Hardcore Casual

It’s rare in single-player games that you can bounce back from a setback. Usually you are either progressing towards victory, or you are defeated.

Take for example a typical game of Civilization. At the start (on a decent difficulty level) you are behind the computer, and you either slowly climb up, or you don’t climb fast enough and lose when the AI beats you to an ending or defeats you in war via superior tech/units. Its very rare that you can fight the AI, lose a bit, and then come back. It’s also pretty rare that you can be winning and have the AI bounce back against you.

The same can generally be said about XCOM. If you are keeping pace, you are winning. If you fall behind the pace, you will lose and have to restart. If a mission goes very poorly, you again lose (this is less the case in the Long War mod). The balance just isn’t there to get a very tough mission, have it go poorly (multiple soldiers die), and for you to bounce back and recover.

Battle Brothers manages to achieve that feeling of things going south, but still giving you a chance (though no guarantee) that you can still turn things around, and its a rather thrilling feeling. I’ve mentioned before that interesting decisions pop up when a guy goes down, or gets serious injuries, but as I finished my first epic event, I can also say that those type of decisions also exist at a higher level as well.

Here is how it can play out. It’s around day 90, and you are doing well. You have a full company of 12 brothers, all decently geared, and your supplies/gold are solid. The epic event starts, and you take a 2 skull contract. That contract ends up being far more difficult than you predicted, but you only realize this after the fact. Now you are faced with a choice; fight the battle and potentially lose it all, or decline the contract/fight and take the reputation hit, along with the epic event getting worse (a town is burned, for example).

Assuming the decision you made didn’t result in complete defeat, you must now recover. The tricky thing is what do you do? If most contracts are event-related, maybe more of them will be too difficult or risky, but you have to do something or you will run out of gold/supplies. Wandering the world looking for fights is an option, and a viable one at that. Taking one-skull contracts is another option, though that might be tricky as the pay may not justify your ongoing expenses, or the gains might be too small for the amount of time spent.

The whole time, you are balancing getting stronger with the world overall getting more dangerous. The more you push yourself, the faster you will progress, but pushing too far could either result in a total defeat, or a setback that requires more recovery/pushing. The epic events just ramp this aspect up, with more dangerous fights and contracts coming up, along with far greater rewards. It’s an impressive display of game design and balance, and makes the later stages of Battle Brothers as engaging and challenging as the early.

If you don’t own Battle Brothers by now, you either A: suck, or B: avoid Early Access games at all costs. Well I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is I can’t fix your suck problem, that’s on you. The good news is I can tell you Battle Brothers coming out of EA on March 24th, so all you EA-phobes can join in and experience the greatness.

The put together a nifty little trailer here. Also note that the price will be going up come release, so you should grab it now before that happens.

Going forward I’m curious what their plan is. I’m all for DLC that just adds more stuff (enemies, recruit backgrounds, items, locations, etc). Plus if they open it up to modding, I’m sure there is a ton of interesting stuff people could do with the game ala Mount and Blade.

I’m really, really enjoying Battle Brothers, to the point that it’s heavily cut into my EVE time and I’ve been in maintenance mode (market, industry, and PI updating only) the last few weeks now. Luckily EVE isn’t going anywhere, and I did take a little BB break to burn a few things in Jita, which was great fun and it’s always amazing to see that level of coordination from Goons. But yes, back to Battle Brothers.

One of the things that is really holding my attention with the game is the overall difficulty has stayed very consistent, while the risks/reward aspect increases as you progress. BB is a difficult game, both in terms of in-battle decisions, and with regard to larger, long-term stuff (when and who to hire, when/what to buy).

At the very beginning, the challenge is learning the basics, but you are also facing basic enemies that don’t bring a great deal of complexity to combat, while your own units aren’t yet specialized. It’s not quite “line up and swing away”, but it’s not terribly far from that, especially if you aren’t hyper-focused on minimizing damage and just want to win. The economy aspect also starts simple, where you are mostly focused on having food and tools, and you aren’t really diving into buying equipment or moving trade goods between settlements.

At the mid-point of the game, more of these things start to factor in. As you gain levels, you open up more abilities or specializations, which you need to align with the gear you have. Say for example you hire an amazing archer with fantastic ranged stats/bonuses, but you haven’t gotten a single decent ranged weapon yet. It would make sense to seek one out on the market, but how much do you spend and where? (at the first city you find, or do you run contracts for a city with a bowyer to increase your reputation and lower the price to create a more long-term solution?)

Let’s say you have that great archer, and are working on reputation with a city that has a bowyer. Suddenly in an encounter that archer is killed. Now what? Do you scrap the whole general direction you were going in, or continue and attempt to hire a suitable replacement? What happens when you pay a high price for a replacement, and their stats/bonuses just aren’t worth really focusing on?

And all of that is just one example, and you will likely have half a dozen such example going at the same time in one game, with varying degrees of impact, complexity, and demand. If two settlements are in close proximity with each other and produce profitable trade goods, you will really want to focus on that area and build a reputation to get lower buy, higher sell prices. But maybe the game has other ideas, and the contracts you are offered are ones to protect a caravan that is traveling to the other side of the map. If you keep declining them, you might not have other work to do. If you accept them, now you aren’t in that area. If the towns are often hit by raiders pillaging supplies, or greenskin raids, prices and supply will also suffer, and your once profitable area is now (at least until you fix it) poor and doesn’t produce what you need to keep going.

The final layer is once you are further in, and you have higher-level mercenaries with mid to high-end gear, a single death or crippling injury is now far more of an issue than it was earlier in the game. Lost gear is much harder to replace, and if the merc lost was also a specialist, his replacement will be both costly and difficult to find. If your general battle strategy counted heavily on the specialist (say a center line holding defensive guy), until you replaced that guy and his general effectiveness, you either can’t fight the same difficulty of battles (not always an option), or you have to change up how you fight.

Now multiply the problem of a single merc lost with a battle that goes really poorly and you lose two, three, or even six+ guys. Sure you can give up and restart, but it’s far more fun to try and recover, which is possible but is its own complex set of problems.

All of this really only works in Ironman mode too. If you save scum BB, you really are going to ruin the game. Being able to reload after a failed contract negotiation, or a bad battle, or even to only hire the best recruits not only cheapens the whole experience of difficult decisions and dealing with them, but you will also out-scale the difficulty since you are accepting only the best results all the time, which the game isn’t balanced around. Even if you generally stay away from Ironman modes in other games, don’t do that here. It should also be noted that Battle Brothers is intended to be played multiple times. Each game has its own map, towns, units; basically everything is different but the game basics, so don’t be afraid of playing with one band, it going poorly, and now having to ‘repeat’ the game again. It really won’t feel like that, and you won’t see that brilliance if you save scum and progress with only one perfectly-played merc company.