Battle Brothers for Total War players looks like an easy move sideways. Both games hang tactical battles off a campaign map, and both let you drag a formation around before the shooting starts. Then your first real fight ends with a dead man who never comes back, and the resemblance falls apart completely.
Battle Brothers for Total War Players Starts With Scale
Forget stacks of a thousand spearmen. A standard company fields twelve men in a battle, with the rest waiting in reserve, and only a few starting origins raise that number. The whole roster tops out around twenty.
So every single soldier is a named unit with his own stats, gear and quirks. Losing one is closer to losing a general than losing a regiment. Worse, reserves count towards your squad size, so parking men at camp does not turn you into a small warband. You would not want that anyway. Field only two brothers and each one earns fifteen percent less experience, while a lone brother loses thirty.
That changes the opening move of every fight. In a grand battle you screen with cheap troops. Here you have no cheap troops, so the shield wall in front is the same eleven faces you hired last month.
Positioning therefore carries far more weight than any charge bonus ever did. Each man occupies one tile, and swapping two of them mid fight costs real action points. Because of that, the line you deploy before turn one usually decides the result.
Equipment behaves the same way. Weapons and armour both lose durability through combat, and repairs eat into your contract pay. So a won battle can still leave you poorer than you started.
Wounds Do Not Wash Out Between Battles
This is the habit that costs new arrivals the most. Total War refills a battered unit with fresh bodies over a few turns. Nothing similar happens in a mercenary company.
Temporary injuries heal at their own pace, and a broken leg takes far longer than a light concussion. Worse still, a brother who goes down can pick up a permanent disability instead. A broken elbow joint permanently drags down his melee skill, his ranged skill and his defence, and rest never repairs it. The developers’ own blog post on the subject explains the reasoning behind that design.
Replacing that man is no comfort either. A fresh hire arrives with low stats and no experience, so he needs weeks of easy contracts before he can hold a line. Meanwhile his wages start immediately, and wages come out of the same purse as food and repairs.
So retreating early is not cowardice here. It is asset protection, and the game expects you to do it often.
Growing Stronger Makes the World Harder
Renown catches everyone out. It climbs when you finish contracts and win fights, and it falls when you fail them, exactly as the game mechanics wiki page describes.
The trap sits in what renown buys. Higher renown unlocks better paid work, and the harder jobs that come with it. It does not quietly buff every enemy, though. The wiki is explicit that renown has no effect on enemy strength, so the danger reaches you through the contract board rather than a hidden slider. There is no snowball here either. You do not conquer a province, secure a border and then coast.
Because of that, the campaign never becomes safe. You get richer, the jobs get meaner, and the arithmetic stays tight all the way to the late game. Turning down a contract you cannot handle is a legitimate move, then, not a wasted turn. Players coming from other strategy series meet the same shock in Anno 117 Beginner Tips for Cities: Skylines Players: 4 Habits to Unlearn. A similar adjustment runs through Quasimorph Beginner Guide for XCOM Players.
In short, treat Battle Brothers for Total War players as a management game wearing tactical armour. Then hire a spare shield.
Frequently asked questions
Is Battle Brothers for Total War players actually harder? It is unforgiving rather than complicated, since one bad fight can cost veterans you cannot replace quickly.
Can permanent injuries ever go away? Only through a rare legendary item, so plan around the disability instead of hoping for a cure.
Should you keep a full reserve? Yes, because reserves let you rotate wounded men out while your company keeps taking contracts.
Add Comment