecting “Rotation” perk for all my guys when they hit level 7. That was before I got answers on the perk thing, and I just assumed it would be good because I saw the AI do it. But of course I haven’t had a single instance where it would come into play for me since.

Besides the tavern and winning battles - any other way to influence mood?

For all of my game thus far (I just hit end-game crisis) the militia unit I hired was much better than the Witch-hunter. This is in large part because the Witch-hunter just doesn’t get decent offensive boosts to leveling. In fact my fisherman and caravan hand are leagues better than my Witch-hunter. But when I start dealing with stuff that scares my peeps maybe the Witch-hunter will be more valuable.

Travelling north is dangerous. Met 12 undead with 3 geist in it… I ran… This was only day 20.

Yeah, I HATE those things. They hit really hard and when they’re fronted by legionnaires with shieldwalls up, you can’t get to them. Archers do nothing against them. You have to have some greatsword bros and use Split to reach them. Either that or flank them. Mix in a few geists, honor guard, and/or necrosavants and you have a fine recipe for a wipe. If you picked the undead endgame crisis you can look forward to town defense battles like this happening 3 times in a row with no chance to rest or heal. Whee!

Yeah, completing an Ambition not only raises your renown, it will give a nice morale boost to everyone.

I just realised something. Concentrating on dependable brothers like @Coldsteel advised made the battles much more dependable. Because you do not subconsciously depend on horrible recruits to hold the line.

Having many bodies that take up space on the battle field but are not dependable only makes things worse because they occupy the valuable space that can be used by a dependable brother who can kill the enemy.

I saw an Adventuring Noble for “only” 3K to hire and thought that I’ll pick him up later but alas, he’s no more to be found! Duh!