DevDiary 5 Enemy Design - Battle-Modders/mod-reforged GitHub Wiki
Dev Diary #5 - 08-Sep-2024
Uberbagel
With the inclusion of deeper combat mechanics, more perks and new equipment we'll be showcasing later, a redesign of enemies to integrate well with these new additions was required. The philosophy we've followed going about this adheres strongly to that inherent in the base game, which we feel is that combat should be dynamic, deadly and interesting at all stages of the game.
The screenshots below show cropped versions of our tooltips to show only the effects and perks.
In pursuit of this goal, we followed a few key design principles. Firstly, enemies should be designed around a certain theme and their perks and capabilities should match that theme. Barbarians should be resilient, Ancient Dead should feel like formation fighters and Orcs should fight like the savage menaces they are. Second, different enemies and factions should be distinctly interesting to fight and offer particular challenges unique to themselves. Finally, all enemies should have a weakness, and coming to battle prepared to exploit these weaknesses is what will shower your in company crowns and renown.
In Reforged, enemies have a base slew of perks that is then dynamically modified depending on the equipment they spawn with. Primarily, these perks will come from the weapon and fighting style perk groups that match their wielded armaments. In some cases, perks outside of these groups are given that serve to facilitate a certain design or capability, such as the new Brigand Bandit who, when spawning with a dagger, is given the Overwhelm perk. This overall design has allowed us to create greater variety and facilitate interesting tactical decisions even on a per-enemy basis.
As in many games, the enemies of Battle Brothers have an advantage players don't have, in this case an improved fatigue recovery rate. All human enemies midgame and beyond have a fatigue recovery rate of at least 20 and even up to 25 on elite enemies. In Reforged, these enemies now share the same base recovery rate of 15 as men in your company. Our intention is to make fatigue-play against enemies a more viable strategy and ensure npcs play as much by the same rules as possible as the player. We've also added the Recover skill to all humans including players, which we've covered in a previous dev diary.