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The Rally Point: The complete Battle Brothers is still the mercenary game to beatSibling chivalry
Sibling chivalry
Can I tell you a secret? I’m terrible atBattle Brothers. I’mstillterrible at Battle Brothers, even after playing it on and off for a few years. It’s a bit likeBlood Bowl, oddly, in that it’s all about mitigating risks. And like Blood Bowl, despite having a decent head for tactics and planning on the fly, I am hopeless at sticking to them when I see a new idea, thus: terrible. At it.
Blazing Deserts Trailer - A Battle Brothers DLCA trailer for the Blazing Deserts 2020 DLC for Battle BrothersWatch on YouTube
Blazing Deserts Trailer - A Battle Brothers DLC
It might not have spread its focus far, but it takes ages to excavate after multiple rounds of DLC (and when you’re not very good at it), because of how much it variegated the details. Overhype Studios have focused on adding more possibilities, with each DLC even taking advantage of the prior ones a little. The more of them you have, the more chance there is of their details bumping into each other, to the point where it would feel weirdly incomplete to go back and play without them.
Combat also compares, quite bizarrely, toDark Soulsof all things, because although weapons have statistics, it’s just as important that they enable differenttypesof attack. This gives you more options, and makes more of them worth considering than most games do. Instead of Sword+2 and Sword+3, you weigh up relative damage levels vs utility vs a specific brother’s skills. Spears are accurate but don’t hit hard, but a spearwall move lets you influence where enemies will move. A humble meat cleaver could prove more useful against the undead than an expensive sword, because it lets you explicitly attempt to decapitate. Weapons become not just means to transmit bigger numbers, but tools, in the grim way of real warfare.
Your dudes are precious, and expensive to lose even when they’re cheap. Each is named and statted, with a professional background, often a personal trait or two, and varying degrees of potential to be better at stabbing, shooting, avoiding either, enduring, moving faster, or holding their nerve. The best are already soldiers or hunters, but they know it and will cost thousands of gold upfront for their experience and armour. Cheaper ones are common labourers, craftsmen, soft-handed scholars, each of which could still have some use. The lowest expectations are from the homeless, refugees, maimed or otherwise downtrodden, but each can surprise you, either with a hidden talent, surviving long enough to reach their potential, or contributing to an interesting story.
Battle Brothers isn’t primarily a story generator. Its narratives vary little from winning or losing repetitive fights, and surviving one of its “late game crises” or not. There’s a curious tension between getting attached to individuals who you’ve invested so much time in slowly levelling up, and treating the party itself as paramount; its entity overrides the value of any one or even handful of members. There are times when, likeWildermyth, you’ll just accept that it’s time for even your favourite and most powerful to take an arrow to the neck. Even more so here, because there’s no legacy, no inheriting children. There is the party, and survival of the whole. It is the attitude of the knife. An oddly upbeat and humourous version, anyway, despite the constant violence and death. In particular, I love that it’s not edgy or grimdark about its grimness or darkness. You can be, well, mercenary, and not only is that accepted, but there are even events where it’s kinder to be a bit of a jerk.
But you do get those events. It is full of micro stories, both yours on the battlefield, and the semi-random events that pop up from time to time, unpredictably, and depending on so many things. Where you are on the map. Whether you have enemies. What the party has done recently. How well the last battle went. The time of day, your reputation, your supplies. The backgrounds of your men can throw up stories, like a punch-up breaking out between your southerners and northerners, or a peasant getting into it with your anatomist because he’s carrying a book.
That’s basically what the expansions have leaned into. Sure, the map is bigger, and there are loads more armour and weapon options. Instead of the default “getting the band back together” start, your party could be raiders who’ve alienated 80% of the map, or weirdo graverobbers who make experimental concoctions out of monster parts. There are more monsters that present atypical fight structures, and a new end game crisis. But it’s not any one thing that any of its DLC added that has made a difference. It is, just like your party, a different and better whole with the complete set. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re eventually made inseparable.
Battle Brothers is meant to be replayed, you see. I’m glad it only recommends, and does not mandate (sigh) “ironman” mode, which would kill it stone dead for me. There are even lower difficulties. But I recognise it says that because it’s meant to be tried again, not to waste your time or make some stupid empty point about being “hardcore”, but to see all its possibilities. All the permutations you won’t realise until you chance into something you haven’t combined before, like when a group of ifrit attacked some nomads I was hired to oust, creating a three-way fight that suddenly became four-way when our dead started to rise and attack everyone, or the magical bird I found in a secret structure while skirting a week-long path to a two day delivery because I’d raided too many caravans. Sometimes you have to accept that the fight is lost, and it’s time for the party to end. You have tolearn to lose. Most mercenary companies will, after all.
I remain kind of terrible at Battle Brothers. I don’t know that I will ever fully love it, but it’s a game that knows what it’s about, and a rare one whose additions only bring that flavour out even stronger. If nothing else, I admire that a great deal.
