Battle Brothers Hits Early Access

First I don’t play Ironman :) But if I did it would go like this: First hires will hopefully be Farmers, Brawlers, Butchers, Thieves, Peddlers, or Wildmen. They have the best stats at low hiring prices. Get 7 guys running. 6 is going to be tougher against your early fights.

Make sure to get everyone shields and headgear ASAP. Keep them in spears until melee hits 60 which gives them +20 to hit. Then slowly graduate them to sword class which gives you +10 to hit. Once they hit 70 melee then you can diversify them more. Always have 1 or 2 people as polearm users. Polearms have a bonus to hit and they do amazing amounts of damage. When you can afford it, try to get more ranged asap. You’ll want them as archers, but for the early stages outfit the new ranged recruits as crossbowman for the to-hit bonus and armor penetration capabilities. But once they’ve leveled up enough and can spec in bow go that route for the extra range. In the end you’ll probably want ~4 archers.

For front-liners when you level you generally want to put all your points in melee attack, melee defense and fatigue. When one of those is just 1 point, then put them into HP and Resolve. Resolve is more important than I realized early on, not just because it’s extremely important in the expansion, but even with Underdog, when you get 2+ guys in you, your guys can get a morale hit (little white flag starting to show) which at stage 1 lowers offense and defense 10% (which is huge). Takes a person’s 60 attack and drops it to 54. This stops happening ~60 resolve with Underdog.

HP you want at 62 or above. This is when a single, lucky Crossbow bolt to the head will no longer kill you.

You can use this as a guide for perks though I’d think about substituting killing frenzy for pathfinder to give you more strategic capabilities in battle. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gKplp5RT2Migt45AP6uItw7WUXXmOO-qQd33fvqY2GI/htmlview?usp=drivesdk&sle=true#

For crap recruits you want survival traits: go Colossus - Gifted (put those points into melee attack, melee defense, and Fatigue/HP/Resolve) - Steel Brow. Nine Lives is good, but generally if you’re down to 1 HP he’s generally dead anyways so it’s better to not get there through other traits.

Don’t be afraid to move up to 12 if you feel you need more numbers. But keep in mind the game scales linearly based on your characters levels, number of bros, and armor level.

If you’ve got a guy with terrible fatigue go Nimble (archers and dedicated polearm should be Nimble anyways). To get max value out of Nimble don’t go over 10 for body armor and 5 for helmet. This gives you 40% reduction in damage.

Get kite shields as soon as you can. They make a huge difference vs. ranged. If you can buy them for a good price do it.

Don’t be afraid to use high starting funds and beginner costs. It’s still wickedly hard, but at least this way you can actually buy something in the game.

Every time I hit the mid-game everything falls apart.

I really enjoy the game, but it feels like it ramps up to where every fight is insanity before I can possibly deal with it. I’ve heard opinions in every way about how you’re supposed to deal with it. Some people say never get 12 people until the last second, others say get them ASAP because it doesn’t ramp things up that much and you need the bodies and it’s based on average level or something anyway.

Hell, I’ve seen people say that you ignore jobs as soon as you can and just attack stuff in the wilderness because somehow it pays better than jobs anyway.

Granted my only real game was on easy, but I never saw this. Too far out into the wilderness and the fights get tough, and the gear I got was never anything special.

Thanks @jpinard on the Unhold tips, I will be sure to try it next time. I think I need to learn to specialize my guys into different roles better as well.

Thanks for those tips @jpinard. Very helpful.

You may not want to do this. Reason being is you want to get as good of relations as possible, as quickly as possible with the factions and towns. This lowers prices of things you need to purchase and raises sale prices. It makes a huge difference in your profitability in the long run. Which leads me to a large database I made. When you get items you may be wondering… is it worth repairing before selling or do I lose money on it?

Tier 1 weapons, you pretty much always lose money. Tier 1 are the first types of weapons you can use. Basic shortsword, first spear, miners pick etc. The most important stat here is the repair cost per tool.
As you can see in the database there’s a surprise in which non-famed item is the most profitable of all - the heavy crossbow. Also some surprises of what is not worth repairing before selling - hunting bow.
Nearly all armor is not worth repairing, only the most expensive armor, and that’s if you have the large number of tools available to do those repairs.

http://s000.tinyupload.com/download.php?file_id=60344674824420986953&t=6034467482442098695339500

There are two worksheets. You can sort columns.

Oh man you just know the game is good when it requires spreadsheets to play. I’m not even joking.

I forgot to mention I didn’t even put tier 1 weapons nor low value armor in the list since they were all going to lose money. Would have just made the database larger making it harder for someone to find the item they need to check its value. So if it’s not on the list it’s not worth repairing.

Anybody playing this on a Dell XPS 13? The game crashes every time I launch a new campaign. It never used to that when I bought it when it came out of EA so I don’t know what’s changed.

Drivers?
———
Barbarian units:

Dev Blog #118: The Barbarians, Part II
—Battle Brothers Developer Blog

“Following the introduction of the barbarian faction in part one, this week we’ll take a look at the first three of their unit types and some general combat mechanics.”

http://battlebrothersgame.com/dev-blog-118-the-barbarians-part-ii/

The game is rock solid so it must be the hardware. I peruse the reddit sub forum, their official forum and steam forums everyday and not seen a report like that.

Yeah, I’ve tried all their solutions. I’ve reinstalled the game. I’ve sent them an email with my game log and dxdiag. We’ll see if they get back to me.

If the driver does not support OpenGL 3.0 you’ll probably be out of luck.

Probably just don’t use the Dell drivers.

One more day til the next reveal. Come on!

Yes! New music! And its’ really good (as always). Read how they decided to do the music going for vocals over brass. http://battlebrothersgame.com/dev-blog-119-tunes-from-the-north/

I’m plunking along in my current game on Beginner economy / Veteran battles. Day 65, 14 guys ranging from level 3-7. I decided to try without Ironman for a while, but accepting moderate losses and only reloading in case of near-total wipeout.

It seems to be pretty slow going trying to ally with a noble house. I’ve freed and returned two prisoners and have spent the majority of my time running the circuit of affiliated towns doing every available contract, and the relationship is still barely “open” and they still aren’t offering missions in the fortified cities.

Not sure if there’s something else I should be doing at this point. It seems like when I take detours or accept missions to leave this territory, the faction relation decays too much to be worth it. And I have an objective to go clear out a wilderness site, but they seem to do the Skyrim thing of getting stronger based on your own strength. There’s one brigand site that I’ve attempted on three separate occasions and each time the mix of enemies has gotten much stronger and stayed ahead of what I could beat at the time.

Oh, is it worth hanging onto direwolf pelts and the like? They have a nominal value of 400, and I’ve been wondering if I’ll find a city somewhere where they’re in demand and I can get close to that amount, but it always seems to be in the 50-70 range everywhere I look.

A real expert can verify, but Noble Houses are mostly interested in your Fame, so completing personal quests is the quickest way to get their attention. After reaching appropriate Fame, I think you may need to choose the Ally with Noble House for it to fire?

It is if you have a brother with a tailoring background. There is a random event where he will make you some nice direwolf armor at some point. So, I always hang onto 2 pelts, just in case.

Thanks to both of you, good to know. I don’t think I have a tailor, so I’ll just sell off the pelts. And I guess I just have to keep trying to complete the site-clearing personal quest I’ve been stuck on for the past 30 days.

Yeah, did they ever make it so you can change your personal quest? That has derailed my games a couple of times. Make the wrong choice and it can really retard your progress.