YMMV / Battle Brothers

• Awesome Music: Several examples; Overhype and Breakdown Epiphanies did a spectacular job with the soundtrack:
  • The Rise and Fall of House Kaltenborn, the first Noble Houses battle theme, which sounds like something straight from Game of Thrones.
  • Traversing the Northern Clanlands, an overworld map theme that evokes a Skyrim feeling.
  • The Might of Obrokk, the third Orc Horde battle theme. Howard Shore's score for The Lord of the Rings, especially the theme for Isengard, was clearly a major influence here.
  • Chant for the Old Gods, a Barbarian battle theme for Warriors of the North. The drums and throat-singing evoke a more primal and natural feeling.
  • Al-Anwar's Pride, a Southern battle theme for Blazing Deserts. Guaranteed to make you feel like the greatest Sultan to ever walk across the sands.
• Crutch Character: Spears are this for most late-game builds as their sheer lack of raw damage and poor performance against armor becomes a problem once your brothers have gotten enough skill and perks in to reliably hit their opponents and therefore making the spear's main advantage of a +20% to hit bonus redundant. To put this in perspective; the lowest-tier axe has a damage maximum comparable to the highest-tier spear. Although spears will have some uses, such as hitting abnormally-hard-to-hit enemies like Goblins and Gheists or being used as crowd control via the Spearwall ability, it's quite rare for a brother to outright specialize in them.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • During the early-mid game, Brigand Raiders and Brigand Marksmen - with emphasis on the Marksmen. Raiders are a big jump up from Thugs, with far better weapons, armour and morale...but they still come in large numbers too. During the early-mid-game transition when the player typically doesn't have much armour, Brigand Marksmen can one-shot your soldiers and usually have the ability to outshoot your own ranged specialists too. Meanwhile the Raiders often outnumber your party and have better armour, skills and weapons. The worst thing? They always appear together.
    • Even later on, when Brigands are somewhat relegated to Goddamned Bats status, Marksmen can prove horribly lethal to high level characters with a lucky projectile or two. Best invest in the Battle Forged perk for your high-level armored damage dealers to help avert such situations.
  • Orc Warriors. Unlike Orc Young and Orc Berserkers (both of which hit like trucks but otherwise die easily), Orc Warriors are more than capable of killing your best soldiers and at the same time they have the thickest armour in the game. It's often a rude awakening to go from hacking up the other Orc soldiers to suddenly having one guy who your whole team struggles to wear down. And then you find an encounter with "several" or "many" of these behemoths... you best bring your heaviest crossbows and warhammers to break/pierce their armor.
  • Goblins. After slicing up hulking Orcs, clever Brigands, elite Noble troops and the relentless Undead, it's very easy to assume that little Goblins will be a pushover. They're really not. In fact, many players simply avoid fighting them completely. They are very deadly at range with pin-point accurate, armour piercing poison arrows and combine this with annoying throwing weapons that maim and immobilise your melee troops. And when you finally get close to them to take advantage of their weak armour? They have annoyingly high evasion, meaning you'll struggle to land the killing blow. Combined with all this, they usually use spears which have a large hit chance bonus... so they almost never miss and keep piling horrendous damage on you while you often can't reliably hit them back. Fire pots and handgonnes can do the trick with their wide areas of effect, but only if you have the Blazing Deserts DLC; hemming them in with war dogs is another option.
  • Alps, one of the new creatures added in the Beasts and Exploration DLC. They attack by putting your men to sleep, then deal direct damage to the sleeping with their Nightmare ability; they can put two men to sleep in a single turn, or put one to sleep and attack him the same turn. Armor doesn't do anything since Alps don't even have a melee attack, they have long reach and are resistant to ranged attacks, and the battles against them are tediously long because every single one in an encounter will teleport around every time any individual one of them takes damage. On the upside, since armor is useless against them anyways, you can have your men running around buck naked trying to kill these things without building up much fatigue. Also, it seems they cant cause temporary or permanent injuries to your men as their attacks are not physical. Also, they have a surprising pair of Achilles Heels: they can't teleport if stunned or trapped in a net, and they can't put someone to sleep if an enemy is standing next to them^note They can still attack someone that is asleep, and this brings up another problem: do you attack the Alp that you're standing next to, or end your turn to keep them from attacking?.
  • Schrats are absolutely brutal, and probably would clarify as a Boss in Mook Clothing if they weren't occasionally encounterable on the world map. You see a group of them in the map, see one and two in a party, and ask "how bad could they be?" Very. As in, these guys hit like absolute freight trains. They're slow to attack and attack by burrowing their roots to the ground (which can be telegraphed, at least to the extent a turn-based strategy game allows), but if one of your guys isn't wearing good enough armor gets hit? Expect them to be outright one-shotted. Even with decent armor, they're still gonna be horrifically wounded, and likely counted out of the rest of the fight. What truly makes them a nightmare to fight is that these guys simply do not die, and on top of having an insane defense stat that practically requires you to equip an axe to break through their defenses, damaging them spawns tree sapling mooks! If you encounter these guys and don't have an axe on you, your best bet is to just walk the other way. Thankfully, they only come in groups maximum of two (one's terrifying enough, but two can potentially be game-ending), so you can overwhelm them by sheer numbers, but only if you're very well-armed.
  • Think all of the above is bad? The Necrosavants will prove otherwise. They are impossible to pin down, teleporting everywhere on the battlefield, meaning your own marksmen are easy prey for them. They like to team up against wounded targets and any damage you managed to inflict on them can be healed by inflicting damage on you. Oh, and they're never alone. They're always in packs of four. Players who have had only one encounter with them have quickly changed their tune and stay away from them as much as possible. Even worse, Necrosavants can occasionally ambush you during the night while on a caravan escort mission, and there will be no forewarnings of this except for the random event notification immediately before the fight itself, though you can use this chance to abandon the contract and get the hell out of dodge if you don't feel like facing them.
  • Direwolves and hyenas. Stupidly fast and evasive with very high damage, a low-level company can get wiped out by three of them, even if they have a spear wall up. At least killing them and getting their pelts lets you make a badass fur mantle at the taxidermist's that you can add to your armor (3 pelts required), which grants you useful buffs. Rabid versions are even worse, not only inflicting more bleed but also reducing your accuracy with every attack and cannot have their limbs crippled to reduce their chance to hit.
  • Hexen. These witches are rather frail for human opponents (for a given value of "human"), but more than make up for it with their two extremely annoying and dangerous abilities: Charm and Curse. Charm makes one of your men switch sides for two rounds (one with the Resilient perk, which reduces the durations of all debuffs to one turn), tying up your battle line and potentially killing your men if the charmed brother is one of your better combatants (fortunately, men with high resolve can resist being charmed). Curse, well, curses one of your brothers to take the same damage as the Hexe who cast it, and unlike Charm, cannot be resisted. If the cursed brother doesn't have a higher health pool than the Hexe, killing the Hexe will kill the cursed brother as well. Even worse, Hexen do not appear alone and will always bring familiars with them into combat, whether they be a swarm of Nachzehrers, pack of direwolves, bandit raiders, and even Unholds and Schrats, which are serious threats in and of themselves. And one Hexe is bad enough, but old gods/Gilder/Davkul forbid you have to fight a coven of them...
  • Gladiators and Blade Dancers will make your life miserable inside the arena. They come with a number of dodge perks that lets them weave and bob under your weapons with few problems and will either be wielding powerful two handed weapons that smash apart your heavily armored brothers or one handed weapons with a net/concussion pot. They also come with the improved Fast Adaptation Perk which adds 10% flat increase to every hit, so eventually one strike will find their way to you with no means to block/evade it.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Provided you are willing to alter your playstyle a bit and shop around for a map seed with a viable north/south trade loop, the Trade Caravan origin can allow you to quickly snowball your income (and in turn your weapons/armour) far beyond what is possible for any other origins even in the most optimal circumstances. It's widely considered to be the meta origin choice, besides Band of Poachers.
  • Oathtakers can also snowball as long as you're able to manage the downsides of each Oath. Every time you complete an Oath, you will get a big Renown bonus. The Oaths are automatically completed after ten days, no matter what you do. As long as the company survived the malus from the Oath, you will get the renown benefit, which means more pay, better recruits, and an immediate morale boost. Coupled with two very strong starting brothers and already having a battle banner unlocked, you will be able to take on well-paying contracts and make lots of money to outfit your company very early.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Geists. Their high evasive stats, multiple attacks that can pass through armor, and ability to cause soldiers to rout made them extremely annoying. Fortunately, they die instantly if you can actually score a hit. Holy Water consecrated as part of a random event by a company brother with the monk background tends to be useful.
  • Ancient Legionaries have pretty heavy armor and constantly use Shieldwall to buff their defense to the point that you might only have a 5-15% chance of even hitting them. Unlike every other enemy, they can spam this ability forever because they don't have to worry about Fatigue. Combine the shield Legionaries with the Billman variant that skulks behind the shield line stabbing you with lances for massive damage, and they can frequently cross from a tedious annoyance into Demonic Spiders territory.
  • Necromancers love to hide at the back of the map, constantly bringing their zombies back to life and making them much more deadly through possession. If protected by shield-holding Wiedergangers, they can often happily ignore your ranged Brothers and drag out short fights against a few Undead into horribly protracted affairs that take dozens of turns.
  • Weidergangers as well, due to the fact that they almost always come in huge swarms of 20+ and will eventually rise from the dead again if not decapitated. Though not difficult to kill, especially when those who are resurrected do not have full health and will usually have had their armor destroyed from when you killed them the first time, their sheer numbers and ability to rise again make any fights against them a protracted slog.
  • Ifrits are sand creatures which can combine together to make bigger versions of themselves, and larger ones have a ranged attack which allows them to break back down into smaller Ifrits while throwing one Ifrit behind the target of the attack if there is space, tying up your company's back line and potentially causing serious damage to lighter-armored company brothers. Fortunately, they move slowly and aren't particularly evasive, so moving in tight formation and keeping one armored and shielded brother running damage control in the rear will let you grind them down.
  • Any ranged enemy that hangs too far back for a melee-focused company. The only easy way for melee brothers to get rid of a ranged enemy is to kill his comrades and make him flee. Ranged enemies too far behind the line, however, receive no morale maluses for losing teammates. They will keep pelting your brothers with arrows and falling back till caught, which can be a major issue for any brother already weakened from the fight.
• Good Bad Bugs: Zombies have a "bite" attack; one of their variants, the Fallen Hero, is able to be reanimated even after being beheaded. There are reports about headless Fallen Heroes being able to bite. They can likewise have concussions inflicted upon them despite having no head.
  • Temporary injuries can affect creatures or company members that lack the body parts that are getting injured. Snakes can have their inexistent legs◊ and shoulders damaged, or a company member who lost his nose in battle can get it broken later.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Alps, whenever you encounter them in a contract, are fundamentally disturbing given how utterly alien they are. One of the pre-battle descriptions mentions them gliding over the ground with their limbs "catwheeling" as they approach. When they are slain, the post-battle text mentions it seems less like they were killed with physical weapons and more by your will to resist them, and even dead the Alp flesh seems to reseal when you try hacking off their heads. Their bodies seem to be hollow or rotten on the inside, their flesh crinkles like old paper, and while they have no eyes in their sockets there is a "third eye" buried inside their heads. There is nothing about them that makes sense according to the rules of biology.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • You can easily tell that Warhammer was a big inspiration for the developers. The game is set in a more low-tech version of the Empire of Man with all the same Germanic trappings, or, more specifically, the Confederacy of the Border Princes, an independent, but incredibly backward and decentralised region at the edge of the Empire. Life is short and brutal and there are enemies everywhere, like the crude and violent Greenskins that lurk in the forgotten wilderness, the savage and war-loving barbarian men of the north (Norsca), the undead zombies together with the vampires (Vampire Counts) and the skeletal remnants of an ancient empire that isn't quite ready to fade away into history (Tomb Kings), though the latter is based on Ancient Rome instead of Ancient Egypt.
  • Being a Dark Fantasy game focused on a mercenary company, Battle Brothers is probably the closest thing to a video game adaptation of The Black Company.