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[Persus13]

My game had the house war crisis fire first, so I ended up fighting a lot of humans. I like the beasts because bandits to the exact same thing every time I fight them except when I raid their base.

[AzyWng]

Began playing the game again for a bit and discovered that not always using spearwall and varying up my weapons of choice has proven surprisingly effective. Granted, maybe that's because all difficulties are on easy, but I'm killing more and dying less.

Also tried experimenting with other stuff, and took risky-ish jobs so I could give my units better armor.

EDIT: Also, yeah, alps are terrible

[Majestic7]

Yeah, I meant greater variety of human foes in terms of tactics and equipment. In general it is nice to have enemies that bleed and have morale. Grinding skeletor legionaires isn't very fun.

[Tack]

Technically Nachrezers are undead with morale which is neat.

But I agree.

[Ai Shizuka]

I'd like a new tier of human enemies after raiders.

All the other enemies have end-game groups. Humans have the noble armies but those aren't exactly an option outside the crisis. Bounty hunters are cool but extremely rare and spawn in very specific events.

[Cthulhu]

Began playing the game again for a bit and discovered that not always using spearwall and varying up my weapons of choice has proven surprisingly effective. Granted, maybe that's because all difficulties are on easy, but I'm killing more and dying less.

Also tried experimenting with other stuff, and took risky-ish jobs so I could give my units better armor.

EDIT: Also, yeah, alps are terrible

Spears are good early on with guys sub-50 Melee Attack but their damage is shit.  Anybody over 50 gets something better, mostly flails and maces with a couple axes.

I'm doing a lot better, figured out the game expects a degree of optimization and isn't very good at communicating how the various mechanics works in order for you to do that.  Read a guide and now I'm kicking ass.

Then I got to the webknechts.  My biggest problem is always these new enemies.  It feels like they ran out of straightforward enemy ideas in the base game and got "creative" with the expansion enemies, mostly by giving them obnoxious new mechanics.  Webknechts fucking suck, I might hate them more than alps.

Edit:  Apparently I was premature dropping all the spears.  Apparently webknechts are easy.

[AzyWng]

The randomness makes me think "If this is what the newer XCOM games are like I'll probably be pretty mad at them too if I get them". I've missed 65s, multiple 40s, and even a few 80+es.

Anyway, pitchforks. I like these things and don't know why I didn't jump on them sooner. They let bros attack from a distance, deal a fairly substantial amount of damage for the foes you'll face if you're buying pitchforks, and since they use the big polearm skills (including thrusts, which have a bonus hit chance), they're good in the hands of less skilled bros.

It's nice.

Also, I'm actually paying attention to bro's stats now.

The Vermillion Dragons (I decided to give up on my previous playthrough of The Few Dead Ones) are doing all right so far, having recently visited every single settlement. We are still recovering from a fairly heavy loss involving some Nazrecher-something in German I can't remember but they eat corpses including their own dead. Discovered the unpleasant way that they can vore your bois, rendering them essentially out of the game until you kill the one who swallowed them.

Had to do a bit of savescumming, but I wasn't ready to stop playing as the Dragons just yet. I'm still not.

[Retropunch]

The randomness makes me think "If this is what the newer XCOM games are like I'll probably be pretty mad at them too if I get them". I've missed 65s, multiple 40s, and even a few 80+es.

Newer XCOM games are AWFUL for the percentage chance hits. I think the issue is that they're probably correct from a 'truly random number' perspective, but due to how the game works and how it looks like (marine stood next to an alien with a shotgun with 90% to hit - miss twice in a row) it feels bad.

I think most games sort of fudge over this - 80%+ means always hit, and anything around 50% means every second shot will hit and sometimes the other will too. For other types of games it's fine as you have relatively high pools of health and large numbers of attacks (take most RPG games) so those individual hits and misses don't matter. in XCOM you have guys with like 3 health, and you'll miss two shots and the enemy will get all three in from the same distance and it just feels unfair. It's not, but it feels that way.

I still enjoyed XCOM but only when I realised that I had to account for this and purposefully adjust tactics to combat awful hit rates.

[Persus13]

Iirc, newer XCOM actually fudges the percentage chances to hit so that something like an 80 percentage chance to hit is going to hit more than 80 percent of the time. Its just when shots with 95 percent chance to hit miss, it can be pretty devastating when it counts.

Battle Brothers actually shows you your chances to hit and what you rolled in the upper left, and I think it just goes straight percentage. And like XCOM, I've missed with over 80%, but I've also landed hits with 5% or 38% that really mattered (mainly on Geists)

Also, if you kill unholds, don't sell their bones, use them to craft bone plating. It will keep your two-handers alive.

Spears are good early on with guys sub-50 Melee Attack but their damage is shit.  Anybody over 50 gets something better, mostly flails and maces with a couple axes.

I'm doing a lot better, figured out the game expects a degree of optimization and isn't very good at communicating how the various mechanics works in order for you to do that.  Read a guide and now I'm kicking ass.

Then I got to the webknechts.  My biggest problem is always these new enemies.  It feels like they ran out of straightforward enemy ideas in the base game and got "creative" with the expansion enemies, mostly by giving them obnoxious new mechanics.  Webknechts fucking suck, I might hate them more than alps.

Edit:  Apparently I was premature dropping all the spears.  Apparently webknechts are easy.

Yeah, some spears will wreck the spiders. They're pretty easy to kill, but are slightly harder than wolves and apes. Now that you've killed them once, you can use their poison glands to craft an antidote to that and Goblin poison.

[Cthulhu]

The randomness makes me think "If this is what the newer XCOM games are like I'll probably be pretty mad at them too if I get them". I've missed 65s, multiple 40s, and even a few 80+es.

Anyway, pitchforks. I like these things and don't know why I didn't jump on them sooner. They let bros attack from a distance, deal a fairly substantial amount of damage for the foes you'll face if you're buying pitchforks, and since they use the big polearm skills (including thrusts, which have a bonus hit chance), they're good in the hands of less skilled bros.

It's nice.

Also, I'm actually paying attention to bro's stats now.

The Vermillion Dragons (I decided to give up on my previous playthrough of The Few Dead Ones) are doing all right so far, having recently visited every single settlement. We are still recovering from a fairly heavy loss involving some Nazrecher-something in German I can't remember but they eat corpses including their own dead. Discovered the unpleasant way that they can vore your bois, rendering them essentially out of the game until you kill the one who swallowed them.

Had to do a bit of savescumming, but I wasn't ready to stop playing as the Dragons just yet. I'm still not.

I havent done much with pitchforks.  The game is really random but with the right equipment you can mitigate a lot of it.  100+ armor (chain or better) and a shield will power through a battle worth of minor bad luck, and curating your bros will get you better odds offensively.  A bro with sub-50 melee at level one will probably never be good at hitting anything without a spear.  Under 60 or so HP will probably die the first time people seriously go after him, etc.

As for nachzehrers, they dont have armor and their morale is really low.  Use slashing weapons to cause injuries and they break fast, they also tend to walk into spearwalls.  Feasted ones are a good target for nets.  I always try to carry at least two or three nets and spare daggers in case something nasty shows up or I find a raider with armor i want

[Ai Shizuka]

Pitchforks are one of my favorite early weapons. Actually I always try to buy one with the starting funds (more if I find some damaged ones on sale).
You can use them to keep a valuable bro in the back and still be useful while he levels up.
You can give them to a bro with a bad melee score because the main skill has a 10% bonus to hit chance.
If you are short on armor for your first wave of recruits, a naked bro can still be useful with a pitchfork.
The repel skill can be a literal life-saver in some situations.

Of course they drop in value when you move past the thug/wolves/naked zombies stage, but then you replace them with pikes or hooked blades looted from raiders.

[Mephansteras]

I often move older polearms, like pitchforks, to my archers as backup weapons. Helps out a lot if I end up in a fight where their bows aren't useful or if they run out of ammo. Also helps that they can drop the weapon for one of the line-brothers to use if they get too hurt to stay on the line.

[Wiles]

New patch is out with an alp rework!

The Alp
In reworking the Alp, we wanted to have fighting them feel more varied and interesting than up to now, but at the same time not compromise their theme or identity. The Alp is a nocturnal predator that haunts you with nightmares and feeds off of it, and fighting it is supposed to have a puzzle-esque aspect to it as you navigate a maze of nightmares. In order to achieve the above, we’ve changed the mechanics of the Alp quite fundamentally.

Alps no longer inflict the ‘Sleeping’ or ‘Nightmare’ status effects – those are gone. Instead, they cast the new ‘Realm of Nightmares’ spell on ground near your men. Any tile such affected has the boundary to the world of dreams erased for two turns, which allows living nightmares to manifest and haunt your men.

Nightmares are a new type of opponent that goes down with just one hit, but whose attacks always hit and ignore armor. The more resolve a character has, the less damage they’ll take from these attacks. A single hit doesn’t do terribly much damage in any case, but nightmares can slowly eat away at your men’s sanity, health and morale. If the ‘Realm of Nightmares’ effect runs out, the living nightmares will also fade from the world.

With the new Alps, you’ll have to face off against nightmares holding you in place and damaging you a bit more literally, but you’ll also be able to get use out of more skills, perks and equipment than with the previous incarnation, and battles should end up feeling more varied and faster-paced. They’re also a bit less unique than before, which is a price to pay, but should still feel unique enough compared to fighting all other opponents in the game.

From: https://steamcommunity.com/games/365360/announcements/detail/1692692109766389051

[Persus13]

Well supposedly its made Alps even worse. Haven't run into any yet myself though.

[Man of Paper]

Yeah commentary has been bad enough that I haven't played. I personally liked the old alps, so them even getting overhauled miffs me.