Balance changes are always going to be controversial in a game as tightly designed as Battle Brothers. Nonetheless, I wanted to provide the reasoning behind the changes I made to help you decide if you wish to use the mod or not.
My goal with all of these changes was not to make the game easier or harder, but rather to smooth out the difficulty curve of the game and reduce the peaks and valleys that come with certain enemy types.
Serpent Resolve lowered
100 Resolve is far too much for such an early game opponent, and is a leftover stat from the Blazing Deserts beta when they were much weaker and needed the help. In their current iteration, Serpents exist with a balance of Hitpoints, Resolve, and armor such that they basically always die before they break or route. Given that they don't seem to be apex predators like Lindwurms or Unholds, nor are they magical or alien like Alps, Hexen, or Schrats, it's both mechanically and thematically appropriate to lower this a bit.
Decrease Serpent damage, increase Serpent armor effectiveness, Serpents now have Executioner
Serpents have a sort of inverse inflection point to Nomads; early game they're so absurdly threatening as to not be worth fighting at all, and late game they don't offer much of a challenge at all. This largely comes down to their high base damage (as much as a Two Handed Saif!) and relatively low armor effectiveness.
Reducing their raw damage makes them less deadly in the very early parts of a campaign, when players have limited armor. Upping their armor effectiveness helps them better keep pace against armor when players do start to get better gear, and Executioner allows them to more effectively threaten the durable bros they pull in and focus fire on.
Increased unit costs
Lindwurms where always a powerful foe, but have had multiple buffs, fixes, and AI improvements to make them stronger since their release. They haven't had commensurate nerfs to check this power creep, and thus are a greater threat than they were balanced around being and are more difficult than intended.
Raising their unit cost reduces the size of groups players encounter on a given day, giving them more opportunities to fight smaller stacks and build up before fighting "the real deal".
Decrease Gorge armor ignore
The Gorge skill was intended to have 40% armor ignore, but was bugged and had 0%. Eventually, well after other stats were adjusted for balance, this bug was fixed, with armor ignore reduced to 35%. This still represents a massive increase in damage over what the skill was balanced around. Additionally, the amount of damage through armor Lindwurms do makes their acid mechanic mostly irrelevant.
Reducing Gorge's armor ignore brings the skill more inline with the numbers it was originally balanced around, and generally makes armor more relevant to the fight.
Cutthroats and Outlaws always have Dodge
Nomads are in an ok place, balance-wise. That said, the massive difficulty spike at day 40 when Outlaws get Dodge and Leaders get Nimble is a little janky. It encourages a phenomena where players try to snowball campaigns by fighting Nomads non-stop in the first 40 days, then leaving the South for most of the rest of their campaign once they get Dodge.
Giving them Dodge up front smooths out the power spike a bit and gives them one of their most unique faction abilities from the get go.
Cutthroats and Outlaws have reduced Defense and get more later
Again, Nomads are in a pretty solid spot right now, so the difficulty of the fights shouldn't be drastically different. Lowering their base defense helps reduce the impact of Dodge early on, and slightly increasing it later helps them scale a bit as the campaign progresses. The big late game fights that offer satisfying challenges should stay mostly untouched as players enter the beginning of the crisis.
My hope and intent is that leaving Nomad Leaders, Archers, and specialty units (e.g. Blade Dancers) untouched allows late game Nomads to continue to offer a satisfying challenge while softening the ramp-up to these fights.
Nomads no longer ignore morale checks when Indebted die
Nomads and Indebted only spawn together in the Indebted Uprising contract, where they effectively act as "powered up" Indebted. The theming of ignoring morale checks didn't make sense here.
Polearm Conscripts no longer have Nimble
The Gilded are an abnormally tanky faction due to the majority of their units having Nimble. Having a mass Nimble faction is unique and fun, but the Gilded high-damage backline units also have Nimble is a big part of what pushes them so far ahead of their Northern counterparts in difficulty. Removing the perk from these units brings them more in line with other factions and offers the player some opportunities to exploit gaps in their shieldwall.
It also reflects a credulous difference in training and helps differentiate the relatively homogenous City-State units a bit.
Indebted have Nine Lives
Indebted are a non-unit - they don't pose any particular threat or offer any real resistance. This makes them a boring part of the Gilded army compositions (and a boring enemy to fight en masse in their associated contract). Giving them Nine Lives doesn't drastically move the needle here, which is fine - individual Indebted shouldn't be threatening, but they should more effective meat shields that tie up your frontline while other units flank to your more vulnerable brothers.
Thematically, it also adds a bit of much needed characterization to Indebted, showing them as desperately clutching at survival as best they can.
Barbarians no longer have Brawny or Dodge, Reavers and Chosen have reduced Fatigue Recovery
First, a bit of background here. Barbarians were originally designed to be the "Dodge faction" in the way that Nomads are now - however, the initial implementation of Dodge on enemies made the perk do absolutely nothing. This got fixed in Blazing Deserts, and at the same time was removed from Barbarians.
This is fine, as Barbarian defense stats were balanced around the bugged behavior where Dodge was providing no bonus. However, the whole Fatigue management layer to the faction never got revisited. Barbarians have by far the best Fatigue management of any faction in the game, with high base recovery, Brawny, Pathfinder, Weapon Masteries, a super low Fatigue cost version of Rotation, and the Drums of War effect. There's a tooltip in the game that suggests Barbarians tire quickly - this is a complete lie given their current mechanics, and is a holdover from a time when Barbarians were intended to need Fatigue management to keep their Dodge bonus up and survive.
Removing Brawny and lowering their recovery gives the player more opportunities to weather the storm of Chosen and Reavers wombo-comboing Rotate-Attack-Adrenaline. Once they build up enough Fatigue, players have a respite from the mass Adrenaline strikes and can try to counterattack or beat them in turn order with raw Initiative.
Reaver and Chosen Resolve reduced
In addition to having the best average armor, the most damaging weapons, the best Fatigue management, and the most threatening unit compositions of any faction in the game, Barbarians also have exceptionally high Resolve. It's a bit much.
Drums of War increased Fatigue Recovery and Resolve instead of directly decreasing Fatigue
Drummers are pure decoration in the current balance of the game; Barbarians already have best-in-class Fatigue management, adding more does nothing. Drums of War acting instead as an active buff accomplishes a few things:
- There is now have some reason to target Drummers
- With Drummers on the field, Reavers and Chosen are once again the hypnotized murderers we know and love
- The overall balance of the faction as it exists today doesn't massively change
- It feels a bit more thematically sound for Drums of War to make Barbarians breathe more gooder and feel more brave than for it to immediately sap the lactic acid out of their muscles
Chosen unit cost increased
Chosen are a complete outlier from any other faction mainstay unit - in terms of stats and equipment they're closer to, say, Hedge Knights, but they spawn in numbers similar to Orc Warriors. Barbarian camps rapidly scale to the point they contain what a friend once colorfully described as "fuckstacks" of Chosen. With this change, they won't proliferate to that point quite as swiftly.
This keeps the faction in a familiar place overall (spawnlists weren't touched, just unit costs) and keeps their maximum potential untouched, but slows the ramp up.
Footmen get better armor during crises
Nobles have been hit the hardest by the gradual powercreep over Battle Brothers many patches and DLC. Zweihanders have become less threatening from numerous Greatsword nerfs, more dangerous weaponry shreds through them easily, the increased effectiveness of Nimble has lessened reliance on good armor (typically gained from Nobles themselves), and Handgonnes in particular destroy Noble armies like they were made of wet paper.
At the heart of their weakness, though, is the fact that Battleforged just doesn't do enough for their mainline units. The perk is underwhelming in general on medium armor, and the lightest Footmen armor is straight up Nimble gear. Giving them beefier gear armor is crucial for them to survive long enough for Billmen and Arbalesters chew up your bros.
This increased armor only appears during crises to hedge against players snowballing in the early game, as bullying Nobles for a quick gear power spike is already a prevalent enough strategy. I also feel that it adds some heft to the late game crises, helping establish that these really are dire times and the Nobles are pulling all the stops to try to keep up.
Billmen Ranged Defense increased
Currently, Billmen keel over and die if you look at them mean. Making them a little less vulnerable to throwers and gunners is important to the faction's overall power, as Billmen account for most of the damage output in the Noble armies.
Standard Bearer Resolve increased
Right now, Standard Bearers do nothing if a Knight is on the field. Given that their attacks aren't particularly threatening, and given that routing Nobles is mostly effortless, this makes the unit a bit more relevant in the overall composition.
Knights are now special snowflakes
Knights are supposed to be the lynchpin of Noble armies, but in the current balance they're little more than Footmen with better gear. They don't boast particularly high damage output, but their ability to hold the line is severely hampered by how brittle the Footmen around them are.
These changes are intended to make Knights the "boss" units I feel they were intended to be. My hope is that every time you fight a Knight, you feel a bit of trepidation and uncertainty about what you're going to face. Will this one be a maul-wielding Lone Wolf, crushing through armor and flesh? An unbreakable shield bearer, inspiring his men with a Fortified Mind? A skillful Duelist? A Head Hunter with a Three Headed Flail?
The other intent is to add a bit more faction flavor into the game. Currently, faction traits are an aborted feature that only drives faction descriptions. Crafting whole new mechanics out of this is well beyond the scope of a balance mod, but I feel it adds something for faction units to look the part. A Knight from the warmongering House Gota wearing thick lamellar armor and a gruesome two handed flail, concerned far more about the function of his arms than their beauty. A Knight from House Rumolt wearing shining scale armor, his sword and shield the tools he uses to uphold justice for his people. That sort of thing.