Battle Brothers is a game about one thing: 12 medieval mans on a hex grid fighting 4-16 other medieval mans in turn based strategy. Sometimes the other medieval mans are orcs, monsters, or undead, but the premise is the same. While there is a bit of an overworld map and an economy, that is all sideshow to the tactical fights.
It does this really well. No Fire Emblem "Move, attack, repeat for 40 turns" crap here. Every weapon has a set of skills and properties reflecting its use. Spears are weaker, but more accurate, and can deny areas with spear walls. Hammers batter armor. Flails can ignore shields. Whips can disarm and shut down an enemy for a turn. Certain weapons strike at two range over your frontliners. Enemies too have gimmicks. Orcs like to charge and stun and just take a lot of damage before going down. Undead keep getting back up and usually there is some goth wannabe nerdomancer in the back who keeps propping them up. Goblins are little rat finks who will keep trapping your team in nets and pelting them from range. Each enemy set provides a different experience and different tactics are required.
The game runs fairly tough and is balanced quite tightly: You can usually win most fights. However, winning every fight without someone dying is exceptionally difficult, and will require proper gear, strategy, and yes, a bit of luck. Life is cheap, and there is a lot of room for you to wuss out, retreat, lose people, or otherwise fail without losing the game. It's a long campaign and the only time you game over is if everyone dies in a battle. You can always recover and rebuild.
Or you can be like most people and turn off ironman and just keep repeating fights until you squeak by. I know that's how I play, but if you can relax and live a little and accept some losses, that's how they intend you to play Battle Brothers.
the bright side, the leveling system and the one perk tree are fairly elegant and not mired in a lot of pointless fiddly numbers. While the absolute quality of a stat is bit tough to read because the game refuses to show you enemy stats, it is fairly easy to figure out who on your team is better at what. (Except the fatigue stat never shows the baseline for some reason.) But that brings me to one of my main issues with the game...
The devs clearly intend for you to play this not only Ironman, but also with a wiki in the other hand at all times. There is ABSOLUTELY NO INFORMATION in this game to help you win it. You are beset by two Schrats. What the hell is a Schrat? What's an Unhold? What makes Undead Legionaires worse than an enemy mercenary corp? You either facecheck this stuff and watch your squad die or you do the smart thing and read a guide. And if you're doing that, you may as well read guides to figure out who wants what out of the perk tree and which archetypes you need to build your team for. It's fairly obnoxious how hard it is to get even general strategy advice when just two lines of "Orcs tend to open with charges that stun your team on impact, but the chargers don't do quite as much damage as their backliners." would do wonders. You can learn by doing but only a moron would do that in Ironman.
There's a lot of little QoL issues with it that could be fixed with mods too: For how important it is to gear your team to counter-play the enemy gimmicks, you have no ability to change your squad's loadout before combat. The overworld map is about half as fast as it needs to be for how much travel you have to do. The keyboard commands mid battle are half-assed and you can't answer "Are you sure" prompts with them. Unless you break immersion and rename your mans to their classes and who is expendable or not, it is almost impossible to see mid-battle how big a loss it was letting Lars die. Was Lars the crippled barber or was he your prospective endgame tank? Now that he's dead who knows? For a game that's nothing but dozens of hours of the same tactical fights over and over you really expect folks to have iron trap memories and not treat this as a backup game between their main games? Throw us a bone so we don't have to memorize so much crap unaided.
That said I have enjoyed Battle Brothers quite a lot and will continue to do so. It is good at what it does and has unmatched presentation and charm. While it is a hair pricey for what it offers, the polish and continuous development has shown that the devs really treat this game as a labor of love, and I find it easy to treat it the same. The strategy combat is satisfying and, in a strange way, somewhat relaxing even if I will probably never seriously run it at a high level of skill.
