DevDiary 10 Other Changes - Battle-Modders/mod-reforged GitHub Wiki

Dev Diary #10 - 10-Sep-2024
Uberbagel

• Introduction
• First Turn Initiative
• Encumbrance
• Veteran Perks
• Variable Rolls with Two Talent Stars
• Trophies and Loot
• Non Standard Action Point Weapons
• Kills, Experience and Loot Ownership
• Scaled Morale Checks from Dying or Fleeing Allies
• Bombs
• Three Headed Flail
• Poisons
• Confusing Enemy Scaling
• Other

While Reforged has many large features that deserve their own Dev Diaries, there are also many smaller features that deserve a mention. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of new features, but rather some prominent ones that we want to bring to highlight.

In Reforged the amount of Actions Points available to a character on turn 1 is variable based on how much Initiative they possess. This system is an abstraction of the benefit being faster than your opponent brings about unique decision-making and positioning considerations.

One complaint we have about vanilla Battle Brothers that affects long-time players and min-maxers is the meta builds. We find metas boring and do our best to keep balance tight enough that no build is too strong or too weak across the full breadth of a campaign.

One infamously cheesy meta build that we've sought to remove is Fatigue Neutral. The Fatigue Neutral build is a bit exploitative in nature in that it allows you to almost entirely ignore the Fatigue mechanic while wearing the heaviest of gear. To reduce the extreme this build brought, we've introduced the Encumbrance system, which works as follows:

• Wearing heavier armor now reduces Fatigue Recovery and increases Fatigue Cost per tile moved if your Maximum Fatigue (after gear) goes below certain thresholds (50, 40, 30, 20).
• Encumbrance only applies if the total head and body armor Fatigue penalty is greater than -20.
• If a character is encumbered, a status effect by the name of Encumbrance will appear on the character.

Brothers in Reforged, gain an extra perk point every 4 levels following level 11 (15, 19...). These are known as Veteran Perks. We find this a nice feature to keep some excitement in leveling a brother past 11. In our testing, the veteran perks come slow enough so as not to skew the game's balance while also feeling rewarding for longer campaigns.

In vanilla Battle Brothers, rolling two talent stars on certain attributes meant for a somewhat boring build where you get a consistently high roll on a high value attribute (Melee Attack, Melee Defense) and thus pick it every level. To bring about some variety, you can now roll 1 lower or higher than vanilla two star talent rolls. The spread of the total attribute points gained from these level-ups is kept reasonably tight e.g. in vanilla 2 stars in Melee Skill mean a total of 30 Melee Skill over 10 levels whereas in Reforged it is 25-35. This creates an interesting opportunity for the player to spend a low-rolled 2 star attribute into another attribute and then later partially make up for it with a high-rolled level-up.

A common complaint in vanilla is that certain enemies don't feel worth it to fight. Some factions and many of the cool and interesting monsters in the game just aren't worth the time or risk. We've started the process of improving upon this by balancing loot drops across factions and adding a new beast sellable. Many enemies now have a higher chance, or a new chance, to drop valuables and sellables. This includes goblins, most beasts/monsters and the new Geist Tear dropped from Geists.
In Reforged, we found an open design space in having a little more variability in thematically appropriate weapons. Typically lower tier weapons now have reduced Action Point and/or Fatigue cost for their skills e.g. the Woodcutter's Axe costs 5 AP for its Split Man compared to 6 AP on the Greataxe. Additionally, we've created a number of hybrid weapons with unique advantages such as both 4 AP and 6 AP attacks and unique 1 and 2 tile range attacks. These weapons sometimes deal slightly less damage than their more straightforward counterparts, but the unique advantages they bring can open up new styles of combat. Goblin weapons typically cost 3 Action Points instead of 4, representing the nimbleness and mobility these weapons afford. Our new Poleflail weapon has 5 Action Point cost weapon skills by default, uniquely allowers users of this weapon to eschew Polearm Mastery because the Action Point cost reduction provided is not needed. These non-standard costs open up builds and gameplay unique to these weapons.

In vanilla you only get XP and Loot from an enemy if you land the last hit on the enemy. This can lead to frustrating situations where you do the most damage to an enemy and then an NPC ally comes in and takes your kill. In Reforged, as long as your company has inflicted at least half of the total Hitpoints + Armor damage to an entity, you gain rights to any items they drop. This means you no longer need to get the last hit on enemies to make them drop loot.

Furthermore, the XP gained from an enemy's death is now proportional to the fraction of the total damage dealt to that enemy by your company, irrespective of who gets the last hit on the kill. This XP is then divided among your brothers with the brothers who did damage sharing 20% of the XP (distributed among them based on how much damage each bro did) and the other 80% is then distributed equally among all brothers. This is analogous to the distribution in vanilla where the killer gets 20% of the XP and the remaining 80% is distributed among all brothers.

In Battle Brothers characters receive negative morale checks whenever an ally dies or flees. The strength of this morale check solely depends on the XP value of the dying/fleeing ally. In Reforged, we've improved this by scaling the strength of the morale check with the ratio of the XP value of the dying/fleeing ally to that of the receiver. So a Brigand Leader will care less about a Brigand Thug dying or fleeing but a Thug will be more strongly affected by a dying/fleeing Leader.

You can now sling Bombs and Holy Water from your bag when using a Sling in combat, improving utility and usability of these items. Additionally, Bombs are now cheaper to purchase and crafting them yields double that of vanilla with the same recipe, hopefully incentivizing use of these sometimes forgotten items.

The Three Headed Flail now does a single attack with three attack rolls. For each failed attack roll the damage is reduced by 33%. This way the damage output is somewhat similar as before, but this eliminates conflicts with modding and newly added perks/skills. This change was required to bring the Three Headed Flail in line with other weapons in its ability to stack debuffs per attack as we have many new effects in Reforged which trigger based on target hit or miss.

Poisons can now be applied for 0 Action Points during the first round of combat, being a thematic representation of being prepared for combat or keeping your weapon poisoned at all times.

In vanilla Battle Brothers, many enemies of a single name, like Nomad Cutthroats, scale in difficulty as days pass, making it hard to judge the difficulty of fights across a campaign. In Reforged, we've done away with this design, instead opting for set power levels on each enemy type.

• Similar to Flails, Bolas now also ignore the defense bonus granted by shields (but not by Shieldwall).
• Tavern Rumors can now sometimes be about Legendary locations that you have not discovered yet but the information they provide about these locations could be true or false.
• Some enemies have unique new perks e.g. the Necromancer has the Soul Link perk which redirects part of any Hitpoints damage received to an adjacent ally.
• Fencing swords have received an overhaul in Reforged with new skills and stats. We have also implemented an AI for fencing in Reforged so NPCs that spawn with such swords will now use them to great effect (unlike vanilla where AI cannot spawn with or use fencing swords).
• Enemy champions now also boost the Resolve of nearby allies, just like leaders do.
• Some skills have been tweaked in Reforged e.g. Gash now applies several stacks of Bleeding.
• Some effects such as Nighttime or Smoke have their effects slightly tweaked from vanilla.