Battle Brothers

INTRO:

Every once in a while, the indie scene would have the emergence of a particularly noteworthy title. Its notability would lie in some ingenious innovations, which make it stand out from the rest. Yet, at the same time, it might well have aggravating designs.

Such is the case with Battle Brothers, an indie title that has been garnering attention for its rewarding combat and the dedication of its developers in expanding gameplay content in an age where further development dries up quickly. Yet, it has some problems in its quality-of-life designs and dependency on luck.

PREMISE:

The game appears to be set in some alternate version of the medieval eras in Western Europe. There are noble houses that are jealous of each other and there are country-sides and forests that are infested with bandits. Standards of living are generally terrible for the masses.

There are fantastical elements, but there is no comfort to be had from them. There are the greenskin menace and uprising of the dead, for example. One would wonder how humanity could ever survive in such a hostile world, but fire, steel and wit go a long way – something that the gameplay of Battle Brothers emphasizes very well.

The player character is the leader of a mercenary band. In the base package of this game, it is a band that has gone through hard times. There are more origin stories in later DLC packages.

Anyway, regardless of its origins, the mercenary band has the long-term goal of earning its fortune through blood and iron, in the hope that some members would survive long enough to eventually retire to an easier life.

It is a simple premise that works for a game that is not meant to tell great stories. Even so, there is some good writing to be had in this game.

THE MERCENARY BAND & ITS DISEMBODIED LEADER:

Prior to recently released DLC, the leader of the mercenary band is not represented at all in the roster. Although the narrative mentions that he is there, he is not a player character. In other words, he would not be put in danger, at least as long as there is one other member left. If all of the other members die, he dies as well and it would be game-over.

Therefore, the player has to maintain the numbers of the mercenary band. Quite a few members are going to die, mostly due to the player’s bad/foolhardy decisions and sometimes due to really bad RNG rolls.

As the leader, the player is the paymaster of the group and also makes a lot of decisions, including even the pieces of gear that individual members would use. Indeed, the band would fall apart if the player has poor planning and lousy analytical skills. That said, most failures can be blamed on the player – most.

THE MERCENARY:

Each member is his own person. (There are only ever Caucasian males, by the way.) He has his own statistics, background and quirks. However, those are all the differences between him and the others.

Every man is expected to hold a weapon – a man-made weapon, used in ways that a medieval man would use. There would be no diversity of capabilities like those in typical fantasy RPGs. Simply put, everyone is either of the warrior archetype, or the bowman sort. Even a man who was a monk, a bard or a beggar is expected to bear arms. (The bard brings a lute to the team, but the lute has no use other than being a bludgeoning instrument.)

In other words, the player should not expect to be playing with a diverse array of characters with vastly different capabilities.

THE BAND:

In a standard playthrough, the Mercenary Band can only have up to 20 men. The size of the roster determines how quickly the band moves on the overworld. More people means slower speed. Therefore, it is in the player’s interest not to have a group that is too big, lest it becomes unable to escape from hostile groups that are pursuing it.

Only 12 members can be deployed into battle. The rest are supposedly in reserve, but they cannot be called into battle as reinforcements. The reserve is meant for convalescing members.

Later DLC would introduce different limitations on the band’s deployment in battle. These will be covered in a later review.

CHARACTER BACKGROUNDS:

Every man has a background, which mainly determines his starting statistics and sometimes levels. Understandably, characters from martial origins have better combat performance than those who do not, even if they are of the same level.

However, characters with martial backgrounds tend to have higher demands for their stipends. Therefore, the player might have to make do with lesser fighters first, before replacing them with better ones after the band has achieved better finances.

TRAITS:

Every man is an individual. In addition to his background, there are his traits, good and/or bad. If the player is lucky, the prospective recruit has good traits, such as bonuses to stats. Otherwise, the recruit has problems that make him an unreliable or sub-par fighter.

Prior to recent updates, the player has to cross his/her fingers and hope to get a recruit with good traits. In the current version, the player can pay a small amount of money in order to reveal the traits of a recruit, if any. This is a handy feature, if the player is playing on Iron-man mode.

THE OVERWORLD AND FIELD OF BATTLE - FOREWORD:

The gameplay is split in between two types of screens: the overworld, and the battle-zone. The overworld is generated at the start of the playthrough, replete with terrain and population centres. This screen is how the player will know where he/she has or wants to go to next. It also shows the whereabouts of the band, as well as other groups that are moving about. The trails of these groups are also shown in this screen, which will be described later.

The battle-zone is procedurally generated whenever battle commences. The procedures consider the terrain that the battle is taking place on, as well as how many sides are represented in the battle. Generally, all sides start at equal distances to each other, or at least the game tries to. As the number of sides increases, the procedural generation can produce a battle-zone with nasty starting circumstances.

THE MERCENARIES DO NOT SLEEP:

The mercenaries might be mortal, but they do not need to sleep. They can travel during the night as well as day, though night travel is a bit slower.

Considering how the gameplay would emphasize human frailties, that the men do not sleep can seem unbelievable. However, this does streamline the gameplay; having to stop the band so that they can sleep would have been unexciting.

FOG OF WAR:

At the start of a playthrough, the regions around population centres (more on these later) are revealed. The rest of the overworld is obscured by grey clouds. As the player’s band moves around, they reveal more of the overworld. This is nothing new in video games, of course.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a second layer of fog that shows what the mercenary band can currently see. This omission is a significant design oversight, because the sight range of the band changes according to the time of the day and their elevation.

HEALTH - FOREWORD:

The mercenaries are mortal, so they can be hurt and hurt bad. Each man has a meter of health that represents how close he is to death’s door. If his health is reduced to zero, he is quite dead.

Health can be lost in both battles and the overworld. Health loss in battle due to wounds can lead to death quite readily. In the overworld, health loss tends to occur through the outcomes of random events that put the band or specific members in trouble. This kind of health loss is rarely fatal, thanfully. For example, already badly wounded members would not be involved in random events with outcomes that wound members.

However, already badly wounded members can still die from their debilitating injuries in random events that are associated with those injuries. These will be described later.

There are no fast ways to regain significant amounts of health immediately. However, as long as the band has medical supplies, any wounded member will eventually heal to full health.

MOOD:

Again, the mercenaries are mortal. They have needs and wants, and for better or worse, these are simplified as “mood” ratings.

The default for their mood ratings is “Content”, at which no advantages or setbacks are forthcoming. All mood ratings will eventually reset to Content over time.

Typically, the mood of a member is raised when things happen the way he likes. Generally, good things that happen to the band would raise the mood of everyone. That is, unless humour is involved, in which case at least one member might have been the laughing stock.

Conversely, things that they do not like reduce their Mood when they happen. Suffering Injuries is perhaps the most common, as is having to retreat from a losing battle. Reneging on ambitions that have been declared is also another source of displeasure.

The men’s mood ratings are converted into Morale ratings when they are fielded in battle, so mood does matter to combat. There will be more on Morale later.

If a mercenary’s mood is too low, he might just desert; this member is lost forever.

FOOD:

Yet again, the mercenaries are mortal, so they have to eat. According to the narrative of the game, the men initially carry their own sacks of food, which they presumably leave with the reserve when they go into battle. They later get better means of transporting their provender.

Anyway, the game displays food consumption as a daily statistic, but this is just an estimate. Food is actually consumed in certain times of the day (and night). More food will be consumed as the band travels, and even more if they are travelling through tough terrain. If the band runs out of food, mood tanks quickly.

Food eventually spoils. Conveniently, each food item has a timer that displays how long before it spoils, in addition to a counter that shows the units of consumption that it has remaining. Interestingly, as long as the food item has not spoiled, it is edible and does not lose its quality. Food items that are close to spoiling will also be consumed first.

Food items have quality. Having more high-quality food items than low-quality ones raises the likelihood of positive random events that involve the men’s appreciation for good food. The converse is true, but it is easier for the player to find sources of high-quality food than sources of poor-quality ones.

After all, good food are made by humans and can be bought at human population centres. What poor quality food there is, is strongly implied to be the flesh of monsters.

MONEY:

Ultimately, when a human is down and out in a medieval society without a safe job, they will be forced to use their bodies in vocations that are more … visceral. Women can always fall back to the oldest profession in civilization, but the men do not have this option in such a society. Conveniently, the dark times for humanity happen to make available for them careers as mercenaries.

Therefore, any mercenary, even he who comes from an ascetic background such as a monk, expects to be paid in that all too worldly of resources – coin.

There is no limit to the amount of money that the band can have; the band is always assumed to have the means of carrying all those metal discs around.

Money is mainly earned by gathering and selling loot, despite the mercenary band’s official profession. There are many brigands and bandits to kill, and they happen to drop readily saleable loot – namely whatever gear that can be salvaged from their corpses. Humanoid inhumans such as the Greenskins and the Undead also drop saleable loot.

The other source of income is the pursuit and completion of contracts. The mercenary band can only ever pursue one contract at a time, however. Most contracts would also require the band to travel quite some distance away from whomever gave the contracts, so the player might want to consider finding things to loot along the way.

Money is used to purchase needed supplies that the band could not get from looting. If the player can work up a profit, that can be spent on purchasing higher-quality gear for them.

GEAR:

When the uncaring world tosses hostile things at a man, he has to be ready to receive. The equipment that he has on his person is how he can prepare for this.

Each man has a number of equipment slots that can be filled with gear. There is headwear and armor, which determine the base amount of protection that they can have.

Then, there are the things that they can hold in their arms. One of these will be a weapon, of course. The other, if any, would be a shield or a throwing net. A mercenary cannot dual wield weapons, however; this is not that kind of game.

The mercenary also has an accessory slot. This is filled by something that do not belong to the usual categories of gear. In the base game package, this is usually a piece of jewellery that grants small bonuses to the wearer’s capabilities, or a wardog.

There is a slot for the ammunition of bows and crossbows. This slot can only ever be filled with these.

Finally, there are two slots for any items that the man has stowed away somewhere on his person. These two items will count towards the man’s burden, which will be described shortly. These items can include spare weapons, if the player intends the mercenary to have backup weapons or consumables like field bandages.

Just about everything that a mercenary would equip on his person would weigh him down, perhaps with the exception of anything in the accessory slot. In particular, the items in the stowage slots will have their burden counted in full, without their benefits being imparted at least until they are used or correctly equipped.

This burden is applied as a penalty on the max Fatigue of individual mercenaries. Fatigue will be described later, because it is a gameplay element that is only applicable in combat.

Almost all pieces of gear can degrade, so the player should have spare gear in the inventory for the occasion when a piece of gear is destroyed or otherwise lost.

GEAR DURABILITY:

Just about anything that a mercenary can equip has a durability rating, representing the amount of wear and tear that it can take before it is destroyed.

Generally, low-quality or primitive gear have lousy durability. Conversely, master-crafted gear has high durability, which is just as well as these are expensive items.

As long as a piece of gear has even one point of durability left, it can be repaired completely. Therefore, it is in the player’s interest to not only keep track of the health of the mercenaries and the durability of their gear.

Repairing gear requires tools, which are a consumable resource. Any gear that is to be repaired will be automatically repaired over time. Who is doing the repairs or how many gear pieces there are to be repaired do not appear to matter. The tools can be used on anything too, from rusty crudes to masterworks.

Tools are rather expensive consumables, however. On the other hand, some population centres, like cities, produce enough of them such that their prices are affordable. Furthermore, the player could decide which pieces of gear to repair and which to ignore, so maximizing the cost-efficiency of tool consumption is not impossible.

AMMUNITION:

Bows require arrows, whereas crossbows require bolts. Both are different munitions, but for gameplay simplicity, they draw from the same resource pool, which is simply called “ammunition”. The band can only carry a limited amount of ammunition, but the maximum is usually enough to supply several ranged weapons for a long while.

Ammunition is drawn and consumed from the pool before the start and after the end of a battle, but not during it. Therefore, the player must carefully decide the number of ammo containers that a character brings into battle, as well as the amount of ammunition that will be consumed afterwards if the band is victorious.

INVENTORY:

Other than the things that are already on the persons of the mercenaries, the band can carry other things in their inventory, such as food. Inventory space is limited, however, so the player will need to strike a balance between supplies and spare gear for the team.

As mentioned earlier, the band are carrying sacks at first, but eventually they can upgrade to carts and wagons. These upgrades are implemented in-game as an increase in the number of items that the band can have.

POPULATION CENTRES:

Population centres are places where humanity are concentrated, and where the player can resupply the band.

However, not all population centres are equal, so their ability to provide for the player varies. Cities can provide the most goods and services. Towns are a step below, and villages the least.

Still, even the least of them has some basic goods that the player can purchase, if only to stave off doom. However, the least of the population centres often has gouging-high prices for its goods; the game explains this away as the premium that the player plays for buying things that the people of that place need for themselves.

CITIES ARE BEST IN THE LONG RUN:

In the long run, cities are better places for the band to resupply. They have more services and items for the player to choose from, after all.

Unfortunately, this also means that the player might neglect the regions around lesser population centres. This can be especially a problem for playthroughs in which the player has enabled the permanent destruction of population centres.

This could have been allayed if the procedural generation of the overworld can guarantee a more geographically balanced distribution of population centres, but this is not the case.

Population centres will never upgrade to a higher-tier one. Regardless of how much the player might try to help some backwater village, it will never grown beyond a backwater village. This is perhaps understandable, because the game takes place across a span of days.

INFRASTRUCTURE:

Some population centres have infrastructure that determines how much that they can offer and how well they can defend themselves. This infrastructure appears as buildings in the vicinity of the population centres. For example, an Iron Mine next to a city would mean that the city can offer more weapons and armor, though not necessarily at a higher quality.

The buildings can be attacked and destroyed by marauders. This causes the population centre to lose whatever benefits that the buildings were providing. However, the buildings will eventually be rebuilt, after which the benefits are restored. During the rebuilding phase, the population centres will also have the “Rebuilding” status effect applied, which increases the prices of goods that are building materials.

STATUS EFFECTS FOR POPULATION CENTRES:

Speaking of status effects, the population centres will have buffs and de-buffs applied on them when things happen to them. For example, if they have been recently attacked by raiders (be they human bandits or greenskin marauders, or some others), they will get the “Raided” status, which reduces their offerings. For another example, if the player has recently escorted a supply caravan to a settlement, that settlement gets the “Well Supplied” buff, which increases the number of goods sold and ease prices.

De-buffs may lead to the offering of contracts about the source of the de-buffs. Returning to the example of the “Raided” de-buff, the settlement’s elders may offer a contract about hunting down the raiders and putting them to the sword, which removes the de-buff. Moreover, the completion of such contracts would ingratiate the population centre to the player’s band.

REPUTATION:

Speaking of ingratiation, each population centre has a meter regarding its relationship with the player’s band. The relationship starts at neutral, but will change as the player takes on contracts offered by the administrators of these places. Understandably, fulfilling contracts in a satisfactory manner improves that centre’s regard for the player’s band, whereas screwing up does the converse.

It is generally in the player’s interest to maintain a good reputation with any population centre. A good reputation translates to better prices and higher possibilities of higher-quality goods appearing among its offerings.

If relationships sour though, either due to the player screwing up contracts or deliberately attacking their people, the population centre perceives the player’s band as a threat. If the player’s band encroaches, the centre will respond to its proximity by spawning a militia group that goes after the band.

Relationships eventually revert to the default level, including relationships that have gone sour. Of course, this reflects the short memories of humans.

MARKET:

Regardless of the size and prosperity of any population centre, it will always have a market, unless it is struck with some debuff that causes the market to temporarily disappear.

The player can sell just about anything in any market. The prices vary considerably from one market to another, however, so the player will want to keep in mind which population centre offers the best prices. The asking prices of items are shown, together with their nominal prices.

POOR U.I. FOR TRADING:

Yet, there are a number of shortfalls in the design of the user interface for trading. Firstly, and most notably, there are no means of rearranging the inventory of the other party in the transaction. There are no means to filter it either, much less any feature to make a search based on keywords.

The only good thing about the U.I. design is the artwork for the things on sale. Their large icons make it easy to recognize which items are what as the player scrolls through the other party’s inventory. Without these, buying and selling things would have been an unbearable experience.

PURCHASED RESOURCES NOT IMMEDIATELY ENTERING THE POOLS:

To replenish the ammunition and tool supply of the band, the player has to purchase ammunition and tool items from markets. However, these items are not immediately added to the supply counters. This only happens after the player exits to the overworld. This means that the player might not have enough item slots in the inventory to store other things until after the player undergoes the tedium of exiting and re-entering the population centre.

This is likely a design gap that the developers do not know how to deal with, considering that there is an in-game statement that mentions that the conversion only happens after the band exits to the overworld.

NO FEATURE TO TRACK PRICES:

Presumably, the markets would allow the player to conduct some trading. Indeed, capacity expansions for the player’s inventory should enable this.

In practice, this is just not doable. There is no tool to keep track of the demands for goods that the population centres have, and there is no feature to show the status effects that they have. Furthermore, trade goods that are offered by a market may be sold at levels far higher than their nominal prices, even if they are a producer of the goods.

Following the maxim of “buy low, sell high” will be difficult in this game. This is a lost opportunity to make the gameplay more complex and rewarding.

SERVICES:

The main reason, by far, to visit population centres is to avail oneself to the services that are useful to the wandering mercenary. Foremost of these is the market, which has already been mentioned. The other is the Temple, which is needed for the treatment of Injuries, which will be described later.

Next, there are the specialty shops that offer weapons and armor. The Armorer offers armor pieces, shields and helmets, as well as pieces of additional armor that can be tacked on for additional durability. The Weaponsmith offers melee weapons. The Fletcher offers bows and crossbows, as well as ammunition stocks.

The Kennel raises and sells wardogs, which the player can deploy during battle to harry fleeing opponents, or just give the enemy more targets. They are among the most useful assets that the player can have, but wardogs are not durable fighters. There will be more elaboration on them later.

Then, there is the Harbor, which is really just there to help the player move the band from one coastal location to another. After all, the band cannot move across bodies of water. There are no ship-to-ship battles or boarding actions by the way.

TAVERN:

No medieval fantasy setting would be complete without some establishment that offers alcoholic beverages.

The player can spend some money to raise the mood of the mercenaries. However, who gets their mood raised is randomized, and how much their mood is raised is also randomized.

Moreover, some of the men would get drunk, and it takes a while for their drunkenness to go away; they are not very dependable in combat when they are drunk. After that, they might get a hang-over, which also saps their combat performance.

Obviously, drinking at Taverns is not a reliable way to raise moods, but it is the most available.

The other reason to frequent Taverns is to listen to the rumors. All of the rumors are true, though some are vaguely worded and lacking in details. Yet, some rumors are detailed enough to give an idea for the player on what to do next.

The player can throw around some gold to get more tongues wagging, but what this does is that it cycles through the list of rumors that have been generated for that Tavern. The player will not get more information on a previously-stated rumour. Eventually, the rumours will run out and any further gold that is spent is wasted.

FAMED GEAR:

After about 50 days or so into a playthrough and after the player’s band has gained considerable Renown (more on this later), special weapons and armor, considered as “famous” in-game, begin to appear. These gear pieces are a cut above the rest. They tend to do more damage than their regular counterparts and have better durability. Some even have less fatigue costs to equip and use.

There are two types of famous gear: ones with randomly generated names, and the “legendary” ones, which have specific names.

The legendary ones often have capabilities that even the randomly-named ones do not have. Incidentally, many of the legendary ones are introduced through DLC, which will be elaborated on in other review articles. Getting the legendary ones can be rather arduous, however, and more often than not involves some battles where the band is heavily outnumbered by a very diverse enemy army.

Randomly-named famous gear pieces are easier to find. Specialty shops begin to stock these as the player’s band gains more renown. The narrative reason for this is that the shops see the mercenaries worthy of being their customers, and the band likely could afford to buy them now anyway. These gear pieces are heavily overpriced, however.

On the other hand, the markets will never sell these. The other alternative means of getting them requires the player to fight champion-class enemies, which are understandably tough and are often accompanied by underlings.

HOSTILE GROUPS:

Whenever the band discovers a hostile group in the overworld, the player is alerted of their presence with an ominous sound effect, but there is no other alert indicator. The player has to pause the game and look around to spot the hostile group.

The hostile group’s tooltip shows its composition, assuming that it is close enough for the player’s band to check it out. The distance at which checking can be done is not shown to the player. Checking it out can be risky, especially if the group is powerful enough to give the player’s band a rough beating.

Generally, the hostile group would have seen the player’s band too. It will run some decision-making scripts, such as gauging its strength against that of the player’s band. It has complete information on the player’s band, by the way.

If the player’s band is powerful enough to wipe it out, the group might just move away in the opposite direction instead. If it does not flee, then it will not actively pursue the player’s band either. However, if the hostile group is confident of its strength, it will pursue the player’s band.

Hostile groups generally appear out of randomly generated spawn locations. These spawn locations will be described later. They will then wander about, looking for something to fight. What they do after that fight depends on how successful they were, and what kind of creatures they are. These will be described further later when the types of enemies that the player would fight are mentioned.

ATTACKING NON-HOSTILE GROUPS:

If the player so wishes, the band can be made to attack a non-hostile group in the overworld. This is done through a combination of control inputs. Unfortunately, this option is not covered in the tutorials for the game. The player might have to discover this himself/herself through third-party sources of information.

Obviously, attacking a non-hostile group will anger the factions that the group belongs to, as well as the population centre that it came from.

SPAWN LOCATIONS:

Spawn locations are the lairs and staging points of hostile groups. The algorithms for their appearance on the overworld is unclear, though end-game scenarios make certain types of spawn locations appear more frequently.

They periodically create new hostile groups, meaning that if they are not dealt with, spawn locations can eventually overwhelm the overworld. However, many hostile groups happen to be hostile to each other too. In the absence of end-game scenarios, they cancel out each other while also providing enough opportunities for the player’s band to find things to kill.

Of course, the player could also just find these spawn locations and clear them out. Their locations may be divulged to the player through contracts that require their cleansing, from the rumours at Taverns by or simply stumbling onto them while the player’s band is moving about. Alternatively, the player could follow trails that lead away from roads or population centres, and follow them back to the spawn locations.

Spawn locations are always defended. If there is a hostile group that happens to be resting there, the player would be facing an even bigger fight.

Clearing spawn locations usually give better rewards than eliminating the hostile groups that they spawn. However, there are more risks too, other than facing the defenders. Some spawn locations, especially large ruins, can obscure the composition of the defenders, making it a bit more difficult to prepare the band for combat. These types of spawn locations can be used by more than one type of hostiles too, thus complicating predictions.

COMBAT – OVERVIEW:

The turn-based battles are the main draw of this game. Having the often-outnumbered mercenary band eliminate an opposing force that has numerical superiority and/or inhuman capabilities can be very satisfying. However, to do so, the player needs to know when to hold back and when to commit, if only to maximize the defensive and offensive abilities of the mercenaries.

MORALE & RESOLVE:

After the health of each combatant, his/her/its morale is the second-most important statistic. Many battles can be won by simply scaring the enemy.

A confident character has a bonus to his/her combat capabilities, whereas one that is close to breaking suffers penalties. Broken characters will attempt to flee the battlefield, and will take extra damage, especially from attacks of opportunity (more on these later).

The morale of the player’s mercenary depends on his mood prior to the beginning of the battle. Obviously, higher mood leads to better morale.

As for the enemies, their starting morale depends on what their hostile group had been doing. A hostile group that has been successful has better morale, but one that had taken substantial losses have lower morale.

Undead, of course, are completely unaffected by morale. They do not gain any penalties or bonuses, which sort of puts them at both an advantage and a disadvantage against living opponents. That said, a confident group that stays confident can reliably crush an undead one.

Regardless of a character’s current Morale, all attempts at changing his/its morale are rolled against his/its Resolve. Resolve checks determine whether a character gains or loses morale. A character loses morale when he/she/it fails a resolve check for morale loss, but lose none if he/she/it succeeds. A character can gain morale if he/she/it wins a resolve check for morale gain, but gain nothing if he/she/it fails. They involve a lot of RNG rolls and no guarantees, for better or worse.

LOSING MORALE:

Morale might be lost when a character is surrounded, or is hit and wounded. Morale loss can also occur when a comrade is slain, and more so if he/it is slain too close to the character. There are also characters with abilities that directly attack morale, such as the screams of Geists.

Characters with raised shields may lower their shields when they lose too much morale. Thus, surrounding an enemy with raised shields can be an effective way to make them more vulnerable, if the player is lucky enough such that the enemy screws up mood checks.

By far, losing comrades is the most likely cause of morale loss. Therefore, the player should prioritize disengaging characters that are about to be overwhelmed, and focus attacks on surrounded enemies to kill them faster and force the other enemies to make mood checks, if applicable.

GAINING MORALE:

Morale is not on a one-way trip to zero, but there are fewer sources of morale gains than morale losses. In the case of the mercenaries, characters with morale-raising abilities, like “Rally the Troops”, can raise morale. However, as mentioned earlier, there are no guarantees to the RNG rolls for morale gains.

By far, killing enemies is the easiest way to regain or raise morale. Therefore, it is in the player’s interest to spot opportunities to quickly eliminate an exposed enemy, use the momentum to force the other enemies to make mood checks and take advantage of the bonuses that morale gains provide.

FATIGUE:

Living characters have fatigue meters, which determine how much exertion that they can make before they tire out. As they tire themselves out, their fatigue meters fill up. If there is not enough free capacity left in the meters, they cannot take any action.

They do not suffer overt penalties as they build up fatigue, but there is a subtle setback; their initiative ratings drop. Indeed, the initiative ratings can drop so much that the fatigued characters can only have their turn after characters with low initiatives, such as the undead.

Speaking of which, undead, of course, do not have to worry about fatigue. With this advantage and their other advantage of not needing morale, they might seem too powerful for mortals. They have setbacks, however, and these will be described later.

Fatigue reduces over each turn, though there are certain abilities that human characters have that can accelerate this recuperation. However, to fully remove fatigue, they have to do almost nothing in their turns.

Max fatigue is reduced by any piece of equipment that has been equipped. Incidentally, the finer pieces of equipment, especially armor, are heavier and thus reduce more max fatigue. Therefore, the player has to be mindful about changes to the gear that a mercenary has equipped, lest he is too weighed down to do much.

WEAPON WEAR:

Weapons get worn down during battles from being used on enemies. It is rare for weapons to break during combat, however, even for old and brittle weapons like those used by Undead.

There is a lost opportunity here to implement an ability to destroy the weapon that is being wielded by an enemy. Such an ability would have allowed the player to greatly reduce the threat posed by specific enemies.

INFLICTING DAMAGE:

When an attack lands, it inflicts damage on both the armor and hitpoints of the target. The actual calculations can be seen in the combat logs. The equations have also been documented elsewhere, in case the player wants to know the algorithms that are used. In this review, simpler statements would be used to describe the equations that are used.

Firstly, having armor is better than having no armor. This might seem a simple statement, but more damage is apparently done on characters that completely lack armor than those who do have some armor left.

Secondly, hits to the head do far more damage than hits to the body. Hits to the head are tougher to pull off, however, because when attacks land, there is an RNG roll that decides whether it hits the head or body. There is a higher probability of hitting the body, that said. However, certain abilities and weapons, such as flails, increase the chances of hitting the head.

Thirdly, since there is armor for the body, and headwear for the head, having both is necessary in order to provide full protection for a character.

Fourth, if the target has a shield, there is a further RNG roll for hits that landed on the body, prior to damage calculation. This RNG roll determines whether the hit lands on the body or on the shield. If the latter occurs, a much simpler calculation is made, which will be mentioned later.

Fifth, damage from a hit is duplicated to two types: damage on hitpoints and damage on armor. Damage on armor is applied first, in order to get the nett remaining armor. The damage on hitpoints is calculated next, and one of the factors is the remaining armor on the location that is hit.

Suffice to say that in practice, the algorithms work. The new player can expect certain generalities about inflicting damage, such as heavily armored characters, i.e. characters with high durability armor, being much more difficult to wound with weapons that are not made to pierce armor, and that opponents with shields are more difficult to land telling hits on.

More experienced players, however, will want to learn more about the algorithms. This helps them pick the right weapons to use against the right opponents.

WEAPON PROPERTIES AGAINST ARMOR:

Speaking of which, there are many types of weapons, with the main differences being their handling of armor. Specifically, there is how much armor that they ignore when inflicting damage on hitpoints, and how much damage that they inflict on armor. These are represented as percentage multipliers, which can be a bit difficult for new players to understand.

For example, both hammers and maces have properties that make their hitpoint damage ignore some damage reduction from armor. However, maces have a higher rating for that and are thus more useful to eliminate physically weak foes who are trying to protect themselves with armor. On the other hand, hammers inflict far more armor damage, which makes them much more useful against heavily armored and naturally tough opponents, such as Orc Warriors, in a protracted battle.

Of course, such sophisticated considerations are only useful if there are armored opponents to worry about. Any weapon would be great against enemies that are not armored.

HITS ON SHIELDS:

As mentioned earlier, hits that are supposed to land on the body of the target may instead hit the shield that it is holding. Certain abilities, like Shieldwall, raises the likelihood of this happening.

Such hits are generally wasted; the hits will only do a damage of one point to the durability of the shield. That is, unless the attack is one that is specifically directed at shields, such as the Cleave Shield attack that can be performed with axes.

Therefore, it is generally in the player’s interest to have front-line characters armed with shields, and having flails and axes so that the band can handle enemies that are armed with shields.

INJURIES:

When hitpoint damage is successfully inflicted, there is a chance of inflicting debilitating injuries on the target. More hitpoint damage means higher likelihood of inflicting them, and higher likelihood of inflicting multiple injuries too.

Injuries are practically de-buffs that stay with a character throughout a battle and, in the case of the mercenaries, after it too. NPCs do not persist after battle, so Injuries are not an issue to the enemy or allies. Nonetheless, there are reasons to keep track of any Injuries that enemies have sustained. For one, there are certain perks that grant bonus damage against any character that happens to have Injuries.

Characters with Injuries also break faster. In fact, taking an Injury immediately reduces their Morale, and any further Morale loss is amplified.

TEMPORARY DE-BUFFS:

In addition to Injuries, there are de-buffs that only last for the duration of the battle, but which are no less nasty.

The most common of these are bleeding wounds, of which there are several. It is possible for a living character to suffer all variants of bleeding de-buffs; undead, of course, do not suffer from bleeding at all. Still, regardless of how many of such de-buffs there are, a single application of bandages would remove all of them. Of course, the enemy can just inflict the bleeding wounds again.

(It should also be mentioned here that bandages can be applied by other characters on bleeding persons.)

There is also poison, which are typically the purview of goblins (and in a later DLC, giant spiders). Interestingly, poison does not inflict damage over time like it tends to do in video games. Rather, they inflict considerable stat de-buffs. As is typical of video game poisons though, poison in Battle Brothers can be neutralized with the application of conveniently universal antidotes.

ACTION POINTS:

Action points are the main resource that all characters have in this game’s combat. Action Points (AP) are used to do just about everything other than stay where one is. Every action has an AP cost, in addition to any Fatigue costs. Failing to have enough APs for an action means that action cannot be taken, understandably.

APs are generally on a one-way trip to zero, but there is a perk that lets characters regain APs upon making a kill. This is obviously one of the most useful perks that a mercenary can have, if only because there will be plenty of killing to be done.

ZONES OF CONTROL & ATTACKS OF OPPORTUNITY:

Each character exudes a zone of control one hex deep. Any enemy that happens to enter one of these hexes is considered to be engaged in close combat with the character, and vice versa. However, if a character is stunned or has broken, the character no longer emits a zone of control. If a broken character is still in the zone of control of an enemy, then he/she/it is in quite a lot of trouble.

Characters that are engaged in close combat may not move away from where they are without giving each adjacent enemy an attack of opportunity. These attacks of opportunity can happen without any fatigue cost, though the durability of the weapons that are used for these attacks will be affected.

As long as a single attack of opportunity lands, that character cannot move away. Any AP that has been spent on doing so is wasted too.

Therefore, a character that has been heavily engaged by a considerable number of enemies in a lot of trouble. Extrication is nigh-impossible, and attempts to do so without certain special abilities can end in disaster.

This also means that characters that have broken are vulnerable to attacks of opportunity, because broken characters always try to flee. Indeed, it might be in the player’s interest to simply not attack broken characters if they are already in the mercenaries’ zones of control and focus on some other enemy instead. They are likely to be killed by attacks of opportunity when their turn comes up.

MOVING THROUGH ALLIES:

A character can move through the hex occupied by an ally. This can happen if the path that the character would take includes two unoccupied hexes that are adjacent to the hex that the ally is on. However, if this requirement is not met, it cannot be done. Therefore, it is in the player’s interest not to have too many mercenaries – and their wardogs – bunch up, lest surrounding the enemy becomes more difficult.

SURROUNDING:

Speaking of surrounding enemies, this will be one of the player’s means of eliminating enemies. Surrounding an enemy grants accuracy bonuses to anyone that is doing the surrounding, with more bonuses for more complete surrounding. Surrounding a character also inflicts morale loss on that character.

This can happen to the player’s own mercenaries too, especially considering that enemies often outnumber them. Therefore, the player should be mindful about not overextending the mercenaries.

SHOOTING FROM AFAR:

Ranged attacks are best made from afar, but longer distances inflict greater penalties to the accuracy rolls. There are not a lot of ranged weapons that can attack from afar, but what there are happen to work differently from each other.

There is the Bow, which is the longest-ranged but consequently also the most susceptible to range penalties. The AP cost for using a bow combines both drawing arrows, nocking them and releasing them, and the archer can fire at most two in his turn. As added versatility, the Bow can be fired over a longer distance in return for a higher AP cost and more range penalties.

Next, there is the Crossbow, which has slightly shorter range than the Bow but significantly more power. Indeed, it can take just a single crossbow bolt into the face of an enemy to just kill it outright. The Crossbow also has low AP cost for firing, so the archer could fire and move within the same turn. Reloading the crossbow does cost considerable AP, however.

Both Bows and Crossbows require archers to carry items that are dedicated to holding ammunition, namely quivers. These quivers do reduce max Fatigue, so this is an additional cost on top of the cost for equipping the weapons.

Slings use rocks, which are described as “plentiful”. Gameplay-wise, this means that they do not need any ammunition at all. However, their AP cost is no less than the other ranged weapons, presumably because the user has to spend time to look for rocks. Furthermore, slings become obsolete rather quickly, due to their lack of damage output and short range. There are no upgraded versions of slings too. This is not Dungeons & Dragons (prior to the 5^th edition), after all.

THROWING WEAPONS:

Throwing weapons, on a per hit basis, do more damage than the aforementioned ranged weapons. Each throwing weapon is implemented in-game as a satchel of them, and is equipped like a weapon accordingly. Throwing weapons also have very short range. However, throwing weapons have a major problem: limited ammunition capacity.

In practice, using them requires considerable opportunity cost. They have considerable costs to max fatigue, and the turn that is spent on using them could have been spent on maneuvering characters to more advantageous positions.

SHOOTING PAST OBSTACLES:

Generally, if there is something next to a target and it is on the frontal arc relative to the shooter, there is next to no chance of hitting the target. On the other hand, a lucky hit is more than likely to hit the head of the target.

When shooting past obstacles, a miss does not mean a complete waste of the shot. Prior to making the shot, the player is shown the characters or environmental objects that pose as obstacles. In the case of the former, there is a significant chance of hitting the characters instead of the target in the outcome of a miss.

Of course, if these interposing characters are the player’s own mercenaries, the player should refrain from making the shot. If these are enemies though, a cunning player may make the shot anyway, well-knowing that the shot might land on them. Indeed, statistically, if all the player wants is for the shot to hit something, this deliberate decision can maximize the chances for a hit.

It should be mentioned that there are no means of having a shot penetrate a target and hit another victim, however.

SHOOTING INTO MELEE:

Archers generally cannot shoot past obstacles, with the exception of shooting into melee at close range. If there is a comrade in between an archer and the target, and the target is just two hexes away, the archer can attack the target without any penalties.

This can be a bit unbelievable, but this is a better option than trying to have archers flank around the melee, which runs the risk of them being intercepted by an enemy that has disengaged from the melee.

CORPSES ON THE BATTLEFIELD:

Any slain character becomes a corpse on a hex. If there is already a corpse on a hex that a newly slain character was on, the corpse of that character is placed on an adjacent hex that does not have a corpse, and further away if the nearest hexes already have corpses.

Watching a battlefield get progressively covered in corpses can be viciously satisfying, especially if the corpses are mostly enemies’.

In the case of non-human characters, like beasts and monsters, corpses are mostly just for cosmetics. Almost nothing that they drop is immediately useful during battle anyway.

However, corpses of human characters, or formerly human, in the case of zombies, are important to keep track of. Human characters can drop items that may be useful, such as bandages and quivers of ammunition. Presumably, enemies could loot things off corpses too, but I have yet to observe this behaviour.

Another important reason to keep track of corpses is that they might come back as zombies. This will be described later. Perhaps the most important reason is to avoid giving opportunities for ghouls to feed. This will be described later too.

ROUND ATTACKS AND SPLASH ATTACKS:

There are very few means of making area of effect attacks that inflict damage. Only great weapons, like greatswords, can do round attacks, which hit everything around the user. However, a round attack builds up considerable Fatigue, and maximizing its effectiveness also means that putting the user at great risk of being surrounded.

It is this caveat that might sour wise players to the use of the two-handed great weapons. A shield and a one-handed weapon provides more versatility and better balance of offensive and defensive capabilities.

Splash attacks are mainly performed by smashing bottles of liquids onto enemies. Thus far, there are only a few types of these attacks, and they obviously require the expenditure of consumables. Furthermore, the bottle throws may miss entirely, wasting the player’s efforts at gaining the items in the first place.

BANDITS & BRIGANDS:

Bandits and brigands originate from camps in the forests, or ruins if they are not in the forest. They will go out to find weak groups to fight, generally avoiding the ones that can crush them. They will also frequently raid unprotected population centres, razing an infrastructure building or two. They may also prowl trade routes, if they are not searching for population centres.

After some fights, they will eventually return to their hide-outs. Their numbers are generally restored over time as they rest. However, if they have been successful, they may upgrade into a more powerful band, eventually having a named bandit leader.

Bandits and brigands are usually poorly equipped. The ones that appear later do sometimes have mid-tier weapons and armor, but their armor is usually of the low-quality variants that have a poor durability to fatigue cost ratio.

These hostiles are at the bottom of the rung among the enemies that the player would fight. They are a good choice if the player has some new members that need combat experience, or just need some money but at less risk.

GREENSKINS - OVERVIEW:

Greenskins behave much like Bandits and Brigands on the Overworld, with the exception that their spawn points are well and far away from civilization. In the narrative, they are invaders, after all.

There are two types of Greenskins: Orcs and Goblins. They ignore each other, but will not form mixed groups – at least before an endgame crisis that concerns them.

ORCS:

Orcs often set up in ruins, since they do not have the patience to set up camps.

Orcs depend on their size and strength to get things done, as is typical of Orcs that are based on the ones in Warhammer. Their weapons are big and heavy; they have high damage, but their fatigue costs are terrible and they have penalties to accuracy rolls. This means that when orcs hit, they hit hard.

Orcs tend to make use of their charges as their opening attacks. At the least, charges stagger whoever is hit, causing the loss of initiative. This in turn means that the other orcs have a better chance of getting to move before their opponents.

Orcs also take a lot of damage, but most of them lack decent armor. The bigger and stronger orcs do have better armor, however.

GOBLINS:

Physically, goblins are push-overs. More often than not, it just takes a solid hit or two to kill one of them. However, goblins are hard to hit because of their size, and they get considerable bonuses from surrounding their opponents. Incidentally, goblins tend to outnumber the player’s band.

Some of them also use nets, and all of their archers come equipped with poison to upgrade their projectiles. Taking a leaf from Tolkien, some goblins also ride on dire-wolves, so the player has to kill both the riders and their rides.

Battles with goblins can get very unpleasant if the player’s band is outmaneuvered. Wise players usually fall back to defensible positions in the case of an ambush, or wait for them to spend their consumables on a shieldwall if the goblins did not manage to surprise the band.

Interestingly, goblin gear, especially their weapons, are quite well-crafted, such that they make good mid-tier weapons.

Goblins either set up in forests, or in swamps. This is for a good reason: they use the topologies of these locations to defend their hide-outs. Gameplay-wise, this means that the player’s band is more than likely to be ambushed when it attacks goblin camps. This can be unpleasant, because the band’s formation is mixed up. The Goblins also get to make the opening moves first too.

DIRE-WOLVES:

Dire-wolves are randomly spawned in forested regions. They have no lairs, and will continue roaming around looking for things to kill until they are slain. It is not clear how they can replenish their numbers.

Dire-wolves are the most straightforward of bestial creatures. They have very high initiative, meaning that they often move first. They can also move across considerable distances.

This is just as well because they will move into the range of the mercenaries’ attacks and have no action points left over to make attacks of their own in the first round. Their scripting is not really bright.

However, if the player fails to take advantage of their starting moves, things get hairy (no pun intended). Dire-wolves get considerable bonuses from surrounding their prey, and the AP cost of their attacks are low, meaning that they can make a lot of attacks in their turn. If they get to make kills, things just get worse because the kills empower them.

UNDEAD - OVERVIEW:

No fantasy setting that wants to be all dark and grim would be complete without the walking dead. Battle Brothers, of course, has them.

Undead have the dubious distinction of being the only enemies that have hard counters: holy water. Holy Water does nothing to anything else, but Holy Water that is tossed on undead immediately inflicts damage, bypassing any armor that they have. Of course, Holy Water is a rare thing to have, so it should be reserved for the most dangerous of undead enemies.

There are several types of undead: Wiedergangers, Geists, Ancient Legionaries, and Necrosavants.

WIEDERGANGERS:

Wiedergangers are practically zombies. The least of them are the cannon fodder of most undead armies. Their considerable numbers can be a problem during the early days of a playthrough, but eventually they become so much chaff when the mercenaries have gained high-tier weapons and armor, as well as improved their skills.

There are better-equipped walking dead of course. These are formerly brigands, town militia or even city watchmen. The most formidable of them are so-called “Fallen Heroes”, who are presumably famous warriors that have been recently deceased.

Among the undead, only the Wiedergangers can come back from being downed. They can do so on their own, without the need for a Necromancer to bring them back. However, this is a RNG-dependent occurrence, and one that happens prior to the start of the next round of combat. They also tend to move last.

Furthermore, arisen Widergangers are a shadow of their former selves, more so the second time around. They might not be holding weapons that they had before they went down, or they may be missing pieces of armor. They also only have half of their previous health. Indeed, re-arisen zombies are often a nuisance, but they can be deadly to mercenaries that already have built up a lot of fatigue.

ANCIENT LEGIONNAIRES:

The current civilization of humans have built their town and cities on top of what remains of the previous human civilization, which fell apart from some calamity. However, their pride has not died with them, and that has brought them back, albeit as rickety mockeries of what they once were.

Like in other medieval fantasy games, there are animated skeletons in this game too, and they happen to be of the disciplined army archetype, e.g. the legions of Khemri in Warhammer Fantasy. They still bear their ancient arms, shields and armor, though most of these are now so brittle that hammers and great weapons can blow through them rather easily.

What makes them deadly is that Ancient Legionnaires retain their combat skills. They fight much better than Wiedergangers do, e.g. they are more likely to form shieldwalls than Wiedergangers that happen to have shields. Furthermore, where Wiedergangers lack any ranged support, the Ancient Legionnaires do occasionally have bowmen.

NECROMANCERS:

Necromancers are one of few mortals that have discovered and attained the use of inhuman powers, namely the ability to raise the dead, or to be more precise, exclusively Wiedergangers. Hostile undead groups led by Necromancers rarely have other kind of Undead, but those that do can be formidable, if only because of their diversity of capabilities.

Anyway, a Necromancer can do one of two things. One of these is to possess a Wiederganger, which effectively buffs that Wiederganger with bonus APs and better combat skill. This can only be done once per turn. The other action that the Necromancer can perform, and can perform multiple times in the same turn, is raise Wiedergangers from the ones that have just fallen, or from mortals that had been slain. In particular, the Necromancer will prioritize raising the player’s mercenaries if they had been killed. Battle Brothers is a merciless game.

Cutting down a Necromancer early in the battle is a priority. This is not made easy, because there is almost always at least one Wiederganger that is next to the Necromancer that acts as a meatshield.

On the other hand, after the player’s band has improved considerably in power and skill, even a large group of zombies led by a Necromancer is easy. Having a Necromancer break after watching his zombie horde gets cut down is satisfying.

GEISTS:

Geists are ghosts. They do not have particularly powerful melee attacks, and they do not prioritize getting into melee. However, their melee attacks do bypass armor entirely, and inflict considerable Morale damage. They are especially devastating on broken and fleeing victims, which happen to be their preferred targets anyway. On the other hand, due to the ethereal nature of their attacks, they do not inflict Injuries.

Yet, their ethereal nature means that they are next to impossible to hit with ranged attacks, so if the player is facing an enemy force with a considerable number of Geists, having a melee weapon for each archer is important. Even so, hitting them in melee is not easy. Amusingly though, Geists are slain from a single hit from any weapon, including bites from Wardogs.

The main behaviour of Geists is to scream at their opponents, forcing them to make checks for Morale loss. This is rolled against their Resolve, so having high Resolve makes Geists near impotent. On the other hand, developing mercenaries to have high Resolve is not easy. Furthermore, the screams of Geists have an area of effect, so more than one victim have to make the RNG rolls.

NECROSAVANTS:

Among the forces of the undead, Necrosavants are perhaps the most dreaded. This is because their movement methods are magical, allowing them to circumvent the rules on zones of control and attacks of opportunity. They are particularly fond of going after archers.

Furthermore, they are surprisingly skilled at using their wicked Khopesh, and they are guaranteed to inflict bleeding wounds. Moreover, they regain some hitpoints when they inflict damage.

However, these abilities come at considerable costs to them. Firstly, they are not entirely undead. They can bleed, and they can be stunned. This will not be immediately clear to players who have expected them to have all of the advantages of being undead. Secondly, although they are great at dodging attacks, they have no armor whatsoever.

For wise but cold players, Wardogs make great bait for them. In between the player’s archers and the Wardogs, Necrosavants are more likely to go after Wardogs, thus giving the player some more turns to attempt to land hits on them.

NACHZEHRERS:

These creatures are ghouls. This article will henceforth refer to them as “ghouls”, if only because “Nachzehrers” is a handful to write, even for this author.

Ghouls follow undead around, especially Wiedergangers. Undead ignore them, likely because they are partially undead themselves, at least in the narrative. Gameplay-wise, they are not. They can bleed, lose morale and suffer Injuries.

In battle, they rarely if not never commit themselves to a fight. Rather, they hang about, waiting for characters to be slain. Afterwards, they go after the corpses, and spend APs to eat them.

The least of ghouls are barely any tougher than goblins, nowhere as fierce or skilled and are cowardly. After they have feasted though, they grow into a stronger and fiercer variant that is more likely to commit to battle. Their third and final form is very difficult to deal with, especially considering that it can just completely devour a mercenary and render him unusable as long as he is within its gullet. Even in their larger forms, they will still try to eat corpses where possible. This is important to keep in mind, due to how the game handles the creation of corpses, as mentioned earlier.

The main danger from the eating behaviour of the ghouls is that they restore health completely upon having eaten, thus wasting the player’s effort at harming them. They also gain a morale boost, making them even more difficult to eliminate.

Therefore, it is in the player’s interest to avoid giving the ghouls opportunities to feed. This is easier said than, because it means distributing damage among enemies without slaying them, which in turn means greater risk of being surrounded.

On the other hand, observant players might notice that ghouls have an overriding urge to feed, including even getting onto corpses that are right in front of the player’s warriors. If the player could estimate the number of APs that they need to move onto the corpses, the player could bait them into moving next to his/her warriors without them being able to feed in their turn. Slaying them in such a manner can be very entertaining.

It should be mentioned here that there is no benefit from fattening up the ghouls and killing them afterwards. In their case, high risk does not come with high reward.

LINDWURM:

Lindwurms are this game’s facsimile of dragons. Via free DLC, they are implemented in-game as a character that occupies two adjacent hexes.

The front part of a Lindwurm matters more, because it is the one that generates a zone of control. The rear part can make attacks too (and these are often round attacks). However, hitting either part wounds the Lindwurm in its entirety. On the other hand, the Lindwurm’s acidic blood guarantees that anyone that hits it in melee gets hurt in return.

A Lindwurm is understandably a formidable enemy, but slaying one grants great renown and yields loot that can lead to further rewards.

SOLDIERY:

If the player’s band has greatly angered one of the noble houses, they will have to face the professional soldiery that had been sent after them.

These are among the toughest enemies in the game, because they are often well-equipped and well-armoured, and have the stats to use their gear well too. There may be some reward to be had from killing them, such as looting their gear. They may even have champions that are wielding rare gear. Still, the risks are incredible, and not being able to visit the holdings of the hostile noble houses is a serious setback.

Therefore, the player might not want to anger any of them too much. However, there is an endgame crisis that might force the player into taking sides, especially to protect population centres that the player has curried much favour with.

OTHER MERCENARIES:

Perhaps the rarest and the worst of enemies are other mercenaries. These are encountered in certain contract missions, especially those that concern deliveries of sealed packages.

These enemies have diverse skills and gear, more so than professional soldiery. They can use the same abilities as those that are available to the player’s own band. Consequently, there is no clear strategy to countering them. The player may even have the bad luck of encountering a band that happens to be coincidentally kitted out to oppose the player’s own.

Mercenary bands that have been around longer tend to have pieces of high quality gear, and consumable supplies that the player can use. Therefore, there is often something to be had from overcoming them, assuming that they could survive to attain considerable heights.

Yet, this opposing band does happen to be one of the mercenary groups that are travelling about the overworld. Defeating them causes them to disappear, which can be a setback during end-game crises in playthroughs where permanent destruction of population centres is possible.

WARDOGS:

The player will have both wardogs as allies and as enemies. Those that the player use would be practically reinforcement characters, because they are deployed using abilities that are available to anyone that has a Wardog “equipped” as an “accessory” of sorts.

The player can choose which of the tiles in the handler’s zone of control to deploy a Wardog in. This is an important decision, because Wardogs usually go after the nearest enemy.

That said, the player has no control over Wardogs whatsoever. Their scripting decides which enemy that they would go after, usually the closest. This is regardless of whether the enemy would overmatch them or not. Wardogs can only bite with their teeth, and will not be doing much against heavily armored opponents.

Wardogs can be equipped with some leather armor, but that is just it. The players should not expect Wardogs to be able to take much punishment, although Wardogs are quite good at dodging attacks.

Therefore, the player has to be careful about their deployment, lest they are cut down before they could have any impact on the battle.

Shrewd players would use wardogs to harry fleeing enemies, using their zones of control to lock down the latter or tear them apart with attacks of opportunity. That said, Wardogs do gain considerable bonuses for these attacks.

A calculating and cold player might deploy them in the face of powerful opponents too, if only to stall the opposition and buy the player’s mercenaries time to land telling blows.

In the case of wardogs on the opposing side, they are always already deployed on the battlefield. This means that they are often the first to reach the player’s lines, and the first to die. That the enemy does not make effective use of wardogs can seem like a disappointment.

PROBLEMS WITH BATTLES:

Unfortunately, as interesting as the battle systems are, everything else around its edges and the ancillary gameplay that leads to or out of battle is rather lacking. The following are mentions of some of these problems.

RANDOMIZED STARTING LOCATIONS IN BATTLE:

As mentioned earlier, the procedural generator for battle-zones considers terrain and the number of sides that are participating in the battle. Unfortunately, this appears to be the only considerations. Where the groups of fighters begin is something that is wildly randomized. This can result in some imbalances.

For example, the battle may take place on hills. One side may begin uphill of the other side. The side that is uphill might have more ranged combatants than the other, if any at all. Obviously, this is a major advantage for the side that is uphill, if they are lucky enough to get such circumstances.

The player does not have any control over where exactly on the battlefield that the mercenary band would start. Some other games with turn-based battles that take place on hex-boards, like Age of Wonders, allow the player to have means of shifting combatants around according to how the terrain in the vicinity would help them. This is not the case with this game.

The developers and its fans have hand-waved this design oversight aside as an expression of the vagaries of circumstances and luck, or just point at the feature to manage the formation of the band’s active combatants and declare it as enough.

This can be disappointing to players who want more complexity in the pre-battle arrangements.

INTERVENING IN AN ONGOING BATTLE …:

During the band’s travel on the overworld, the player may come across other bands of opposed allegiances. These bands will fight each other, but it should be mentioned here that simplified coding is used to hurry the battle along. The player is not shown the algorithm or calculations.

It is possible for the player to come across a many-way battle. I have personally come across a four-way battle involving greenskins, the undead, bandits and a city patrol.

If the player intervenes in these battles, the player joins the battle as a group that is allied with whichever non-bandit human group, if any and if they are not hostile to the player. Otherwise, all of the other parties are hostile to the player, but will fight each other.

On paper, this sounds like that there could be some interesting experiences from participating in such battles. Yet, an observant player might notice a few flaws when battle starts.

… BUT THEY SEEM TO BE JUST STARTING:

A player might have observed a battle between two groups, and have done so for a while, likely to wait for one side to be weakened before intervening.

However, when the player intervenes and battle commences, the battle always begins as if a fresh fight has just started. The combatants always begin close to their edge of the board, even if they ostensibly had been fighting for a while. Furthermore, all of the combatants always begin with full health and gear condition, as if they have freshly joined the fight.

Such an oddity can be a dissatisfying reminder that believability had to take a back seat to conveniently implementable code.

POSSIBLE REDIRECTION UPON INTERVENTION IN A BATTLE:

Since the battles that the player intervenes in always begin as if they are fresh battles, the parties that are involved in the battle will select their own targets from scratch. These may be the player’s own men, if the CPU-controlled characters deem to go after them. This can happen, regardless of who had been fighting each other in the battle in the overworld screen.

This can result in some unpleasantness, especially if the battle involves enemies with very high Initiative ratings, such as Necrosavants.

CARAVAN PROTECTION:

Due to oversights in the coding of the game, if the player intervenes in a battle involving a non-hostile caravan, the player’s band begins on the same side as the caravan. This is supposed to only happen if the player’s band has been hired to protect a caravan, but apparently the game interprets such circumstances as a battle to protect the caravan.

That said, the player should not expect any reward for having successfully defended the caravan. Therefore, without a contract, there is no reason to protect any caravans in the overworld, unless the player does not want the population centres to suffer de-buffs.

NO EXAMINATION OF BATTLE SITES:

When a battle between two sides have concluded, it creates an icon that marks the site of battle on the overworld. Together with the trails that lead away or into the site of battle, the observant player could gauge how long the battle lasted and possibly estimate how much strength that the victor has left after the battle.

Unfortunately, there are no means to examine the battle sites and figure out who had been fighting who. Even if the player has observed two opposing groups fight and one walking away from the site of the battle, the tooltip for the site does not mention who have been fighting.

Such information could have been helpful in the search for opportunities, e.g. tracking down and finishing off a weakened group of hostiles.

HEALING INJURIES:

One of the player’s concerns, post-battle, is likely the healing of Injuries. As mentioned earlier, all of the Injuries that a mercenary can suffer while he is alive can be eventually healed with no lasting effects as long as the player has enough medical supplies.

However, the Injuries can take days to heal. More serious ones take even longer. If the player is exceptionally unlucky, they may get worse, such secondary infections coming up. These stack even more debilitations on the unlucky fools, and existing Injuries take even longer to heal. If worse comes to worse, the men can die from being weakened too much by their ordeals. On the flip-side, the player could get lucky and have the injured men somehow heal earlier.

Luck is ever a fickle mistress.

TREATING INJURIES:

To avoid having Injuries become worse, the player should have them treated. This is the specialty of the Temples at some towns and cities. Of course, the player has to travel over to them, and then hand over some coin. Worse and fresher injuries have higher costs to treat.

The healers cannot remove the Injuries outright, but alter them to “treated” versions that will never trigger any worsening. The time to heal is also greatly reduced.

Treated Injuries can become worse if the player exposes the injured men to further wounds. In such a case, the Injuries lose their “Treated” status and have their timers reset. Obviously, the player should not have fielded the injured men in the first place.

NEAR-DEATH AND PERMANENT INJURIES:

As long as a mercenary has more than one hit point left, any Injuries sustained are not permanent. This is not the case if he has no more hit points.

This usually leads to death, but the player could have mercenaries gain perks that practically give them an extra life. They can come back, but often with a permanent injury that cannot be healed and that will always set them back.

This makes the aforementioned perks quite useless to players who save-scum, but for players who play in Iron-man mode, they are much needed, if only to preserve the lives of members that the players have invested much in. There are also certain fortuitous random events that can lead to their permanent injuries being healed.

LEVELLING UP & STAT GAINS:

The mercenaries gain experience as they participate in battles and get kills. There are few other sources of experience points.

When a mercenary gains a level, rolls are made for the possible stat increases that are available for him. If the player is lucky, the game may make high rolls, like the maximum +6. If the player is unlucky, most of the possible stat increases are below +2. The player picks three of the possible stat increases and implement them.

This small number of improvements means that the player has to decide the specific direction of the mercenaries’ growth. For example, front-liners should have their melee combat skill improved where possible.

LIMITATIONS IN POWER DEVELOPMENT:

Level 11 is where the development of a mercenary’s power comes to a near-halt.

After level 11, the experience cost to get the next level is a flat 5000 points. This steep cost is understandable, and is quite a common gameplay-balancing measure in the history of video games.

However, perks are no longer available, which means that the versatility of a character is virtually stunted from further growth after level 11. Again, this might not seem so bad; a mercenary that has many perks can be overwhelmingly powerful.

What is not as acceptable is the stat gains, which are pegged to just one-point increments. This is a measly improvement for so much trouble of gaining a level after level 11.

Granted, there have been videos of characters with stats that have been altered with cheat engines. They are incredibly capable of single-handedly wiping out dozens of enemies.

ENDGAME CRISES – OVERVIEW:

About 50 days or so into a playthrough, the first of the endgame crises begin. Endgame crises affect the overworld in significant ways, the most obvious being the appearance of many hostile groups of the same kind.

There are three types of crises. One of them will happen first, and some time after the resolution of this one, another will happen. The playthrough will eventually cycle through all of them, before there are no more.

The DLC packages that would come later do not introduce additional crises, for better or worse.

UNDEAD UPRISING:

The remnants of the previous human civilization return in force, while recently slain humans begin to come back as zombies. Necromancers appear more often, taking advantage of the rise of undeath.

During this crisis, humans that have just been slain can come back as Wiedergangers, which are hostile to anything that is not undead (or the ghouls). This can actually be fortuitous because CPU-controlled enemies tend to target weak enemies first, and it so happens that Wiedergangers of humans that had been slain earlier are some of the weakest characters.

Undead hostile groups can appear just about anywhere, but rarely in massive floods. However, they are still capable of eventually overwhelming and razing population centres, if the player has enabled this option.

After the end of the Undead Uprising, the number of Undead hostile groups and their spawn locations fall drastically. The player might not even encounter one for a long, long time. Freshly slain humans also stop coming back as zombies.

GREENSKIN INVASION:

The Goblins and Orcs have finally agreed to work together to wipe out anything that is not a shade of green. As implied, the player will begin to encounter hostile groups that have both types of greenskins. Having to deal with this diversity of opponents can be challenging.

The bulk of the hostile groups will come like a flood from the regions of the overworld that do not have human population centres. Since they come in droves, greenskins can quickly overwhelm the defences of any population centre in the way. Of the three endgame crises, this one has the highest likelihood of ending the player’s playthrough.

CIVIL WAR:

It is in the nature of humans to be leery of each other for this or that reason and find whatever excuse to raise a conflict. Battle Brothers has a take on this too.

There are four noble houses, with no love lost between them. Eventually, they will declare war on each other. When that happens, warbands begin to appear from the population centres and travel towards the other population centres to sack them. The player may also observe other mercenary bands having taken sides and participating in the fighting too.

Unlike the other two endgame crises, this will not have population centres razed to the ground. However, they will suffer a lot of setbacks, making them difficult to be used as resupply bases.

The player could participate in the civil war of course; the contracts happen to pay very well. However, as mentioned earlier, this is going to anger one House or another.

NOT MUCH VARIETY ON WHAT TO DO IN CRISES:

When the crises rear up, the player’s band gains new kinds of contracts, usually associated with the factors that are involved in the crises.

Yet, the player is still doing the same thing: fighting and more fighting. Sure, the enemies are more diverse and troublesome, but they are still not much different from what the player has been doing earlier, or later, for that matter.

For example, in the Undead Uprising, the player’s band could be contracted to retrieve an esoteric artefact that is needed for research on a solution. Yet, the player’s band would not be collecting and transporting any special item; it does not even appear in the player’s inventory upon the supposed retrieval of the item according to the narrative. Rather, that contract would involve attacking a location that has been generated for the purpose of the contract mission.

It can be a bit disappointing to realize that the game actually has a dearth of variety in the gameplay, after the player has experienced the complexity of the combat.

RENOWN:

The pace of a playthrough is not just measured in the number of in-game days that have passed. The mercenary band’s renown is another measurement.

Renown is the fame of the band. It is increased by simply being successful at what the band is supposed to be doing, and decreased if the band has been doing poorly. In particular, completing contracts is the best source of renown, and breaking contracts is the worst source of renown loss.

The player’s band needs to get considerable Renown before it obtains the attention of the noble houses, after which the noble houses offer contracts that pay better than the usual ones. These contracts happen to involve more danger too, but they in turn also provide more Renown.

The other main use of Renown is that they expand the offerings of shops. In particular, high-tier goods become less rare, and famous items begin to appear too.

AMBITIONS:

Ambitions are long-term goals that the player decides for the band. They are another means of gaining Renown, but the player is more likely to pursue them because of the more practical rewards that they provide.

One of these ambitions is about earning the attention of the noble houses. This must be achieved in order to gain contracts from the nobility.

Another notable ambition is the creation of a banner for the band. The banner is a mid-tier pole-arm, which does not have damage output that is competitive in the long-run. However, it is useful if the player needs to have the band’s mood as high as possible, such as in battles against Geists.

Perhaps the most desirable is the ones that increase the size of the inventory. These are much needed if the player wants to keep spare weapons so that the band’s fighters can have the most appropriate weapons for an upcoming battle.

The implementation of ambitions is not without problems, however. For one, the game takes a while to register the completion of an ambition – often a few in-game days, at least.

RANDOM EVENTS:

While in the overworld, the player may get random events. Of course, these events are not entirely random, because they require certain conditions to be fulfilled before they can trigger. For example, in the case of the random event that is about an altercation between a lower-class and an exiled noble, it can only happen when there are such members in the player’s band.

However, even with the conditions fulfilled due to the efforts of the player, these random events might not even happen at all, thanks to the vagaries of RNG rolls. Of course, if the conditions remain fulfilled, they will happen sooner or later – how early that is, depends on the player’s luck. That said, the player also needs to have learned about these conditions, and that would have to be from third-party sources because there is no in-game documentation about them.

Some random events apply their effects, whether the player likes it or not. Some others give the player a semblance of a choice, but often with no clear indication of the outcomes. Even so, an option may not lead to a single outcome. There may be more than one possible outcome, and which it would be is decided by an RNG roll. The probability of each possible outcome is not shown to the player.

VISUAL DESIGNS:

Battle Brothers is a game that uses 2D graphics that can be considered rudimentary in this day and age. The most animations that the player would see are sprites sliding around. There are not even spliced-sprites. Rather, the most technical complexity there is in the visual designs are layers for sprites, such as the layers that are used to indicate changes in the gear that the mercenaries are using.

Other than these, the game depends on a lot of static artwork. Chief of these are the sprites for the heads and torsos of characters. They can seem a bit silly at first, because only the collar region and top parts of their chests are shown, resulting in a goofily bulbous look. This is especially so for characters that are supposed to have lithe builds, such as Wardogs and Dire Wolves.

Perhaps the oddest of the visual designs for the sprites are those for the Lindwurms. They are represented as two separate counters, appearing as if the Lindwurms have been split apart.

At least there are variants of sprites for the transition of characters being fresh to sorely wounded. Watching a character gradually get cut up and bruised can be entertaining, especially if the ones on the receiving end are enemies.

During battle, the player’s mercenaries and allied characters are always facing the right. Enemies always face left, regardless of whether they belong to the same side or not. This can result in some problems, such as having allied characters that happen to have the same appearance and gear as the player’s mercenaries.

Fortunately, in the case of the enemies, this is not an issue because if they are hostile to each other, they already belong to enemy archetypes that look distinctly different.

SOUND DESIGNS:

Music is the first thing that the player hears in the game, and there is a lot of it. Composed by Breakdown Epiphanies, most of the soundtracks sound appropriate for the grim medieval fantasy world of Battle Brothers. During the overworld, forlorn tracks play, only to be interrupted by an ominous refrain whenever hostile groups or spawn locations are discovered.

Energetic orchestral plays when the player accesses the screens for the population centres, in an attempt to make the otherwise static screen seem lively.

The best tracks can be heard in combat though. These are quite inspirational and great to listen to, at least when the battle is going the player’s way.

Some of the sound effects for clicking buttons and enacting scenes appear to be made from musical instruments, like percussion, and other real things. This is fitting, and perhaps pleasant to players who have heard too much electronic stuff from indie developers.

Then there are the sound effects for attacks. These are surprisingly varied. Even if the player has not examined which weapons that characters are using, the observant player would recognize them when their associated sound effects play. There are even sound effects for when attacks land and miss. For example, a crossbow bolt makes a wistful twang when it misses, but a meaty thud when it embeds in its target. The developers are particularly enthusiastic about these sound effects, which is perhaps for the better because the aesthetics of battle would have seemed crude without them.

VOICE-OVERS:

There are voice-overs for characters, though there are only ever heard during battle. In the case of the voice-overs for the humans, they are never consistent. A certain character could be uttering the same some clip as another character, and some time later, a clip with a different voice. However, the game does attempt to vary the use of the audio assets so that this is not too obvious.

As for the utterances that the humans make, they mostly make noises when they are wounded. Therefore, the player can expect groaning, yelps and other expressions of pain. The most amusing noises that they make is when they die: gurgles, screams and such other sounds associated with death.

The only disappointment to be had from their voices is the sound clip for breaking human characters. It sounds like hard breathing, which is not entirely convincing for someone that is terrified.

The inhuman characters are given voice-overs too. They make them whenever they move, attack, get hurt, try to flee or die. Each different occasion has a different set of voice-overs. It can be entertaining to listen to the rarer ones, especially the ones that are associated with fleeing. The game will also occasionally play their associated noises when they are not doing anything but are otherwise still on the field. This goes some way to emphasize their threat.

CONCLUSION:

The battles in Battle Brothers are great examples of how superior positioning and shrewd decisions can prevail against inhuman enemies and/or overwhelming numbers.

Yet, it is unfortunate that the complex hex-based combat in Battle Brothers had been packaged together with gameplay elements that depend so much on luck, such as random events that can stack more woes on the player when the player does not want them. On top of these complaints, there are the unwieldy user interfaces and lack of informative features that make anything that is not about combat into a tedious hassle.

Games like this are a reminder that there are people out there who still believe that fickle circumstances and sloppy quality-of-life in gameplay make for great challenges, or that these setbacks are a small price to pay for the other better-designed elements. For other people who are not “suck it up” masochists or “glass-half-full” apologists, they are better off looking for some other squad-based combat title that had been more thoroughly and better designed.