Forum *pop*

Hmm the main page shows 5% discount on the DLC but the DLC page does not. Also, why is the DLC Supporter Edition the same price as the normal DLC?

Interesting, Battle Brothers is great.

Working as intended: battlebrothersgame.com/dev-blog-109-the-kraken

I must be a masochist, I instabought this and yet I find some of the base game monsters to be really nightmarish... and these new enemies look even worse. :S
Time to suffer!

Various reviews on Battle Brothers state that the base game is flawed (shallow, repetitive, unfair RNG, bad AI, bugs) and that devs stopped updating the game.. does this DLC fix such problems?

Shallow - After you learned everything, yes I guess. It's not shallow the first 10 hours you play it, though. I guess the DLC increases that time to around 12 hours.

Repetitive - It was super repetitive, doing the same 5 things in endless loop. With the DLC it changes to doing the same 6 things in endless loop. So it's 20% cooler I guess.

Unfair RNG - That's part of the design and intended. Like Darkest Dungeon or Battle for Wesnoth.

Bad AI - The patch notes indicate that the AI was improved. Giving it the benefit of doubt.

Bugs - Didn't notice many bugs even before this DLC. I think all the critical bugs had been fixed long time ago.

Thank you for the detailed info.

As somebody who has been involved in Steams EA for the duration of development... 10 hours? Really?

I was still learning things after 100 hours post-release, even with all the information gained during development. Going by the forums, 100 hours was estimated to be around the time where everything starts to click together in terms of player knowledge.

Considering that you won't even get best equipment for at LEAST 30 hours of play time (or brothers skilled enough to use it), I dare say you are severely underrepresenting the entertainment value of the game.It is about as repetitive as Jagged Alliance 2. Considering that enemy types are somewhat tied to game progression, and things like end-game conflicts do not occur early on, I guess the game rubbed you some wrong way to make such duplicitous statement as yours.Ironically, the RNG is very much fair in its randomness. Some enemies might be considered "unfair" (don't fight goblins during the day!), but in general indeed, it is not a game that hand-holds.What was the problem with AI in the first place? I can think of only a handful of situations where AI did not react to really cheesy tactics (relying on knowledge of enemy reactions in the first place, and conditions that negate them). For that matter, I know a lot of people failed to appreciate that the developers specifically wrote enemy behavior to match their archetype. Weidergangers don't hold formations. Wolves will just swarm you. It's only the "intelligent" enemies that will show more complex behavior, and even then there are some "species" preferences (greenskins will still WAAAAGH!)Haven't run into any since about the second post-release patch, but as usual YMMV. Don't think I've seen anybody reporting any major issues for a while, either.

Battle Brothers is a fantastic game. Not for everyone, but if you enjoy RPG tactical combat (with a side dish of management), it's one of the top titles in my opinion.

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Unable to open file "music/worldmap_10.ogg".
The program will now terminate.

Ugh. :(

Make sure you don't have any mods installed before applying the patch for the base game and the DLC (+ DLC Supporter edition upgrade).
If you own the Supporter edition upgrade for the base game you might want to re-install the latest version too, just to be safe.

In regards to repetitiveness - Battle Brothers is a mercenary-simulator set in a low fantasy world, where there's only so much to do for a company of mercenaries. Doing the same old same old contracts over and over again is to be expected. That's where Beasts & Exploration comes in and mixes it up by putting more emphasis on the exploratory.
You can carry on doing contracts for most of the time (until one of the late game crises hits) like before, but now have the option to venture out into the wilderness and come across and discover all these new events, locations and whatnot, if you feel so inclined. Some of them even resolvable by not having to do combat at all.

The AI I thought was always quite decent and anything but bad. Staying back and forcing the player to make the first move, actively avoiding spear walls, trying to take out the most defenseless, most injured, most dangerous (ranged) mercenaries in the company as fast as possible, trying to take the high ground before you do, smart use of rotating, and so on.

Hadn't much time yet to dive in properly, but did at least the obligatory Hoggart the Weasel introductory segment. The starting town had one of the new weapons, the two-handed wooden hammer on offer, so instead of outfitting the starting mercenaries + the 3 new ones you're required to pick up in half-decent armor and with half-decent weaponry I went for the mallet. A bit of a gamble but luckily it paid off and the mercenary swinging the hammer single-handedly wiped out Hoggart and gang (with a little help of high ground and ranged support of course).

Speaking of Jagged Alliance 2 - THQNordic should commission Overhype to do the next installment. Sure could use another proper one to make everybody forget about the disastrous attempts over the last years and especially the upcoming Jagged Alliance Rage.

To be fair, I didn't measure the time I played it, so it's just an estimate. But I thought it was around 10 hours playtime until you've visited all cities and the "war" starts. After that felt like it was pretty much the last thing added. I could only take the same contracts again and again in endless loop.

Not at all, I actually really loved the game until I reached point where it felt repetitive. The problem is I'm doing contracts in town and save them, but a bit later they get attacked or something else happens and then you have to do very similar contracts again. It feels like you are in an endless loop of hopelessness. Same about the war. Even if I focused my help on a faction and was successful, it still didn't seem to end up with that faction winning. The enemies always kept fighting back and won towns were lost again. So it just ended up feeling like a completely pointless task. Just doing the same things again and again without hope.

If you asked me I didn't have any problem with the AI. Also, I'd argue that a dumb AI is a good thing. As a player I want to feel like I'm winning the battle even though I'm weaker just because I have the smarter strategy. If the AI is perfect and never does mistakes, it just makes the player feel dumb.


I wonder how much use I can make of this. Already before the DLC, exploration was really hard because you'd need a lot of resources like food and arrows stored to be able to venture really far.