Battle Brothers

A lot of the negative reviews came from the game's RNG system. Many people described it as broken, unfair and unbalanced, while there are a lot of others claimed the system was fair, balanced and had been tested to death. You don't need to believe both sides, from my point of view both of them are correct, and you can buy the game and test it by yourself. The most important thing is that you need to feel FUN when you play a game. (I quitted after playing ~100 hours, just because it's not fun anymore) Based on my data, this game's RNG system is not broken, but is unfair. Let me explain: (1) If you have played XCOM, you will find its RNG system is more close to what you expect. But in fact, the XCOM's RNG is skewed toward the player, because this is a balance between player's real world and the virtual game world. Because what players care is only their OWN team. Imaging there are 100 mercenary groups on the map (1 is yours and 99 are game generated) and there are endless monsters to fight. What players want is that they can keep playing the game to the end, and their team be the standing out one, surviving to the last moment. This 100% player's expectancy, in math world, is 1%. You see the gap here? You don't care about other mercenary groups, right? But Battle Brothers treat your team the same as the others, even they are CPU generated. (2) Now run your Excel, type in =RANDARRAY(1000, 100, 1, 100, TRUE). Now you get a table of random numbers. What this means is that you have a 100-face dice, you roll it 1000 times, collect the data, and do this test again, and repeat it 100 times. These are numbers what random numbers should look like. If you roll a 100-face dice 1000 times, you will have a mean of 50, or very close to it, such as 48.82 or 51.29. Very occasionally you will get a mean like 42.37, but this will be very very very uncommon. The deviation from 50, is actually very narrow. If you plot a distribution of these means (you have 100, because you repeat the test 100 times), you will get a "normal distribution", with the center located at 50. (3) Now check the distribution of every number. If you roll a 100-sided dice 1000 times, you can expect that most of the numbers will be rolled 10 times. Some of them may have appeared 9 or 11 times, even 8 or 12 times, but overall they will approach 10. Very occasionally a number may only get rolled 2 times, or luckily 18 times, but this will be uncommon. The distribution of these numbers of "numbers of getting rolled", will also be a "normal distribution". (4) In Excel 2003, the RAND function used the Wichman & Hill algorithm for generating pseudo-random numbers. Starting with Excel 2010, the Mersenne Twister MT19937 (32-bit) algorithm is being used. As you know, the MT system, is used by the RNG system of Battle Brothers. That means, they should be the same. (5) Now record every RNG number in your fights when you play Battle Brothers. You can record only yours, only the enemies, but not both. For RNG calculation, you have a fixed number (that's the hit roll, the final value calculated from the basic hit roll and many modifiers, of your or your enemy's attack) and a random number (randomly generated by the RNG system, to beat the former fixed number). We want the random numbers, not the fixed numbers. In every fight, generally you can record more than 100 values, so 10 fights are enough to make a preliminary conclusion. If you want to do it quickly, you can use Cheat Engine to lock the fatigue and the action points of your brothers, so that you can regenerate these numbers quickly. (6) Do a t-test to see if your distribution can be tell from the Excel distribution. Based on my data, I have a 99.99% confidence to say that these two systems are different. In Battle Brothers, some minor algorithms are applied so the numbers are slightly skewed toward both sides, so that encouraging very lucky and very unlucky events to occur. But this modification, based on my data, applies equally to you and your enemies. (7) But why can a system applying equally to both sides be called unfair? Because in Battle Brothers the developer did not take the factor "weight" into consideration. This makes the game more challenging and this is the base different that distinguish Battle Brothers from XCOM. Things with same incidence do not mean they bear the same weight (or, significance). In business, we call this risk management. For a high-level team, being extremely unlucky versus being extremely lucky bears different weights. The benefit gained from being extremely lucky is minimal. It may result in a battle you originally need 20 turns to beat with some mild to moderate injuries into a battle you beat in 10 turns without any injury. That's nothing. However, the weight of being extremely unluckly is heavy, you may lose an important brother and ruin your whole team. It is, the benefits you get from being extremely lucky, even several times, do not match the weight of ONE single loss of being extremely unlucky. An enemy being extremely unlucky? You don't care, right? But what if an enemy being extremely lucky? The same rule applies here. Why you want to play an unfair game? Because, brothers, the real world is cruel and the same unfair. Fair worlds only exist in dreams and in games. In real world, you don't bear the same weight as those rich people, right? So, you must change your mind when playing Battle Brothers. The game mechanism treats your team the same as any other CPU team. You are going to fail anyway. The soul of Battle Brothers lies in the STORY you build around your team brothers, not lies in beating the game to the end. There is no end in this game, just memories.

The game I have the most hours in. It is, without a doubt, one of my all-time favorites.

[strike] Strategy [/strike] -> Randomly Love the game but the RNG in this game is too much at the point that all of your unit position and strategy become meaningless. Same tier unit 6 VS 1 surrounded all directions with high ground advantage are all missed and that 1 unit just lucky enough to one shot 2 units each turn. The worst part is UX/UI in this game, you are never able to check enemy stat and ability. You never know what an enemy is capable of, you might learn and remember that an orc can charge and stun but there is no detail about it at all. Necromancer casted possessed on its unit but you don’t even know what that skill does and what you should do about it. It’s a game that knows the details by wiki only when they should add a little extra UI for it.

Good gameplay? - Check Developers supporting their game years after release? - Check Mod community? - Check Runs on a potato? - Check DLCs that are actually good but optional? - Check I mean... go buy it unless you have it already! If you do - gift it to a friend :)

I have almost 90 hours in this game and while i can say that in the beginning i was having a blast with it despite not liking turn based combat, after a good amount of play time i cant stand the way the game handles your party leveling and getting better. From the start with 3 lvl 1 men to the end game with a group of 12 with no one under level 10, the fights never got any easier whatsoever. If your on any difficulty higher than beginner you will constantly lose your best men to what seems like bs. Your men can be decked out with the best armor and weapons money can buy and it might as well be made of paper. I have seen raiders that have the exact same weapons do twice as much damage as my men and take half as much with less armor. There is no "Holy crap ive made my guys into absolute badasses" because the enemies you fight are always going to be a little bit better than you. I want to love this game but im tired of dying and feeling as if getting better gear and leveling up is absolutely worthless. I dont want to be invincible i just want to actually see the use of getting better weapons and armor.

Seeing as feedback was requested I figure I'd leave a review of this game that I have sunk many, many hours into. It's great! Fantastic and unique with only a few flaws I've found. There is far more good than bad, so I'll start with the good. The progression is top notch, seeing your bros get stronger and gear up, looking for legendary pieces of rare gear, building out your forces and seeking new recruits, its all a wonderful pace that hits just right to keep you going contract after contract. The battles as well are varied and mostly interesting, barbarians, desert troops, and in between. Battles scale up and become more developed in the late game, you go from fighting a couple rugged bandits to complex formations, and even crazier in the far north. Missions vs humans are all very interesting. This does lead me into the primary complaint about the game though, monster fights, in particular, monster fights in the middle and late game. Where human battles are always ramping up in size and complexity, with new units and abilities and formations as you get further, monster battles... get bigger. You fight 10 spiders early game, you fight 40 spiders late game. You fight 1 lyndwurm early, you fight... 6 late. Same with Djinn, same with ogres. Couple that with how the monsters just aren't as fun and satisfying to hit, lacking the same visceral feedback of fighting men, and late game monster fights become an extreme slog. The strategy used to fight each monster is usually quite simple, and because monster fights are usually composed of only one unit to fight, that strategy is the same, every time. If I could ask for one change to the game it would be a revamp of monster fight progression through a campaign. Focus more on adding monster subtypes, new abilities, tougher ones instead of masses that eat up time. As it is now I tend to actively avoid many monster contracts late game, not because they are hard, but because they are quite the slog.

I have spent so many hours being frustrated at this game. It will hurt you and you will hate it. But you will also fall in love with it if you are anything like me.

希望能有中文版本

I love this game more than anything however it's been bugged to all heck, A lot of people cannot SAVE or even get to the menu settings. GPT says there's a file error with the DLC and it probably has something to do with old conent and stuff beyond my understanding. Please fix @dev

Finally upgraded to buy the burning deserts DLC. I do like this game. It's very much an open-ended singleplayer tabletop roleplaying experience. Fans of old single player board games like Barbarian Prince, old-school DND, Sid Meyer's Pirates, etc., will all like this, assuming they enjoy the tactical combat. Note about the combat. The game is super, super hard. Ironman mode is optional (but who doesn't play Ironman when you can?!?!), and despite starting 10+ campaigns I've yet to get very far in the game. Which is great! There are options to make things easier though.