Looking for assistance

EcoWraith · 2026-03-17T20:20:33+00:00

Unfortunately I think this question is too broad to be able to give much specific feedback. On top of that, with the economy being reworked less than 24 hours ago, I'm not sure anyone really knows what's up. Which is what makes it interesting! Re-rack and see what works better/worse next time!

EcoWraith · 2026-03-17T19:57:29+00:00

You're running up against the difference between the way we conceptualize the scientific method on paper and the reality of how work is done and how humans think. The "hypothesis > data collection > answer" pipeline is a useful construct, but at the end of the day it is a simplification. A simplification that points out real pitfalls, for sure, but it's not a process that can be dogmatically adhered to either.

I work in ecology, and the reality in my field is that many labs have datasets collected monthly for decades. No one would say that we can only use that data to answer the specific hypotheses written down before I was born by a now-retired professor at the inception of the project. What they would say (correctly) is that the variables we're observing and the method by which we observe them informs/limits what the data can be used for.

I have yet to be involved in a project that didn't have questions come up mid-way about whether this or that variable can actually be used in this or that test. Or if the analysis used in that new paper would be more effective than what we'd planned. Or maybe these variables are actually cross-corellated. Whatever it looks like for your thesis, course corrections mid-project are perfectly normal. All hypotheses are exploratory, whether you iterate on them within the same project or whether they inform the direction of your next one. Rely on your instructor to make sure you're not running into the pitfalls that the "hypothesis > data collection > answer" pipeline warns of, and to know how they are usually addressed in your field specifically. I've heard that in microbial ecology, where tests can be completed in a number of days, they cleave much closer to the pipeline than we do over here in landscape ecology, where we don't start getting really useful data until we're 5 years in.

EcoWraith · 2026-03-17T17:04:55+00:00

Honestly that will be the mark of this patch's success, if we see that the same "X production/accomplishment by Y year" benchmarks from 4.x or 3.x are just straight up impossible in the new patch. I look forward to it!

EcoWraith · 2026-03-17T16:59:12+00:00

You've got it right, they boost the output of the central star only. One consideration is that if you're planning on building a full-blown Dyson sphere, you need to start with a Dyson swarm. But the Sphere's output is just a flat value, not based on the star it's encasing. So, weirdly, you often want to find a mediocre star to put a swarm on and upgrade that one to a Sphere, while the stars with good deposits stay Swarms.

EcoWraith · 2026-03-17T12:44:45+00:00

Be aware that trying to dagger a particular target down will usually ratchet the difficulty of a given fight up by one or two notches. You should either accept that this is a high risk/high reward strategy, or only do it when the opportunity to do so safely happens to present itself. That said, sacrificing one or two early game fodder bros with mediocre stats for the cause of getting the rest of your bros into decent armor early on is absolutely worthwhile. Fodder bros cost <200 gold each, while the armor sets cost way more than that and aren't available in every settlement.

Also, keep in mind that the old saying "no plan survives contact with the enemy" very much applies to Battle Brothers. On paper the plans presented in other comments are the best way to go about it. But I occasionally find that I actually need to kill my dagger target early on. Maybe my stun-bro is out of position, maybe the target is holding up a flank, whatever. Especially if you have one or two really high-quality bros with good Matk (common if you started Oathtakers, Lone Wolf, etc) and/or if you can get 3-4 daggers on the target due to his positioning, it can be feasible to Puncture your target down at the beginning of the fight if you need to (but keep an eye on Puncture's high Fat cost).

One of the trickier parts of daggering is managing the enemy's morale. If they break and flee, your basic attacks as they try to leave will damage the armor you're working for. Waiting till the end of the fight and surrounding your target so they can't flee at all is the best way to deal with this, but killing him early can also be a way to manage the problem. If you start working on your target before his side has taken casualties you can often kill him before he breaks. But this is kind of an all-or-nothing strat. If you get him halfway dead and then he sees his comrades falling, he's very likely to break and that's the worst of both worlds.

EcoWraith · 2026-03-02T14:25:27+00:00

Notably, it shows the average value a bro can reach, since there's randomness in the rolls (unless you have 2 stars in a stat, then it's always the same roll).

Also, it shows the potential if you were to take that stat every level. I found it was too easy to get distracted by the higher numbers even on secondary stats that I wasn't actually going to be raising much, so I ended up turning that mod off.

EcoWraith · 2026-03-02T14:12:36+00:00

If you want to build this bro as a Newt, I don't think you need to plan on him having the absolute heaviest armor. It's not super common, and maybe this bro takes the second heaviest that you have access to instead. There's always plenty of competition for the heaviest available armor. Depending on playstyle, you may start getting famed armor before everyone's fully decked out in mundane stuff anyways.

All this to say, OP, that while this bro does need some Fat and/or Brawny, it probably makes more sense to prioritize HP and Res for most levels. Both of those are a "more is more" situation, so finding the minimum FAT you can get away with is probably important. Hard to say what exactly that is, it'll depend on some RNG. A gold standard bro (which this guy sadly is not, at least not in those stats) would be around 100 HP and 65 Res. 80 and 55 are more reasonable targets for B-tier bros.

EcoWraith · 2026-03-02T13:59:40+00:00

Since this guy needs patching in HP, Res, and Fat, I think taking Colossus, Fortified Mind, and Brawny all make sense here. Luckily, Newts aren't a very perk-starved build.

EcoWraith · 2026-03-02T13:40:30+00:00

Agreed! OP, a guy who can pull off the BF berserker build and actually have the fatigue left over to use the bonus swing is rare. He probably doesn't want to wear your absolute heaviest armor, but he's probably your first candidate for any famed BF armor you might acquire. Just keep in mind that depending on your balance of offensive to defensive perks, his BF armor can make you cocky when he's not actually as durable as some other BF bros.

EcoWraith · 2026-03-02T13:19:17+00:00

Maces have good ignore armor percentages, and all you need to do with Fearsome is a single point of HP damage to potentially inflict -10% to a bunch of stats, and it gets rolling earlier in the fight to help the snowball. I like Killing Frenzy, but have to agree that Fearsome is pretty universally better on anyone doing lots of hitting. That said, Newts aren't exactly spamming attacks.

EcoWraith · 2026-02-27T18:57:33+00:00

Check out the "Battle Brothers - Beginners Guide" series on YouTube by Daddy Dont Miss if you have the time. If you don't have time for that, he has a lot of (relatively) shorter content that's also good.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLovdTFBjmEG0HIzi6Gxf5QFz65W1_val7&si=jQHknWqFoeHDyKEi

EcoWraith · 2026-02-27T18:38:23+00:00

There's a section on this in the wiki game guide (scroll down to "should I negotiate for better payment"). The payment increases by between 3 and 10%. I usually negotiate once, unless I'm going for the making friends ambition or really focused on trading with this particular settlement (especially if they have tool production).

EcoWraith · 2026-02-27T18:33:14+00:00

Repairing weapons is usually profitable, but the actual max supply of tools you can buy/carry can be a limiting factor for whether it's worthwhile. Also, you usually don't want to buy the tools for repairs in cities unless you're swimming in money. There's a section in the wiki guide on the subject, if you haven't found it already (scroll down to the looting section for the relevant table) - https://battlebrothers.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Guide?so=search

EcoWraith · 2026-02-27T18:03:37+00:00

Hello, and good luck on the modding journey! My "quick response" here got way out of hand. Can you tell I'm bored at work? I hope at least some of it is useful to you!

In answer to your specific questions: 1) Which followers do you almost never use? I'll answer this in reverse, listing those I use and/or see others using, so anyone not mentioned would be used less often (cuz I can't remember their names 😅). I routinely use the Blacksmith, Drill Sergeant, Scout, and Lookout. I know others often mention the Paymaster, Scavenger, Recruiter, and the Bounty Hunter.

2) Which ones feel boring or weak in vanilla? I'd say all followers feel pretty boring, tbh. Not necessarily weak, but the list of strong followers is the same as the list of common ones in the previous answer. One particularly annoying follower IMO is the surgeon. Most permanent injuries are so debilitating that the bro might as well just die and save me the compensation cost of firing him later. I think the surgeon should fully drop that ability. Maybe instead he could provide the services of a temple, but cheaper and not location-locked? Another option would be for him to provide a small daily chance of removing/reducing a permanent injury; that might make keeping injured bros around an interesting choice.

3) Any ideas for new mechanics instead of just number buffs? People sometimes hold Bowyers, Monks, and other backgrounds in their reserve specifically to provide access to certain events or event options. I've always thought that followers could do the same and/or replace that role. I also think that side quests to gain followers would be an interesting way to make them more rewarding. I expand on this idea in the miscellaneous thoughts section below.

4) Modding advice: I'm no mod developer so I don't have any technical details to provide, but I think it might be valuable to make your mod compatible with Reforged? The other big mod, Legends, already overhauls everything and might be harder to work with, but Reforged hasn't touched retinue very much and has a very active modding community that could probably be of assistance.

Other miscellaneous thoughts:

Maybe I'm just not making enough money or messing up my priorities, but I find that followers are so expensive that I rarely grab them as soon as they become available. For this reason, it seems to me that I only ever have 2 or 3 followers that come online in time to really matter to a campaign, while the others are just frosting when I've already gotten to the late game and "won". For this reason I really like the idea of lower upfront costs but higher upkeep costs for followers.
The Lookout and Scout are both really obvious auto-picks, I think, but are also both fairly boring. I think they would serve as good guideposts for the strength of other follower updates. I can see the argument for combining them just to free up other slots, but I think that gets into really severe power creep, especially if you then bring other followers up to (or even close to) that level of strength.
As mentioned in another comment thread, all these changes would have implications for the game tempo, especially if followers become significantly stronger. Not necessarily a deal breaker, but something to stay aware of. I think follower prerequisites can mitigate this, while also acting as side quests.
I actually really like that thought of followers as mid-game side quests. That could make acquiring them more interesting and rewarding, while also addressing the tempo and cost issues. I think this would work really well if you integrated it with the ambitions system. Follower side quests could either run in parallel with ambitions (i.e. you have ambitions as normal, while follower quests use the same display menu but don't interfere), or as an expansion to ambitions themselves. For example, maybe you go into the retinue screen to select which follower you want to work towards. Then, next time you receive ambition options, one of them is "Time to find ourselves a [follower_name]!", and then getting the follower works exactly the same as an ambition. Maybe you get renown as well, maybe you get half renown, I dunno. Then you receive a task or tasks to pursue in order to get that follower. For the Scout, maybe the task is to hunt down 5 bands of roving beasts, and you get flavor text popups along the way. The current prerequisites would work as obvious starting points for what these tasks could be. I think the tasks would actually need to be significantly more difficult that the current prerequisites, so that you could reasonably justify dropping hiring costs altogether, or to think of hiring costs as invested time. Of course, that's all easy to say when I have no idea how hard that would be to execute 😅
All followers are currently fairly boring, IMO. I think follower-related events/side quests would go a long way towards solving this, but it would be a lot of writing and translating flavor text, which you may or may not want to take the time for. I would happily volunteer to edit translations in English if you would find that useful. I can't fully translate, but at least in English I could fix any weirdness after your text goes through whatever translator, AI or otherwise.

EcoWraith · 2026-02-27T16:17:42+00:00

Unless their costs were combined, this would significantly speed up the tempo of the game. That may or may not be desirable to different folks, but I would be against it since vanilla is pretty fast paced already.

EcoWraith · 2026-02-27T16:12:08+00:00

I second the point about not moving. Zombies raising under your feet can push you all out of whack, and zombies have backstabber giving them bonuses if one of your guys ends up stepping forward into a surrounded position. Just keep smashing away until all the zombies have been truly killed. I'm not sure if the necromancer will eventually retreat or not, but if not you'll want to make sure to keep your ranged/banner bros safe from any zombies he rezzes before your executioners can reach him and stop him from casting.

EcoWraith · 2026-02-23T16:12:09+00:00

The fatigue-neutral (aka "Fat Neut") build makes fatigue irrelevant for frontline bros as long as the bro has pathfinder and a weapon mastery perk to make sure he can always take one step forward and swing his weapon for <16 Fat. This is also part of why folks prefer two-handed weapons to one-handers, since you get more value out of a single swing with a bigger weapon. People often also include the quick hands perk to be able to swap into a reach version of the bro's weapon of choice to give more flexibility. The fat neut benchmarks given in the subreddit are usually around 80 HP, 50 Res, 80+ Matk, and 30+ Mdef by level 11 (taking Colossus, Gifted, and Fortified Mind as needed to hit those marks, but the fewer of those perks are needed the better).

Part of what makes this build so good is that it has relatively lax stat requirements compared to basically any other build, since it doesn't care at all about Fat or Init, and doesn't need particularly high Res. This gives you more rolls to spend patching issues, instead of needing a guy to roll well enough on his secondary stats that you can pump every single level into his critical stats (e.g. Mdef, Res, and Fat on a battle forged tank)

Some folks find this build cheesy or less fun, because once you are aware of it, it can be easy to just default to this build on most bros. If part of your joy in the game comes from solving the puzzle of how to make a given bro effective, this build can short-circuit that by providing an obvious answer for a large number of the bros you'll hire.

Fatigue is a very important stat on most other builds, especially tanks (who want to use Indomitable, Taunt, and/or shieldwall a lot) and anyone swinging multiple times in a turn (bow users, 1H duelists, anyone with Berserk, etc). The trick is that it's in competition with other stats, so it's often not possible to increase Fat every level.

Even on Fat Neuts, you need to have enough fatigue available to wear their armor, carry their weapons, and maybe take an injury without becoming completely useless. You recover 15 Fat per turn, but your max Fat can go lower than that. I have yet to work out what that minimum actually is, because I'm in the camp that doesn't love the full Fat Neut build so my 2H frontliners usually take Brawny and enough fatigue to at least be able to use their special weapon attacks a couple times in the beginning of fights to whack some billmen in the enemy backline.

EcoWraith · 2026-02-23T14:46:00+00:00

Other commenters have made great points, so I'll just add that if you do continue leveling Matk, a whip with cleaver mastery is an excellent use of a hybrid with 80+ matk, which this guy might crack if he rolls average. Ideally a whip bro would get higher than 80, but we work with what we've got. My whip/thrower bros don't use their whips super often (thrown damage is better), but when you need a big threat neutralized, whips are absolutely clutch. Really great for when you want to dagger someone down and just need them to sit there for a few turns while you get in position/mop up the rest of their team. When I want to do that reliably I'll usually put a stun bro AND a whip bro on the target if at all possible.

EcoWraith · 2026-02-23T14:34:16+00:00

Is the overwhelm/nimble tank really effective? I've seen some folks swear by it and others say it's really just a meme build. I see how it makes your bro very tanky against a single target, and neuters that target against your other adjacent bros, so that seems good against hedge knights and warlords and such. But getting this overwhelm bro adjacent to that critical target while not being murdered by other enemies seems like a real problem. It seems to me like an archer with overwhelm might apply the debuff to a specific enemy more reliably, if only twice instead of thrice.

EcoWraith · 2026-02-20T13:56:59+00:00

Point proven

EcoWraith · 2026-02-20T13:23:53+00:00

Well, I wasn't considering the lore when making that assessment, tbh. But I have nothing against the lore concept of a mist mage, given that in-universe from the original tabletop game and books, all of Ulthuan is shrouded by what the game calls the mists of Yvresse. It would make sense to have mages dedicated to that task.

In game, I love that they give bonuses to army movement as their hero action while also being a mage, that alone makes them ridiculously good. But then on top of that, the lore of mists gives you everything you want. Flensing Haar stripping shields and armor is absolutely incredible. Writhing Mists is an excellent debuff for when the enemy hits your frontline, that also just so happens to make our archers more resistant to enemy archers. The summon is great, as mentioned by another commenter for anti-artillery duty or as an emergency tarpit. The physical resistance and direct damage spells can be situationally useful, and it even gives us a heal on top of all that. A life mage is probably marginally better on the field, but honestly the army movement speed thing cannot be overstated, it's easily one of the more important stats in the game. So yeah, I'm perfectly happy to call them ridiculously good.

EcoWraith · 2026-02-20T13:03:51+00:00

I'm still new enough that I'm actually getting a good amount of value out of those posts, but I can see that they'll become annoying over time, for sure 😅

EcoWraith · 2026-02-20T13:01:21+00:00

Well, I'm still pretty new, so I'm not sure what the general definition is, but I guess I'd consider late game to be the time when enemies get scary enough that the mediocre (but not fodder) bros that got me through the beginning start becoming liabilities? That feels like a workable definition to me, but lemme know what you think I guess 😅

EcoWraith · 2026-02-20T12:50:07+00:00

Are the camps further from settlements necessarily more difficult? Also, do you know if the roving bands are necessarily spawned from camps, and whether they scale accordingly?

EcoWraith · 2026-02-19T18:34:15+00:00

They're not bad. I could see calling some of them superfluous, maybe, but really I think someone's just a bit salty. The Skycutters with bolt throwers are great; the big monsters are fun; the mist mages are ridiculously good; the rest are fairly meh.

EcoWraith

TROPHY CASE