I’ve heard of Battle Brothers when it first came out, apparently 5 or so years ago, but I never ended up getting it. I recently picked it up, with the DLC, on sale to play on my Steam Deck, and dang, what a fun game!
It’s basically a turn based tactical RPG version of Mount and Blade. You control up to 12 of various backgrounds, skills, and equipments on both an overland and battle map. It’s pretty difficult, even on the standard settings! I’ve had my butt kicked more than a few times.
I didn’t see any threads on this game, so I’m wondering if anyone else gave this a try.
That was definitely my original experience. Eventually I went from thinking spears were horrible (low damage!) to awesome (spearwall crowd control!) to horrible (crowd control isn’t enough to kill!) to a key part in a balanced frontline, for now at least. So I’m running with 3 spears/shields, 2 swords or flails and shields, 2 long arms (a polearm and a polemace), and 4 archers/crossbows.
Currently I’m doing decently well, doing a “bronzeman” run (I’ll restart battles, but not load saves other than that). I have a full stack of around 12 men and I’m trying to keep my most promising recruits alive while slowly replacing less desireable troops with new hires.
Very good game! Definitely a learning curve to figure out how to not lose every single soldier in the battle. Greatly satisfying one you take a look at your soldiers stats and realize how long you’ve kept some alive!
Couple years ago I was off work for over a month, and ran across this game. May have been on sale or something. I willed myself througha couple rough restarts, but after that I played for hours in the afternoon every day. It’s possible to get pretty obsessive with building your squad.
I tried to go back to it again recently, and just could not get back in to it for some reason. Too bad really; is a good game.
It’s certainly simple, but I wouldn’t call it awful looking. The art style is neat and communicates all the information you need at a glance. Armor and helmet graphics get beat up and dented as they get damaged, and fall off entirely when destroyed. Units, too, suffer cuts and bruises; specific injuries, like Missing Nose or Eye, show up on the character model as well.
I agree with Babale on the art style. It is what it is, and you can get a pretty good idea how fucked you are by just looking at the state of your chess pieces.
Actually I don’t know what it would gain with more detailed art/graphics. It’s a Panzer General kind of game. You get lost in the strategy and actual game details and the visual details only matter to the extent that you see what you need to in order to plan/play.
Agreed! Although that’s about what it cost me with all DLCs on sale.
I did a couple playthroughs where I was just absolutely demolished; then the longer “bronzeman” run where I got to day 50 or so while limping along. I haven’t lost that game yet, but I decided to start over anyways to see if I can handle true Ironman, now that I kinda have the hang of it.
This time the game started me off in the north, so I’ve had to fight barbarians instead of bandits. I have to say, so far they’re scarier in terms of damage but wear crappier armor. I may need to head to temperate lands soon!
So my new run has been going pretty well, although I did have one horrible mishap - a misclick led me to miss out on looting a bandit camp that had 2 pikes and a glaive plus a number of mail shirts, all before day 10. That would have been quite the power spike!
I’m paying attention to the stars on recruits now, and using lots of throwing weapons. This has been the key to my success.
So my run ended. I took a 1.4k contract to wipe out a bandit camp. That sounded too good to be true, but I couldn’t resist that big a pay day. Turns out, there was a bandit champion in the camp… but I’m less scared of trye ironman now.
I started a new run, with unexplored map this time. Had some false starts but I’m finally going down a run I feel good about.