I just made this giant post on the official forums (awaiting for moderation) Maybe someone here is interested.
Before I give my feedback I think it's important to establish where I come from.
I love strategic and tactical games, and not only play many online games vs players, but also enjoy many as singleplayer. I still play moo1 and Heroes of might and magic to give an example. I love the idea to ironman CRPG, but many have too many cheese deaths if you don't know the game (oh you walk there? you die, game over) and are otherwise too easy.
One of the CRPG that i enjoyed the most to ironman is Knights of the chalice, for it's great ui and combat design.
Sadly Knights of the chalice is notoriously not random, so once you know the game, you can basically repeat your motions exactly and win evertyime.
I love the idea of roguelikes, but generally the combat in those games is pretty bland/poor and the games tend to be extremely complex yet not necessarily deep.
Xcom is the closest i found to what I expect from a rougelike but I find the combat to slow/boring and the overall mechanics too complex too my liking. Not to say about the huge amount of micromanagment the game has which I don't find entertaining at all.
Battle brothers is the first "rougelike" that seem to have a very interesting Combat for my liking without being unnecessary complex. It has enough strategic elements to make it deep, yet not shallow.
A minimum amount of micromanagement And the combat is slightly too slow, but still way ahead of a game like XCOM (but not dynamic enough like Heroes of might and magic or Knights of the chalice)
So this is pretty close to a game I was looking forever in gaming. So thank you a lot for making this game. I only played so far Expert ironman and did 10 runs, and i'm now deep into my 11th run (Day 72)
With that said for someone that enjoy tactical/strategic games of this kind, It has several things I think would improve and would appeal to many players like me, some of which are my friends, and are repealed by some features of this game.
So with that, this is the list of suggestions, feedback, and personal recommendations. I know some of them could be in a patch, or expansion, but I know some would be unfeasible unless it's a new game. And maybe that is something to consider if there is a Battle brothers 2 or a new game with similar engine.
-Fleeing:
Retreating Is necessary, yet terrible annoying, and is probably the most grindy aspect of the game, where you are just doing work, just clicking your guys to retreat with no real decisions for a few minutes. I could expand on this but I
already did on this thread.
http://battlebrothersgame.com/forums/forum/game-discussion/#
-Information:
I know some people enjoy not knowing the game mechanics, I'm ok to having an option to remove tooltips. But for many people having so many mechanics hidden in the game is really annoying and unsatisfying. Should I hire the ratman or the fishmeran? Well it's whatever because I have no idea of the consequences of either. I should know what stats it gives, what % chance of different events gives, etc. I need to have a way to evaluate my decisions, instead of making decisions blindly. I use right now the wiki for that, But I don't think i should be playing with the wiki open to do this, and is very annoying to search for all this in the wiki.
The game loves to not inform you about what your options are, and just throw them out there for you to do and hope for the best and it's really not great imo.
I know tip to toe all mechanics of games like Master of orion and Heroes of might and magic, and yet the game are to this day a blast to play. I play a lot of board games, where i know all the mechanics and still a blast to play. I don't think you need to hide the mechanics to make games interesting.
-Quick UI:
Changing guys from reserve to team is a little annoying, i wish there were buttons or functions where you just switch guys clothes, or just a "strip down" button. Doing the action of stripping the injured guy on the back and clothing the front guy, is really annoying, specially late, when you have a constant cycle of guys.
-Pausing when you town:
It's annoying to have to quickly press the spacebar every time i leave town, it should be automatic.
-Combat ui:
I need more easily information in combat, there is a space bottom left for it. I want to see my guy, perks, abilities, and most important THE SECONDARY WEAPON, it's greatly frustrating havign to open the inventory all the time, which covers my whole screen, to check those stats.
Something crucial in this respect is bleeding. I often get surprised by my guy bleeding, there should be a big Blood spot on his head or on the NEW UI or somewhere, isntead of me having to remember which of the 30 potential injuries are actually bleeds and their tiny icon.
Initiative is very confusing, is very hard to predict when my guys are gonna act next turn, how often I did set up that spearwall to not use since my guy would act first next turn. I should be able to see the whole initiative list and make more clear why i move first or last
Hit to chance. I see things that help for me to hit or miss, but I'm not given exact numbers, I should be given those numbers, again refer to Knights of the chalice for that.
I need a grid, sometimes is hard for me to visualize what terrain is passable or not, I refer to battle for wesnoth with this, where with a single button you can see a grid with different colored squared, that show me control zones, impassable terrain, passable terrain etc.
-Combat log:
The combat log is really poor, it barely tells me anything. I strongly recommend checking Knights of the chalice Battle log, it precisely inform you of what really happend there, and is great tool to learn the game.
Extra Combat actions. Too often i know i want to wait with all muy guys, or end the turn with all my guys, and it's annoying having to wait and click the 12 times. Plz give me a WAIT ALL or FINISH ALL button. Also a retreat button, sometimes a Guy is so injured i know i just want him to run, let me put him on "run forest run" mode and never ask me again what i want him to do. I just want him to run.
-City feedback:
The information on the cities is not clear, I want to be able to hover a city and tell me what is annexed to it, instead i have to be slowly monitoring the surroundings, which is annoying.
It would be nice to be able to see what potential contracts i have open there. I don't mind if the game mechanic where that once you leave a city , you lose the potential to accept the contract, but given it's not like that, you should be able to check what the contract was about.
-In the world map I want to be given the information of the average/expected time from point X to Y, and include the food costs.
-Weapon swap souldn't be permanent, I battle I often switch back to secondary weapons, and then i have to switch back all weapons, worse is when sometimes i forget and i start the game with secondary weapons.
-Give the option to AI to autoflee for all guys not in a zone of control, it would save a lot of annoying time/grinding chasing down guys that in most cases you can't catch up, and would not me having to do a lot of tactical positioning
in the off chance he decides to comeback and fight (and it has happend)
-I think it's really dumb that your first attempt to haggle the price of contract, never backfires, At this point is just a routine to auto ask for me.
-Not too important, but I find weird you never need to sleep, and making a camp doesn't seem really that much beneficial, unless im strongly missing something.
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Personal Suggestions that I feel are more of a different kind than the previous one, because they are more extreme, more personal or bigger.
* Have a Demo: I was strongly suggested this game , again and again, and looking at videos didn't convince me, I decided to pirate the game to give it a go, and I loved it, so I bought it. But I don't understand why it's not worth to have a demo, you encourage peopel to pirate your game to give it a shot.
* Have a 2x, 3x faster mode: I don't know how long would be to have a run, given that you say final crisis is the soft ending of a run. given my time right now and how long it seems to be, i suspect is on the realm of 60-80. I think it's too long, for a game meant to be replayed. You don't need it to be so long to have a game with an inmersive experience, a large map of master of orion takes me 8-12 hours and I have that experience. Even a run of Knights of the chalice, is
around 15-20 hours. And Given my experience with the game, I think it's gonna feel a little too long if it takes twice as much, and my current run is 16 hours in.
Talking with many people trying to suggest the game, they run when they hear a run may take 60-80 hours, yet they would totally be interested if they could do a run in a lower time. I think a game like this should have a run of around 20-30 hours tops. Maaaaybbe sometimes 40 hours. I could explain exactly why this is important, but it would be a an article by itself.
Maybe it's possible to have a mode where everything happens 3 times as fast. 3x time of experience, 3x fast travel, peolpe consume food 3x times as fast, events happens 3 times as often, etc etc.
If it's too late for current battle brothers, I really wish to see a very similar game with a similar engine, where runs are a lot shorter. So hoping for that in battle brothers 2 or any other game with this engine.
* Right now Different guys have different World map effect based on their events, which for the most part are unknown, but it would be nice to have more world map effects or even perks. For example A messenger, allows you to travel slightly faster, or a blacksmith allows you be more efficient in the use of tools to repair.
Right now that kind of it's on the game but is terrible random and mostly unknowable to the player.
*This is a super personal thing, I know, but I would like to see more fantasy, not only from a thematic point of view, but I like to have in games all the kind of option magic gives, like buffs, teleports, magic walls, etc etc. Also would like to be able to have wolfriders and orcs myself.Again, prolly not for battle brothers, but if the game is successful I would pay premium for a similar game with a more fantastic background, and I'm sure a lot of other people would. I know that it would make the game more complex and probably woudl be harder to do.
I think that's it, and with al this said, this is probably as of right now, one of my top 10 single players games I ever played in my lifetime and I've played LOTS of games. So thanks a lot.
cannot deal.
