Battle Brothers: We're on a Mission for Gold

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Battle Brothers: We're on a Mission for Gold

Gammymajams: Jan 30, 2016

What kind of retard thought appropriate level 2 contracts for my party of level 3 and 4 peasants involved necrosavants? There are barely any level 1 contracts to level up on, you have to slowly, slowly, slowly wander across the world map going town by town in the hope they have any contracts. And all the while time is working against you to pit more and more overpowered enemies against your crew of fucktards that can't hit anything and get 1 shot by anything with a bigger dick than gwyneth paltrow. This is a total crock of poo poo.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2017 03:31

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 2, 2024 12:30

Gammymajams: Jan 30, 2016

I must be, because the next town had an almost identical poo poo contract and it is, once again, a complete clusterfuck. 2 necrosavants killed 4 troops and made another run away after I'd finally ground down 7 skeletons, who individually can solo my lovely mercs.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2017 03:50

Gammymajams: Jan 30, 2016

Right, I'm going to abandon that game and restart. How do you prevent contract difficulty escalating out of control? Is it all to do with renown? So try to only do contracts that are going to provide gear (i.e. combat contracts) in order to keep your gear ahead of the renown level of your company?

# ¿ Mar 25, 2017 04:07

Gammymajams: Jan 30, 2016

So I started another game. Day 6, level 1 contract, 5 bandit raiders my guys can barely hit even with spears, many of whom can 1 turn my melees, who each need to be hit about 8 times to die.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2017 16:17

Gammymajams: Jan 30, 2016

I'm playing on veteran difficulty, my first playthrough was beginner and it was too easy. I've now had a few abortive attempts at veteran. I have no idea how I'm supposed to take more than one or two raiders with this gear and character level without casualties. Progression in this game reminds me of Might and Magic games, where you're expected to plough through encounters without injuries to build up a critical mass of powerlevel to snowball the game. And if you fall behind, that's pretty much it. Is it normal to just wander the map cherrypicking encounters? Is it realistic to catch up if you fall behind the curve?

# ¿ Mar 25, 2017 16:48

Gammymajams: Jan 30, 2016

Tin Tim posted:

Yes. Larger towns will always have a bigger and better range of stuff to find. The way I saw it is that small villages with weapon/armor shops will only spawn high-end gear if they have the "well supplied" status after you led a caravan there

Also, tips for peeps that have problems with contract difficulty. Instead of going only by skulls, try to learn to use the reward money as a hint towards how difficult it will be and if you're able to handle that. 1 skull contracts are pretty safe to take early on when they're around 300-600 gold. This usually means bandit thugs or basic zombos which are easy to deal with even for your scrubs. You can even safely pick up 2 skull contracts in the 500-800 gold range. Those will usually have the same enemies as 1 skull contracts except that there'll be more. 10 thugs and a raider for instance instead of the 7 thugs you faced on a 1 skull contract. If you see 1000 or more gold rewards for 2 skull contracts then you have to get picky and be careful. Bandit raiders will appear in larger numbers for that kind of money and you can't safely beat them with mercs that carry spears and shields. Their armor is too good to beat them quickly and their weapons will cut your own scrubs to pieces. Undead will usually include armored zombos and necromancers at this point and again you don't want to deal with that with spear+shield scrubs. They'll just overwhelm you halfway through the fight. 3 skull contracts are obviously the dangerous ones that you want to pass until you're ready but sometimes you can get a 3 skull caravan escort for hella money. It's kind of a gamble to take these but it usually pays off because the money is based on travel distance and not on difficulty. There's the chance that you'll run into several hostile groups on the way and some of them may be too hard but on the other hand you can also go all the way without doing a single fight. Getting 3k for 2 days of walking is really sweet. And then there's also 3 skull contracts for bandit lairs and those can also be taken if the reward is below 1000 gold or at least not much more cause it means mostly thugs with a few raiders sprinkled in. Goblin and orc contracts should be avoided at all costs(even the cheap ones) until your band is a serious group with chainmail and tier 2 weapons cause it's usually not worth the trouble to go for them otherwise. One specific contract type I also want to mention is the "go to lair and get our artifact back" contract. Those will always pit you against skellies and they can ruin your little band early on. A contract like that for like 400 gold will pit you against 4 auxiliaries and they can cut through your spear+shield scrubs despite what the low amount of gold may make you think. Only go for those contracts if you have some blunt weapons or when your band is starting to get serious.

My personal way is to hunt for combat contracts with bandit thugs as much as possible early on. They give you much needed xp and gear on top of the money. Delivery contracts are poo poo and I would only take them if I desperately need the money to pay my group. I'll also try to snipe random bandit groups without raiders if I see them or travel the map a bit to find bandit lairs. Those can be good pickings if they don't have raiders. Basic undead are also fine to fight but they drop less good gear so I put less value on those contracts/lairs/groups. When I have a group of 8 solid guys in the range of lv 4-5 is when I start to hunt for bandit raiders and their gear. By that point I have mostly ditched spears(60+ melee skill is my mark for the switch) and rock any weapon that does more damage to speed up my kills. The tier 2 spear isn't bad but it still takes too long to kill people imo. Spearwall is a popular early game strat but the fatigue costs will catch up to you once the basic enemies phase out so I only bring out spears against orcs/zombos later on. And even then I don't always do it cause the damage isn't impressive enough. Once I have that part of the game rolling is when I look towards getting 12 good guys that then can take on 3 skull contracts if the money is good enough. Of course there's some rng to all of this due to the random map and stuff but this strat has worked for me since the early days of EA

This is a really great post, thanks. It sounds like you really cherry pick contracts when playing. Doesn't that burn a lot of time moving between cities to find the right one? And so you'll be falling behind the difficulty curve if you don't find something that fits your criteria? For me it's been kind of ambiguous whether it's worth my while intercepting random groups of enemies on the world map, since there's always a risk of injury and there's less financial incentive without a contract. It seems like you recommend hunting easy stuff/ bandit thugs etc that are roaming the map? I think I'm gonna be more selective from here on when picking contracts and fights. Once I understand exactly what each mission is going to look like from the description that should make things easier.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2017 17:00

Gammymajams: Jan 30, 2016

Day 7 360 gold 1 skull contract: 6 raiders. What the fuuuuuck.

Edit: Turns out, this time I beat the raiders. That extra level on a few guys made a big difference. Well, this is embarassing.

Gammymajams fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Mar 25, 2017

# ¿ Mar 25, 2017 18:31

Gammymajams: Jan 30, 2016

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Ok, bear with me here --

I've been trying to work out a little chart to figure out what skills to take, by role -- not as a "best" build but as a basic thumbnail build I can just refer to as I level up bros. Here's what I have.

Something about this game makes us all autistic, me included.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2017 21:52

Gammymajams: Jan 30, 2016

Wizard Styles posted:

Since the differences between backgrounds and which of them are worth it etc. came up repeatedly over the last couple pages, here's some stuff I've been working on:

You absolute maniac. Looks really useful though thanks. Depending on the format you kept the data in, you may want to get in touch with the guy who made this thread on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BattleBrothers/comments/65264v/background_stats_spreadsheet/. He's doing something similar but has less data and would probably appreciate it if you could dump the source data for him to look through.

Edit: I didn't read your post thoroughly, you discuss the format already.

Gammymajams fucked around with this message at 12:15 on Apr 19, 2017

# ¿ Apr 19, 2017 12:03

Gammymajams: Jan 30, 2016

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Woohoo, the developers posted a positive comment on my guide =)

You deserve it, you've posted some really useful stuff in this thread.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2017 05:53

Gammymajams: Jan 30, 2016

How useful are archers in the end game? I'm on day 150, with my second crisis (undead this time) starting up and I finally found a decent hunter (51 ranged skill, 2 stars so expected L11 ranged of 91). That's an expected value 5 or so points higher than my other ranged bros, starting bro excepted. But now that I'm at endgame I'm wondering just how useful he's ever gonna be. I can't think of many end game enemies that aren't better approached by sending in another gorilla with a two hander. Am I missing anything or is it not worth training a new ranged once I reached endgame already?

# ¿ Dec 29, 2018 13:30

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 2, 2024 12:30

Gammymajams: Jan 30, 2016

I get that archers can be quite effective against certain opponents, e.g. noble war just let the other 15 guys take hits and let your 6 archers ping away. But are they ever, strictly, better than a good two hander veteran? Because I have a lot of quite good ones and training a new archer bro for 11 levels when I could just hit stuff with a big hammer might not pay off the opportunity cost of lost experience on a melee bro.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2018 23:18

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Battle Brothers: We're on a Mission for Gold