Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Elfeater]

Okay makes sense, will some of the mercs you hire start with levels you can use to tailor them right off the bat? Say you hire a woodcutter with the strong trait who served for a year in the kings army. Would he have a strong trait and then have an assignable perk since he has more combat experience than a rookie? Or would he have a trait like hardened giving him more morale on top of his strength trait?

[Jaysen]

This is a tricky one and i have to admit that we are not decided yet.

For now you can only hire level 1 Brothers, so no perks are available to them. As the game progresses and you lose some men, you will want to refill the gaps with seasoned soldiers and not train them from level 1 again. This is also essential to alleviate the impact of permadeath a little and make people less inclined to "save scum" to avoid losses.

So we definitely want higher level soldiers for hire later on. Two possibilities: Give them a number of perks according to their level that the player can assign freely or pre-assign the perks according to character background and traits.
Problem with the second one is, that we want each character to be absolutely unique and procedurally generated. As soon as we, as the designers, pre-choose perks there is a very limited number of sensible set-ups and you could end up with a lot of "repetitive" or very similar characters wich we really do not want. On the other hand, getting a new soldier and then freely assign his perks feels really "gamey" because that character already learned a lot and lived through many things to become who he is now.

Im not sure but it may well be that we go with the free assign variant as it leaves more options for the player and helps sustain character uniqueness.

[dennislp3]

Why not just assign random traits...no predefined traits and no player choice?

Or have weighted results based on backgrounds...some traits would be more likely among certain backgrounds but you would still have a large pool of traits to pull from

[Jaysen]

Completely random perks would not work as we have perks that only benefit ranged attacks or shield use and some perks dont make much sense together. That would lead to very inefficient perk combinations.

We could go with the weighted perk assignment, that might be a decent option.

[Retropunch]

Weighted makes sense, with level one hirelings having a trait strictly related to their background, with others being a mix between background specific and random traits which are relevant (so a farmer isn't going to suddenly gain +2 to ranged or something)

[Jaysen]

Finally we can show you the first video of our Battle Brothers worldmap! It took us a while and it is all still WIP but we reworked all the tiles and how they are put together but it payed off. Take a look and if you have any ideas im happy to hear them:

[Elfeater]

Are the numbers the strength of the party? Or the number of troops?

[Sharp]

Resources, so gold/food/loot I'm guessing.

Looks very interesting, can't wait to play it.

[Elfeater]

Resources, so gold/food/loot I'm guessing.

Looks very interesting, can't wait to play it.

Sorry, my mistake I meant by the AI factions. They had a bracketed number by their name.

[ragnar119]

I am not a fan of randomization, as it will often make things that are of less quality compared to hand crafted worlds and for very little benefits.
 
Anyway there are  two small things I noticed/not fan of.

First the whole world map seems very empty (probably because it's still early, but anyway just pointing it out). So fill it up with a lot of different points of interest, things like those graveyards or some other building. Having a whole fields with nothing on them is very boring. Maybe resource pick ups, statues that give you bonuses, and similar (played to much hero games )

The other thing I am not a fan is field of view. You have this active living world, but you will not see 90% of it if you are not there. Suggestion: maybe make your allies shared field of view with you, or something like that.

Also I really like that placeholder for a town interface, reminds me a little of heroes of might and magic town screen

[Jaysen]

The number in brackets that is shown near the name of a party is its strength.
Thats not the actual number of troops but the overall "power level"- that is a combination of the number and strength of troops in that party. For the final game we want to give the player some other clue to the strength of a party without showing an actual number like this. If you think of heroes of might and magic the power of an enemy troop was displayed in the description like "horde" or "few" or something along those lines. We will probably go down that way.

The number with the "R:" in front is the number of resources that the party has plundered or is transporting. You will see that on caravans and supply trecks but also on raiders. These resources will be added to the resource count of the location this party is bringing the resources to.

@ragnar
I can feel your concern and that is why we do not use a full "randomization" but procedural generation. Everything that we create has to follow certain rules so that it makes sense within the game world -  be it the worldmap, tactical combat maps or character background stories.

The map being a little empty is true. This is due to the early point in development and we are adding more locations and more variety to the environment all the time. HoMM is a great inspiration with its packed and exciting maps where you would find something new and interesting at every corner but i think our worldmap will end up with a little more space between points of interest

Regarding the field of view we are thinking about giving you a shared field of view with friendly locations like villages or so to give you a better idea on whats going on in the world.

[Elfeater]

A thought on the world view, you could do something close to Hammer of the God's world view, with a a start having a map of the known world, and all major areas, however the map  isnt perfect. For instance in Hammer of the Gods you your fleet may be sailing for England, but it is few squares away from were you anticipated. Have this system for most major cities and towns, but perhaps have the small isolated farming towns not show up till you actually find them, or hear about them then they apply to the same sort of map rules, you know around where it is, but not exactly, of course sometimes the maps are perfectly right and there is no trouble, but a single days extra travel may be what does you in.

Also once found they are always known exactly where they are.

[Jaysen]

Thats a pretty great idea right there - i like it!

For the EA we will probably not be able to put something like this in but definitely for the full release. Great stuff! I like how it gives you a general idea of sour surroundings while still letting enough room for exploration.

[Jaysen]

The first update this year: We implemented villages and castles and also the essential mercenary contracts:

Dev Blog #37: Progress Update - Village Screen and Mercenary Contracts

We hope you all had a great holiday time and a happy new year!

After the holidays it’s back to work - and we’re happy to announce that our last missing core mechanic, the mercenary contracts, has now made it into the game. From now on it is adding meat to the bones, that is content, polishing and eventually secondary features. Read up in our progress update on villages, castles and mercenary contracts to learn more.

Village and Castle Screens
As your mercenary company roams the land there are a number of friendly locations you can interact with. Both civilian locations, such as villages and larger cities, and military locations, such as watchtowers and mighty strongholds, can be entered.

As you enter them, you’re presented with a screen that acts as both an atmospheric backdrop, giving you a sense of where you are, and a hub for all actions there. From here, you can reach the shop to stock up on equipment or sell surplus items, you can hire new men to fill your ranks, and you can bargain with potential employers over mercenary contracts and collect your pay for done deeds. Of course, depending on where you are, you’ll have more or less options. For example, the selection of goods is far greater in a rich city than in a poor village - but so are the prices. Castles will offer different equipment, more suited to professional war, than villages which often have to use improvised weaponry and armor - not any village smith will be able to forge you a masterwork armor, afterall. On the other hand, you’ll find potential recruits more readily at villages and cities than at a lonely watchtower along the road.



This is how the new village screen looks. You can see the merchant on the left, mercenaries for hire in the middle and potential employers on the right, each with a contract offer of their own. The people are placed on a different layer and only shown as there is a reason for them to be there; the mercenaries are only shown as there are actual people to recruit, and the number of potential employers shown depends on the actual number of contract offers available at that location.



As you can see, castles use the same general layout, but have a different backdrop for atmosphere. In addition, we aim to have different soundscapes for individual locations to convey the vibe of a living and breathing village, or a busy castle readying itself for war, respectively.



During night time, both villages and castles will close their shops until morning. Ultimately, we want to have more and different backdrops for a number of locations, so that villages and cities feel noticeably different not just by the options available there but also in atmosphere. For the time being, however, villages and cities share a backdrop, while castles and watchtowers share the other.

Mercenary Contracts
A core mechanic of a game simulating a pseudo-medieval mercenary company is the idea of mercenary contracts. Basically, your men being hired to fight for coin. We’ve talked quite a bit about how contracts are issued and how they work in the past, and even if your’re familiar with the details, you might want a refresher at our previous blog article here: Blog Post on Contracts.

With the basics out of the way, we can announce that mercenary contracts have finally made it into the game. We’ve started with a few simple ones to ease us in, such as the classic errant (someones hires you to safely bring an item to another location) and the less classic discovery of a location (someone hires you to venture out into the wild to find a particular location, with varying degrees of clues to point you into the right direction). Now, let’s take a look at how the whole contract process works by using the example of another contract type, the hunting down of wild beasts.

As a party of werewolves roams across the worldmap and dwells in the vicinity of a village for a time, snatching a villager as meal every so often, that village will get alarmed and try to get rid of the looming danger in the area. It can muster a militia force if it has the resources to do so, but militia fights poorly and is ill-suited to tracking a pack of dangerous werewolves in the forest. A better course of action is thus for the village to offer a mercenary contract to exterminating these beasts, that is, offering payment for the player to track down and destroy the party of werewolves which has a very real effect on the village by slowly draining its resources.



As the player enters the city, an individual will offer the contract to the player in the form of a short story, looking something like in the image above. The details of all contract offers are proceduraly generated, making use of a variety of interchangeable pieces. Two contracts to hunt down beasts can therefore have very different descriptions - different employers, motivations, payment and potentially helpful details, such as where the beasts were last seen heading. A poor village may not be able to pay you much in terms of coin, but may instead offer to pay with bread and dried meat - is it still worth it for you to risk the lives of your men? Although, realistically speaking, we can’t really avoid repetition here, our aim is to provide enough variety to have these texts be interesting, informative and succinct enough to be read well into a campaign and provide atmosphere, context and light roleplaying opportunities. We purposefully decided not to go with a bare billboard list of tasks with nothing but rewards attached but want the player to pause if only for a brief moment and consider what his or her actions mean in the context of the world.



Upon confronting the beast party and killing the werewolves the player has to return to the village to collect the promised pay. Here again we use the same screen with a short procedurally generated story to give closure to the contract, pay out the player and provide a bit of atmosphere.

At this time we have four different contract types in the game, all relatively straight-forward. We aim to have several more for the initial Early Access release, including escorting caravans and defending a location from raiders. After the initial Early Access release, we aim to experiment with more complex contracts, including contract chains where one fulfilled contract can sometimes lead to another. We feel that a large number of varied contracts, both simple and complex ones, will go a long way to keeping things entertaining and diversified.

[gimli]

Very nice! This game is one, which I am going to buy for sure. This + "That Which Sleeps". Both games are looking very promising, so keep up the good work, lads! 

Also, 2 questions: Will it be possible to mod factions/kingdoms and create new ones even? Also, factions are interacting with eachother?...for example do they forge alliances, declaring war etc.? It would be awesome, because that would add lot of strategical diversity to the game.