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What if Fire Emblem Hated You? (LP: Battle Brothers)


Integrity
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Welcome to Battle Brothers! Battle Brothers went into Early Access about a year ago, give or take, and finally launched late last month. In the interim, it became one of my favorite games ever. You recruit and manage a mercenary company through a world that hates You, Specifically, and pretty much everything from battle maps to unique equipment to even the overworld is procedurally generated. If you ever played Mount and Blade, replace the first-person combat with isometric turn-based tactics. I'm here to sell you the game. Hopefully. This doesn't mean the Big Fire Emblem LP Thread is dead, just still on hold until summer, when I'm not dead. This, on the other hand, I play at work and don't have to do much critical thinking about updates.

 

The main draw of the game is the huge variety in your team composition and in enemy team composition you can have - and there's almost always a kind of enemy that you just don't want to fight, but it's not the same for two different companies. Center your dudes around a core of really good archers? Goblins are going to melt to you, and human enemies won't fare much better, but you're not going to be very happy fighting skeletons. Big guys with huge hammers and axes? Awesome against orcs and the undead, won't do too well against goblins. There's (Ike counts carefully on fingers) nine? major enemy types, and each one is really best fought different. It's great.

 

So what's your part?

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Every dude is made of the most 90s spreadsheet/paper doll combination imaginable. Each gets a background (this one is Battle Brother, all three of your default are), traits (the club means this guy does more damage when he hits the head, but has lower skill), and morale (he's not very happy right now). Backgrounds range from cripples, gamblers, hunters, bowyers, squires, hedge knights, swordmasters, raiders, daytalers, fishermen, the list goes on. I haven't even seen all the traits. Morale is a gradient from mad (probably gonna desert you) to euphoric (gets +10% to a bunch of important stats in combat). You don't really get to customize those, but if you really want I guess I can recruit a specific background guy for you.

 

What's important is the stats. And the gear. And the name, of course. The stats are all really self-explanatory - Health, Fatigue, Resolve, Initiative, Melee Attack, Melee Defense, Ranged Attack, Ranged Defense. Dudes are randomly generated with 0-3 stars next to their stats (see this guy's two stars in Health), which gives them better growths in those stats. For gear, each dude gets a hat, a shirt, two hand slots (for 1h, 1h+shield, or 2h; there's reasons for each), two bag slots to hold other weapons, a slot for ammo, and a utility slot. This guy's got some light armor, a regular old shield, and a pretty junky spear. His role in combat is pretty much what you'd expect from a guy with light armor, a shield, and a pretty junky spear. You start with three daves who are predisposed to the same archetypes each time: this guy, who is a good Linesman with some kind of 1h weapon + shield; a second bloke (the chufty Val Kilmer looking guy with the red bandana above) who is a great 2h melee fighter; and a third dude (really stupid haircut) who is a great archer/crossbowman/javelineer. Not all guys are great at something - some recruits are just going to suck.

 

For now, I need volunteers who want to be those three dudes, and at least four names besides. You can have a name and a title (optionally), and tell me what kind of medieval fightsman you want to be. Light armor sword duelist type? Heavy armor, big axe? Weird flanker archetype with a crossbow and a mace? The limits are way out there. You can be nonspecific too, I can interpret - heavy or light? Good against armor or flesh? Long range, short range, or somewhere in between? There's some kind of a niche for just about anything. Hell, I had a game about a week back where I gave a naked guy a high-tier knife just to see what the hell would happen. He got kills! Rest in peace Naked Knife Guy.

 

No magic tho.

 

The opening quest plays out pretty much the same each time, if you choose to do it (which you should), then we can go anywhere and do anything, including heading out to find dungeons and getting slaughtered to a man and seeing the game over screen. Or banditry! We can attack peasants and caravans if we want.

 

I reckon that's too many words already. I'll attack mechanics and stuff as they come up. Give me daves for the New California Republic.

Edited by Integrity
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41 minutes ago, Rothene said:

I want to be that flighty light guy with a crossbow and a shield. With maybe a small axe as a sidearm. But I don't want a stupid haircut, so make me the next person you recruit.

there are barbers! and they're free! and they can change your face, too! i'll fix the original crossbow guy's hair and make him you

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20 minutes ago, Integrity said:

there are barbers! and they're free! and they can change your face, too! i'll fix the original crossbow guy's hair and make him you

the barbers can change your face??? that sounds disturbing

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the only girls in the game are like floozies your guys can get into events with in town and a witch and some shepherdess who tells you to piss off in an event

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13 minutes ago, Integrity said:

the only girls in the game are like floozies your guys can get into events with in town and a witch and some shepherdess who tells you to piss off in an event

are you telling me there are no playable girls? 0/10

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Let's get back to it, then!

 

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The walk back to Olbing is pretty short, and we're a small company. Larger companies travel a little slower, but not really noticeably.

 

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There's (relatively) a lot of dialogue front-loaded into the game. You can choose to not kill Hoggart, but if you do you're a shitty person and I want nothing to do with you. If you choose to, the quest changes to buying 3 men, some equipment, and traveling to a nearby city where there are better supplies.

 

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Sometimes the nearby city can be, say, really close as the crow flies but behind the fucking Alps. That's procedural generation! We got a nice one this time, though I don't love snowy starts. Snow suck to fight in until you get a specific perk (if you get it), then you trash people in snow. Let's buy some--

 

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--stuff. Shit villages like this one have contracts and pay pretty well, but they can generate with the bare minimum improvements - a Marketplace and a Gathering Spot - needed to qualify for township. Marketplaces let you get supplies and (usually lightly used) gear on the cheap, gathering spots let you hire more dudes. Every town has both, and what they have depends on the kind of town; Farmsville here probably has absolutely nothing of merit to offer us. A town in the forest might have pretty cheap timber, which we could cart around and sell somewhere else for profit. A mining town might have cheaper tools, etc. Recruits change too; this shit village has nothing but farmers (basic linesmen) and daytalers (There Is Nothing More Generic). There was also a flagellant. We picked him up, because fuck it he was cheap.

At the top you can see our supplies - money (pay your dudes or they hate you, also buy gear), food (feed your dudes or they hate you), tools (fix your dudes' shit or they die), ammunition (you shoot it), and healing supplies (injuries won't recover unless you have these). You mostly buy them at marketplaces, but you can scavenge some from the environment or enemy camps.

 

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Events usually fire off close to town, but there are other contextual ones - you can get one when you're near a river and have a fisherman on your team, rarely, for instance. This one is primed to fire as soon as you get close to Brammingborg, or whatever the Nearby Big City generates as. Dave is our drinker apparently.

 

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Brammingborg is a real city. Clockwise from top, we have a Training Hall (you can pay to get an XP boost on a dude for a few days, reasonable in the midgame), an Armorsmith (all tiers of armor, helmets, and shields sold here! can generate legendary armor if the town is well supplied), a Weaponsmith (all tiers of etc. etc. but weapons instead), and a Temple (pay to get your dudes' injuries checked out so they heal faster and don't fester!). There's also a Gathering Spot and a Marketplace, which you'll notice graphically have way more going on because Brammingborg isn't dirt-ass poor.

 

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The dudes gathering here are really good. Raiders (Konrad Ravensblack and, uh, Konrad) are one of the high tier melee fighter recruits; Squires (Ingolf) are similar. Bjarne is a Witch Hunter, a middle tier rangedman kind of recruit. The second page of recruits is similarly priced, and even has a Hedge Knight, arguably the best fighting background in the game on average. Exactly two dudes are within our price range (not counting Bjarne, we could buy him for all our cash) so we pick them up. We also pick up some reasonable gear, leaving me Poor, and go back to Olbing.

 

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Time to go kill Hoggart.

 

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A lot of the time, when you take a contract, a nearby enemy camp gets marked on your map. That's where the Thing you have to get is. The logic behind camps is actually really neat, and I'll explain it more as we go on, but for now suffice it to say that an actual camp did exist there before and it got rebranded as Hoggart's Refuge for us to go clear out because we hadn't found it yet, so we have no idea.

 

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Sometimes (always for The Hogs) you can tell who's in the enemy camp. Sometimes you can't, and it's dicey. Brigand Thugs are the enemy daves, no-to-medium armor, shit weapons. Brigand Poachers are the enemy bowdaves, no armor, tier 1 shooters. The game uses the good old Heroes of Might and Magic convention; to wit, "a few" means 2-4 or maybe 2-5. A means 1. There's no penalty whatsoever for falling back now, so let's meet the crew first!

 

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Karl the Skunk (Wyatt's submission) is the original linesman-type battle brother. He's got some edge-of-medium armor, a spear, and a shield. He's Pretty Good at Being a Wall. Spears are shit against armor but have an innate to-hit bonus, and also have Spearwall - any enemy that tries to close to melee will get repelled if you roll a successful hit until an enemy is in melee range or your next turn. Spearwall is also awesome for manipulating the AI. Any shield bigger than a buckler also comes with two skills: Shield Bash (huge fatigue cost, shoves an enemy back a hex if you hit) and Shieldwall (huge fatigue cost, but doubles the defense bonus from a shield PLUS extra for adjacent allies using Shieldwall). This is how you build a linesman early on.

 

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Dave is the generic fight bro. He's good at fighting. He has a two-handed axe. Two-handed axes are special because you can only swing them once per turn as opposed to twice like one-handed weapons, and they always hit both head and body. Hitting heads is a crit for most other weapons. The second skill (Round Swing) hits every hex around you at a penalty to hit; the third (Split Shield) automatically hits but does a ton of damage directly to a shield instead of health/armor.

 

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Rothene, the crossbowman. Every bro has 9 action points; a crossbow takes 2 to fire and 7 to reload. That's the only crossbow skill that exists. Crossbows are slower to fire than bows, but easier to use, and are better against armor.

 

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Markus the Lustful has an absolutely insane Resolve base and three stars in it, so he's a de facto sergeant if I don't lose him. Swords have a smaller to-hit bonus than spears, are mediocre against armor and good against flesh, and come with Riposte - any attack that fails to damage you for this turn (i.e. you dodge or it hits your shield) you retaliate against with a penalty to hit. It's nichely useful, but not great.

 

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cat is a deserter. Markus has a Resolve base of 47 (50 considered an endgame must for bros); cat has a Resolve base of nineteen. Cat does have two stars in melee fighting and a decent base, though! He also has a two-handed axe like Dave-oppa.

 

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Lore the Princess is forgettable in every single way, except he has two stars in health and one each in melee and ranged defense. He does have a cleaver, though, which is awesome against flesh and awful against armor, while causing opponents to bleed if you do health damage. Its skill is Decapitate; guess what it does if you kill with it? He also has a bandage in his utility slot, letting him stop bleeding.

 

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Weapons are characterized by % effectiveness against armor, % damage that penetrates armor, damage, durability, and fatigue. Swords are basically middle of the line. Armor absorbs damage directly until it breaks. So basically, if Markus got hit by his own sword for max damage (40), 20% of that (8) would go straight to his health, the remaining 32 would hit his armor and cause 32*0.75 = 24 damage as long as the Gambeson holds. I don't know if Gambeson is even a word.

 

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I don't want to save the post and finish later and I'm too tired to crank this out tonight, so we'll kill Hoggart in a microupdate tomorrow. Night!

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yes you do

 

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So this is combat. Soak it in. Top-left is a combat log, top-center is Your Mans - Turn Number - Their Mans, bottom-left is statistics, bottom-center to right is actions and turn order. It's pretty compact. Statistics are, clockwise from top-right: helmet condition, armor condition, HP, morale, fatigue, action points.

Battle Brothers is very finely balanced around 9 action points. Moving a hex takes 2 points; moving up or down a level takes an additional one, and irregular terrain can take more (up to 4 for mud). Most fighting actions take 4 points: quick shots with a bow, sword swings, axe chops, shieldwalls, etc. This means you can attack twice if you don't move, or move some and attack once, or move a lot. Two-handed weapons usually take 6 AP to swing, which means you can move up to one space and attack. There's exceptions, obviously, but those actions dictate the flow of just about every combat.

 

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Combat is - how to put it? Brutal. There's a chance for each attack to hit the head; if it does, it hits head armor (which is almost always less than body armor, down to "not existing") and lowkey just hurts a lot. One swing that hit this guy's unarmored head decapitated him. Wear a helmet! Or at least some padded leather!

 

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Slammo! Whenever you do more than 25 damage directly to health in one attack, you have a chance to inflict an injury. Injuries have between mild (Ripped Ear: -15% initiative) to sever (Severe Concussion: -50% basically everything) effects for the rest of the battle, and persist on your dudes for several days until they heal. Battle Brothers heal bizarrely fast (a broken leg, untreated by proper healing, heals in a week) but that's video games for you. Cut Arm Sinew directly reduces all damage done by 25%. It's not a crippling one, but you'd probably pull a reservist up for a few fights if someone got it.

 

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Every time >1 enemies move into melee with a unit, a morale check is rolled. Morale slides from Confident (+10% to major stats) to normal to Wavering (-5% to major stats) to Breaking (-10% to all stats) to Fleeing (bye!). Fleeing is especially bad, since trying to leave a melee-capable opponent's adjacent hex does provoke attacks of opportunity - and if you get hit, the move is canceled without refunding fatigue or AP. This dude just had Lore move into range and now is wavering. Shoutout to the guy from the previous screenshot, dead on the left now.

 

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Hoggart Shieldwalls up after we hit him a bit. Enemy stats are given as ranges - "Healthy" "Near Death" "Bruised" etc. They're easy to interpret without giving real numbers.

 

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Hoggart's shield wall will not save him.

 

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As I said, fleeing is Really Bad. Flailguy tried to run away from Lore, and Lore slashed his hamstrings. Now running away is going to be harder, and every time he runs away Lore is going to cut something else.

Spoilers: he dies.

This can happen to your daves too! Mind their morale!

 

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When things are going really badly, unengaged enemies will also try to run away.

 

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Chase them. Kill them. This is the roguelikiest part of Battle Brothers - hit rates are generally around 40-60% in the early to mid game, which as you all know as legitimate statisticians is the Most Streakiest Part of the uniform distribution. Later in the game, you can push to 80-95% hit on your main DPS daves, but your tanks will usually stick in this range. Spears, swords, and leveling Melee Skill help.

 

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Slammo.

 

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Summary stats. Skulls are kills, swords are damage, XP is XP, blood is damage sustained (which has to heal over the course of 1-3 days). We did pretty good. cat was the clear MVP. The yellow arrow by Dave signifies that he leveled up.

 

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There's also loot. The cloth is a trade good (money), then there's food, money, tools, ammunition, and some general shitty gear. The 95% sword is a Falchion, the tier 2 sword, so it's actually a really welcome upgrade for Markus. Everything else sucks.

 

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rip hoggo

 

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Levelups roll a random number for each state. If you have 1 star, the minimum roll is increased by 1. If you have 2, it's increased by 2. If you have 3, the max is increased by 1 as well. Generally, you want to specialize dudes more than generalize them, but that's not always the case. For the most part, if you're focusing a stat, it's always worth taking even if you get a kinda crappy roll in it (e.g. if this guy were a shooter I'd take that +2 in ranged skill even though it s u c k s). Fatigue is almost always worth leveling.

 

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Every level you also get a PERK. Every level unlocks the next tier, and each level you can pick a perk from your tier or previous tiers. From left to right this tier:

Fast Adaptation: every miss gives you a stacking +8% chance to hit until you hit.

Crippling Strikes: you inflict injures more often.

Colossus: +25% HP.

Nine Lives: once per battle, don't die instead of dying when you die.

Bags and Belts: two extra backpack slots.

Pathfinder: -1 AP and -25% fatigue for each square traveled, to a minimum of 2AP.

Adrenaline: spend a bunch of fatigue to act first next turn.

Recovery: spend a whole turn to recover half your built-up fatigue.

Learner: +25%(?) XP from everything.

 

Pathfinder is my go-to tier 1 perk. It's great to outmaneuver.

 

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So we get paid.

 

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And the world opens up.

 

Where to? Pick a town, let's go check it out. Good night!

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Let's walk to Black Field White Stag Nation. It's not a long walk. Battle Brothers scales up a bit assholishly as you go, so you want to consolidate your adventuring to some degree. I'm not sure if the scaling is based strictly on time or on time and your progress, but might as well scale yourself as fast as possible.

 

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The first village we meet is shithouse, but somehow has a fully functional weaponsmith. Hell yeah. It also has a contract for us - there are two types of contracts (burgermeister and noble) and each contract has three rough levels of difficulty from 1-3 skulls. A one skull burgermeister contract is the lower form of moneymaking. We can't even take noble contracts yet, and each village can offer any combination of the two - Brammingborg, to the north, is noble contract only so it's just a selling/hiring/buying hub for us for now.

Also note in the top-right the little red circle. That particular thing indicates that this village is suffering from supply route raids, which will decrease item availability and increase costs. This is because of a bandit camp in the area, which we can either hunt down on our own or we might be able to get a contract for. Town conditions are worth paying attention to - for instance, legendary items can only be generated at towns that have the "well supplied" condition.

 

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Here's our local contact. He's incredible. Each faction has an aesthetic and a mood, and their dudes fit that. Apparently House White Stag is one of the better aesthetic/mood combinations, dressing and acting decadent. We negotiate our price and set out.

 

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Technically, we're working for Kravlund, not House Rabenholt, but the dude takes his aesthetic from them. Raising a town or faction's impression of you gives you better (read: higher-paying) contracts with them, and in the case of towns better prices and availability. It's worth doing.

Also, House Rabenholt are complete assholes. Decadent assholes. Parrhesia, eat your heart out.

There's an event later in the game that might happen where we have to pick a house to side with, I'll go over the others if that happens.

 

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Your progression is slightly guided and checked by company ambitions (we get this right after leaving Kravlund). Fulfilling an ambition gives you renown (better contracts overall, might be what scaling is based off of), a company-wide morale boost, and sometimes unique items. These two are just renown and morale - top is to have Allied relations with a town, bottom is to have 12 dudes. We pick the top, it's only like three contracts if you do them within a few weeks.

 

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Anyway, the camp is really close to the town so I just cut out the walking. "Some" is 4-6, I think.

 

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It's the mirror. Six shit brigands versus six shit brigands. Difference is our gear is better and we have a crossbowman, while they have Junk.

Terrain is really nice, too. There's a knoll for Rothene to sit on and plink, and some bushes aligned really inconveniently for them so we can block them in.

 

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Gorgeous. In retrospect, I might have overextended Markus, but it turns out okay. Rothene's already put a bolt into some guy.

 

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Lore moving into melee causes already flagging morale to break. We've barely taken any damage, and Dave's already killed a dude (and gotten stunned).

 

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I promised an action shot of Lore lopping a guy's head off and I delivered.

 

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"It's just cleanup now!" but Rothene missed and shot cat right in the chest. Jesus, Rothene. That's the kind of damage the shittest crossbow pumps into light-medium armor, and that's not a headshot. Crossbows are lethal.

 

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Cleanup was easy. We took 13 points of damage from enemy fire, and 54 points of damage from Rothene fire. Everyone who didn't level up before leveled up - pretty much everybody got Pathfinder because I'm a slut for mobility, but Rothene got Learner instead.

 

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Loot was awful, but we got 39 units of pretty good food, which saves me some money. We also picked up bad-tier maces and a flail - maces are good against armor and flesh, but tire you out pretty fast; their skill does less damage, but has a 75% chance to stun. Flails are similar but more tiring, while ignoring the base bonus to defense from shields (shieldwall still helps, just not as much); the flail skill lets you target the head but not ignore shield defense. Even late in the game, bandits (and orcs!) occasionally wear no or bad helmets, and 1-2 solid hits to the head with a flail will kill from full health with a bad helmet. On the other hand, nothing short of orcs is immune to stunning, so it's worth having mace and flail guys for their own reasons.

 

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Naturally, Rothene shot cat hard enough to give him a real injury. This means cat has -20% max fatigue until this recovered, for any combat he's deployed in. Most people get mad at you if you let them linger in the reserves and don't use them, but if they're injured (or have a coward/disloyal trait, like Lore) it doesn't build up. We can get this treated at a temple for cash so it will heal faster, but a pierced chest is a really low-key injury for most circumstances so we'll just put him back on the line and tell him to suck it up.

 

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Kettilmund pays us and this contract removes the trade route penalty, moving costs back towards base and giving us more stuff to guy. Money! We put it towards tools and a new dude.

 

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"Sigbold" the farmer needs to be adopted. Any takers? Next time we'll keep rolling around Black Field White Stag Nation, but now I gotta go pick up goat grain.

Edited by Integrity
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