With the ‘Beasts & Exploration’ DLC comes a big free update that improves the game in many aspects. Below you’ll find a list explaining the most important changes and additions.
Note that all of this is in addition to the many additions brought by the DLC which you can read about here. You can purchase and wishlist it here.
If you’d like to continue your current campaign with the previous version of Battle Brothers, or continue to play it altogether without the DLC, you can do so as well. Find Battle Brothers in your Steam library, right-click it and select ‘Properties’. Navigate to the ‘Betas’ tab and select the ‘1.1.x’ branch from the dropdown menu. Steam should now update Battle Brothers, and once done, you’re ready to go.
Starting a new campaign is very much recommended. You may continue your current campaign, but if you do, expect some glitches.
Note that most mods probably will not work anymore until they've been updated by their authors to work with the new version of Battle Brothers. Make sure to remove them, as otherwise the game may crash.
Changelog
- Added new main menu background.
- Added icons to the main menu showing what DLC are installed or missing.
- Added 24 new settlement situations for a more dynamic economy.
- Added 16 new character traits.
- Added ability to pay for a tryout and uncover a potential recruit's traits before hiring them.
- Added button to end the current round and have all your men skip their turns until the next round starts.
- Added ability to give potions, strange mushrooms and antidote to other characters in battle without having to drop them on the ground first.
- Added 'Free Ally' skill to free adjacent allies from nets, webs and vines.
- Added 'Grant Night Vision' spell to Goblin Shamans.
- Added lots of new event and contract illustrations.
- Added more names for characters, settlements, regions, items, locations and opponents for more variety.
- Changed world map to be 25% larger and include two additional settlements. New campaign required to take effect.
- Changed map seed to use words made up of characters from a to z, and no longer exclusively numbers in hexadecimal notation. For example, the word "overhype" is now a possible map seed.
- Changed XP required for veteran levels to increase by 1000 for every level. In effect, the first levels are attainable roughly as fast as before, but attaining the following levels takes longer as to cut down on the attribute inflation for very long campaigns. Also, with a linear increase in XP cost, there's no longer any sudden roadblocks where one veteran level would require twice as much XP as the previous one did. And because enemy strength scales in part with the levels of your characters, having the average level a bit lower in long campaigns will also reduce the number of enemies a bit, leading to quicker combat and less pressure to replace everyone with superhumans as time goes on. Note that when loading old campaigns, veteran level characters may seem to need excessively much XP to level again - this isn't the case when starting new campaigns.
- Changed starting size of stash to 99, up from 90.
- Changed named shields to always have either the same or better fatigue penalties than regular ones.
- Changed strength of roaming beasts to scale more depending on distance to civilization, and less on campaign time.
- Changed enemy bases to be more proactive in sending out parties to intercept enemies threatening them, but also have a weakened garrison while doing so.
- Changed all end game crises to start slightly later, to take slightly less time to defeat, and to fade out more smoothly.
- Changed greenskins and undead to be a bit less active in destroying settlements, as to make using the 'Permanent Destruction' setting more viable.
- Changed chance of any human dying during the Undead Scourge crisis to return as a Wiederganger to be lower.
- Changed 'Escort Caravan' contract to give better directions, an approximation of the time required (e.g. two days), pay slightly more per tile of distance, to support payment per head, and to have a cap on distance, especially in the early game.
- Changed 'Armed Courier' contract to have a cap on distance, especially at the start of a campaign, to pay slightly more, and to give an approximation on the time necessary for travel if going by road.
- Changed 'Defend Settlement' contract to make sure that there's bases of the attacking faction near enough to not have the player need to wait for too long for the attackers' arrival.
- Changed contracts to be more readily available at the very start of the game.
- Changed renown to decrease by -2 each passing day, as stories about your company will slowly fade from people's memories unless you continously create new ones.
- Changed effect of different training regimes at Training Hall to be slightly stronger and made them stay for a certain number of battles, and no longer a certain number of days. Also, they're more affordable now.
- Changed costs and stats for various character backgrounds to some degree, and introduced a random +/- 10% factor for all daily wage demands, so you'll find cheaper and more expensive recruits also within the same background.
- Changed how daily wages for mercenaries employed by the player are calculated. Instead of a flat +2 crowns for every level, it's now a cumulative 10% on the wage for every level until the 11th, and then 3% on the wage for every level afterwards. In effect, there's less wage pressure in the beginning, low tier backgrounds have become cheaper to employ in the longterm, and some backgrounds have become more expensive to keep around if they reach veteran levels.
- Changed how retreating works. If your men are already on the edges on the map, you'll safely retreat as before. If they aren't, they'll now attempt to move to the edges of the map by themselves until either they succeed or die. While this is going on, they'll get a defense bonus for moving through zones of control, the amount of which scales with the chosen difficulty level.
- Changed enemies and player characters to make no more than 2 attempts to flee from a position in a single turn.
- Changed morale checks to always have a 5% chance to succeed or fail, just like attacks do.
- Changed dropping items to the ground, or switching between hands and bags, to no longer grant effective fatigue to spend in the same turn.
- Changed polearms to have a -15 chance to hit targets directly adjacent, reflecting how long and unwieldy they are in close combat. Picking the 'Polearm Mastery' perk will remove this penalty.
- Changed 'Polearm Mastery' perk to reduce the action point cost for using skills of polearms from 6 to 5. The 'Repel' and 'Hook' skills now always apply the 'Staggered' effect, even without the mastery.
- Changed 'Hold Out' to be called 'Resilient' and have a new effect; any negative status effect with a finite duration (e.g. Bleeding, Charmed) has its duration reduced by -1 turn, to a minimum of 1 turn.
- Changed description of 'Shield Expert' to include the fact that picking it grants a +15% bonus to hit chance to the 'Knock Back' skill. This was already true in previous versions, but the game neglected to mention it.
- Changed 'Killing Frenzy' perk to count the turn the effect first triggers as part of its 2 turn duration.
- Changed 'Reach Advantage' to provide a bonus of +5 to melee defense per stack, with a limit of 5 stacks, instead of the +20% of total melee defense per stack it provided before.
- Changed 'Nimble' perk to now give consistent damage reduction to hitpoints up to 75%, but reduced exponentially by the total fatigue penalty of body and head armor. Fatigue penalty from other equipment does not affect the damage reduction, but neither do the 'Brawny' perk or traits.
- Changed 'Battleforged' perk armor damage reduction to be based on current total armor value, and no longer maximum total armor value. Also, a status effect now displays details on the effect as with 'Nimble'.
- Changed 'Underdog' perk. The defense malus due to being surrounded by opponents is negated, as was previously the case. However, if an attacker has the Backstabber perk, the effect of that perk is now negated, and the normal defense malus due to being surrounded is applied instead.
- Changed 'Brawny' fatigue reduction to 25%, down from 30%.
- Changed 'Bags & Belts' perk to no longer entirely remove the fatigue penalty for two-handed weapons and shields.
- Changed Lindwurms to have slightly more hitpoints, and to give significantly more XP. Their 'Tail Slam' skill now has an equal chance to either stun, daze or knock back their target. Also, they're a bit less rare now.
- Changed out some assets for updated versions.
- Changed AI of many enemies to perform better in a variety of situations.
- Changed AI to make better use of parallelization for faster turn processing times.
- Changed savegames to use compressed fog of war information for smaller file size and faster cloud synchronization.
- Changed lots and lots of smaller things for the better.
- Fixed game sometimes not continuing when a Lindwurm retreated from the battlefield.
- Fixed game sometimes not continuing when a character that used the 'Taunt' skill died in the same turn.
- Fixed rare issue with frenzied direwolves not dying properly.
- Fixed issue with 'Reset Equipment After Battle' option not working properly under very specific circumstances.
- Fixed issue with 'Last Stand' contract where the game would potentially freeze when defending settlements isolated on small islands.
- Fixed 'Caravan Escort' contracts failing without battle in some cases.
- Fixed combat slowing down in very long campaigns for some people.
- Fixed player banner bonus not being updated immediately after moving.
- Fixed wrong damage values displayed in tooltip of 'Knock Out' skill.
- Fixed morale chain events being displayed in the wrong order in the combat log under certain conditions.
- Fixed 'Nine Lives' perk not properly resetting after triggering once combat is concluded.
- Fixed coastal settlements not being reachable by boat in some cases.
- Fixed various minor issues and annoyances.