Send help
Aight so I've been playing for awhile now on beginners maybe a year on and off. I have been just getting frustrated, i don't understand how anything in the background works, i barely see a use for most perks except final perks and even than their meh, i think i kinda understand the weapons, longswords seem kinda okay hammers are okay spears are useless as i miss almost every hit and when i do there is little damage done except to very poorly equipped bandit thugs. I've only gotten to the endgame once but got my what i thought were well equipped troops got wiped out by 5 conscripts, a assassin and two gunners against a full company. I've noticed my luck for rng is beyond terrible as my archers maybe hit once a battle and i tend to go 12 rounds against thugs with brothers that have fought since almost day one as they miss no matter how good their melee skill is. No they don't have permanent injuries, yes i make sure their equipment is.. mostly repaired. Honestly i just a very good walkthrough of what to do because I'm tired of A getting wiped out in the early game by 3 direwolves, 5 thugs that i outnumber, or taking caravaning and boom "hi death with no option to retreat cause if you do you, get run down by some monster far better than your troops" or B going broke from yhe amount of casualties i need to replace to keep 6/4 men in a company with spears and shields. Anyways thank you for reading this far please help me before i lose my sanity
Edit: thank you all so much this post has become a treasure trove of knowledge not just for me but for other players i am so thankful some of.you took the time to read this and give me advice, in depth guides or simply point me to good sources! You guys are awesome and i hope your battles find a your bros not dying and your contracts drowning you in riches!
Posted Dec 21, 2020, 9:16 AM UTC · edited
As for RNG, you want hitchance to be >50% when you take attacks. You want it to be as high as possible of course, but for early to mid game, your goals needs to be modest.
If your hit chance is less then 40%, you're going to miss a lot and you're going to be frustrated. Because 10 rolls of 40% hit chance does not equal 4 hits out of 10. Rather it's 60% to miss first round, then 60% from that first 60% and so on. It's like a snow ball of low luck. You want that snow ball to work in your favor.
If your hit chance is consistently under 50%, there's something you need to change. Equipment, leveling of brothers, choice of enemies and contracts. In fact you want it to be consistently >60%. When it does, you know you're doing things right.
Most early to mid game enemies have lowish defense of 5-20ties. For example raider with the shield will have 20 (5MDef+15shield). That means you need attack of 70+. But he may shieldwall in which case you need more.
Of course, your recruits will have 55-60 MAtc. So that impossible right? No.
Give every men with <60 MAtc a spear (+20 attack)
Give those with 60-70 MAtc a sword (+10 attack)
Give those with 70+ MAtc a flail and use them against enemies with shields, flails ignore shield (but not shieldwall), which is +15 to hit against round shields
I like to have at last two flails that I give to best of my men (at the moment) against humanoid opponents with shields.
Once you have couple of guys with 70+ MAtc, you can can go fancy with weapons, but until then it's spears, swords and flails. Hitting consistently is more important then doing huge damage. And then, consider your equipment before every fight. Flails aren't going to do much good against direwolves or webknechts. Against later you also want to leave behind your shields. Carry couple of spare weapons and shields in your inventory and reequip all your men before every battle.
Another way to up the hit chance is adjacency bonus. It's +5 for every additional man standing next to the enemy (works against you too). So don't just move and attack with your men, use turn order to set up attacks. Move one men to the enemy you want to take down and skip his turn order, move the second one and skip, move third and he already have +10% to hit, as will have those two before him when they get to finish their turns at the end of the round. +10% is huge, those are 3 max levels in MAtc. And that's 3x+10%. Of course don't do it blindly, sometimes you don't want to give enemy time to carry his attack, so always consider situation.
Use terrain. Every height level advantage is +10% to hit and -10% to get hit. Especially deadly with ranged as they can fire from more then one height level above (works against you too, so beware enemy archers on high ground). If you have ranged advantage, enemy will have to come to you. Use it to take high ground if available and fight from there. Even on otherwise flat terrain you can find tile or two of a high ground. Use it to anchor your flank for example. On the other hand don't fight at the place where enemy can put his archer on a high ground behind his line and in range of your men. If at all possible.
Use turn order at the start of combat. You generally will go second in round, and that's what you want. If you are advancing and enemy is defending, enemy goes first and skips his turn, skip yours, enemy ends, you move at the end of round without enemy having chance to attack. If you set your attack right (1-2 tiles from the enemy), you will get chance to attack once in the first round of the combat -or shieldwall if you think you won't be able to do much damage, then enemy goes against your shield wall the next turn with you having full 2 attacks after.
If you are defending even better (always try to be in defense and having enemy to attack you). Move such that enemy can't move and attack with 2H weapons and pikes in the same round -meaning end previous round with more then one tile away from advancing enemy and shieldwall. Next round enemy will move first and attack your shieldwall, once with his 1H and not at all with his 2H. You go after him with 2 full attacks. Use those initial 2 attacks to concentrate damage and take out some of his men, swinging battle to your advantage before fighting even begun.
Before you move or attack, think ahead move or two. "If I move this guy and attack that enemy now, what will happen with him the next round?" and so on. You know the turn order, with experience you will know AI patterns of different enemies, that means you can predict what he will do. So plan ahead a little bit.
Start treating combat little bit like a chess, just more complex one. In chess, you don't just advance towards enemy and hack and slash. You use strength against weakness, you plan your moves ahead few rounds. You use turn order and you set up kills. Use weapons (set flails against shielded enemies for example), terrain and turn order to do it.
And last thing, ranged bros are not very good when you hire them. They need levels to become effective. But you want to hire them early and start leveling them, because once raider marksmen start appear, you gone need them. You will also need them against necromancers. Similar with bannerman, you will need him against gheists, so find one and start leveling him early.
You have no idea how much this helped me understand stat related stuff and general game knowledge. I wish I had a gold award to give you! Thank you so much.
Your comment will suffice :) Thanks.
Your calculation on the 40% hitchance is a bit misleading. Second try is (statistically) 60% misschance of 60% (-> 36% chance to miss again on second try already) - so your chance to miss many times in a row gets lower and lower. Which is no snowballing downhill but quite the opposite.
Still 40% hitchance is very bad, dont get me wrong on that 😝
The best tip by far is the one with adjacency bonusses. Humanoid enemies also often get spooked by getting surrounded. Each stage of lowered morale is -10% to combat stats. With this info you can steamroll most raider groups
He's saying it's not 4/10 hits when the chance is 40%, instead it's consecutive 40% chances, you're just as likely to miss the second hit as the first, and each consecutive hit after that.
Your calculation is, from the very start, "what's the chance that I will miss both swings", rather than "what's the chance this next swing will miss"
Hope this explanation makes sense
I stumbled over that paragraph too and was going to say something. Saying it "snowballs downhill" makes no sense if he's not talking about the total, as is implied by the context. The writer of the post just got that part of statistics wrong, which is ok. The rest I assume is mostly solid.
Yes that's an important tip about morale, that I forgot and should have mentioned. Thanks. And it of course works against your own men too.
As for the hit chance, see leSwagster below.
This will actually help a massive amount. As alot of these things i didn't know and just thank you so much i can start abusing the game now.. for the most part.
You're welcome :) And don't hurry with the abuse part, game will still kick your ass aplenty :)) These things might just help even the odds a little.
Here are some other tips you may find useful I had written elsewhere:
https://www.reddit.com/r/BattleBrothers/comments/djr2n7/how_do_you_win_literally_any_fight_early_on/f4cdg2w/?context=3
One thing to add when you talked about being offensive or defensive. The AI decides which action they'll take based on how many range units each side has. If you have more or equal number of ranged bros (in my testing this includes bros with throwing weapons equipped) then the enemy will move towards you. If you're fighting goblins or bandits and you have no ranged they just hunker down and will defend while the archers shoot your bros. If you trust your armor and ranged defense you can use this to your advantage. Move your bros close but not engaging the baddies and just skip through a couple turns while their front line uses stamina expensive shield wall or spear wall until they're exhausted and will only be able to make 1 attack per turn. Then you take your fresh bros and attack.
Also early perks can make a big difference for your bros. Collosus gives a huge hp boost that really helps survivability and reduces risk of injury so you don't waste time/money healing. Adaptive hit gives your bro +10% to hit when they miss until they hit. Meaning they will always hit after a turn or two at least once (really good for bros with good defense but terrible melee attack or your "fodder" bros. Gifted is a great second perk to boost early stats, (you pick the three stats lvl up for reaching lvl 3 then take gifted and get to lvl up your stats again with maxed rolls. So OP definitely needs to check out build suggestions to understand how early perks help.
Lots of good guides and tutorials on what background bros are best, how to fight specific baddies, what contracts to take at what lvl and which ones to avoid (caravan is almost never worth it), how to use trading and reputation to improve your economy so you can afford better bros/equipment. Even which end game crisis is easier for the first time (holy war is probably the hardest especially if you fight the southerners)
It's a tough game and rng will fail you at times, but the tense close battles or fights where your bros kill the last barbarian right before the last tick of bleed damage kills your tank or getting a heads flying off multi kill with your long sword knight are the sweet moments that'll bring you back for more.