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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? 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.