I thought Guts traveled alone with a pixie or something after the Eclipse and was never again happy.
Giving Guts a traveling harem was obviously more in line with character.
That's actually, remarkably, very far from what happens, and it's one of the big reasons why I respect Kentaro Miura so much as a writer (as well as admiring his gorram fantastic eye for detail in his art): he doesn't write simple characters. Technically, the first member of Guts' new party is Casca, given that he manages to rescue her, but he dumps her with the blacksmith while he goes off looking for revenge. Then there's Puck, the fairy. Two of the others are introduced in Chapter 95 (though they don't join up with Guts until much later), and the last of the group as it currently stands debuted in Chapter 184. By way of comparison, the Eclipse is only in the mid-80s.
But yeah, that's a big part of the reason why I love Berserk so much: none of the characters are what they initially appear to be, and all of them are fairly complex. The closest you get to a "stock" character is Isidro, given that he's something of a parody of shonen tropes and a deconstruction of what would actually happen to a shonen hero in a grimdark low fantasy world, but even then he goes through real development, both as a character and a fighter, and makes contributions to the various plots. And he's the most easily ignored of Guts' crew;
Farnese and Serpico are both wonderfully messed up people and have an excellent dynamic,
Schierke is probably equal with Guts in terms of importance to the group,
Evarella makes a wonderful counterpoint to Puck, and
Cascaafter she shows up again with
that creepy mystical toddler that looks too much like a mix of her and Guts.... o.0
Those spoilers are mostly namedrops that would tip readers off, BTW.