Battle Brothers Appreciation Thread - ultra grounded medieval peasants with pitchforks vs dragons and wizards

[grump]

I've always felt Battle Brothers, despite having a lot of good (good gameplay loop, efficient writing, good presentation and now with the DLC enough content for repeated playthroughs) had a basic problem with itself: the game is a high-lethality sometimes RNG dependent system but raising, equipping and preparing Brothers again and again is essentially a bore. Lose a Brother you needed in your battleline, or lose a battle badly, and you can only reload, there's no coming back if not through significant suffering and waste of time.

I always wonder why tactical games never copied more from the original UFO Defense approach: your advances are almost independent from the relative skills of your troops, a bunch of well-equipped rookies can still manage to do something proper if you are in a difficult scenario, and accepting losses for clear results is almost encouraged. Sure, UFO has a definite endgame and BB is merely a sandbox but..... it feels like it's wasting the player's time.

It really is annoying to lose a specialist bro in a bs goblin ambush in what was supposed to be a straightforward 1 skull contract and have to scrounge around for another suitable replacement for in game weeks. But thats part of the 'appeal' once you find one and build an even stronger party.

Your company as a whole is your metaprogression in a tiered sense.

You keep the bros you don't lose.

If there is a complete disaster than your equipment (assuming you don't lose the battle)

and your stash and renown (assuming you don't keep losing over a long period of time) is your metaprogression.

and uh...I guess you keep your retinue no matter what.

A fresh bro with endgame equipment is far deadlier than one without. I guess there are some disasters that are extremely difficult if not impossible to recover from but its not like xcom doesn't have those too. You can lose almost everything hypothetically but its more realistic. One thing I will agree with is I would have liked some kind of elaborate story driven campaign in addition to the sandbox. But oh well the studio was pretty small back then.

Are all the DLCs worth it? Stopped playing just before the desert DLC came out. Thinking about getting back in and doing a cult campaign.

I came in after all the DLCs and I was shocked at how much of the game wasn't in the base. If I played the base it would feel very barebones.

 

[ZealotCrustacean101]

I've been grinding trying to get better but I keep getting bummed out by not being able to upgrade my shitty raider armor, how do snowball better?