Battle Brothers

> New Bro. Amazing stat, amazing traits. A true god of war

> Get an arrow in the eye during his first fight

> Survive, because he's too angry to die

> After three month, he become a true legend among the company. He manages to protect flanks alone, saves several battles single-handedly. One-Eye is a beast, a monster, equipped with the best weapons and armor. New recruits join the company just for the honor of fighting alongside him. He is a symbol, an inspiration to all those dreaming of another life. He killed everything that lives (or doesn't) and walks. Bandit, noble house, orc warrior, wiederganger, nachzehrer, unhold, alp, hex, barbarian king, lindwurm, necrosavant

> Returning from a difficult contract, the company attacks goblin marauders

> One-Eye charges sword-armored goblin. Miss. Three other goblins jump on him, crits, kebab him against a tree, and kills him


I swear, i love this game. Probably one of the more complex turn based tactical RPG ever.
You don't just need raw power, but also long and short-term strategy. Know your weapons, their particularities, but also your enemies' fighting styles and methods. Some strategies and weapons, effective against one type of enemy, will prove useless against others.

The game offers you an experience that's uncommon these days. Here, forget the idea of "min max" to have the perfect mercenary band. You won't succeed. You must adapt. Every day. With every encounter. With every death. Yeah, your Bro are going to die. But don't reload your game. Each death, each blow is a new lesson. And in the end, it's your enemies who will fear you... Until you get too confident and get crushed. Again. But it's okay. It's just a new lesson. The only failure is giving up. But your company needs you. Don't make this mistake.

People think this is a Strategy RPG. They are wrong. This is a Crisis Management Simulator.
You start with hope and gold. Five days later, you are managing PMC 'The Bums' - a corporate entity where a hired peasant costs less than the bandage used to save him.
This game taught me that heroism is a liability.
I developed a doctrine: "Lucrum ex Nihilo" (Profit from Nothing).
Don't buy armor. Loot it from dead enemies.
Don't save soldiers. Amortize them.
If a recruit survives three battles, he earns a name. If not, he was just a 'walking shield'.
10/10 Asset Management.
(Based on my Ironman run/story on Royal Road: Lucrum ex Nihilo:The Corporate Grimdark)

“My god, this game is ugly” was my first thought when I opened this game. This rimworld/newgrounds aesthetic was so unappealing, I did not play this game for years. However, on one of my long trips, I was left alone with a steam deck and a desire to play a deep tactics game. My friend recommended this one. So, I pushed past my hatred and gave it a shot.
The game does not hold back, the battles are immediately challenging and units die often. My first company is poor enough that oftentimes I can only afford the peasants and the untouchables. A ratcatcher, a thief, a beggar, a cripple… whoever I can find to just hold a shield. My company is barely making enough money to feed themselves. But it doesn’t last long. I get ambushed in the woods, and a bunch of direwolves surround my barely forged company. It's over. What? Wasn’t this about medieval combat? Now there are zombies, witches, vampires, huge serpents?
So again, I started a new company. And again, and again, and again. Many barely get off the ground. The start is tough and uncompromising. I took a simple escort mission (so it said), and I got attacked by orcs. Fearsome warriors, nary an armor in sight, but they leap into my shield wall and shatter my formation. Another one where a bunch of necrosavants (vampires) fly into my back lines and rip through my forces. Goblins, weak things, but able to pick people apart in range and poison my units. Many more fall simply to the thieves, raiders, barbarians that run rampant in the wilderness. And slowly, through all of this, I start learning.
The thieves are just like my peasants. Barely armored, with some farm tools to rob passerbys. They provide a learning ground for all the different types of weapons that are possible in the game. A flail, a pike, axe, a mace, etc. All with their advantages and disadvantages, surprisingly varied for how limited it seems. But quite soon, they will be led by a raider. And a raider has a proper weapon and some armor. If only I could steal it… but in this game you can! Armor can be reused if it’s only lightly damaged. The way to do this is to surround him and shank him! But this is inherently dangerous, as you are keeping the most powerful unit with the best weapon alive… but I brought some nets. So you put him in a net, pray to the gods that he doesn’t chop off an arm and a leg as you shank him to death. Now you have proper armor and maybe his weapon as well! Well, usually at the cost of one or two people. Hopefully with only permanent injuries instead of lives if they are lucky. It is brutal after all.
That’s the essence of the game. The raider eventually becomes the new normal, and then you have to start facing bandit leaders. Perhaps you will raid the caravans of a noble house to get the valuable armor or supplies you desire. Or maybe you will help the villages and townsmen with the trouble in their area, helping their settlement grow by dealing with bandits or supernatural issues (if you can). Or maybe you will take simple courier missions because you value your life as you explore the unique map generated each run. Or maybe you will rob villagers yourselves. As your renown increases, you can take missions for the aristocrats, and hope to get a plated mail from an enemy knight you killed. The variety of enemies and the difference in each weapon manages to keep the game interesting. The southerners have guns, the northerners are barbarians with powerful javelins, the middle area has powerful armor and good melee weapons. And of course, the monsters, the zombies, etc. The terrains are also very different. Forests, snow, sand, swamps, hills, etc. Each has huge consequences on the tactics you can employ.
And through it all is this tension that makes all of this memorable. Variance is high, the consequences lethal. Adapting to the changing circumstances is paramount. Each hit usually causes injuries, morale breaks, or death. Everything requires you to adapt. I still remember my one cripple that held off a raider early on in my campaign. The only thing he could do was hold a shield, and I needed him to protect my right flank until my attackers could break through their line. The raiders swung and missed, and my entire left flank missed as well! So again he swings, and again my cripple blocks the blow, and again my entire left flank misses! Somehow he is able to hold for a third time, and my left flank is able to wipe out theirs, and I am able to save my company. Or my brave flank, much later in a different campaign, who had a rare panic attack after 8 ghosts ganged up on him, almost died as he ran away from the frontlines. But he was able to calm himself and came back to kill the last enemy. The fate of a company hung in the balance each moment, each moment seared into my brain.
The levelling system and hiring units take a similar design. The stat and stat gains are randomized, so a promising unit with good potential could end up disappointing you. A mediocre unit could roll a bunch of great rolls and become valuable for little cost. An oathkeeper is an expensive hire compared to a peasant, but there is no guarantee he is going to live up to his full potential. But he is of much better stock, so he will have higher stats, and won’t come with the same ailments the poor would (ie asthma, clubfooted, etc.) and has a higher chance of having good traits (ie brute). This adds much needed variance to replaying of the game while still giving you many reasons to keep trying new people once you have your core. And that’s not even getting to how much I agonized on what to level up when I was first learning the game. Weapons are similar. An interesting unique weapon can drastically change how you deploy a formation or build your units still hundreds of hours into the game.
The game also does a “good enough” take on trying to bring this world alive. The writing is handled from the perspective of a merc, so it’s a lot of base humor. But it’s fitting. The supernatural stuff is properly eerie. Many classes will have unique interactions with the world. A witchhunter will be able to figure out who the hag is. A brute will bully the elderly and kids in the villages. A thief might have a bounty on his head. It all makes sense, in its own way. Of course, this is not simulated that deeply, but it does bring this aspect of the game alive.
And even the visuals, while not exactly good, portray the necessities of the game. Each face is pretty unique, and you can even give them new haircuts to differentiate them better. New armor and helmets are portrayed on the character. As are each of the weapons. An eye gouged out is reflected on the portrait, a missed arrow will show up on the ground, a hit will show up on an enemy. It portrays the violence in a good enough way that it’s satisfying, even if I would have preferred something more beautiful or intricate. But such is the life of the indie dev. The music is appropriately tense when fighting powerful foes, appropriately melancholic when butchering peasants (as aristocrats will ask you to), appropriately unique for the different environments.
This is one of the best tactics games that came out in the last decade, just try to make it past the visuals.

this is the best game i have ever played. i have put in 1429 hours into this game at the time of writing and i still turn to it when other games get old. battle brothers is my rock. when everything else goes wrong in life, i know that i can at least rely on battle brothers to distract me from my struggles.

This is a wonderfully difficult and brutally consequence-filled game that will keep you loving it for years. It has strategy, the ability for your characters to improve (and die ignomiously), and never gets old from a challenge standpoint. Every game really is different, even though there are, of course, always similarities between them. Further, the developers are STILL improving it, with a new beta coming out just this week!
I cannot recommend Battle Brothers highly enough.

Liking this game is like learning to like a cat. It doesn't want to be interacted with and it will hurt you if you get too close. Once you begin to understand it however and change the way you approach it; a whole new world gets opened to you. A world where your best merc will be one shotted by a 10% because you remember its still a cat at the end of the day. That's Battle Brothers BABY!!

Highly recommend this game.
This game is like Wartales, if Wartales had 10x times the replayability and actual good tactical fights.