Battle Brothers Ignominy Challenge

The misadventures of the Ringolos – Days 16 to 20

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Day 16
We follow the tracks and meet a pack of direwolves that we put down without much trouble.

On our way back west to the major towns, me let curiousity get the better of us and follow a panicked man into the woods. We briefly lose track of him, but find his mangled corpse after a while. Before we get a chance to decide what to do, direwolves pounce on us!

The surprise attack leaves us disorganised, but we quickly recover and form two solid flanks.

We are very lucky to outnumber the wolves two to one, otherwise this could be our end. Our luck holds once more and we collect a few more pelts to sell off.

We run into a group of bandits just east of Wunderstadt. We chase them down, but their archer and two raiders make it an even fight. Alfgeir, who volunteered to join us after we shared some food with him, gets filled with arrows. Still, he did his part during his short career and repaid our generosity many times over. We get a nice hunting bow for Babar, a kite shield, a flail and a nice leather lamellar armor that is better than anything we currently sport.

Day 17
We hire a replacement for Alfgeir in Wunderstadt, Eberecht the gravedigger, an unimpressive soldier that is brighter than average.

We sell our accumulated pelts and end up with just over 2000 crowns. That banner will soon be ours.

We agree track down the men who stole a town grandee’s ceremonial staff for just over 400 crowns.

We catch the bandits after going through some swamps to the west. We can see that they lack discipline, as their helmetless pikeman ends up isolated right in front of our two flail holders. Hopefully, they can bash his head in and start a panic in the enemy ranks

The pikeman doesn’t survive his face-first encounter with a flail and Babar the archer takes down the two-handed axe wielder. We rapidly take down the less dangerous thugs and surround the two raiders. We manage to stab one of them and recover his worn mail shirt. We also get a pike, so our back rank will be far deadlier from now on.

We head back to town to get paid, but we surprise a large pack of nachzehrers on the way. Even if no one will pay us for destroying them, it will be a good source of experience for us. We hand out a few spears. The battle is uneventful.

Day 18
Wunderstadt is continually harassed by bandits. They offer me 1440 crowns to raze the bandits’ fort. This sudden generosity makes me feel uneasy. I don’t think we are ready for this mission. We go south to Grafenhaven to see if they have anything less dangerous.

Grafenhaven also only has a three-skull contract, but the lower payout makes me think it will be a bit safer than the one in Wunderstadt. We agree to raze a bandit group’s hideout.

On the way there, the men ask me what our next goal should be. Having just made a banner, it seems logical to name a sergeant to carry it in battle.

Just as we approach the hideout, we see a group of bandits leave to camp and go into the nearby hills. That makes this the perfect time to strike, as we will face fewer bandits. Our armour is still damaged, but we are out of tools, so we switch the armour around and give the damaged pieces to our backliners. Our scout reports seeing some marksmen and some raiders, so we decide to wait until night to attack, which should make the marksmen way less effective.

We win the battle, but at a tremendous cost. Gustave and Horace both get killed. We just lost one of our three original survivors, the company’s most talented melee fighter. The company’s morale will suffer badly from this. Even in the darkness, the enemy marksmen made their shots count. If we had attacked during the day, we would have been slaugthered.

Still, we recover some very nice equipment from the battlefield: a pike, a two-handed warbrand, a strong hunting spear, some daggers, three strong helmets and a mail shirt

We make Kettilmund our sergeant after the battle. That shores up the men’s morale, but I have doubts about the wisdom a making an officer out of a coward.

Day 19
We make it back to town and get paid. The company is down to nine men, so we hire Erik the apprentice and Valdemar the fisherman. Erik is nothing special, but Wolfgang has potential

Day%20019%20-%20Wolfgang

We go back to Treiten. Before we even enter the town, the mayor runs up and begs us to defend the town from raiding parties. We would hate to see this nice village razed, so we agree to help them for 960 crowns. We set up our camp and wait for word of the bandits’ approach. Around the campfire, we decide to try to catch the eye of the noble houses. These village contracts allow us to survive, but we want more out of life than merely avoiding starvation.

Day 20
Way face 8 raiders, three of them armed with longaxes. This does not look good. We fall back so that we fight them on even ground.

We should have fallen back farther, as the longaxemen can swing at us from higher ground. Still, we win the battle with only one loss: Erik the apprentice, one of our new recruits. We pick up three longaxes and some nice armour.

We make it back to town and rest for the night.

 W I D O W  M A K E R S

Being a journal of the Widow Makers battle company: Days 31 - 35.

War late game crisis
QT3 map seed
Veteran/Veteran/Medium/IronMan
Permanent Destruction disabled.

After our last action We limped into Wunderstant a crippled company, with almost half the men seriously wounded. We marched back out the next day as a fully functional fighting outfit again, though the cost of it was staggering. When the healing brothers from the monastery presented me with their bill it was all I could do to suppress showing the surge of anger I felt. Theirs is a monopoly and at times such as these, I fear they take full advantage. I gritted my teeth, paid their bill and left as quickly as I could.

As a result, we marched back into Tanndorf with only a day’s pay for the men and 2 days of food in reserve. I sold off some of the less needed equipment and I can meet payroll for 2 more days now. But, we need work and we need it fast. Fortunately, Tanndorf has what we need.

There are two contracts for us to consider here. One pays well but looks to be very dangerous. The other is less dangerous but the pay isn’t as good. I have decided to take the lesser one. We have no financial margin for error currently and can ill afford a host of new injuries. We need to get in, get out, and get paid and do it as efficiently and with as few injuries as possible.

We take the contract to hunt down the thieves of a rare coin collection. We follow their winding trail though the forest and up into the mountains. We make contact there in the foothills and our scouts report there are 12 of them. They outnumber us, which is bad.

But, fortunately they are a rabble, which is good. Badly armed and trained. Even better, we have the high ground.

We move quickly to take advantage of the terrain and soon they begin to fall like wheat before the scythe.

It’s over very quickly and we unleash the company hound to run down the last fleeing man. The thief gets away but that’s probably for the best. If he was forced to stand and fight, that ax could very well have killed the pooch with one blow.

Eugen did yeoman’s work felling 4 thieves with his deadly flail during the battle. Best of all, there were no major injuries or damage to equipment.

The battle spoils contained little of note besides a spare nasal helmet.

Back in Tanndorf, we collect our pay and move on to the more lucrative contract. I know from bitter experience that the undead seem to like to take these village talismans for some reason so it could be extremely dangerous. We shall see.

The location is an abandoned keep a good half days journey west of Tanndorf. I don’t like the looks of it but cautiously we go in anyway. This is going to be a snatch and run operation.

We find and grab the village’s missing trinket just fine, but then, as soon as we do…

Ambushed by what looks to be the skeletal remains of an ancient legion, heavily armed, heavily armored, and highly disciplined. I want no part of it. We have what we came for so I instruct the men to retreat in good order, double-time. Our job is to retrieve Tanndorf’s damn trinket, not to fight the legions of hell for it.

We move calmly and with purpose, there is no panic, soon we are all in position to withdraw from the field of battle. The retreat is successful. There are no casualties.

We have no battle loot but we have what we came for, so back to Tanndorf we go, where they pay us a princely sum for what turns out to be very little work. The company coffers are replenished and we buy some much needed food and medical supplies.

There’s no more remaining work in Tanndorf so we head south again to Treiten. It also has a very dangerous contract. Strangely, they have the same type of contract to retrieve their own village gewgaw that we just completed in Tanndorf. We take the job since with some caution, this should be easy money.

Yes, this is the same abandoned keep we just visited a day ago. These undead must have quite a collection of these things. The men know the drill now. Sneak in, grab the artifact and then run like hell.

It works again. As I always tell the men, if we don’t need to fight to accomplish the objective, then we don’t fight.

On the way back to collect our pay, the men are all feeling pretty smug, laughing and joking about which men wet their drawers running from the dead legion. The scouts certainly weren’t doing their job. Suddenly we are being chased by a necromancer and his 14 weidergangers. We stop running when a large, well armed company from the nearby keep passes us headed in the other direction and begins chasing the necromancer, who then turns and flees. Well, we want in on this so we turn and follow both parties down the road to where the two forces have just engaged in combat. We jump into the fray, hoping to take advantage of the situation and scavenge some spoils and experience at little to no risk to ourselves.

We enter the battle on the south of the action and quickly move north to make contact.

There they are. We begin to pick off strays from the main action.

We want to kill that necromancer in hopes of getting some of his gear. That hat would look mighty nice on one of our bowmen.

The other company is doing most of the work. We kill our share but spend most of our effort surrounding and killing the necromancer and his guard. We take him down and without him raising the dead every turn the battle is over. Unfortunately, we do not get any worthwhile loot and not much experience. Still, no one was injured and it was a worthwhile effort.

On the road back to Treiten, we make a discovery. We are becoming very well stocked for tools.

We collect a very nice payday at Treiten and since they have no more work for us, we travel south again to Wunderstadt, which has become our informal base of operations here in the south. Over a round of ale at the tavern we take stock. Over the past 5 days we’ve gone from a hungry, ill supplied company teetering on the edge of insolvency to one with full supplies and enough coin to pay and feed the men for a week or more. Better, no one died or even got injured. We all raise a cup to the goddess opportunity, for surely she has blessed us this week.

Keep it up!

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The misadventures of the Ringolos – Days 21 to 25

Day 21
Tandorf asks us to defend them against bandit. For a few hundred crowns, we agree.

Day 22
We camp outside the village through the night. As the sun rises, we spot the bandits, but another mercenary company jumps them right away. Their help is very welcome, and we don’t have any way of turning it down. Together, we crush the bandit troop.

We take a simple caravan contract to Fuchsberg in the west. The plan is to head up north once we get there.

Day 23
The trip is uneventful. Fuchsberg is having problems with bandits and we promise to take care of it for 800 crowns. We also hire Raban the apprentice, who turns out to have some potential. Hopefully, he can survive long enough to reach it.

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We soon reach the Greedy Hearts Hideout. Our scouts reports a fair number of archers, so we fall back unnoticed and wait until night falls to attack.

What a catastrophe! It seemed like an ordinary contract and the enemies didn’t seem too dangerous, but this battle might spell the beginning of the end for the Ringolos. Wolfgang the fisherman was killed and both Eugène and Wilreich, two of our most experienced soldiers, were struck down and suffered permanent injuries. Eugène can barely put three words together anymore (brain damaged - decreased initiative and experience gain, but improved resolve) and Wilreich left foot is a mangled stump (maimed foot - 1 more action put expended per tile moved). With Gustave’s recent death, out of our four best frontline fighters, two have been killed and two are greatly diminished. Things look grim and the men’s confidence is shaken.

To add insult to injury, Valdemar injures Eugène after mistaking him for an intruder while standing guard later that day!

Day 24
We make our way north to Gunnheim. The only job on offer is a cargo delivery to the next settlement to the north-west. It pays just over a hundred crown, but we were heading there anyway and, in our state, it’s better to avoid any combat for a few days.

Day 25
Thankfully, the trip goes without any trouble. The village of Wolfhaiden asks us to attack a bandit settlement for 540 crowns. It’s not a contract that will make us rich, but we wouldn’t want to take on anything more dangerous right now.

We reach the bandit’s lair just after midday. We can’t get close enough to the camp to see what numbers we are facing, so we will go in blind. Eugène and Wilreich are too badly injured to join the attack, which means that the company will go into battle without its two best fighters.

We end up facing seven enemies: five raiders and two archers. This should be doable.

We lose our latest recruit, but the rest of the company pulls through unscathed. We make it back to the village by dusk. Our cart is almost full, so we decide to trek up north to the citadel of Helleborg to sell off our accumulated loot.

I had to take a BB break because I was burning out on it. 😕

So keep writing and I’ll keep reading.

Don’t worry about it, better to put it down for a while than to get sick of it for good.

Doing this playthrough made me realize that playing in chunks of around five in-game days every other day is the perfect pace for me. It makes me pay more attention to each decision and keeps complacency and overconfidence in check. That’s a good thing in ironman mode!

Alternating between this and Battletech for the last week has really made me appreciate how brisk the battles and exploration are. I think a single Battletech contract takes as long as a five day stretch of Battle Brothers.

Yeah this game is dangerous because you finish whatever quest or battle and you have just enough time to get another contract, then maybe just enough time to do that contract…

then you realise you’ve been playing for 30 days straight.

Exactly! It’s impressive how every small aspect of the game feeds into the other ones. Either one of your key brothers is close to leveling up and gaining a key perk, you need tools and medical supplies to recover from a tough battle, you’re close to realizing an ambition, or you’re heading towards a specific settlement to buy or sell equipment or hire new brothers. Simply playing the game generates all these short-term goals.

I haven’t updated in close to a week, but I am not abandoning this challenge. I have an update that is almost ready to post, but I will spend the next two weeks in Paris so it will have to wait until I return home.