Battle Brothers

Je suis franchement sélectif dans les jeux auxquels je joue couramment, et Battle Brothers fait partie de ce cercle restreint.
Battle Brothers est une énorme gemme, peut être injustement méconnue.
J'ai une préférence tactical/4X/Deckbuilding, et BB est sans doute le plus propre des tactical auxquels j'ai joué.
les plus :
- grande diversité lors de la constitution du roster
- le progress curve est profond
- les situations et contrats sont bien dosées
- le jeu est punitif
- c'est possible d'avoir des pertes, alors le jeu va s'adapter au roster (pour les contrats)
- les 4 factions (humains, goblins, orcs, morts vivants, il y a même des divisions de factions) doivent s'aborder à chacun à leur façon, sous peine de douleur
- le jeu est ok visuellement, c'est propre
- le jeu est assez dur, on est content quand on clean les endroits légendaires (il n'y a pas de véritable fin à ce jeu)
- la recherche et découverte d'objets améliorés (named items)
- il faut rester attentif à chaque combat même si le roster est éprouvé et le contrat/camp facile, une faute d'inattention, ça peut valoir un "bro" qui saute
- communauté reddit toujours active sur ce jeu, malgré son age
- un nombre assez fou de mods QoL ou changement plus ou moins radical du jeu sur NexusMods ou autre
- le jeu de base se suffit totalement à lui même, et les DLC sont "superflues donc complètement obligatoires" (mobs/objets/missions supplémentaires qui diversifient encore plus le jeu)
- il existe une traduction française, sous forme de mod sur NexusMods
les moins :
- la résolution des combats est basée sur un système hit/miss, la variance de la RNG provoquera certaines frustrations, surtout en début de campagne où on peut perdre des "bros" rapidement. Et même en fin de partie, rien n'est sûr, le cap hit est 5% min - 95% max, donc il est possible de rater 2-3 95% pour ensuite se prendre 2 5% et perdre un bro de fin de campagne (et ça pique) (il y a un mod qui peut modifier ces valeurs également)
Dernier conseil : ne commencez pas la première campagne avec l'option Ironman activée, testez vos actions et vos builds, recommencez certains combats pour vous améliorer, et comprendre ce qu'il se passe !

As said in the game description, it's a hard game, sometime frustrating as the games mecanism seem at first quite simple. Unless you are ready to watch hours of Youtube tutorial, don't expect to win a game before having played more than hundreds of hours. But overall, it's a great game, with a good (somber) univers and interesting extensions. Unless you consider youself as a casual gamer, highly recommended.

Battle Brothers manages to do many things that are very hard in its tactics genre:

- Tactical games that have attacks success based on rng tend to fall into bullshit generators where you will die not because of tactics but because of bad luck, because single actions can be so influential that missing even a single attack can lead to a party wipe. While this can in theory happen too, especially in the early game where your options are more limited, you can quickly get to a point where you get enough actions that luck plays a small role compared to your own tactical and strategical decisions, while still being something to manage. There are some specific fights where this is less true, especially when there is a high value target you need to eliminate but can only devote one or two bros to get to them because of all the other enemies, but they are the exception, not the rule. This is enhanced by some other factors, like how most fights are avoidable, how you can strategically keep some weapons in your inventory for specific fights, and how some feats make managing the rng easier.

- Tactical games with a strategic layer tend to need the player to snowball, making the early game hard and the late game easy. This is also somewhat true for BB, but the game has three solutions for that: the first one is, there is always a bigger, better, harder fight. No matter how strong you are, you can always get into a bad fight, get way outnumbered, outflanked, countered, attacked at a bad time, or get some bad luck. So unless you're a god at that game, at which point you've probably spent a few thousand hours and had a lot of fun with it, you're never in a state where you're untouchable and have no challenge. The second solution is, quest difficulty is based on your current roster at the time of taking the quest, so if you lose half your company to a hard fight, you can rebound; you won't get in a negative spiral that kills you, you can continue on the same save. And the third one is - most of the combat is optional. There is always the possibility to retreat, although some fights are easier to retreat from than others, and sometimes retreating means leaving behind some brothers to cover for that retreat. But with these tree elements, namely: late game challenges, variable game difficulty, and optionality of fights- you can pretty much always influence your game in a way that you don't lose your campaign to a fight, which also means you don't have to snowball hard to have a good campaign.

- When it comes to tactics games with inventory, item choice is generally "bigger number is better" in terms of damage. BB does something good in which every weapon category has strengths and weaknesses, which makes it sometimes preferable to use a sword, a spear, a dagger, an axe, etc... depending on which enemy you're facing, your bro's stats and build, and the general strategy you have with your roster. Even within these categories, while there are clear superior choices, you can have weapons that are circumstancially better. This is made better with the variety of enemies and how they need to be handled differently. You can't get a cookie cutter build that will handle all situations optimally, although there are some builds that perform adequately enough most of the time, you as a player need to change your tactics drastically depending on what you're facing and in what conditions, which allows that inventory diversity to be meaningful. You can't fight an evasive glass canon and a hard-hitting but easy to hit tank the same way.

That was the praise, now for some criticism:
Many people praise the writing of the game and the events, and while it is well-written in the sense that it puts you in the shoes of amoral mercenaries who make a living by killing people, I don't care much for that specific vibe. If you find it fun to be a bastard and profit from it, it will please you. Don't go looking for knights in shining armor accomplishing valorous deeds; here, it's gritty pseudo-realism with some low fantasy elements, mostly dark ones at that. Some stylistic choices are also justified by devs through the lens of realism, or historic authenticity, which is, frankly, bullshit when it comes to a game that includes fantasy elements such as undead, magic, and mythical creatures, especially when the lack of say, women fighting is actually ahistorical. I'll temper this with the fact that there are other choices that the audience may think to be modern inserts; so it's not evidently clear if some of the pseudo-historical bullshit choices were politically motivated or just a consequence of ignorance on specific topics.

If you can stomach these setting choices, you'll find a gem of a game with pristine mechanics and excellent tactical and management design, and I can only recommend playing through it if only to see how good tactical combat can get.

Sans doute l'expérience la plus frustrante et la plus satisfaisante de ma vie, XCOM qui rencontre un jeu de gestion médiéval avec des mécaniques uniques, un monde vaste et procédurale riche en récit qui malheureusement n'est que disponible en anglais, je le recommande et les DLC en valent la peine sans etre crutial.

L'un des meilleurs si ce n'est ( pour ma part ) LE meilleur tactical game sur lequel j'ai mis la main.
On pourrait résumé la méthode d'approche par le "easy to learn, hard to master", ce jeu promet des situations variées et des combats qui ne pardonnent pas. En vrai c'est la DA et l'ambiance du jeu que j'adore le plus.
Donc si vous aimez préparer et optimiser votre groupe pour vous faire rosser par le moindre cul-terreux je ne peut que recommandé.

Un des meilleurs jeux de ma bibliothèque. Le plaisir de constituer son équipe, d'essayer des recrues, de ne conserver que les meilleurs, de perdre les meilleurs tout est génial et donne envie de poursuivre l'aventure !
Les graphismes sont lisibles et pas moches (moi je les trouve même jolis) mais c'est surtout le gameplay qui est génial pour tout ceux qui aime les jeux de tactique au tour par tout. Pour moi c'est une des références de ce genre...

Je joue à ce jeu depuis longtemps mais le mélange de RNG et de low fantasy de cet univers m'a happé, je reviens presque tous les mois pour refaire une campagne.
Je recommande chaudement.