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[AndClayton]

Gah, it all looks so good so far!

I just wanted to pop in and say that I think variety and choices are excellent for games like this...

[Yolan]

This looks just fantastic. I can't believe I overlooked it. Really nice graphical style. This up there with Darkest Dungeon as my most wanted.

[Jaysen]

Thanks for the support!
As always we are working on the project all the time and good words help us keep going ; ) And of course you should try the demo and let us know of any possible improvements or ideas for features!

[AndClayton]

A suggestion, if I may:

I think a really interesting feature that would fit into this game would be context special/award troops.

For example, the game TBS/RPG game Fallen Enchantress had certain quests that would reward you with 'special' or otherwise unique troops. I think this feature would fit in very well with this game because of the kind of uniqueness special troops afford the player.

Just a random thought.

[Jaysen]

We do not really have troops in the sense of classes like warrior, archer and so on. We just have human soldiers that can be equipped with all kinds of equipment and thus granting them different skills. So in that sense every Battle Brother is special ; )

However we have two mechanics that you cant see yet that will make your Brothers more unique. We are working on an extensive skilltree that your Brothers can choose skills from once they level up (there will be probably 10 levels in the first release).
Secondly, there will be unique and legendary items like armor and weapon that also grant unique skills. This can be a magical sword that has its own unique set of skills coming with it.

These are just two mechanics that we are working on to both give great rewards to the player and also make the Battle Brothers more unique.

[Parsely]

Very nice looking game so far, love the option for two-handing. Wish I could play the demo, but alas..

[Jaysen]

Does the demo crash or why cant you play it - then we can surely help you? Or do you have a Mac/Linux System?

[Neonivek]

A suggestion, if I may:

I think a really interesting feature that would fit into this game would be context special/award troops.

For example, the game TBS/RPG game Fallen Enchantress had certain quests that would reward you with 'special' or otherwise unique troops. I think this feature would fit in very well with this game because of the kind of uniqueness special troops afford the player.

Just a random thought.

I don't know... I'd think this game would lend itself more to games like Fantasy General where there are dwellings scattered around the map and securing them before the hoard comes might be an advantage with occasional people inside.

Though I am not sure how much either idea lends itself to this game.

[Jaysen]

To keep you updated in the project here is the latest development blog entry. We hope to present to you the promotional trailer as soon as possible, it is going to be pretty awesome ; )
As always: If you have any ideas, comments or questions dont hesitate to shoot them my way!

Dev Blog #16: Progress Update – Game Trailer, Perk System and Character Screen Redesign

We have a bunch of new things to show you this week. As work continues on the strategic part of the game, we give you a preview on the perk system for Battle Brothers. We also have a new weapon, the Flail, and decided that the character and equipment screen should have a layout redesign based on player feedback. But first, the trailer.

Promotional Trailer

Having people grasp at a glance what Battle Brothers is about can be hard when all we have in terms of video are several 20+ minute long commented gameplay clips. Clearly we need a short and snappy trailer to showcase the game to a larger audience and get the idea across in just a minute or so - especially now that the game is getting some more media attention. It’s been overdue for a while, really, but we wanted to complete the combat demo first in order to let you experience the game yourselves instead of merely putting bold claims out there.

The trailer we’re working on will consist of a mixture of both gameplay footage and partially animated drawings to build up atmosphere. To give you a first impression, here is the non-animated version of one of the scenes that will be shown in the trailer. If you’re interested, you can follow the progress more closely in Paul’s art thread on our forums.



Perk System

A key component of the strategic gameplay will be the character development of Battle Brothers by gaining experience and leveling them up, rpg style. With each levelup, a Battle Brother will have the opportunity to select an additional “perk”, a passive skill that confers some advantage and allows for specializing in some way. These perks can have a variety of effects and we’re still working out the design of all the final perks. When designing them, we have several concepts in mind.

Firstly, we don’t want a perk to simply increase a basic character stat like hitpoints or stamina that can otherwise already be increased on levelup. That’s just boring. Instead, we want them to offer a unique effect that isn’t otherwise accessible.

Secondly, we want them to have a meaningful impact on the game. Perks should change the way you play with any particular Battle Brother, and the way to achieve this is by having perks be strong enough to open up new tactical avenues instead of merely relying on single digit percentage modifiers. There should be a feeling of accomplishment when gaining a level and anticipation when selecting a new perk. Players should then rush to the next battle to try out the newly aqcuired perks in action. It would be terribly frustrating to reach the next level and then get the feeling that the perk does absolutely nothing for you.

Thirdly, all perks have to be viable choices. Not for every individual Battle Brother, of course, since we want to encourage some specialization, but in general. There must be no instant-picks and no-brainers. This might be the hardest to achieve and will take a lot of balancing, tweaking and time; many a game fails at this this with skills out of balance so much that players would have to be willing to put themselves intentionally at a disadvantage by not picking some of them up every time. Still, we really want people to choose perks according to their individual playstyle and tactics and not because they read in some internet forum which perk is the indisputably strongest.

Perks will likely be organized into several thematic trees (e.g. mobility, offense) and individual perks may require certain other perks to be picked first. How exactly the perks will be organized is yet to be determined, though. To give you an idea of what a perk might look like, here are a few examples that may or may not end up in the game like this:

“Berserk” - Recover 4 AP when killing an enemy. Can only occur once per turn.

“Pathfinder” - Reduces movement AP costs on all tiles by 1 down to a minimum of 2.

“Coup de Grace” - Inflict additional damage against targets that have been stunned.

“Artful Dodger” - Ignore the Zone of Control.

Character Screen Redesign

One of the more frequent points of feedback from the combat demo was the character screen layout, and how players needed to constantly switch tabs between seeing all Battle Brothers and the Stash when equipping their party, never able to see both at the same time. We agree that this is less than ideal, and we’re about to change it.

We took the layout of the character screen back to the drawing board and tried to come up with a solution. The minimum resolution we want to support is 1024x768 - and that really doesn’t leave a lot of space. On the other hand, doing more than one layout (and later on, skinning it) for multiple resolutions isn’t a great use of our time, either. Our solution is the mockup below; it may look a bit congested at first, but it does allow for showing the list of Battle Brothers and all the other tabs at the same time. Even better, it can now scale to the right with increased screen resolution, making use of additional screen space without us having to do an extra layout. Do mind that this is still work in progress, though, and may yet change further.



The Flail

Another week, another new weapon added to the game. This time it is the Flail, a separate striking head attached to a handle by a chain. In the game, the Flail’s damage varies greatly with each strike, making it perhaps the least predictable weapon currently. It has a reasonable effectiveness against armor and, like all weapons, comes with a unique tactical quirk.



The Flail’s chain and striking head can easily bend above and around shields, rendering their normal defensive bonus ineffective. Using the second skill of the Flail, even a Shieldwall offers little protection against it, making it a great weapon against heavily shielded opponents in tight formations. The flipside is, of course, that the Flail comes with no defensive skills and is outperformed by some other weapons when against an opponent without a shield.

Be a Bro and support us on IndieDB!

Lastly a quick shoutout to all our readers: Download the Battle Brothers Demo and show your support by rating us on IndieDB!

[Parsely]

Gnarly. Wish I could think of more to say.

[Jaysen]

Sorry for the long silence, heavily working on that trailer and worldmap!

Until then take a look at our latest gameplay video "Hunting Werewolves" featuring a night fight and involuntary amputations!

[Parsely]

This looks like it's turning out very well. Keep up the good work, man!

[Jaysen]

To keep you updated here is the latest dev blog progress update with a lot of new worldmap features:

Dev Blog #17: Progress Update - Villages, Day/Night Cycle, Banners and more

While work on the tactical combat has been reduced to a minimum we are making great progress on the worldmap. As we are setting up all the basic features and functionalities we already have some stuff to show and a packed list of things to come next. Read more below!

New worldmap features in the game:

Villages

We now have a procedurally generated worldmap with a handful of villages placed on it and connected via a system of dirt roads. These villages manage two basic resources, health and wealth.

Health: This is a measure of a villages population and their condition. Health will be reduced by fighting or getting raided by enemy forces but also by recruiting milita to defend itself. Once the health is reduced to zero the village is destroyed and goes up in flames. From now on the player wont be able to rest here or perform any other actions like hiring and trading. Health regenerates slowly over time so villages will recover eventually if getting some “peace time”.

Wealth: This is a measure of a villages riches, wares and item stock. Villages want to increase their wealth by trading with other villages. To accomplish this, they use an amount of their wealth to send a caravan off to antoher village. From the ensuing trade both villages will experience a growth in wealth.

Caravans

The caravans that villages send out are already in the game and working. They use the existing roads and due to their heavy load are rather slow. Of course the lands and forests are dangerous and might be swarming with bandits that will attack and plunder the caravans. This is a constant risk the villages are facing and they might even call out to the player to help them if their caravans are constantly raided. They also will buy some additional caravan guards for protection if they have the means to do that. But these guards only offer a limited amount of protection.

If a caravan is attacked and the gurads are overwhelmed (more on worldmap combat later as the combat is not yet in the game) the attackers take all the wealth from the caravan and take it back to their base of operations.

Day and Night Cycle

Time passes in real time on the worldmap, not in turns. We now have implemented a day/night cycle to add to the atmosphere of the world. Of course the day and nighttimes also have gameplay effects.

At night all parties movement will be significantly slowed as they have more difficulty finding their way in the dark. Additionally, the sight range is greatly reduced during the night, making it more difficult to spot enemy parties, locations or spawnpoints. So the player has to be careful when moving at night not run into any ambushes.

Depending on the type of party there are creatures in the game that do not suffer from sight or movement penalties during the night. This applies to werewolves and the undead, making these enemies especially dangerous in the dark.

Disclaimer to the following pic: The green circles on the pic below show the sight range of the party, they are only visible for debugging reasons. Also, the big sun and moon are only to give a better example. Finally, the caravan icon is still a placeholder.



Raiders

Similarly to villages there are other locations that spawn parties. So far we implemented haunted crypts that spawn a variety of undead raiders. These spawnpoints also have a health and wealth resource pool that they use to spawn (buy) raiding parties.

These raiders seek out villages to attack and plunder their wealth. After a successful raid on a village they return to their spawnpoint and add whatever they plundered to the spawnpoints resource pool. This way a successful spawnpoint keeps growing its resource base that it can then use to buy even more powerful raiding parties and plunder even more resources.

As you can see there is a dynamic at work that can lead to really powerful spawnpoints and raiding parties. So leaving a spawnpoint unchecked for too long can lead to “no-go areas” that are mainly controlled by evil forces and where all villages are destroyed (mind you that village destruction is not in the game yet).

Next up on the worldmap:

The following features are close to completion and will be implemented soon in the game.

Distinct Party Banners

Each party that is travelling the worldmap will have a unique banner showing from what village, or any other spawnpoint for that matter, a party is coming. The player will be able to choose a custom banner when starting a new game.

Paul already pumped out a first set of banner graphics so you can get an impression on what to expect.



Worldmap Combat

As we wanted the possibility of two parties fighting each other on the worldmap without a player being present (and a real tactical combat) we had to come up with a simplified world map combat system that estimates the strength of a party and calculates their chances of winning and their losses in combat.

As this system is not final, we cant go into too much detail here. The combat system will account for the strength of each individual solider of a party and also takes place in turns. However, there is a delay between each round of combat to make the combat last a while and give the player the opportunity to join the fight. Once the player joins the fighting, it will continue in the tactical view just like any other fight that the player is involved in. As of now we do not have an automated combat or auto-resolve feature planned for player combat.

Destructible Villages

As mentioned above villages (and other spawnpoints) should be destroyed when their health reaches zero or below. We will implement this feature shortly.

Become a Bro and download the tactical combat demo!

If you haven't done so already head over to our “Downloads” section, get the Battle Brothers tactical combat demo and give it a try! Also make sure to let us know what you think about it and how we could improve it in our Forums.

 

[Jaysen]

We want to give your Battle Brothers an individual background that also plays into the tactical combat. We elaborate on that in our latest dev blog:

Dev Blog #18: Character Traits and Backgrounds


Battle Brothers is a game where attachment to the individual characters in your retinue is an essential part of the game. Today we explain how we use character backgrounds and traits to create characters that feel unique from the moment you hire them, and that you can relate and get attached to (only to see them getting horribly slaughtered by some axe-wielding skeleton).

Character Backgrounds

Each Battle Brother comes with a background trait that should give you an idea of the character’s former life, the childhood or profession before he was hired to join your warband.

A Battle Brother may have once been a noble from an established and wealthy family that ended up losing its fortune, or he may have been a simple farmer forced to take up arms and sell out his swordarm to get by after his farm was raided and burned to the ground. Perhaps he is a former soldier that fell in disgrace with his superiors and had to disappear, or a former thief that had a change of heart.

Whatever the case, these background traits come with a short procedurally generated story for flavor and an actual game play effect. Depending on the background, characters have different starting attributes and equipment. A farmer will be used to work the fields all day long and will not fatigue easily, whereas a noble may have benefitted from lessons in swordfighting at court. And whereas a farmer will have only the most basic of weaponry, a noble may bring his own sword or armor.

The characters that make up your group are a colorful, mixed bunch that will grow together into a band of brothers over the course of the game. We realize that not every one of you will care for character backstories - some are in just for the tactical battles. However, for those of you who like to have their creativity and imagination run wild when playing, we try to give you as much inspiration as possible.



Character Traits

In a recent blog article [Dev Blog #16] we talked about the perk system and how the perks help specializing your Brothers and change the way you employ them in battle. Character traits work very similar. However, they generally don’t have as much impact as perks do and can not be chosen on levelup. Instead, each Battle Brother comes with a random 0 to 2 character traits from the beginning that can be positive, negative or something inbetween. Below are some examples of what traits you can expect - keep in mind, though, that those are still heavily subject to change at this time.

Tough - This character is tough as nails, shrugging off hits and blows, and gains additional hitpoints.

Eagle-Eyed - This character can see a fly on a zombie’s nose from across the battlefield and gains increased view range.

Fearless - There are a lot of old friends to meet in the afterlife. This character is not afraid of death and has a higher maximum morale.

Dumb - Umm, what? This character isn't the brightest, and new concepts take a while to really stick with him. Experience gain is reduced.

Tiny - Being rather short of build, this character is used to getting pushed around and does less melee damage.

Clumsy - This character is as dangerous to himself as he is to his opponents. The to-hit chance for melee attacks is reduced slightly.

These traits are not designed to be fair and produce balanced characters. On the contrary, the traits are designed to add flavor to characters and elevate them from being mere clone soldiers to individuals with strengths and weaknesses exactly by being imbalanced and distributed randomly. The impact of these traits will never be prohibitingly strong, and every single character will have something to contribute to your group. However, some characters may be naturally better suited for specific roles than others, and some may be less suited for the hard life of a mercenary in general.

Imagine a Battle Brother that is both “tiny” and “clumsy” - seemingly not a good point to start out. However, these traits do not affect his ability to use a ranged weapon and this character may still end up becoming one of your best archers. As the commander of a mercenary outfit, it is your responsibility to make the best out of the men you have available. And we really want to make sure that it feels like men, not just a bunch of anonymous units. Indeed, we feel that it is situations like the cowardly and overweight Brother surviving battle after battle against all odds and ultimately saving the day by slaying the lich-king when all hope seemed lost, that contribute to an enjoyable emerging narrative and make for fun anecdotes.

[Jaysen]

Its time for another developers blog entry - this time we describe some of our worldmap assets in more detail:

Dev Blog #19: On Worldmap Locations



The strategic worldmap in Battle Brothers is filled with opportunities for adventure, battles and interaction. One of these opportunities are locations that you can explore, destroy and plunder or trade with. In this week’s developer’s blog we want to present you a couple of these locations.

On resources

Before getting into the midst of things a quick word on how locations work. Each location has its own resources that it uses to “buy” various parties with that each have their own agenda, AI, combat strength and troop composition. These parties will then venture out to perform various tasks. Most of these activities have the ultimate goal of increasing the location’s resources so that it can buy even stronger parties in the future.



Hideout

The hideout is an encampment hidden in rough terrain like dark woods or steep hills in a safe distance from the next stronghold or watchtower. The hideout usually harbors a flock of bandits or other scoundrels that use it as a base of operations to plunder trade routes or raid unprotected villages.

It will first send out several small groups of scouts that search the area for valuable targets like trade caravans or small villages that do not have a lot of defenses. Once they have observed and estimated a target they return to the hideout to inform their fellow bandits. The hideout then uses its resources to create a larger raiding party that travels out to attack the reported target. If the attack is successfull, the bandits plunder everything they can get their hands on and haul it back to the hideout, in turn increasing the hideout’s resources.

If the player, or any other faction for that matter, manages to intercept the scouts before they get back to deliver their information, the hideout won’t be able send out raiding parties as they don’t know where to send them.

If the hideout’s activities go unchecked for a while, their raiding parties will grow with their available resources and their parties become bigger and bigger until then can evenetually even threaten larger towns or watchtowers.



Watchtower

Watchtowers are used to guard the long and lonesome roads that trade caravans use to get their wares from one market to the next. As these trade caravans are easy prey for bandits and worse, the watchtowers aim to prevent any attacks on them.

These towers are usually placed along the road network and mostly close to road intersections. They use their resources to create patrols that move along the roads up to the next market and scout for bandits and their hideouts. The resources are not gathered by the tower itself, but the tower is usually supplied by the much bigger strongholds that are described below.

The patrols will of course hunt down any evil-doers that they come by but in case they are not strong enough to deal with the threat, the watchtower will be able to spawn a bigger assault party and even call in help from a stronghold that houses a lot more troops.



Stronghold (Picture still wip)

The stronghold is a big military fortress that accomodates a large amount of professional soldiers and provides security to a large region. The stronghold will create patrols of its own like a watchtower but it will also supply the much smaller watchtowers in the vicinity via supply trecks. Of course these supply trecks can be raided just like trade caravans.

What is more, the stronghold does have the means to fight bigger threats by sending out a dedicated assault party of trained footmen and knights. However, the soldiers of the stronghold are not numerous enough to guard any caravan or village at all times. So there will be many opportunities for the player to help out civilians in distress even when close to a stronghold.

As a stronghold usually has a smithy dedicated to forging and repairing all kinds of weapons and armor, the player will have the opportunity to stack up on military equipment. The amount and grade of equipment will be different for each stronghold depending on its location and resource stockpile.



Villages and Towns

We already talked a little about the human settlements in previous blog posts. These play a central role as in the strategy part of the game as you need them to hire new men, buy equipment and do much more.

These settlements create trade caravans with local goods and send them to other towns markets to generate trade revenue for both locations. Because these caravans are usually not very well guarded, bandits will try hard to ambush and plunder them.

If the bandits, or any other attacking faction, attempt to attack a settlement itself, it will hastily gather a militia troop to fend of the aggressors. However, this needs some time and if the attackers are fast enough or are seen too late, for example by attacking at night, the settlement will be completely undefended. The strength of the militia depends on the resources available.