Battle Brothers Hits Early Access

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The ambition doesn’t matter. What gets you the good gear during a noble house war are two things.

One, missions where you are fighting alongside one noble house in a big battle against another noble house. If you play conservatively you can kill a lot of enemies (and take their stuff) without suffering bad casualties yourself: position yourself so that your guys are not exposed and let your allies get whacked on.

Two, once your band is mighty enough to take on noble troops straight up, fighting the town and militia patrols can yield quite good gear. Be careful not to take on too many at once as the regular troops can be tough.

Also, if you are just playing normally without daggers or flails, you are not going to get much in the way of armor. You will loot some nice weapons, but most of the good armor will get destroyed. If you want to get good armor, you need to use flails for headshots, and if you want both armor and helms you need to use daggers for puncture. Having 2 to 4 guys specializing in dagger or flail working as a unit to target high value enemies can yield some excellent games. Your whole front line doesn’t need to be dagger or flail dudes, but you do want at least some, to get the best armor.

There is one ambition which can help, which is the ambition to become Allied to a noble house. Once you meet that ambition you get some free armor, shields and maybe a helmet, all pretty good stuff, in the colors of that noble house.

Also, as you become friendlier to the noble house, you can also buy stuff more cheaply at their castles. If they have castles with high end weaponsmith or armorer, you can buy good gear. Once you get to that level, you may find yourself rolling in cash. (YMMV)

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The stats are random within a range for each origin. I think the reason wildmen are considered good is that they tend to have good offensive stats and yet are very cheap to hire and very cheap to keep. Brawlers are another good early “bang for buck” origin. Later on I tend to go for the militia/veteran/hunter type troops but early on wildmen, brawlers, and laboring types are good cheap choices.

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A good Wildman comes with high health, fatigue and offense stats. As @Sharpe mentioned, they’re a good bang for your buck. I have one that I’m leveling as the proverbial 2-hand weapon swinging barbarian.

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Might I submit this reference:

Whenever I am shopping it proves quite helpful.

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Well I think I bungled my game mightily LOL. I gave up on the Noble War missions for now. The odds are crazy. 35 enemy vs. 24 of us. And my guys are still mostly in 115 armor. Talk about slaughter. Not pretty.

Worse, I don’t have any of the good backgrounds you all mentioned hehehe. Except for my starting dudes, they’re all level 9 but their stat gains have been very poor. At level 9 they’re still only in the 50’s-60’s attack values. And to think, I nurtured and save-scummed these guys, like a parent coddles their baby to make sure they made it to this stage. I’ve started turning down any war mission because I expect it will just be too hard, and have mostly turned to hunting stuff in the wild.

I am the worst ally, and I think this war might last forever :p

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jpinard, if you decide to play again, let me give you a summary of my thoughts on how to do well.

Early Game: hire cheap guys with good stat potential: wildmen, brawlers, masons, farmers, day laborers, caravan guards, lumberjacks, poachers, that sort of guy. Don’t spend money hiring guys with lots of gear or levels. Do spend some money to buy basic shields for everyone, and if you can find leather armor or gambesons cheap (damaged) at the market, buy some of those. Early on, you want 1 to 2 archer types, using crossbows, and 6 to 8 frontline guys using shields. During this early stage, try to selectively pick missions against brigands, who are not too tough, and will yield useful loot. In terms of random encounters, fight brigands where the numbers are good, avoid orcs, goblins, and skeletal undead. You can fight wolves, nachzerers and wiedergangers for exp if the numbers are good.

Midgame (once you have guys at level 5 and up): your first priority here is to get 2 to 4 of your frontline guys to dagger mastery and to also buy good daggers or poignards for those guys. Make sure your dagger dudes are placed together so they can gang up on enemies and puncture the heck out of them to get free armor. You can start taking on 2 star missions and even the occasional 3 star. Again, brigands are your best bet for easy loot. Only take on orcs, goblins and skeletal undead if you feel strong and the numbers favor you. During this phase you should also get your renown to a level where you can get the Noble House missions. At this phase you can add another archer or two, and add a two-handed user or two. Once your archers have 70+ ranged attack, consider switching them from cross-bow to bow. For hiring at this stage, don’t blow huge money on swordmasters or hedge knights but do consider spending money on militia, veterans and hunters. You want to get to twelve men, with one or possibly two backups. There’s no need to hire a full 20.

Once you have done those two steps, you should start hauling in a substantial amount of good armor and weapons. You can then decide how to approach the endgame: you can continue down the dagger route, or diversify your weapon masteries.

Throughout, be selective in your mission choice. Once you have “accepted” a mission, you get a chance to say “I need to think about this”. So go ahead and accept which will give you a detailed description of the mission, and then you can decide to actually do the mission. Doing large numbers of easy missions is the safe and steady way to build up. Don’t push your luck until your crew feels strong.

As an example, to do those noble house missions, your frontline should all be in 200+ armor. 115 isn’t going to cut it.

My overall sense of what you have posted here is that your weakness is not getting enough good armor from loot. You really do need to focus on daggers (or flails) with roughly half your line to score the good loot. Weapons will drop pretty steadily, but armor takes planning.

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I hate that, it sounds way too gamey. I suppose its a bit better if I concentrate on flails…

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I agree, but it’s the only way to really gear up in terms of armor. The armor cost/loot issue is really the one significant game balance issue. If they changed it so that you had a normal chance to loot armor with only 0% of its durability (and then repair it) that would improve the game balance tremendously.

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This game can be so weird. Sometimes I feel like I am lucky to make it from one town to the next. Then other times, I get a 2 skull escort mission to the other side of the map for 1500 gold, get all the way there without so much as seeing anything.There I get another 2 skull mission to halfway up the map for 700 gold, and again see nothing. It was incredibly boring and I decided to scrap it and reload. While the money was good, I figured the 4-5 days of travel without any experience gained would hurt me in the long run.

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Oh I will be playing a lot more and many more games!

Things changed a lot in the past 18 hours of gameplay :)
I went to an older savegame where the Noble War is still on and my Ambition is to help end it, but I ignored it and just did my own thing for several weeks. When I finally checked the noble quests there was one to help conquer the smallest House, and I only took a battle where the rewards were much smaller (2,000 instead of 5,000). I’ve found the reward amount for all kinds of missions are much better indicators of difficulty vs. the the number of stars.

My first mission was to deal with deserters which ended up being very fortuitous! I threatened them with a fight which I handily won. This got me some of the first sets of better gear including a Warhammer, Heavy Crossbow, and some Flat-top mail helmets (230!) all which I desperately needed. Now if I could just get my guys fatigue levels up s they could actually wear all this heavy stuff and be able to swing their weapons LOL. Glad I’d made that a to priority (even over health at times) while doing upgrades. That being said I haven’t touched ranged defense for anyone but my archers and Captain.

I have 200 hours in this game heh.

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Oh for Noble War mission when you have to bring back the deserters or kill them, does the subsequent battle have fewer allies in it because they were the deserters if you’re forced to dispatch them all?

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At some point you are going to have to admit that you are an expert.

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Yeah I don’t like this as a necessity, either, but I suppose one could apply a little creative role-play and call these your rogues… Alternatively, can you not just buy the best armor or is it not available/too expensive?

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I am only playing beginner, so it makes a things a lot easier, but I have had a couple of good armor pieces drop without doing the dagger/flail thing. Money is also getting to the point where I can buy suits as needed as well. From reading the Steam reviews it sounds like there is a massive difficulty jump from beginner to veteran though.

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Yeah this. I haven’t used daggers or flails at all in my current game and I have had tons of good armor drop. Cleavers are good if you use decapitate and swords/axes can do that as well, I believe. I rarely (if ever) bother with daggers. Flails can be really good against certain enemies though.

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Helmet
Helmet.jpg1920×1080 742 KB

I’m wondering if it’s worth it to get this helmet. 356 Armour at 16 Fatigue. But I’ll need to start saving again if I buy this. It uses up almost all my cash.

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I guess it depends on how much you’re hurting for a really good helmet. If it was a great suit of armor or weapon I might do it but that’s a pretty steep price for a helmet. If I already had a set of awesome armor and just needed this to go with it, then I’d probably do it. Otherwise I wouldn’t.

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Be careful if you really really want it as it won’t be there in 2-7 days.

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My problem with Battle Brothers is that I dont get to play with the awesome gear. :(

I walked away from the shop keeper, over the cries of “Deal of the century!”.

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My view on that super-expensive elite gear is that you have crew geared pretty well with purchased items from an armory or weapon shop, and you can afford the masterwork gear without bankrupting yourself, then it’s actually worth it.

I’ll give an example: it’s pretty easy to get 200hp helmets from noble enemies and you can often buy helmets in the 200hp that are not completely ridiculous in terms of price. You could at that point pay about 5K each for the top end artisan helmets which go up to 265hp IIRC. To get higher than that I believe you need a loot drop off a Knight or Undead Hero or a masterwork item. My view is that if all your frontline is set with 200hp or better helmets, then go for the uber helment. I mean it’s true that you can buy 5 of the 265hp helmets for the cost of the 320+ masterwork but those 250-ish helmets are frequently available at armorers and the masterwork helmets are quite rare. Plus you get to wear an awesome helmet.