I bought the base game and I guess now I’m also one of the bros here!
Started the “tutorial” campaign but there were no character driven guides, cut scenes, nor any tools tips at all. Basically it was just a tactical battle with me figuring out the actions and how to move the units. So I guess the best tutorial is the one you taught yourself?
I’ll start a new campaign tonight. Are the tutorial videos in the menu worth watching?
There’s a guy on youtube called FilthyRobot who is very good at exposing the underlying mechanics, he has a combat basics guide which is excellent (among many others)
Seconded. He has guide videos from Complete noob just starting out to tips and tricks to more in depth strategy. I watched several of his videos before fully jumping back in.
Yeah, you choose the end game crisis from the ones available at set up. The crisis is triggered after some number of days that varies, but it seems like my earliest was close to Day 75 so you have plenty of time to advance and gear up your dudes. Then, assuming the crisis is resolved, you get the choice to retire or continue. Continuing means one of the other crises is now in play and you work towards that one.
And when you retire, you get a score that is based on who knows what. :) And they give a couple of little “What happened to…” wrap ups of some of your crew.
I have continued to play on Easy/Easy because I have been having fun, but now I am to a point where I rarely lose any guys. I am not playing Ironman so if I wipe, I do reload, but not if I just lose some men. I think I make too many dumb mistakes to stick with Ironman. :)
Thanks for the helpful answers, everyone. This feels like exactly what I was looking for.
I have visions of trying to develop effective battle tactics and formations. Like a shield wall that absorbs an attack, then shifts to allow two-handed axe wielders to step forward and wreak havoc, and darkening the skies with arrow volleys that wipe out any survivors.
I’m a bit far from that at the moment. Last night our archers ended up shooting our own guys in the back as much as they hit enemies. Improvement is needed.
Was kind of holding off for a good Switch sale, but f’ it. Y’all have me hyped and I just bought it.
This is a game that can get really frustrating if you always insist on playing ironman, it’s just too easy to have a long game wiped out completely unexpectedly.
Yeah, step into one of those camps that doesn’t give you any scouting info and faced with twice your number of upper level undead and you’re done. I may eventually play Ironman as I did in XCom, but the frustration from losing someone to the brutal difficulty and RNG made it far less fun.
First campaign wiped out somewhere around Day 35. Things kind of gradually started falling apart after day 25 or so.
We lost our best front line fighter, a survivor of over a dozen battles with more than a dozen kills in a skirmish against brigands.
Then our entire front line got ripped to shreds a few days later by two snow ape things (forgot the name). We managed to kill one by tossing a net over him, but we only had one net. The other one just kept regenerating health and tearing apart our men. Only one melee fighter and three archers survived that.
We rebuilt our front line and got the crew up to nine members again but just weren’t up to snuff in a battle against some higher level brigands in some thick woods. We got in a bad position and I was too stubborn to adjust tactics. Only two survived that, and they promptly got surrounded by barbarians and dogs in some woods and wiped out.
Final Score: 14
What a fun game, though. I learned a ton in this first play through.
haha, exactly the same. dang it!
I was just watching FilthyRobot’s 2020 roundup last night. His guides and playthroughs are great. Games like BB are almost as fun to watch as they are to play, when a good player with good commentary is the one playing it.
Good assessment. The game often let’s you know what you’ll be facing for many contracts, so you’ll want to be adequately equipped for them. Learning when and where to take on some battles when you have options is another good lesson. I can remember a horribly ill-conceived notion to chases a bunch of brigand archers into a swamp. My guys got pincushioned.
My second campaign ended badly only a week in. Note to self: Necromancer = run away.
As much fun as I’m having playing the game, there is one element I’m struggling with: the game is failing pretty much every diversity and inclusivity check I toss at it.
Gender
At first I was wondering if you could have female fighters in your crew. Doesn’t appear that you can. You might say, “Well, it’s called Battle Brothers, silly.” But that too is a design choice. The only women I’ve encountered in the game are whores in cringeworthy text-flavor events focused on banging them for the pleasure of my crew. Beyond that, I haven’t seen any women in roles of authority in towns, it’s all men. Far as I can tell six hours in, the only role for women in this game world is “sex object”.
Diversity
Maybe this changes as you get into the southern lands, but every single crew member for hire has been white. They have a great diversity of faces and hair and weapons and armor, but I haven’t had a single option to hire a person of color. And I haven’t seen a person of color in an NPC role either.
It seems like, from what I read, that the developers talked about adding female characters and but then the mod community did all the work and now they just recommend the mod.
I don’t think it’s a great solution but here we are.
Originally it was
But then they rolled it into
Yeah. The scripted events are miserably misogynistic. I haven’t read the text in weeks as I just click through the events. I guess maybe when recommending going forward I should add that caveat. I think they went the route of “well, this is how it was” in whatever medieval time and location in which it was set. Not excusing it at all by the way. I believe that is their weak excuse.
The Blazing Desert does add people of color.
Yeah, I don’t really watch any playthroughs or streamers. I’d rather be playing, but there’s something about Filthy Robot I like outside of his spreadsheet analysis. He’s probably while I’ll also get Urtuk, soon. His taste in games is pretty much inline with mine.
Thanks for the mod link! That led to a work break exploration of how they’ve packaged their art sprites and whatnot, and looking at various mods for the game out there. I’m not understanding how they have their sprite sheets organized at all, seems like in many cases lots of different assets are tossed into the same sheet. (I’m wondering if I might be able to hack the original files to shift a couple of the head images to people of color.)
I’m not sure if you can just use that legendary mod to only add women mercenaries, and not add the other features, but I’ll probably play around with it after a few more campaign attempts.
I’m thinking I might do a short YouTube video series on a campaign at some point, and I’d feel a lot better about that if I could make it more inclusive. It’s got such great gameplay.
That’s good to know about Blazing Desert, thanks! That’s somewhat redemptive, that people of color at least made a DLC.
And yeah, I agree that the “we were trying to make it like medieval Europe” doesn’t work here. They can add necromancers, undead, and massive snow apes to enhance their fantasy version of medieval Europe, but adding women who aren’t whores or black people to the core game breaks an emphasis on historical accuracy?
How stable/balanced is that Legends Mod Beta? It looks interesting but I’m always a bit leery of beta mods.
Having just started back on my PC after having played for 6 weeks on the Switch, I intend on downloading and fiddling with it this week before I start a serious campaign. I’ll try to report back.
Game score of 55. Try and beat that suckers!
Seriously though, this game is hard. On my next game on beginner everything setting moving to my third mission destination I got jumped by 12 barbarians with 7 war dogs. Maybe if I was more zoomed in micromanaging my walking I could have dodged it but as it was just instant slaughter.