[Nearly Updated] An Overly Ambitious Guide on Efficient Character Builds: Intended for Experienced Players

Overview

[Seek information in the first two sections of this guide to understand the state of this guide in terms of recent DLC & update changes]Come one, come all, come for the character builds to rule them all!This guide is built with a min-max perspective with minimal guesswork involved. This guide is not meant for beginners of the game, as covering all the basics and disciplines you will build from playing this game is more fitting for an entire guide of its own, which is pretty ambitious right now, despite the current length of the guide. The intended reader is one who has gone through several campaigns, is committed to refining their strategies and wishes to achieve an efficient, general use, reliably strong company that will be created in your first 100 days that will last you your entire run. You will also gain the information to help utilize an efficiency-based playstyle, in order to maximize the potential of these builds. That being said, all of my work is open to civilized debate in the comments.

♦ Disclaimer & Acknowledgements ♦

Disclaimer: Work In Progress:
• This game guide is not currently completely optimized for the Beasts & Exploration DLC (99%), the Warriors of the North DLC (99%) & Blazing Deserts DLC (99%). Any enemies, build changes, and game balancing reworks added from this update will have to be heavily tested and researched in order to verify that this guide and its contents are still the most efficient for a late-game playthrough. This will take a decent amount of time to playtest, in order to gather accurate information; However, it is important to note that a good portion of the guide is being updated. Feel free to share your take regarding an efficient late-game playthrough or any well-thought-out information that would be helpful to the refining of this guide, thanks.
• Any section that does not have “Temporary” or “[Update Needed]” in the title is applicable for the new DLC & changes. (See additional disclaimer section below this one for further information on the latest disclaimers).
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• This guide is primarily geared for experienced players of Battle Brothers. If you are a new player looking for a build to start off with, I would not recommend this build for you, but you are still free to give it a try. Just keep in mind that without an intimate understanding of AI patterns and advanced world map game mechanics, you might struggle to execute an efficient usage of this build. But feel free to experiment and enjoy the game, and I’m sure that there is still plenty to learn from this guide. Additionally, you are free to use this guide for any difficulty, but I will be primarily talking about Expert Combat, Expert Economy, Low Starting Funds, and Ironman. Thank you.

Acknowledgements:
• To start off, it is clear that there is no one way to play and succeed in Battle Brothers. Whether you use my guide or not, you can still be successful & have a good time using alternative playstyles and builds; However, the focus of this guide is to present the absolute best character builds built around a sensible amount of absolute efficiency, and how to efficiently achieve the means needed to recreate those builds. For more information on popular & effective meta builds, see the Q&A sections down below or ask me why a build isn’t listed as the best character build.
• Additionally, if you do intend to do a legendary location boss rush, or a similar run that ends before 120 days, this guide might not be the most efficient with a very short-term campaign in mind. This is because there are perks and strategies that primarily benefit the short-term. As a reminder, this guide is only the most efficient for a lengthy campaign, but will still allow you to obtain an incredibly strong company for your first 100 days that will continue to be refined & excel beyond the late-game.
• Luck: It can work in your favor, and against you. It does exist and will be a constant factor during your campaign. Now, to make this clear, luck is slightly different than Rng. Luck is always going to be uncontrollable, but Rng can be manipulated in your favor with most game mechanics. Bad Rng does happen, but it happens a lot less than you might think. Most negative outcomes come from a butterfly effect, accumulation of misplays, in and out of combat.
• One of the biggest problems about learning the ropes of Battle Brothers is that players are not always given exact data about how the game works. This has caused anecdotal conclusions to be formed for each individual player about how the game mechanics function based on the outcome of a learning experience. This meaning that one would use a personal experience or an isolated example instead of calculated evidence. I am not void of this fallacy, but with this guide I have aimed to focus my thinking on what is more concrete in Battle Brothers. With that in mind, when in pursuit of absolute truths, you should practice being skeptical, and within reason, ethically test those assertions for yourself.
• As always, if you believe me to have made a mistake, feel free to leave a constructive comment and we can discuss it in the context of this guide, in which is centered around a sensible amount of absolute efficiency. Additionally, remember that a honest pursuit of true efficiency requires an open mind to being proven incorrect, and that being provided a better answer will only strengthen the quality of one’s beliefs.

♦ Guide Status & Roadmap: Disclaimer! This guide is still being updated ♦

• Currently, I’m continuously carefully updating sections of the guide that have been accounted for with ethical testing. See the sections that do NOT have “[Update Needed]”, and/or strikethroughed text on the text or in the section title for the latest implemented updates, and DLCs information. Otherwise, the pending sections will come with more playtesting, information gathering, consideration for the many new factors regarding efficiency, and a solidified build meta. Additionally, there may be some sections marked as “[Under Construction]”, in which contain valid information, but are incomplete in wholeness. Spreading misinformation or causing confusion with information is also a problem I diligently aim to avoid, but it’s still possible that I’ve made a mistake that might need pointing out. Additionally, hasty conclusions are NOT regarded as the cream of the crop when it comes to a guide centered around absolute efficiency.
• With this in mind, I am currently aiming to play as much Battle Brothers as I can comfortably handle in my day to day life. So that said, if major sections of this guide remain un-updated for a while, you will know that I am actively & thoroughly playtesting/researching first, in order to really ensure that these sections are truly representative of this guide’s goal to provide the best possible team composition & builds, and that are not entirely theoretical/anecdotal. Thanks, and I hope you understand that I do not want to spread untested information, and that updating this guide completely will take some more time.
• As for recent changes, I will be releasing some temporary experimental build sections to have something for people to aim for when building their units, but it is very important to note that they are marked temporary if they are largely untested or undergoing perk debate, and that they are not to be taken with absolute certainty just yet, unless the temporary warning is replaced.
• Not to discourage, this guide will take a while before it is fully updated, as the devs love to spoil us with DLC content. I also intend to have a visual overhaul of the guide once it is complete. If you have any concerns about any of the information provided do feel free to communicate them to me, as I strive to have the most accurate relevant information available.
• Guide Roadmap: Finishing up: Updating guide information to a final state. (About 95%, Progress a lot slower than usual, Reminder: Build Stat Reasoning!)
  Currently working on: Adding & completing additional/bonus sections, as a little something to give back for your continued support. (About 53%, placeholders & under construction sections)
  Next 1: Extra thorough reevaluation on information presentation.
  Next 2: Image information, aesthetic pass & moving images. (About 3%)
  Next 3: Request & seek peer reviews & finalization.
  Next 4: Keep up with the Battle Brothers meta-gaming scene & hope that no more drastic changes come to the game.

♦ Choosing your map & Starting off ♦

When choosing your map, whether you pick a pre-researched seed or not, you must first decide what your playthrough goals are, in order to find a layout that will work for you. For the purpose of sticking to this guide, your goal will be to have your company obtain a “godlike status” the quickest, without sacrificing efficiency in the long run. In other words, you must be aiming to play longer than your first crisis, but ideally you want to play with a standard of between 150 to 750 days.

Now that we have your goals set, we can look at what should be desired for when you pick your map for a long-term campaign.
Firstly, basic shape should be taken into consideration.

This means that you should be looking for:

• More undiscovered distant land mass to explore and conquer.
• Less water running in between the lands, so that roads may stay intact, unless said water leads to an abundance of ports.
• Swamps, forests, and mountains don’t completely plague the map; However, you can still use unfavorable terrain to your advantage. (a singular mountain top for overseeing the land, Small oases/forests for hunting beasts, and the occasional tactical positioning using swamp terrains).
• A large open area on the map to use as an enemy camp farming ground for later in the game. Preferably, in between towns in area without terrain debuffs.
• A map with convenient enemy spawns, as different areas of a map have unique enemy faction spawning grounds.

Secondly, the town layout is just as important.

This meaning that:

• Towns are closely clustered together in favorable areas, so you can go from quest to quest with ease.
• Having towns that can be used as exploration points for when you want to branch out into the wilderness, or having a route that you can take through the wilderness to get to your next town for the extra chances to run into hidden camps or enemies.
• There are towns that are not largely undefended/unpatrolled. (If you decide to play with permanent destruction checked, but that is not recommended).
• You should look to have at a minimum of 2 to 3 port access spots that you can travel great distances with, especially in the South near or at the arena.

Lastly, it is important that you consider the city types provided to you by your seed. Each settlement type is unique, so, just remember to read the city’s description. As pictured above, Expensive noble city (on the left), Decently priced trading town (on the right).

Another aspect of towns is the importance of:

• What trading goods and resources the towns offer (gems, dye, salt, tools, etc.).
• What city type is it in relation to its resources? (city = costlier prices to buy but better to sell VS. small village = cheap to buy but worse resale value).
• What recruits you will be likely offered based on city type (forest city/hunter’s cabin/lumber camp= Hunters, Lumberjacks and Wildmen, fortification = combat affiliated troops, swamp city = Cultists and Witchhunters. etc.).
• Are there a decent amount of attached buildings for your city (blast furnaces, ore smelters, workshops, etc.).

Starting Companions:
Another aspect of a map seed to consider is what starting stats/traits/backgrounds your chosen start gives to you. For this guide we will be looking almost exclusively at the three Companions from the Rebuilding a Company, A New Company & Southern Mercenaries starts.
Ideally, you want positive traits on all, but primarily you will want the two melee star Companion to be buffed out with good traits/base stat rolls. Additionally, the archer Companion, and the shield Companion are to be utilized until someone better comes along in the late-game. There will be coverage on the ideal talent stars in the build sections of this guide.

In general, you should play with a map that fits your playthrough, but randomizing your map seed is just as viable; However, it is important to note that if your seed rolls poorly it can greatly impact your efficiency in the long run, if you intend to spend a lot of time in a single save.
While you shouldn’t go to extreme lengths to find the perfect map seed, a little patience wouldn’t hurt when choosing your map seed.

♦ Alternate Starts: Applicable Starts: Part 1 ♦

Sorting Key:
Applicable = This start will be covered by the entirety of this guide.
Partial = This start will play out similarly to how this guide is set up, but some factors like starting units, tasks, and equipment timings will be different.
Not Covered = This start is too unique to be covered by this guide, and would require a guide of its own in order to ethically cover the differing factors for this style of campaign.

Applicable Starts:

• Rebuilding a Company: (Applicable): While this start is advertised as a tutorial, it is your classic start for any Battle Brothers campaign. The duration of the tutorial is no more than a couple days long if one is efficient with their time. With that said, you will start out with some decent starting companions to work with, and some easy gold making opportunities in the form of the tutorial. You will be rushed into the tutorial, unless you decide to pass on the opportunity to make the easy gold. Otherwise, this start is largely free of any large advantages or disadvantages.
• A New Company: (Applicable): Much like the Rebuilding a Company start you will be given a few sturdy starting companions, yet this time you will be given no tutorial contract to grab value out of. With this in mind, this is the most positive or negative modifier free, campaign start that you can choose. This makes it a great baseline to use for measuring the many factors the game has to offer with an ethical lense. The main difference between this start and the Rebuilding a Company start is that you will be deprived of a few money-making opportunities: the starting fight loot & experience, the Hoggart fight loot & experience, renown & contract payment from completing the Hoggart fight. With this in mind, you will be allowed to hire more at your own hiring pace, allowing you to choose exactly the right backgrounds to hire along the path of your journey.
• Southern Mercenaries: (Applicable): With this start, you will begin your campaign in the southern city states with the usual starting companions, given a few weapon & armour changes. This start will be good for grabbing some select hires (Manhunters) and earning some extra gold in the arena to spend with your starting gold. Otherwise, this start will be just as good as any of the other applicable default starts.

Partially Applicable Starts:

• Band of Poachers: (Partial): (Limited inventory space slightly hurts the economy ramp)
  With the Band of Poachers alternate start, your company will be slightly faster on the world map, able to obtain a scouting report for attacking locations, start with a smaller inventory cart, and start with three ranged favored backgrounds. Being faster on the world map will help with performing money making tasks faster, especially when combined with the scout retinue, which could help in obtaining gear slightly faster. You will be able to reliably decide if attacking a wilderness camp is something you can pull off when you are still in the developing stages of your company, which could lead to obtaining famed items earlier. You will also start with one Hunter and two poachers specialized in ranged skill, which can greatly decrease the need for hiring any ranged units until you can seek to replace them in the late-game. While this is all great & can be seen as an advantageous start, you will miss out on 18 inventory slots, which ought to push you to purchase the first cart upgrade sooner than ideal sometime around day 25. Otherwise, your campaign will be largely similar to the standard Applicable campaign starts, with the exception of some minor starting economic and relation barriers.
• Beast Slayers: (Partial): (10% worse buying and selling prices cripples ones economy)
  The Beast Slayers alternate start will allow you to start off with some more slightly talented units of the Beast Slayers background, which will allow you to take greater advantage of early-game encounters. It is notable that you will start out with a noticeably low starting gold compared to other starts, but you will have some different forms of company wealth with your starting items & renown. Overall, the benefits of seeing tracks from further away and gaining extra beast loot has a minimal impact on the campaign & it’s economic ramp; However, it can lead to obtaining a full set of valuable armour attachments & craftables sooner than the usual 100+ days. Otherwise, the main deterrent from running this alternate start as a fully applicable start is the 10% economic penalties to buying & selling. This will mainly slow down your armour timings & how early you will want to approach certain fights due to a lower equipment strength.
• Trading Caravan: (Partial): (10% better buying and selling prices skew economy & playstyle)
  As the Trading Caravan alternate start, you will start out with a large collection of trading goods to push you over 2000 gold on even the lowest starting gold amount. On top of this, you will have a permanent passive for 10% better buying & selling to increase your profits throughout your campaign. With that said, the reason why this start is only partially applicable to the playstyle of this guide is because the armour timings will be noticeably quicker. With that in mind, it will leave room for a different money spending priorities such as: more room for refining hires early to mid-game, hiring retinue members, or even skipping past the earlier armour tier and buying near end-game gear. As for some downsides: the starting units aren’t going to be impressive candidates for the late-game, and the -34% penalty to renown gain will have a mild impact that will prevent you from being able to take on noble contracts & may incentivize a hieghtened priority on going after wilderness locations.
• Deserters: (Partial): (Acting first at the beginning of every fight can lend itself to a slightly different playstyle, and having a hostile noble faction at the start can lead to more caravan raiding)
  Reasoning for Partial:
  General Strategy:

♢ Alternate Starts: Non-Applicable Starts: Part 2 ♢

Non-Applicable Starts:

• Peasant Militia: (Not Covered): (Different background hiring limitations and a larger company means different character builds and party compositions are more efficient in this scenario, thus changing the entire playstyle and economic ramp)
• Davkul Cultists: (Not Covered): (Somewhat limited to certain backgrounds, at the mercy of sacrificial cultist events, and builds being different due to the bonus traits/abilities of running a cult)
• Manhunters: (Not Covered): (Differing Indebted and Manhunter party composition mechanics and increased party size that strays from the standard backgrounds, playstyles and builds that are featured in this guide)
• Northern Raiders: (Not Covered): (Starting off with negative relations to most of the territory map will severely limit one’s economy style to either focus on raiding or farming random ruins with the small inclusion of contracts. This changes one’s economic priorities and progression ramp too severely)
• Gladiators: (Not Covered): (Each of the three Gladiators gained from this start are given special traits and are used too differently from the builds in this guide. Additionally, your party size is limited to 12 troops, and if your Gladiators die your campaign ends)
• Lone Wolf: (Not Covered): (Limited to 12 troops, thus changing almost entirely what builds are more efficient)
• Random: (Not Covered):
  Reasoning for Not Covered: This start option is not going to be covered simply because you can be put into an alternate start that is not covered by this guide. If you are looking to take your start seriously, you will want to control as many Rng factors as possible and this is not the way to do that. Of course, this option will still always be a good way to mix up the predetermined elements of your campaign start.

♢ Starting Gold & Building Your Company ♢

Alright, so now that you have settled on a map to start out on, let’s talk about how one should begin their efficiency-based campaign.

Starting Gold:
Which brings us to another important factor for a successful run, and that is how you spend your starting gold.

• In a Low Staring Gold campaign, you have little room for error in terms of gold spending. This meaning that your start will be higher stakes in terms of stocking up on end-tier recruits & equipment, those will have to come a bit later.
  With 1900 gold in hand (Rebuilding a Company, A New Company & Southern Mercenaries starts), you want to almost always buy one or two discounted weapons in the market. This could cost you around 80-300 gold, but it will still leave you with room for hires and perhaps even some armour. Weapon-wise you can purchase a discounted pitchfork/warfork, a tier 2 flail, a couple of knives, or even cash out for a rondel dagger or a severely discounted billhook/military cleaver as weapons for one or two of your hires.
  Spending money on trade goods is a great way to make profit early on for a better start.
  Under ideal circumstances, you will want to spend as little as possible on your hires and weapons, while still gaining good value out of what you purchased. This is because, after a small handful of contracts you should be starting to gain enough momentum to purchase your first piece of medium tier armour. When you likely spend most of your starting gold, just make sure that you were able to secure some worthwhile value out of what you purchased. Regardless of your starting gold spending habits, you should make sure your frontline troops have at least a 30D+ hat and a 50D+ body armour (ideally, avoid purchasing directly) to protect them from being killed in two hits for your first few fights until you upgrade from looting brigands.
  With your money quickly being spent on accessories, you should also be looking for affordable hires from backgrounds that have potential to roll decent base stats.
  (See the Capable Backgrounds to Hire sections for ideal hires).
  Rebuilding a Company, A New Company & Southern Mercenaries only: For most starts, you can take your time hiring ideal backgrounds at your own pace, instead of settling for lesser backgrounds. But if you cannot afford or find any of the ideal backgrounds for a few days, you might need to hire from the desperate backgrounds tier and hope that your item purchases/good combat positioning will win you your early combats. It is not good to rely heavily on Rng, but it is probable that you can be forced into that situation. That being said, overspending on one area is a misplay that you should acknowledge and learn from in your next run, if it ends up going poorly. Make sure you hire an added 4 to 6 troops to secure your numbers without spreading your gear too thin.
• Now that we have our goals set for what we should aim to buy, let’s talk about how you should spend your gold in a Medium Starting Gold, and High Starting Gold campaign.
  With a larger pool of starting gold you shouldn’t have to be settling for subpar hires to meet the requirements of your starting contract (Rebuilding a Company). You may even be able to afford a luxury hire, such as a couple Militia, a Hunter, or other better hires recommended in the Capable Backgrounds to Hire section of this guide. With that in mind, it is fairly straightforward as extra gold, is extra room for creating a stronger start for your company. One could also start to purchase better armour right away or reinvest the gold into trading goods.
• One factor to take note of is how starting gold options also affect how many tools, ammunition, and medicine you start out with and can hold in total.
• Regardless of what starting gold path you take, this guide will primarily be talking about an Expert Combat, Expert Economy, Low Starting Funds, and Ironman campaign.

Battle Efficiency Example: Rebuilding a Company:
The “Rebuilding a Company” campaign starts with an initial fight, in which you should generally minimize the incoming damage your three Companions will receive. Additionally, allowing your axe Companion to get the starting experience is technically the best outcome as said previously he will likely be worth keeping. Additionally, you can use the dagger of the archer Companion to secure armour loot. If you end up getting a shield, some armour, or a weapon you will be saving yourself 80-300 gold for the first few days. After the initial fight you should accept the Hoggart quest to net yourself 400 extra starting gold.

Battle Efficiency Example: Rebuilding a Company:
With the Hoggart fight being all too familiar to the Battle Brother’s veterans of the world, I don’t think I need to talk about this for too long. The main goal of this fight, as it should be with every single fight you have in Battle Brothers, is to take the least amount of damage to your troops, while simultaneously obtaining as much armour & weapons as possible as loot. That said, daggers and flails are splendid for this ideology. Once you are done with the Hoggart fight, you will receive one or two trading goods to help you progress and some payment for the contract. Here’s to hoping that you do not receive helmet paint as your hard-earned Hoggart reward.

♢ Your First 25 Days ♢

After kicking off your new company, your next priority is to make as much gold as possible, without wasting any of it on unnecessary expenses.

Moving Forward:
After you’ve started your campaign your focus should be on sticking with 8-9 usable troops, ideally with good stats, stars, and traits, for a good portion of the early-game. If you didn’t manage to beat the Rng with your initial hire’s stat rolls, don’t stress out too much there is no controlling the Rng factor when hiring troops besides picking the correct backgrounds. It is likely you will have to label more than a few as fodder and replace them later in the campaign if they do not meet the stats, stars, and traits standard (explained in the character build sections below).
This being the case, your focus should not be to refine or gather more troops, but to focus on taking contracts and fights your current company is capable of handling. This is so you can earn gold to make leaps in armour upgrades until your frontline is equipped with 105D-145D head armour (looted), and 200D-210D body armour (purchased). Two to four of your frontliners should be armed similarly by roughly around day 10 to day 25, the rest should be using what you’ve looted from fighting nomad/undead/raiders or have gained for free by other means.
You should aim to fight almost every foe you come across, but the enemies you should prioritize fighting in the early-game are: manageable amounts of brigand raiders, barbarian reavers, orc young, and select amounts of beasts such as: hexe, alps, direwolves, unholds, and schrats.
Crafting items achieved from fighting beasts for materials can be valuable, but are not usually more lucrative than fighting human opponents. Some valuable craftables in the early-game that one could prioritize are: Beast Trophy Necklaces (free bonus resolve), Direwolf Pelt Mantles (temporary armour attachment), and Living Tree Shields (high-end heater shield).

Only hire units when you can equip them with armour:
It has been revealed to the community that the number of troops, and your party level both factor into how an enemy party is generated for a contract. As a reminder, equipment does not factor into difficulty scaling, nor does your total renown. Additionally, distance from civilization and time is a scaling factor for world map enemy difficulty. Some enemies also get stat and perk boosts after day 40, others just scale with increased unit tier/count.
A benefit of keeping your troop count low is that it is much easier to have a balanced armour value in your party earlier on. So rather than having 10 to 12 men who are poorly equipped with armour spread out thin amongst your troops, you can have a handful of solid frontliners who are geared up in metal armour and can take on stronger opponents for better loot. When you run a large party, you will run the risk of casualties a lot more due to the armour spread, and dying is a big setback, as you spend money on recruits and their gear, which you don’t always get back. The main purpose of the early-game is to gain momentum in terms of armour, economy, and renown.
While this is a partially experiment-based conclusion, keeping your party around 8-9 troops, while focusing on armour, for the first 20ish days is an efficient tactic that tells the game to generate smaller groups of enemies for your quests, while you also power level your good hires using Student to bring the difficulty back up in your favor.

Some notable hires you should work on obtaining is: a banner carrier, an additional archer, and some talented melee skill fighters.

Now that we have gotten down how your first 25 days should go, let’s talk about the methodology of how you can maximize your economic momentum in the early-game.

• One way is to do multiple contracts for the same town to better your relationship with them. This is so that their prices are better, hires are plentiful, and their contracts pay slightly more.
• Another way to get gold is to increase your company’s renown so that the contracts from towns, again pay more.
• If you are fortunate enough, you will get a village with good trading goods that you can buy from for decent profits as you go town to town for contracts. You could seek this feature when looking at map seeds, but it is not completely necessary to find a map with good trade routes.
• Choosing strategic contracts that are easy to complete in a short amount of time for good pay is also a way to build economic momentum. Arena fights pay well. One should aim to complete the noble contract ambition, and make the most out of any possible downtime. Do not feel the need to play out a campaign if you feel you have been largely inefficient before the 25-day mark.
• Besides contracts, you can come across parties of nomads, barbarians, raiders, and orc young to fight if you feel like you have the advantage. That being said, be sure to understand your party strength, and gauge if you can win the fight from the safety of a paused world map. Parties with high-end ranged units will be a riskier engagement and should be decided upon if you can handle the risk of high damage armour penetration. Fighting ranged units at this point in the game can come at an advantage, as it can be a great way to achieve a working hunting bow, a composite bow, or even heavy throwing javelins.
• It is also important to remember that, in combat, if you feel as if you have the advantage in a fight, and can afford to be vulnerable, you can swap to your dagger and puncture your target for their armour. This is particularly valuable against raiders, and other human opponents.
• With daggering down opponents in your vocabulary, one should, if given an ideal opportunity, seek to dagger down a mercenary company for their armour loot. Mercenary companies have the chance to spawn in with Sellsword’s Armour (260D), warbows, and they can even be partied up with a hedge knight, in which could carry end-game gear. That said, fighting mercenaries is damaging to faction reputation and renown, and is most definitely a high risk, high reward situation that one should not rely on for most playthroughs.
• Besides fighting roaming parties, you can also attack world map fortifications if you can afford to take the battle described to you by your scouts. You will likely earn some trade goods and decent loot as a reward. Just keep in mind that setbacks will slow your momentum drastically, so be careful about your engagements, and try not to take unnecessary losses.
• Regarding ambitions, it is important to remember that spending gold on ambitions is going to take away from your armour timing economy efficiency, and that choosing ambitions that don’t require time or money to be wasted is preferred. With this in mind, obtaining the company’s battle standard is fairly beneficial.
• When it comes to retinue decisions, you should seek to pick up your first retinue member after meeting your day 25 armour needs (see The Retinue section below).

♢ Days 25 to 75 ♢

Once you’ve established a strong 8 troop company and obtained some decent mid-tier armour, you are ready to work on expanding your loot tables, expanding your ranks to 12 units, increasing the level of your hires to level 11, preparing your troops for the first late-game crisis, and to continue to min-max every day for gold, in which you should save for end-game gear.

Company Progression & Ongoing Goals:

• Alright, from here on your company should be fairly sturdy and you can start grinding manageable amounts of human raider, barbarian reaver, and orc young parties with greater ease. This is so that you can obtain decent weapon loot & gear to sell in between contracts. Before engaging with a raider party, you should be cautious of groups that have multiple marksmen, because you will not have the armour, attachments or perks to help sustain heavy archer fire in the case that the enemy marksmen spawn in with tier 2 ranged weapons. With barbarian reaver parties, you will want to play carefully to avoid allowing the two-handed weapons to strike your units by using whips, maces, and/or great positioning, due to the high amounts of armour penetration damage. Your current success is determined by your ability to make smart decisions on what enemies to engage for an efficient use of your time on the road.
  The weapons that you should expect to get are: some pikes for your backline, flails, arming swords, boar spears, head choppers (orc cleavers) for your frontline, and some sipar/kite shields to help you through some future fights against marksmen & more. If you manage to fight some brigand/nomad leaders do attempt to dagger down them for their armour, and also obtaining their tier 3 weaponry is always a plus.
  That all being said, you are going to need to be efficient on how you spend your time on the map, in order to make economic deadlines. While pressuring yourself to achieve gear with deadlines is good in practice, you are still welcome to go at your own pace, if that is how you feel like playing the game. Just remember that being more efficient will only help you succeed in the long run.
• In terms of gold spending, your primary focus should be on purchasing body armour for your frontline troops, this is arguably the more important purchase as typically it is unreliable to try to seek out enemies with high-end armour to loot.
  Just like before, you should only make armour jumps well above your current armour level, in order to get the most out of your money. The most valuable armour piece, besides unique armours, is the 320D Coat of Plates. The reason why you would jump directly to the best armour is not only to get the most out of your gold, but you will not be able to reliably get the small chance to loot a coat of plates until you start encountering hedge knights and noble troop knights in the late-game. In this portion of the game your best bet for free armour upgrades will be from looting the bandit leaders you come across for their chest and head gear; However, you are likely to only obtain some mid-tier armour upgrades from fighting brigand/nomad leaders, but it will save you from needing to buy any head armour in between the 140 thru 250 durability levels. Additionally, one could seek to isolate barbarian chosen or various human champions (rare) for their armour and weapon loot.
  Whether or not it was a struggle to equip your frontliners with a couple 210D Reinforced Mail Hauberks, you should still work on obtaining 320D Coat of Plates armour next. If you did not get enough mid-tier armour for your non-Nimble frontline, this may slow down your goal of an even distribution of armour in the short term, but this will allow you to excel in obtaining a complete max armour value in an efficient time period.
  This being said, it is easier said than done to find in a store & purchase 6 coat of plates by day 75 (keep in mind that this is obtainable by as early as day 55). Many factors would pile into reaching that goal, such as: trade opportunities, high paying contracts, convenient fights along the road, very little setbacks early in the game, or the need to not spend more gold on better hires. Not every run will go this way, and understandably so considering the gold cost of the armour in total. That said, if your map seed doesn’t have enough blast furnaces to reliably spawn coat of plates, you can always settle with a coat of scales (300D)/Padded Mail and Lamellar Hauberk (290D)/Heavy Lamellar armour (285D) as a substitute, but don’t aim for a company using these armours over the more valuable Coat of Plates, as not having to replace your Coat of Plates later is more valuable than settling for a weaker armour. Either way, it is better to be prepared for future fights with better armour, and every run it isn’t always going to go exactly the way you want it to. It is important to remember that with every run you actively try to become more efficient, you will likely see that your goals will become more achievable, and that you can continue to push your economic efficiency to the next level.
• Head armour wise, you should be okay with your 140D head armour that you looted, but keep in mind that higher end head armour is still obtainable from brigand/nomad leaders/fallen heroes/barbarian chosen. Additionally, purchasing head armour most likely will not be the best way to go about spending your hard-earned gold, as body armour is far more important to secure first. (Note: you can also come across barbarian chosen and fallen heroes with high tiered helmets that cost a lot in fatigue but can be worth it for the armour values depending on your hire’s fatigue).
• In terms of weapon choices, you should be well stocked with tier 3 weapons from all your raider fights. You should always be prepared to choose the correct weapon before you enter a fight depending on the enemy type, but you will primarily be using one-handed flails, and high-end cleavers/swords. This is of course until you obtain the primary weapons for the intended units. Additionally, you should try to obtain warbows for your archer units if you see the opportunity without having to spend your hard-earned gold. If you were not fortunate enough to obtain a free premium weapon to help you out in the late-mid-game, do feel economically free to take advantage of a good discount on a two-handed mace, two-handed hammer, warhammer, etc. to give to your end-game ready frontliners. As achieving a good two-handed weapon early on can be very helpful for certain fights. With that said, try not to go overboard on purchasing weapons, as buying body armour for a stronger frontline is important to secure, as defensive perks start to become available.
• Aside from obtaining gear as loot or from gold purchases, you should promptly expand your party size to 12 as you come across good hiring opportunities. So again, you don’t want to be spending too much money on hires, spreading your armour thin, having too many weak links in your party, and having the AI measure up to your large company size immediately. The idea is that you can be picky about who you chose to take the chance on hiring and will be able to slightly refine your company’s hires at this point in the game, in terms of ideal stats, stars, traits, and backgrounds.
• Sometime in this day range, you will also at least be leveled up enough to have Battle Forged and other valuable high-end perks. Which can mean that you are just about ready to take on select noble contracts, such as fighting orcs more reliably. They do come with risks, but they are good for making a decent pile of gold. Once you get some better gear, you can test your mettle with orc warrior fights.

This all being said, from day 25 to 75 you should seek to obtain end-game body armour, and any additional gear advantages for the upcoming late-game crisis.

♢ Days 75 & Going Beyond ♢

Once you’ve gotten to this point in the game, you will be ready to finalize your builds in order to dominate the late-game foes of Battle Brothers reliably & effectively. You will do this by purchasing the needed remaining end-game head/body gear & weaponry that your company is missing and to refine your current hires for the extensive end-game content to come.

Finalizing Your Company: (Gear will be listed in order of importance)

• Obtaining 300D Full Helmets for Battle Forged units & any remaining Battle Forged 320D Coat of Plates body armours (Eventually buying spares is welcome too). Do note that you should seek to obtain 320D Decorated Full Helms through fighting a noble house with it being highly preferable during a war of the noble houses or the holy war on the side of the southern city states (famed helmets are acceptable as well, instead of souring your relations).
• Obtaining any two-handed weapons for your end-game builds. This more limited to: Two-Handed Hammers, Greatswords, and Two-Handed Flanged Maces. You will likely need to buy them, as they are much rarer to loot than other weapon types.
• With Heavy Throwing Javelins being very strong for your archers, you will want to continue to farm barbarians until you have the sufficient amount. In addition, you will want to purchase or seek to obtain Warbows if you couldn’t obtain any in the earlier portion of your campaign.
• After you’ve obtained less of a money farming goal for gaining an armour advantage, you can shift your priorities to spend gold crafting the remaining armour attachments for your builds, or farming the relevant foes if you lack the materials. You may collect most of your materials through a naturally played campaign where you take every fight opportunity you can handle, but there are certain foes that are elusive enough that you have to focus hunting down. A case of this would be the white furred unholds being highly desired for crafting the Additional Fur Padding attachment, but also being primarily found in the northern tundras in low quantities. This meaning that you may have to spend some focused farming in the northern part of the map to hunt white furred unholds.
• Aiming to obtain or purchase the remaining secondary equipment for your active builds (Battle Whips, Rondel Daggers, Qatal Daggers, Polehammers/Billhooks, Throwing Nets/pots, Armoured Wardogs/Warhounds, Falcon, Tank weapons, etc.). (See Keeping Your Inventory Efficient section & the equipment section of each character build for more information)
• Improving your Nimble armour load out from bandit gear to 120D Sallet Helms for Archers and/or Nimble Tanks, with the added purchasing of 160D Noble Mail and/or appropriate Nimble armour sets (See the appropriate character builds that use Nimble to know what armour combos to pursue).
• Additionally, seeking to obtain Hexe Necklaces for the added resolve for non-ambition necklace users, as well as obtaining the ambition necklaces that you have not yet obtained.
• While replacing your hires is dependent on how lucky you were in your initial hiring, you will still most likely need to work on replacing your imperfect hires for better stats, talent stars, traits and backgrounds. In addition, you will likely want to expand your rooster further to fill up your remaining company slots with the relevant roles. You may also want to seek the help of the Recruiter retinue follower to increase the amount of hires available to you and to give you more chances to find better backgrounds to hire from.
• Lastly, you may want to work on expanding your inventory size based on how well you are doing on inventory space. Additionally, you ought to be hiring the relevant Retinue hires based on your company’s evolving needs, until you are set on your final group of retinue members (See Retinue section for further information).

Going Beyond:

• At this point in the game you should be fully equipped with armour and gear. You will have reached level 11+ and have transitioned into using your finalized gear sets. You should have a working crew of fighters, but you will still likely need to spend some time refining your hires for better recruits with better stats, stars, traits, and backgrounds. With this in mind, you will still have to pick and choose your fights when dealing with some high tiered enemies; However, you will cut through any foe with ease with proper tactics, as well as a leveled & geared 12-man crew.
• In terms of improving your company from this point, you should focus your efforts on obtaining spare armours + armour attachments, famed weapons & armour, unique armours, and refining your hires (better stats, stars, traits, and backgrounds). You can also pursue taking out the three crises, the kraken, the witches hut, the goblin city, the black monolith, the Ijirok and any other late-game challenges you wish to take on. Otherwise, your motivation to continue playing is of your own making, as the game will continually scale according to your crew. Although, it is important to note that this guide is only valid in it’s claims if you intend to have a playthrough that doesn’t end before day 140 or stretch beyond 750 days, as there are various build compositions that take advantage of the shorter & longer playtimes.

This all said, the game of Battle Brothers is vast and complex. It can be a consistently challenging game, and I’m sure that is why it is still exciting to play for many, even after hundreds of playthroughs. This can be in part due to the presence of Rng in the game, but more largely due to the accumulation of uncountable, minute inefficiencies that occur, to make every campaign different. Just remember, in combat, good positioning is key, pick your contracts very carefully, and always aim to be efficient. You should always try to better your game by practicing good battle safety, economic safety, and explorative safety. Most importantly, you should play to enjoy the game, and one should avoid disciplining one’s Battle Brothers experience too much with the burdensome ethics of absolute efficiency. Of course, keeping the passion for being absolutely efficient can be a way to have fun with the game, and for me, I will not be giving up the discipline anytime soon. Find what works for you, and remember that life is about the experiences you gain out of it.

[Under Construction] ♦ The Retinue: From Early to Late: Part 1 ♦

The Early-game: The first valuable addition to your company is going to be one of these two options:

• The Scout for traveling 15% faster, in order to spend more time making money, gaining experience, and renown. Additionally, it allows you to catch up to enemies faster, or escape more easily from enemies on the world map, given that your party size isn’t slowing you down too terribly. Overall, with the Scout in your company, you will be gaining an advantage over daily wages, mood loss, food loss, terrain based injury events, potential for more battles, and the money gaining economy aspects of Battle Brothers, in which will only strengthen the success of your playthrough.
  Will they be Replaced?: No, the Scout will provide irreplaceable value throughout your campaign.
  Obtaining: You will have to win 5 battles against beasts, which will happen naturally in a normal playthrough, and can be accelerated by picking beast specific contracts. You will have to pay 2,500 gold, which I would recommend doing only after you secure some mid-tier armour for your frontline and are on track for a well timed run. If you happen to fall behind the curve, do take your time on hiring the Scout, and try to obtain them later when you are ahead on the difficulty to company safety curve.

• The Drill Sergeant for obtaining up to 20% more experience for your low level troops, with 2% lost per level gained. This is mainly beneficial for obtaining strong perks and stats for talented hires at a faster rate, which you may not always have in your company in the beginning. If you happen to have a good amount of troops that are not talented in their respective stat roles (aka. frontliner = melee skill, archer = ranged skill, tanks = melee defence), you won’t benefit from ramping up their level as much, as increasing your level comes with a higher difficulty in contracts. That said, combined with Student, on valuable hires, the added experience gain can spike your potential to win battles with advantages in stats and perks. On top of the bonus to experience gain, anyone in your reserve will not lose mood from not participating in battles, which can be helpful if you are looking to build a big reserve of troops in the mid-game, instead of saving up for armour. If you roll poorly on hires in the early-game, you are better off picking the Scout instead.
  Will they be Replaced?: Yes, in an ideal circumstance, you will eventually train all your troops to level 11 (new, refined hires included).
  Obtaining: To obtain the Drill Sergeant is somewhat painful, as it requires that you hire and sacrifice a unit in battle in hopes that they will survive with a permanent injury, so you can then retire that unit. The cost of hiring the Drill Sergeant is also a hefty 3,500 gold, which can be hard to justify spending early on, but it can be worth the added experience gain on a majority of valuable hires.

The Late-game:

• The Quartermaster
• The Blacksmith
• The Scavenger is an easily undervalued retinue member for his ability to recover up to 15% of destroyed enemy armour as tools and 10-20% of ammunition used after a battle, due largely to the fact that he simply is not very effective until the very late-game, where enemy counts are very large. In the early-game, your goal will to gain armour by bypassing armour, or to kill an opponent with all damage going into their hit points, which largely lowers the amount of destroyed armour there actually is. Additionally, the late-game foes, such as orc warriors or barbarian chosen, or ancient undead all have large armour pools to gain additional tools from. While paying for tools & ammunition is not a late-game concern, it’s more of an availability issue when it comes to wilderness runs or consecutive fights in an isolated location. For this reason, being able to repair one’s armour is a must for an efficient Battle Forged company, and to refill ammuntion after spamming heavy throwing javelins while away from civilization is also very helpful.
  With that said, you will often find that you will need more tools or ammunition from civilization eventually, so this is not a retinue member to be highly valued, as if there were better retinue member options, the Scavenger would be easily replaced.
  Will they be Replaced: After you’ve cycled through your Temporary Late-game options, and have decided that none of the Situational Late-game options suit your company, you will be hiring the Scavenger as your last retinue hire, to not further replace.
  Obtaining: Innate with your first retinue slot, but they should not be hired until the very late-game.

Situational Late-game:

• The Paymaster
• The Cook
• The Surgeon

Temporary Late-game:

• The Recruiter would be employed promptly once you reach the late-game and have already achieved a secure armour/survivability advantage over the late-game content in the game. With the primary benefit to hiring the Recruiter being that you will have 2 to 4 more available options of hires per settlement, your overall goal is to replace your lesser hires & achieve ideal hires (stats, stars, traits & backgrounds) that will be almost entirely undefeatable by the content in Battle Brothers. While perfecting your rooster is a min-max orientated perspective, it is in general a good idea to at least replace the troops that fell behind in stats by a reasonable margin. As for the economic value gained from hiring the Recruiter, one isn’t too worried by this point about saving gold, but the Recruiter will likely pay for himself after enough hires are rolled due to the 10% less up front pay when hiring. With that said, it is not worth hiring the Recruiter if you already have a majority of your company as ideal hires.
  Obtaining: Naturally (recruit 12 units)
  Duration of Stay: Overall, you will only want to keep the Recruiter for as long as you need better hires. This could be a couple of weeks or up to 50 days depending on how lucky you are with finding suitable hires to start to train.
• The Alchemist is a useful temporary retinue member solely because you may have a rare crafting recipe you want to roll on saving materials for.
  This could include: Additional Fur Padding (Thick White Fur), Horn Plate (Kraken Plate), Protective Runes and Sigils (Shimmering Ashes, Witch Hair), Unhold Fur Cloak (Thick White Fur), Hexen Trophy Necklace (all hexe crafting ingredients), and/or even Fermented Unhold Heart (Unhold Heart, Wine).
  While it isn’t necessary to do this, it is wise for some of the rare ingredients that are hard to find opportunities to obtain. Additionally, you will have the opportunity to craft Snake Oil from various ingredients; However, gold is most likely not an issue in the late-game for an efficient company, making it a low priority retinue hire for that reason.
  Obtaining: Craft 15 items. This can be done easily by crafting low tier crafts such as: Trophy Necklaces (nachzehrer variant easily obtainable for the early to mid-game), Large Quiver of Arrows (late-game archer gear), Reinforced Throwing nets, Antidotes (if any company largely Nimble), Poisoned Oil (cheap), Smoke Pots (cheap), Paint Remover (very cheap), or aided through a gradual accumulation of natural crafts throughout the first half of your campaign.
  Duration of Stay: The duration of this retinue member is flexible, but one could save a large portion of your company’s late-game crafts for a single crafting session while hiring the Alchemist solely for that crafting session.
• The Bounty Hunter
• The Minstrel

[Under Construction] ♢ The Retinue: The Remainder & Cart Upgrades: Part 2 ♢

Avoided Retinue Picks Reasoning:

• The Brigand
• The Agent
• The Lookout
• The Cartographer
• The Negotiator
• The Trader

When to Purchase Inventory Upgrades:

• Cart
• Wagon
• Big Wagon

[Under Construction] ♦ Keeping Your Inventory Efficient: Part 1 ♦

With the large assortment of enemies in Battle Brothers, a few fights are bound to require a different strategy than the normal party composition listed above. With these differing strategies comes the necessity to use a different item or tool to most efficiently deal with your opponent. Knowing that before every battle, one must pause and consider what the best loadout is for defeating one’s opponent the most efficiently, you will have to stock up on the correct items and tools beforehand. Here is what you may choose to keep in your inventory as you progress through your campaign.

What to collect in one’s inventory:

Weapons & Accessories:
• In your company inventory it would be beneficial to carry around additional battle whips for your melee skill using units (more so if they use Cleaver Mastery), as being able to switch out your dagger for a whip can sometimes be more efficient when fighting tough enemies that don’t have valuable armour to loot. This would mean that you would swap to a whip for the option to disarm your opponent when fighting against high damage units, orcs, barbarians, mind controlled undead and beasts.
  (Recommended Amount: 4-10 whips for your melee skill using units, with the consideration that polearm users receive equipping priority with whips in their bag slots in the early to mid-game)
• For the mid to early late-game fights against schrats, you will want to have a small supply of one-handed axes to break the shields of schrats. The most common axes to collect are handaxes, but you do eventually want to hope to loot fighting axes (as a replacement) and longaxes (for your archers). You can choose to collect two-handed axes, but they are not going to be necessary, as long axes and fighting axes are sufficient enough.
  (Recommended Amount: Enough for your entire frontline in the early-game, and 2 one-handed axes for your Nimble Tanks in the late-game)
• Another valuable weapon to collect in your company inventory is a small supply of polearms. These can be pikes, long axes, polemaces, billhooks, or even swordlances. This is because there will be fights in the early-game, mid-game, and rarely in the late-game, where having your typically frontline melee fighters wield polearms, while your tanks absorb the attacks of your foes. The enemies you typically want to employ this strategy are: unholds, lindwurms, schrats, ifrits, and sometimes a low number of barbarian chosen.
  (Recommended Amount: Enough for your entire frontline, with some consideration for long axes being used for breaking schrat shields)
• In the early to mid-game you can utilize a small supply of spears to better your chances of hitting your opponent if your unit is not specialized in melee skill or still in training. This would be primarily for your Nimble Tanks. You can also use these to defeat swaths of wiedergangers using spearwall at a 95% if you choose to.
  (Recommended Amount: 2-3 spears of the highest tier collected)
• One item that might need to be frequently replaced is the living tree shields or heater shields or famed equivalent that are used by your Nimble Tanks, as they are vulnerable to being heavily damaged or shattered. It is also sometimes valuable to carry a small supply of kite shields (or famed equivalent) in case you ever want to arm one of your damaged units some extra ranged defence in a ranged heavy fight in case of an unfortunate scenario.
  (Recommended Amount: 2 living tree shields or famed equivalent, with the consideration for 2 kite shields/lindwurm shields/famed equivalent)
• Another valuable item to carry is a few spare large quiver of arrows for you archers to use in special fights where more arrows are more valuable than heavy throwing spears. While you are able to carry any spare quiver on your ally’s quiver spot, you cannot store heavy throwing javelins in the quiver spot, which leaves you needing to store them in your company inventory temporarily.
  (Recommended Amount: 4 slots on reserve for the situational storage of heavy throwing weapons)
• With the increase in numbers of dangerous enemies it is sometimes more efficient to equip a unit with a two-handed flanged mace for the ability to reliably daze your opponents. The choice on how many you will carry is dependent on how many two-handed mace specialists you already have in your company. In other words, if you have no two-handed mace specialists in your company to swap in & out of fights, you may want to carry around about 2 two-handed flanged maces. It is valuable to note that in the early to mid-game it is convenient to obtain and use the barbarian two-handed spiked maces until you reach the late-game where you have extra crowns to spend on spare weaponry.
  (Recommended Amount: 2 two-handed maces in your inventory or used as up to 2 two-handed flanged mace specialists)
• Two-handed 4 AP (two-handed saifs, rusty warblades, crypt cleavers, two-handed scimitars, warbrands early-game)…
  (Recommended Amount: up to 4 rusty warblades, or two-handed scimitars in the company inventory)
• With the use of Duelists in one’s company composition, it would be efficient to carry a few alternate or spare Duelist weapons with the primary alternate choice being winged maces (or southern variant) for situationally stunning your opponents (primarily equipped in specific barbarian chosen fights as an alternate tactic with more control focus). That said, you can chose to carry spare head choppers (orc cleaver), military cleaver, and/or warhammers.
  (Recommended Amount: up to 4 spares of any variety in one’s company inventory)
• The ability to stun in Battle Brothers is somewhat lackluster due to the number of high-end foes that are immune to being stunned and for the stun abilities lack of damage output. With this in mind, there are still situations where stunning your opponent is a valuable strategy. The most commonly valuable usage of stunning is done against the hexe foe to prevent or delay a hexe from reusing hex (share damage received as hexe). That said, the best mace to stun hexe with are low damage wooden sticks, as they weigh very little and they deal very low damage output to prevent harming your units in the process due to the return damage from being hex. In addition, it is a good way to stun your own units who are under the affects of a hexes charm, while dealing as little damage as possible to them. It’s up to you on how many wooden sticks you want to carry, but I would recommend up to 4 or more kept either on your reserve units or in your company’s inventory.
  (Recommended Amount: up to 4 or more wooden sticks in your inventory or on reserve units)
• Throwing nets/Reinforced throwing nets, Flash Pots/Smoke Pots, Apothecary’s miracles, a couple pocketed bandages, Berserker Mushrooms, Happy powders, Second wind potions, and Night Owl Elixirs…Minding the Addict trait…
  (Recommended Amount:)
• When to use Wardogs (warhounds/armoured/crafted armour)…
  (Recommended Amount:)

♢ Keeping Your Inventory Efficient: Part 2 ♢

Spare Armours:
• Regular Battle Forged Armours: This consists of a handful of 320D Coat of Plates with the Additional Fur Padding attachment for the reduced damage to body HP, as well as spare 300D/320D Full Helms or Decorated Full Helms. These serve the purpose of being quick swap outs in case you require your Battle Forged users to be at full strength shortly after a battle.
  (Recommended Amount: 1 back up set per Battle Forged user)
• Irregular Battle Forged Armours: With the desire for efficiency, having some spare Battle Forged armours that protect against niche attacks is useful. For your Heavy Polearm units, you will want to carry a spare 320 Coat of Plates with the Light Padding Replacement attachment for the -20% fatigue reduction in order to secure more AoE attacks with your fatigue pool. For all your Battle Forged frontline units you may also choose to carry a replacement set of 320D Coat of Plates with the Protective Runes and Sigils attachment to help in fights with alps and hexe.
  (Recommended Amount: Typically one per unit, but try to reduce the burden on your Inventory space)
• Regular Nimble Armours: This consists of a handful of 120D Sallet Helms + 120D Assassin’s Robe with Bone Platings for the free absorption of an attack to the body for -2 fatigue (any Nimble user) or Horn Plate for the -10% damage to the body & +30 durability to the body (Nimble Tank). You may chose to cycle through raider armours in case of an armour shortage.
  (Recommended Amount: At least 1 back up set per Nimble user)
• Irregular Nimble Armours: With the desire for efficiency, having some spare Nimble armours that protect against niche attacks is useful. For your Archers, obtaining some spare 160D Noble Mails with the Unhold Fur Cloak attachment for the -20% ranged damage to the body & +10D for large goblin battles can help stave off the poison debuff for your archers. As for your Nimble Tanks, obtaining some spare 140D Assassin’s Face Masks + 160D Noble Mails with the Unhold Fur Cloak attachment can also serve as an anti goblin poison armour set. If you happen to have a Nimble melee combat unit, having a spare set of Nimble armour with the Protective Runes and Sigils attachment to help in fights against alps and hexe.
  (Recommended Amount: Typically 1 back up per unit, but try to reduce the burden on your Inventory space)

♦ Unrivaled Builds: The Cleaver Duelist ♦

The Cleaver Duelist:

(Damage Orientated & Tactically Flexible; Main Frontliner)
Perk Order:
Student → Pathfinder → Executioner → Cleaver Mastery → Underdog → Battle Forged → Duelist → Berserk → Indomitable → Killing Frenzy → Recover
Brief Perk Reasoning: See more in the relevant perk sections.

• Student: The reason why you pick Student for the Cleaver Duelist build is to allow you to obtain high tiered defensive and offensive perks at a faster rate by utilizing the bonus experience gain. You will not need Student to skip past any perks, as you will come back to obtain Recover.
• Pathfinder: With Pathfinder you will save AP when traversing tough terrain/elevation in a battle, as well as greatly saving fatigue for repositioning, retreating, and movement.
• Executioner: By picking the perk Executioner you will be amplifying your damage output by a small amount on a good portion of your strikes, and increase your hits to kill ratio on valuable late-game foes, making the difference between having to take an additional hit or not. Additionally, some members of this team composition take advantage of Crippling Strikes to help set up Executioner strikes.
• Cleaver Mastery: With Cleaver Mastery you will gain additional bleed damage on your main cleaver weapon, a strong reduced fatigue cost from using weapon abilities, and the accuracy penalty to whip disarms removed.
• Underdog: The reason why you will want Underdog on your Duelist user is because melee defence is still an important stat for any frontline fighter, and the ability to get full value out of your melee defence is important, even if your only in contact with 2 enemies. That said, late-game battles will often include your units being surrounded by two or more enemies often.
• Battle Forged: By pickling Battle Forged you will gain a healthy 30% to 40% damage reduction while wearing heavy armour. While it does deteriorate in value as you take damage, the reduction is very noticeable against all incoming types of damage, as well as the defensive value of Battle Forged exceeding the value of a Nimble user.
• Duelist: With Duelist you will be gaining an additional 25% to armour penetration damage with a one-handed weapon, which is an exceptional form of damage output when partnered with a military cleaver/orc head chopper’s high damage output. This form of damage output is preferred for your main frontline force, due to the ability to be able to use Indomitable, as well as perform exceptional damage output.
• Berserk: The perk Berserk synergizes well with builds aiming to maximize damage output, by allowing an additional attack or action upon a kill. With a 4 AP weapon in hand, you will also be able to secure a free turn to use Indomitable or use Recover to stay on top of your fatigue drain.
• Indomitable: With the ability to utilize Indomitable, you will be able to guarantee a 50% mitigation of incoming damage from all damage sources, as well as being immune to being stunned, or moved. This perk isn’t for every turn usage, but you will benefit greatly from Indomitable to be able to safely take down two-handed champions, large amounts of barbarian chosen, unholds, schrats, tier 3 crossbow users and other heavy hitters.
• Killing Frenzy: The reason why Killing Frenzy is a strong perk for a Duelist is because it will allow you to deal more damage, which is valuable for a damage dealing role. It shows the most value when you are fighting mass numbers of units in the late-game and beyond.
• Recover: By picking Recover you will be allowing your unit to use fatigue intensive perks and abilities, while also maintaining a working fatigue for the rest of the fight. Recover also synergizes with Berserk procs, as it will allow you to use Recover, while also providing damage output.

Main Stat Priority: Melee Skill (95+) → Melee Defence (35+) → Fatigue (150+, Before Gear; 70+, After Gear) → 1 or 2 max rolls into Hit Points (70+)
Stats Reasoning:
Never Prioritize: Initiative, Ranged Defence, Ranged Skill, Resolve (Arena Included, 50+)
Never Prioritize Reasoning:
Equipment: Decorated Full Helm (320D), Coat of Plates (320D), Additional Fur Padding attachment (-33% penetration damage taken), Military Cleaver/Famed Orc Cleaver, Battle Whip/Rondel Dagger, Reinforced Throwing Net, and Hexen Trophy (+6 Resolve). All weapons and armour will become famed equivalents.
Summary: With the Cleaver Duelist you will want to focus on dealing high damage, while having good damage mitigation, survivability options and tactical flexibility in combat with disarm. The cleaver is the primary weapon of choice due to the high base damage of military cleaver skills, amplified damage of famed orc cleavers, or, if efficient for a certain encounter, a two-handed cleaver. Your Cleaver Duelists will serve as all around damage output specialists that will also allow for tactical flexibility.
The Cleaver Duelist will take 2-3 slots in your active company (interchangeable with other damage dealers depending on the fight, can choose to build more Cleaver Duelists instead of Hammer Duelists).

♦ Unrivaled Builds: The Hammer Duelist ♦

The Hammer Duelist:

(Blunt Damage Specialist; Optional Frontliner)
Perk Order:
Student → Pathfinder → Executioner → Colossus → Underdog → Battle Forged → Duelist → Berserk → Indomitable → Killing Frenzy → Recover
Brief Perk Reasoning: See more in the relevant perk sections.

• Student: The reason why you pick Student for the Hammer Duelist build is to allow you to obtain high tiered defensive and offensive perks at a faster rate by utilizing the bonus experience gain. You will not need Student to skip past any perks.
• Pathfinder: With Pathfinder you will save AP when traversing tough terrain/elevation in a battle, as well as greatly saving fatigue for repositioning, retreating, and movement.
• Executioner: By picking the perk Executioner you will be amplifying your damage output by a valuable amount on a good portion of your strikes, and increase your hits to kill ratio on valuable late-game foes, due to your bonus armour penetration as a hammer Duelist user. Additionally, some members of this team composition take advantage of Crippling Strikes to help set up Executioner strikes.
• Colossus: With the perk Colossus you will be able to gain the necessary hit points to avoid a vast majority of all one shot armour penetration attacks with only a minor investment into hit points (See Stat Priority below). Although you will already have Indomitable to stave off killing blows, the extra hit points will allow you to be more comfortable against high armour penetration damage enemies.
• Underdog: The reason why you will want Underdog on your Duelist user is because melee defence is still an important stat for any frontline fighter, and the ability to get full value out of your melee defence is important, even if your only in contact with 2 enemies. That said, late-game battles will often include your units being surrounded by two or more enemies often.
• Battle Forged: By pickling Battle Forged you will gain a healthy 30% to 40% damage reduction while wearing heavy armour. While it does deteriorate in value as you take damage, the reduction is very noticeable against all incoming types of damage, as well as the defensive value of Battle Forged exceeding the value of a Nimble user.
• Duelist: With Duelist you will be gaining an additional 25% to armour penetration damage with a one-handed weapon, which is an exceptional form of damage output when partnered with a warhammer’s high armour penetration. This form of damage output is preferred for your main frontline force, due to the ability to be able to use Indomitable, as well as perform exceptional damage output.
• Berserk: The perk Berserk synergizes well with builds aiming to maximize damage output, by allowing an additional attack or action upon a kill. With a 4 AP weapon in hand, you will also be able to secure a free turn to use Indomitable or use Recover to stay on top of your fatigue drain.
• Indomitable: With the ability to utilize Indomitable, you will be able to guarantee a 50% mitigation of incoming damage from all damage sources, as well as being immune to being stunned, or moved. This perk isn’t for every turn usage, but you will benefit greatly from Indomitable to be able to safely take down two-handed champions, large amounts of barbarian chosen, unholds, schrats, tier 3 crossbow users and other heavy hitters.
• Killing Frenzy: The reason why Killing Frenzy is a strong perk for a Duelist is because it will allow you to deal more damage, which is valuable for a damage dealing role. It shows the most value when you are fighting mass numbers of units in the late-game and beyond.
• Recover: By picking Recover you will be allowing your unit to use fatigue intensive perks and abilities, while also maintaining a working fatigue for the rest of the fight. Recover also synergizes with Berserk procs, as it will allow you to use Recover, while also providing damage output.

Main Stat Priority: Melee Skill (95+) → Melee Defence (35+) → Fatigue (140+, Before Gear; 70+, After Gear) → 1 or 2 max rolls into Hit Points (85+, Colossus Included)
Stats Reasoning:
Never Prioritize: Initiative, Ranged Defence, Ranged Skill, Resolve (Arena Included, 50+)
Never Prioritize Reasoning:
Equipment: Decorated Full Helm (320D), Coat of Plates (320D), Additional Fur Padding attachment (-33% penetration damage taken), Warhammer/Cleaver (Cleaver for fights against low armoured opponents), Battle Whip/Rondel Dagger, Reinforced Throwing Net, and Hexen Trophy (+6 Resolve). All weapons and armour will become famed equivalents.
Summary: With the Hammer Duelist you will excel in dealing high damage output with your hammer attacks, while keeping your damage mitigation survivability in an ideal place. The hammer will be primarily used to take down opponents that are more vulnerable to high blunt damage, while also remaining proficient against most enemies. Your Hammer Duelists will serve as a blunt damage specialist that can be called upon from your reserves or can be utilized to similar effect as other Duelist users in regular combat.
The Hammer Duelist will take 2 slots in your active company or reserve (Interchangeable with other damage dealers depending on the fight, can choose to build more Cleaver Duelists instead of Hammer Duelists).

♦ Unrivaled Builds: The Greatsword AoE Two-Hander ♦

The Greatsword AoE Two-Hander:

(Damage Orientated; Complimentary Frontliner)
Perk Order:
Student → Pathfinder → Colossus → Sword Mastery → Underdog → Battle Forged → Berserk → Killing Frenzy → Reach Advantage → Fearsome → Recover
Brief Perk Reasoning: See more in the relevant perk sections.

• Student: The reason why you pick Student for the AoE Two-Hander build is to allow you to obtain high tiered defensive and offensive perks at a faster rate by utilizing the bonus experience gain. You will not need Student to skip past any perks, as you will come back to obtain Recover.
• Pathfinder: With Pathfinder you will save AP when traversing tough terrain/elevation in a battle, as well as greatly saving fatigue for repositioning, retreating, and movement. This is particularly valuable with 6 AP two-handed strikes.
• Colossus: With the perk Colossus you will be able to gain the necessary hit points to avoid a vast majority of all one shot armour penetration attacks with only a minor investment into hit points (see Stat Priority below). This is especially needed as you will not have Indomitable to save you from high armour penetration damage enemies.
• Sword Mastery: As a two-handed AoE weapon user, you will greatly benefit from the fatigue reductions when performing AoE strikes, in which you will often chain with Berserk procs. Additionally, your mastery will provide a minor hit chance bonus for select skills, as a very minor bonus.
• Underdog: The purpose of Underdog will be to protect your AoE Two-Hander’s melee defence, as you will often desire to be surrounded by 3 or more enemies to make the most out of your AoE cleave, without being severely punished.
• Battle Forged: By picking Battle Forged you will gain a healthy 30% to 40% damage reduction while wearing heavy armour. While it does deteriorate in value as you take damage, the reduction is very noticeable against all incoming types of damage, as well as the defensive value of Battle Forged exceeding the value of a Nimble user.
• Berserk: The perk Berserk synergizes well with builds aiming to maximize damage output, by allowing an additional attack or action upon a kill.
• Killing Frenzy: The reason why Killing Frenzy is a strong perk on this build is because it will allow you to deal more damage, which is valuable for a damage dealing role. It shows the most value when you are fighting mass numbers of units in the late-game and beyond.
• Reach Advantage: With Reach Advantage, you will be allowed to maximize your damage output with AoE strikes, being partly at the center of 3 or more enemies aggro, while also gaining up to 25 melee defence, with 10 to 15 melee defence being the average gains.
• Fearsome: The perk Fearsome will give you an added 10% to 13% higher chance to route an opponent with this build, this becomes more meaningful when you are performing AoE attacks on dangerous opponents, as the increased chance to lower their morale with debuffs or make an opponent flee is valuable when against large numbers of dangerous late-game foes.
• Recovery: By picking the perk Recover, you will be able to freely utilize your fatigue intensive abilities, and extra attacks from Berserk, while also maintaining a working fatigue for the rest of the fight. In any meaningful battle against large amounts of late-game foes. you will greatly benefit from being able to maintain the ability to use your fatigue intensive abilities.

Main Stat Priority: Melee Skill (95+) → Melee Defence (30+) → Fatigue (145+, Before Gear; 70+, After Gear) → 2 or 4 max rolls into Hit Points (95+, Colossus Included)
Stats Reasoning:
Never Prioritize: Initiative, Ranged Defence, Ranged Skill, Resolve (50+, Arena Included)
Never Prioritize Reasoning:
Equipment: Decorated Full Helm (320D), Coat of Plates (320D), Additional Fur Padding attachment (-33% penetration damage taken), Greatsword, Battle Whip/Rondel Dagger, and Hexen Trophy (+6 Resolve). All weapons and armour will become famed equivalents.
Summary: The goal of the AoE Two-Hander is to deal high AoE damage, and benefit from the flexible skill set of the greatsword. You will be without the guaranteed protection of Indomitable, so your survivability will be largely dependent on your supporting units & positioning.
The AoE Two-Hander will take 2 slots in your active company (interchangeable with other damage dealers or tanks depending on the fight, can choose to build other two-handers instead).

♦ Unrivaled Builds: The Hammer AoE Two-Hander ♦

The Hammer AoE Two-Hander:

(Damage Orientated; Complimentary Frontliner)
Perk Order:
Student → Pathfinder → Quick Hands → Hammer Mastery → Underdog → Battle Forged → Berserk → Killing Frenzy → Reach Advantage → Colossus → Recover
Brief Perk Reasoning: See more in the relevant perk sections.

• Student: The reason why you pick Student for the AoE Two-Hander build is to allow you to obtain high tiered defensive and offensive perks at a faster rate by utilizing the bonus experience gain. You will not need Student to skip past any perks, as you will come back to obtain Recover.
• Pathfinder: With Pathfinder you will save AP when traversing tough terrain/elevation in a battle, as well as greatly saving fatigue for repositioning, retreating, and movement. This is particularly valuable with 6 AP two-handed strikes.
• Quick Hands: By using Quick Hands you will be able to situationally attack using a polearm or to use disarm with a battle whip, when it is more efficient to do so. Your primary two-handed hammer skills will be your strongest attacks, but there will be situations where attacking an out of reach enemy will be more favorable.
• Hammer Mastery: As a two-handed AoE weapon user, you will greatly benefit from the fatigue reductions when performing AoE strikes or polehammer strikes, in which you will often chain with Berserk procs. Additionally, your mastery will provide a minor hit chance bonus for your AoE strike as well as additional armour damage for your polehammer’s secondary, as a very minor bonus.
• Underdog: The purpose of Underdog will be to protect your AoE Two-Hander’s melee defence, as you will often desire to be surrounded by 3 or more enemies to make the most out of your AoE cleave, without being severely punished.
• Battle Forged: By picking Battle Forged you will gain a healthy 30% to 40% damage reduction while wearing heavy armour. While it does deteriorate in value as you take damage, the reduction is very noticeable against all incoming types of damage, as well as the defensive value of Battle Forged exceeding the value of a Nimble user.
• Berserk: The perk Berserk synergizes well with builds aiming to maximize damage output, by allowing an additional attack or action upon a kill.
• Killing Frenzy: The reason why Killing Frenzy is a strong perk on this build is because it will allow you to deal more damage, which is valuable for a damage dealing role. It shows the most value when you are fighting mass numbers of units in the late-game and beyond.
• Reach Advantage: With Reach Advantage, you will be allowed to maximize your damage output with AoE strikes, being partly at the center of 3 or more enemies aggro, while also gaining up to 25 melee defence, with 10 to 15 melee defence being the average gains.
• Colossus: With the perk Colossus you will be able to gain the necessary hit points to avoid a vast majority of all one shot armour penetration attacks with only a minor investment into hit points (see Stat Priority below). This is especially needed as you will not have Indomitable to save you from high armour penetration damage enemies.
• Recovery: By picking the perk Recover, you will be able to freely utilize your fatigue intensive abilities, and extra attacks from Berserk, while also maintaining a working fatigue for the rest of the fight. In any meaningful battle against large amounts of late-game foes. you will greatly benefit from being able to maintain the ability to use your fatigue intensive abilities.

Main Stat Priority: Melee Skill (95+) → Melee Defence (30+) → Fatigue (145+, Before Gear; 70+, After Gear) → 2 or 4 max rolls into Hit Points (95+, Colossus Included)
Stats Reasoning:
Never Prioritize: Initiative, Ranged Defence, Ranged Skill, Resolve (50+, Arena Included)
Never Prioritize Reasoning:
Equipment: Decorated Full Helm (320D), Coat of Plates (320D), Additional Fur Padding attachment (-33% penetration damage taken), Two-handed Hammer, Polehammer, Battle Whip/Rondel Dagger, and Hexen Trophy (+6 Resolve). All weapons and armour will become famed equivalents.
Summary: The goal of the AoE Two-Hander is to deal high AoE damage, while also being able to situationally utilize a polearm for two tile reach. You will be without the guaranteed protection of Indomitable, so your survivability will be largely dependent on your supporting units & positioning.
The AoE Two-Hander will take 2-3 slots in your active company (interchangeable with other damage dealers or tanks depending on the fight, can choose to build other two-handers instead).

♦ Unrivaled Builds: The Debuff Two-Hander ♦

The Debuff Two-Hander:

(Damage & Debuff Orientated; Utility Frontliner)
Perk Order:
Student → Pathfinder → Quick Hands → Colossus → Executioner → Battle Forged → Berserk → Killing Frenzy→ Dagger Mastery → Duelist → Head Hunter
Brief Perk Reasoning: See more in the relevant perk sections.

• Student: The reason why you pick Student for the Debuff Two-Hander build is to allow you to obtain high tiered defensive and offensive perks at a faster rate by utilizing the bonus experience gain. You will not need Student to skip past any perks, as a good number of your perks are within the first four perk tiers.
• Pathfinder: With Pathfinder you will save AP when traversing tough terrain/elevation in a battle, as well as greatly save fatigue for repositioning, retreating, and movement. This is particularly valuable with saving AP on your main weapon, polearm, and sidearm.
• Quick Hands: By using Quick Hands you will be able to situationally attack using a polearm or follow up your 6 AP dazing strikes with a 3 AP qatal dagger deathblow strike. Quick Hands will also allow you to swap back to a 6 AP weapon when your next turn starts.
• Colossus: With the perk Colossus you will be able to gain the necessary hit points to avoid a vast majority of all one shot armour penetration attacks with only a minor investment into hit points (see Stat Priority below). This is especially needed as you will not have Indomitable or a 100% guaranteed daze to save you from high armour penetration damage enemies.
• Executioner: By picking the perk Executioner you will be amplifying your damage output by a valuable amount on a good portion of your strikes, and increase your hits to kill ratio on valuable late-game foes, making the difference between having to take an additional hit or not. Additionally, some members of this team composition take advantage of Crippling Strikes to help set up Executioner strikes.
• Battle Forged: By picking Battle Forged you will gain a healthy 30% to 40% damage reduction while wearing heavy armour. While it does deteriorate in value as you take damage, the reduction is very noticable against all incoming types of damage, as well as the defensive values of Battle Forged exceeding the value of a Nimble user.
• Berserk: The perk synergizes well with builds aiming to maximize damage output, by allowing an additional attack or action up a kill.
• Killing Frenzy: The reason why Killing Frenzy is a strong perk on this build is because it will allow you to deal more damage, which is valuable for a damage dealing role. It shows the most value when you are fighting mass numbers of units in the late-game and beyond.
• Dagger Mastery: With Dagger Mastery you will be able to follow up your dazing strikes with Quick Hands into a 3 AP qatal dagger deathblow strike to finish off an opponent or deal additional damage. This paired with additional damage perks, you will be able to maximize your impacts in a single turn.
• Duelist: With Duelist you will be gaining an additional 25% to armour penetration damage with a one-handed weapon, which is an exceptional form of damage output when paired with the qatal dagger. This synergizes well with your dagger strikes as your two-handed flanged mace will deal a good amount of armour penetration damage.
• Head Hunter: Being able to hit the head two times in a row is a valuable combo to have for the high single target armour penetration damage of the two-handed flanged mace, and even the qatal dagger deathblow combined with damage perks. If you end up hitting an opponent in the body & then the head, you can spread out the damage between the two armour pieces; However, with the two-handed flanged mace, you will be able to make positive progress on killing your opponents due to the increase damage of a headshot with high single target damage & high armour penetration.

Main Stat Priority: Melee Skill (95+) → Melee Defence (30+) → Fatigue (150+, Before Gear; 65+, After Gear) → 2 or 4 max rolls into Hit Points (95+, Colossus Included)
Stats Reasoning:
Never Prioritize: Initiative, Ranged Defence, Ranged Skill, Resolve (Arena Included, 50+)
Never Prioritize Reasoning:
Equipment: Decorated Full Helm (320D), Coat of Plates (320D), Additional Fur Padding attachment (-33% penetration damage taken), Two-handed Flanged Mace, Billhook/Polehammer, Qatal Dagger, and Hexen Trophy (+6 Resolve). All weapons and armour will become famed equivalents.
Summary: The goal of the Debuff Two-Hander is to deal high single target damage, while also dazing your opponents to be able to use a qatal dagger deathblow strike with one’s spare AP and to increase the company’s survivability in high damage encounters from utilizing the daze penalty. Additionally, you have the tactical flexibility for situational usage of a polearm to inflict two tile damage if it is a more efficient move. You will be without the guaranteed protection of Indomitable, so your survivability will be largely dependent on your supporting units & positioning.
The Debuff Two-Hander will take 1-2 slots in your active company (interchangeable with other damage dealers or tanks depending on the fight, can choose to build an AoE Two-Hander instead of the second Debuff Two-Hander).

♦ Unrivaled Builds: The Heavy Polearm ♦

The Heavy Polearm:

(Complimentary Damage; Supporting Utility)
Perk Order:
Student → Pathfinder → Rotate → Polearm Mastery → Quick Hands → Battle Forged → Berserk → Killing Frenzy → Fearsome → Recover → Colossus
Brief Perk Reasoning: See more in the relevant perk sections.

• Student: As a polearm user, obtaining a quicker stat and perk advantage is still very valuable when it comes to securing battle efficiency. You will not need Student to skip past any perks, as a majority of your perks are within the first four perk tiers.
• Pathfinder: The reasoning behind picking Pathfinder for your polearm users is to save AP when traversing rough terrain during a battle, allowing you to keep the advantages of using your Polearm Mastery, as well as saving fatigue for when you need to traverse the battlefield.
• Rotate: With your role as a polearm user being to support your frontliners by dealing damage from the back row, helping in absorbing damage to improve your overall company survivability, and using Rotate a polearm user can relieve a unit in an unfavorable situation, while still performing the other roles mentioned previously.
• Polearm Mastery: By using Polearm Mastery on your polearm user, you will be saving a hefty amount of fatigue on your AoE reap attacks, as well as allow for a smoother usage of Berserk chained attacks. Arguably more importantly, you will be reducing the 6 AP strikes of a polearm to 5 AP, in which opens the possibilities of additional movement, and other actions.
• Quick Hands: As a warscythe AoE damage dealer as your primary role, you will occasionally leave one enemy inconveniently alive, and you will want to swap to a billhook for high single target damage to finish off that enemy. It could also be chained with Berserk AP refunds, and it could be used to save a small amount of working AP when using the situational battle whip disarm.
• Battle Forged: The reasoning behind why Battle Forged is picked for this polearm build is because this build requires an extra priority on perks unrelated to a Nimble build (mainly Colossus). Battle Forged will provide you with the means to survive melee encounters, as well as provide assistance with surviving high damage ranged attacks. With a Nimble build you would be more susceptible to bleed and poison, as well as the limitation on perk choices. There are many efficient Nimble polearm builds, but this guide is about the top builds that form the strongest company.
• Berserk: While the perk Berserk isn’t a complete must have on every efficient damage build, this perk pick up is without question an extremely valuable investment to almost double your damage output by allowing you to chain your AoE strikes, or reposition after a kill.
• Killing Frenzy: With Killing Frenzy, you will be gaining a valuable damage increase that will allow you to deal more damage, inflict injuries easier, as well as set up or finish off opponents for your frontliners.
• Fearsome: The perk Fearsome will allow for your AoE polearm user to inflict multiple improved morale checks against your opponents, in which decently affects the odds of lowering the morale level of high value opponents such as: orc warriors, and barbarian chosen. While only having an investment of 55 average base resolve (+10 from arena victories, 10+ extra from Banner Carrier), you will increase the odds of a morale check being successful by a noticeable margin.
• Recover: By picking the perk Recover, you will be able to freely utilize your fatigue intensive abilities, and perks, while also maintaining a working fatigue for the rest of the fight. In any meaningful battle against large amounts of late-game foes, you will greatly benefit from being able to maintain the ability to use your fatigue intensive abilities and perks.
• Colossus: With the perk Colossus you will be able to gain the necessary hit points to avoid a vast majority of all one shot armour penetration attacks with only a minor investment into hit points (see Stat Priority below). Although a polearm user may be seen less in melee contact range of foes, having Colossus will allow you to safely utilize Rotate to help take in damage for your allies.

Main Stat Priority: Melee Skill (95+) → Fatigue (150+, Before Gear; 80+, After Gear; LPR Attach.) → Hit Points (95+, Colossus Included)/Melee Defence (Any is a Luxury)/Resolve (50+, Arena Included)
Stats Reasoning:
Never Prioritize: Initiative, Ranged Defence, Ranged Skill
Never Prioritize Reasoning:
Equipment: Decorated Full Helm (320D), Coat of Plates (320D), Additional Fur Padding (-33% penetration damage taken)/Light Padding Replacement (-20% fatigue, on spare body armour) attachments, Swordlance/Famed Warscythe, Battle Whip/Rondel Dagger, Reinforced Throwing Net/Smoke Pot/Flash Pot, and Hexen Trophy (+6 Resolve). All weapons and armour will become famed equivalents.
Summary: The role of the Heavy Polearm is to provide AoE damage, enemy defeat setup and enemy damage output using the Reap skill, while also providing Rotation support for units in need of repositioning. Additionally, it is important to note that you can situationally mix up your two tile range weapon of choice depending on the needs of an encounter; However, the swordlance will provide top damage output with the AoE put to good use with added benefits such as Fearsome.
The Heavy Polearm will take 2 slots in your active company, with a recommendation to carry an extra or two in reserve (interchangeable with other backliners or frontliners depending on the fight).

♦ Unrivaled Builds: The Distance Archer ♦

The Distance Archer:

(Damage Orientated; High Distance Targeting)
Perk Order:
Student → Crippling Strikes → Quick hands → Bow Mastery → Throwing Mastery → Nimble → Berserk → Killing Frenzy → Duelist → Executioner → Bullseye
Brief Perk Reasoning: See more in the relevant perk sections.

• Student: As a ranged skill user, obtaining a quicker stat and perk advantage is still very valuable when it comes to securing battle effectiveness. You will not need Student to skip past any perks, as you will have enough perks in the lower tiers to satisfy one’s advancement.
• Crippling Strikes: With heavy throwing javelins & a warbow, you will increase your odds of injuring barbarian chosen & orc warriors by a decent margin to merit the perk point. In conjunction with Executioner, your enemies will also die decently quicker for you and your allies than without spending the perk points here.
• Quick Hands: The perk Quick Hands would be used as a 4AP weapon swapping enabler for swapping between using heavy throwing javelins for high short range Dps and swapping to a warbow for long range snipes. The frequency of swaps is varied on the battle, but can be as frequent as is required for increasing efficiency in battle.
• Bow Mastery: As a bow user, your goal will be to utilize the range advantage of the warbow to be able to take out high priority targets out at a distance (hexe, necromancers, beastmasters, goblin shamans, etc.), as well as to deal repeated quick shot Dmg throughout the battle, and Bow Mastery will aid you in completing both of those objectives (increased range/reduced fatigue costs).
• Throwing Mastery: While you already have one weapon mastery, when combined with other perks (Duelist, Killing Frenzy, Executioner), the increased Dmg output gained from Throwing Mastery for heavy throwing javelins becomes massive at close range. Additionally, reduced fatigue drain from repeated javelin tosses are welcome.
• Nimble: As a bow user that is dependent on high vision, going a heavy armour build is unideal due to the helmet vision penalties and that going a Nimble light armour build is greatly more efficient for an archer. Some people try to go without Nimble on their archers, but when it comes down to surviving for a few turns of an orc that broke through/overflowed, you will need some defensive capabilities, and Nimble will be more reliable than building up melee/ranged defence and completely relying on perfect positioning.
• Berserk: With Berserk you will be gaining an additional 4AP to use on chaining bow and javelin attacks for a solid increase in damage output with up to 3 attacks per round. It may be also important to note that the archer will also clean up a good amount of kills, making good use out of Berserk.
• Killing Frenzy: When it comes to Killing Frenzy, the main factor to consider is if your build will be gaining enough kills to make use of the added bonus damage. With the archer, not only will you benefit from the bonus Dmg, but you will also greatly increase the hits to kill Dmg output of your weaponry.
• Duelist: While Duelist is primarily thought of a melee perk, currently throwing weapons also gain the added +25% ignore armour Dmg, in which greatly increases the Dmg output on heavy throwing javelins. In combination with other Dmg increasing perks, as an archer, you can rapidly take out even the most dangerous foes like orc warriors & barbarian chosen.
• Executioner: With the perk Executioner, you will be able to increase the Dmg output of your attacks by a noticeable amount to merit spending the perk point on Executioner.
• Bullseye: The perk Bullseye will increase you chance to hit targets hidden by cover up to nearly 50% from the typical 25% without Bullseye. It may be more preferable to shoot at uncovered targets in many situations, but when it matters, you will need to shoot at targets behind cover & when succeeding against high priority targets behind cover, it can trivialize certain fights.

Main Stat Priority: Ranged Skill (95+) → Fatigue (140+, Before Gear; 110+, After Gear) → Hit Points (95+, Colossus Included)/Melee Defence (Any is a Luxury)
Stats Reasoning:
Never Prioritize: Initiative, Ranged Defence, Melee Skill, Resolve
Never Prioritize Reasoning:
Basic Equipment: Sallet Helm (120D) + Assassin’s Robe (120D, End-game Nimble)/Dark Cowl or Assassin’s Head Wrap (40D) + Noble Mail (160D, Pre-End Game), Bone Platings (Absorbs First Body Hit), Unhold Fur Cloak (-20% Ranged Dmg & +10D, on Poison Resist Armour) attachments, Warbow, Heavy Throwing Javelins, 2 Large Quiver of Arrows, and Hexen Trophy Necklace (+6 Resolve)/Falcon. All weapons and armour will become famed equivalents.
Summary: The role of the archer is to provide accurate damage from a distance, enemy defeat setup and to deal a substantial amount of damage using throwing weapons at close range. You will also aim to take out high priority targets that are largely unreachable in melee.
The Archer will take 2 to 4 slots in your active company depending on the encounter or number of long distance targets (Interchangeable with other backliners or frontliners depending on the fight).

♦ Unrivaled Builds: The Nimble Tank ♦

The Nimble Tank:

(Defense Orientated & Aggro Holder; Supporting Utility)
Perk Order:
Student → Colossus → Rotate → Shield Expert → Underdog → Nimble → Indomitable → Recover → Dodge → Steel Brow → Gifted
Brief Perk Reasoning: See more in the relevant perk sections.

• Student: Much like the other builds, picking up Student allows for your unit to obtain key defensive perks at a quicker rate; However, you will not need this perk to skip past any perk tiers, as this build is heavily reliant on perk tiers 1-3.
• Colossus: With the key defensive perk of this build being Nimble, you will need Colossus for increasing your HP as high as you can get it, in which should be at least 125+ to ensure that your tank can actually tank. Additionally, picking Colossus as your second perk pick up allows you to get a more effective Nimble survivability as soon as you are able to use Nimble down the line.
• Rotate: As a tank, your role is to provide damage absorption support during a fight against dangerous opponents, while also using Rotate to relieve units from unfavorable situations. Additionally, Rotate can be used to better position your nimble tank into the zone of control of your opponents to dodge or tank your opponent’s attacks.
• Shield Expert: With the nimble tank build you will be utilizing the benefits of high melee defence shields in addition to your already high melee defence. With the priority being to dodge your opponent’s blows, obtaining as much defensive capabilities as possible is key, which is why Shield Expert is picked up for the additional passive & active melee defence. Additionally, a side reason why Shield Expert is picked is so that you can sustain more shield damage and the additional hit chance to knock back your opponent.
• Underdog: With the purpose of the nimble tank to lock enemies in your zone of control and absorb the attacks of your opponents, it helps if when surrounded your unit doesn’t suffer large debuffs to their melee defence. While the nimble tank is beneficial the most for fights against schrats & unholds, you will still use them in fights against groups of heavy hitting enemies in which the perk Underdog provides its full value.
• Nimble: By going Nimble on your tank you will be able to defend the majority of the incoming armour penetration damage that could cause an injury or threaten the survivability of your Battle Forged units. While the existence of Nimble units isn’t completely mandatory for survival of your frontline units, it does help in reducing incoming damage enough to merit using nimble tanks against certain foes such as: schrats, unholds, barbarian chosen, lindwurms, and other heavy armour penetration damage dealing attacks. Otherwise, it is best to avoid using your nimble tanks in every fight as they will cripple your damage output in fights where killing your opponent faster is more efficient (i.e. groups of large nachzehrers, or swathes of weak enemies).
• Indomitable: With the obvious being that a nimble tank is purely defensive, you will most definitely want to pick Indomitable, as the 50% incoming damage reduction and immunities to being stunned or moved is incredibly strong for defending oneself. Indomitable will also serve as a fail safe for shieldwall when you have a decent chance of getting hit by an opponent.
• Recover: The perk pick-up of Recover is needed because with a nimble tank you are going to need to spam your fatigue heavy perks and skills such as: Indomitable, Rotate and shieldwall. While you will not have the perk Berserk to synergize with Recover you will still need to use Recover to be able to continue to use your active abilities.
• Dodge: With Dodge you will typically have around at the start of the fight +15 melee defence depending on your character’s base initiative. The perk will deflate in value to as low as a +5 to melee defence when you are at an initiative low point due to low fatigue; However, the added melee defence is highly welcome and will give you a passive advantage in avoiding blows.
• Steel Brow: The inclusion of Steel Brow will award your damage absorbing tank with more passive effective HP to extend one’s lifespan by a noticeable amount during combat, especially when talking about high damage attacks. It of course only applies to head hits, but those are the most damaging hits for your Nimble tanks, especially when utilizing a low head durability armour setup.
• Gifted: By picking Gifted on your Nimble tank, you will be gaining a +4 to hit points (Colossus increases the hit point gain to +5), which will increase your survivability with Nimble. You will also gain an added +3 to melee defence, which will help your dodge chance slightly, most notably in low percent to hit situations that aren’t 5%. Additionally, you will gain an added +4 fatigue to aid in keeping your ability cycle going with a Nimble tank build. (see “Popular Meta Builds” section for optional runner up perks instead of Gifted)

Main Stat Priority: Melee Defence (35+, Before Dodge & Shield Bonus) → Hit Points (125+, Colossus Included) → Fatigue (150+, Before Gear; 110+, After Gear)→ 2 or 3 max rolls into Initiative (100+)/Resolve (55+, Arena Included)
Stats Reasoning:
Never Prioritize: Ranged Defence, Ranged Skill, Melee Skill
Never Prioritize Reasoning:
Equipment: Sallet Helm (120D) + Assassin’s Robe (120D, End-game Nimble)/Dark Cowl or Assassin’s Head Wrap (40D) + Noble Mail (160D, Pre-End Game)/Assassin’s Face Mask (140D) + Noble Mail (160D, Anti-Goblin Poison), Bone Platings (Absorbs First Body Hit, Pre & End-Game), Horn Plate (-10% Body Dmg & +30D, End-Game Option), Unhold Fur Cloak (-20% Ranged Dmg & +10D, on Poison Resist Armour) attachments, Fencing Sword/Fighting Spear/Qatal Dagger/Three-Headed Flail, 2 Living Tree Shield, Reinforced Throwing Net/Smoke Pot/Flash Pot, and Hexen Trophy Necklace (+6 Resolve). All weapons and armour will become famed equivalents.
Summary: The role of a tank is to mitigate damage received when facing off against specific late-game foes such as: large amounts of schrats, unholds, lindwurms, barbarian chosen, and other fights that would benefit from distracting several units or dangerous foes. Additionally, a nimble tank can be used as a supporting unit to rotate in or out your damage dealing units for better AP usage. While a nimble tank isn’t without use during a standard fight, it is usually more efficient to swap them out for damage dealing units.
The nimble tank position should take up 2-3 of your reserve company, but will be situationally placed in one’s active company, in exchange for any position when it is more efficient.

♦ Unrivaled Builds: The Banner Carrier ♦

The Banner Carrier:

(Rally the Troops Unit; Supporting Utility)
Perk Order:
Student → Fortified Mind → Rally the Troops → Rotate → Pathfinder → Battle Forged → Indomitable → Colossus → Recover → Underdog → Bags & Belts
Brief Perk Reasoning: See more in the relevant perk sections.

• Student: Similarly to other builds’ reasoning, the experience gained from picking Student for your banner carrier is still valuable for establishing a perk advantage faster. With this build you do not need Student to skip past tier 4 and 5, but it is still in good practice to level your unit quicker as picking up another tier 1 perk instead of Student doesn’t establish too much of an advantage for the early stages of this build.
• Fortified Mind: The deal with Fortified Mind is that you obtain a percentage increase in the resolve stat. While using a perk point to obtain stats is not normally good, this is a percentage increase on a vital stat for a Resolve sharing & rallying-based banner carrier.
• Rally the Troops: In the case of Rally the Troops, you will want to pick this up in order to save your units from wavering or fleeing during combat. While you typically might only waver from being surrounded in odd situations, or while against an enemy with Fearsome, the geist enemy in Battle Brothers is so impactful for demolishing a party that Rally the Troops becomes a necessary must have perk for any company.
• Rotate: Much like a polearm user, the banner carrier will need to provide physical support by Rotating in, and contributing in absorbing damage just like all your other melee fighters.
• Pathfinder: The reasoning behind picking Pathfinder as a perk is because it will allow you to save AP to Rally/Rotate when traversing rough terrain during a battle and will allow you to use up less fatigue if you need to move to or retreat from your opponent. Additionally, it would be to keep up with your team of Pathfinders.
• Battle Forged: With the banner carrier, being a heavy armour user, Battle Forged is still a quality choice in providing the top defensive value, while allowing you to pump up your Fatigue without sacrificing defensive value. A Nimble banner carrier is still valuable as a good alternative, but when it comes to absolute efficiency heavy armour will provide more value in the late-game.
• Indomitable: The reason why you would pick up an additional active perk is, because Indomitable is still showing its value in reducing the amount of incoming damage drastically. The banner carrier should seek to absorb dangerous blows for your troops, and Indomitable will allow you to do so.
• Colossus: When taking damage, to a degree you will still take HP damage in parallel. So just like other heavy armour users, you will want to survive just as long as your armour does. As a banner carrier, Colossus will just help with receiving armour penetration damage a little bit more, as using Indomitable in every dangerous situation isn’t always possible due to 5AP cost, or the need to Rally the Troops.
• Recover: The incorporation of Recover in your banner carrier’s build is key as you will have a large amount of fatigue build up from the fatigue consuming perks available to your build, as using Recover can come in clutch when you need to be able to use Rally the Troops/Rotate/Indomitable when you are becoming maxed out on fatigue.
• Underdog: With the role of using your Banner Carrier to Rotate out disadvantaged allies, you will need to be able to survive a few rounds of attacks from an opponent. With a small fraction of your tertiary level ups being split between MD & HP, you will gain a small accumulation of MD that you will want to protect from the negative debuffs of being surrounded, and to negate Backstabber from the enemy.
• Bags & Belts: With Bags & Belts you will use it to hold extra valuable consumables such as: Reinforced Throwing Nets, Flash Pots, Smoke Pots, and Bandages, depending on the combat situation you are thrusted into. Additionally, you can use a spare slot to hold a MD shield in case your Banner Carrier has to endure a disadvantaged position for an extended period.

Main Stat Priority: Resolve (125+, Fortified Mind Included, Sergeant’s Sash & Arena Included) → Fatigue (150+, Before Gear; 70+, After Gear; LPR Attach.) → Melee Defence (Any is a Luxury)/Hit Points (100+, Colossus Included)
Main Stats Reasoning:
– The purpose of a banner carrier is to use Rally when facing Resolve punishing enemies. An increase in Resolve provides a more effective effect of the Rally the Troops perk, and with the battle standard 10% of the character’s resolve is distributed to your troops in a 4-tile radius.
– Having massive amounts of Fatigue is something anyone wearing heavy armour can utilize, and with the need to use Fatigue draining perks constantly, it is worth leveling up.
– Having extra Hit Points for a banner carrier will allow you to take slightly more armour penetrating damage without having to use Indomitable every turn you are in a dangerous situation, where having extra active fatigue might be a life or death situation for your wavering troops. Melee Defence is almost just as important to level, because a banner carrier is still somewhat assuming the role of a damage distributor by taking the aggro away from other units.
Never Prioritize: Melee Skill, Initiative, Ranged Skill, Ranged Defence
Never Prioritize Reasoning:
– The role of the banner carrier is to rally your troops, and wield a Resolve sharing battle standard. With the damage output being very subpar with the battle standard in the late-game, you will be better off not using your banner carrier for combat, nor should you swap weapons.
– Initiative can sometimes matter for Rallying but is in no way a justification for spending level ups on, as sometimes being slower can be better in terms of enemy turn orders. Additionally, heavy armour is still preferred for this unit, which implies issues with Initiative.
– In terms of Ranged Skill, is not worth leveling as the banner carrier’s role is to provide AoE Resolve from holding the company’s banner, and having it put away to shoot ranged weaponry would not allow you to gain this benefit. Again, you can hold a crossbow for the first turn, but it isn’t necessary and is not an excuse to level up RS.
– You will not level Ranged Defence as you will want archers to focus your banner carrier.
Equipment: Decorated Full Helm (320D), Coat of Plates (320D), Additional Fur Padding (-33% penetration damage taken)/Light Padding Replacement (-20% fatigue, on spare body armour) attachments, Battle Standard, Sergeant Sash (+10 Resolve), Living Tree Shield (Optional), a Bandage, and Flash Pots/Smoke Pots/Reinforced Throwing Nets. All armour will become famed equivalents.
Summary: As you can expect, the banner carrier provides AoE Resolve for the company troops around him, and Rallies any troops that start to break Resolve, whether it is from fear effects, or from combat with dangerous foes. Additionally, the banner carrier plays a more non-combative role in your backline that you don’t need for most fights, but as Resolve attacking enemies exist it is important to keep one banner carrier in your company rooster for when you need the extra resolve saves. One could argue that having a banner carrier in every battle is the best strategy, as it makes it easier to achieve a confident morale when obtaining kills, but if you truly want to be efficient, you are probably better off having an additional frontliner or archer in fights where punishing resolve checks are less likely.
The banner carrier should take up a single slot of your active company in the middle of your back row.

[Under Construction] ♦ Build Formations & Role Compositions ♦

• This section is going to showcase how to best use the builds listed for this guide in a more specific way than just a description of use or the number of units for each build. It will cover formations and role compositions in terms of average party composition strategies and how to efficiently use each party role in combat.
• First 20 days composition… summarized from earlier sections…
• Within the next 50 days… summarized from earlier sections…
• Finalized optimal company composition…
• Situational compositions (necrosavants diamond, hexe equipment and loadout, alp weapons no archer, unholds early polearm, scrats axe, ifrits loadout, webknechts positioning, ancient undead loadout, regular undead spear wall, barbarian chosen loadout will be accounted for; legendary locations will not be included)…
• Terrain tactics (Forest choke points, Swamp dry land edge guarding, high ground tips) & sample formations (zig zag AoE pockets, etc.)…

♦ Capable Backgrounds to Hire: Part 1 ♦

Before you start leveling a character, you must be able to tell what hires are good for each character build in this guide.
To start off, I will say that the hiring process is the largest Rng factor in Battle Brothers, so don’t beat yourself up too much if you are playing ironman mode and you aren’t getting hires with the right talent stats/stars/traits. That being said, you should at least be able to hire the most valued backgrounds possible for a higher chance for optimal starting stats/stars/traits.

Starting with the core class, your Duelist classes:

• Great: Hedge Knight.
• Good: Wildman, Squire, Adventurous Noble, Brawler, Farmhand, Lumberjack, and Barbarian.
• Okay: Militia, Manhunter, Sellsword, Nomad (Melee), Raider, Beast Slayer, Gladiator
• Desperate: Nomad (Ranged), Converted Crusader, Hunter, Poacher, Cultist, Flagellant, Thief, Caravan Hand, Butcher, Messenger, and Gravedigger.

Reasoning:

• Hedge Knight: (Pros): Guaranteed very high starting stats, ranged attack and initiative talent stars excluded, and the best stat hire in the game. (Cons): Very expensive to hire, high-end wages, and more than one hedge knight causes one to try to kill the other, but that can be avoided with minor punishment. (Recommended Amount = 1-6)
• Wildman: (Pros): Amazing starting fatigue, above average hit points/resolve, not concerned with wages too much. (Cons): Slower xp gain, mediocre melee skill, and a chance at poor to low melee defence starting stats. (Recommended Amount = 1-6)
• Squire: (Pros): All around above average stats, lower end price and wages. (Cons): Not quite a Hedge Knight when comparing some of the stats. (Recommended amount = 1-4)
• Adventurous Noble: (Pros): Chance at very high base melee skill, melee defence, and resolve. (Cons): Only average fatigue base, better suited as a banner carrier, expensive to keep, higher than average starting pay (less than Sellsword), and possible nagging/wage increase event. (Recommended Amount = 1)
• Brawler: (Pros): Chance at high starting hit points, chance at above average resolve, with a higher chance at meeting the top of the average melee skill, trainer of weaker backgrounds (Lumberjack, Farmhand), Ranged attack talent star excluded as an option, and very affordable for the stats being the staple feature. (Cons): Likely to be replaced later, and violent town event costing reputation. (Recommended amount = 1-4 or replaced)
• Farmhand: (Pros): Chance of great fatigue and hit points, a low list of excluded traits. (Cons): Only average peasant tier melee skill, and resolve in need of repairing (Arena needed). (Recommended amount = 1-6 or replaced)
• Lumberjack: (Pros): Higher chance at slightly above average melee skill, chance of great fatigue and hit points, (Cons): Chance that resolve needs repairing (Arena needed), is slightly expensive for the stats due to equipment. (Recommended amount = 1-6 or replaced)
• Barbarian: (Pros):Barbarian: Higher chance at slightly above average starting stats overall, and some positive events. (Cons): Only recruitable through an event. (Recommended amount = 1-4)
• Okay hires explanation: Militia: Chance at above average melee skill, and a chance at slightly above average resolve/melee defence, but can be difficult to find them cheap, Manhunter: Chance at above average melee skill, and a chance at slightly above average resolve/hit points/melee defence, and potential to come with a whip for a cheap price, Sellsword: High-end melee skill and melee defence, and average stats, but may need resolve repaired (Arena Needed), and needs a paymaster retinue hire to avoid high risk of pay raise events/desertion, Nomad (Melee): Decent chance at high-end melee skill and melee defence, and average hit points, but chance at low fatigue and poor resolve (Arena Needed), and has a noble troop event that could result in a party wipe/renown hit it not prepared, Raider: exact same as Nomad (Melee) above, but with more events (confirmed), Beast Slayer: Chance at an above average melee skill/fatigue, average to above average starting stats overall, some positive events, but is expensive and outclassed for the price, Gladiator: Higher end melee skill and melee defence, but is overall average in other starting stats and has a high starting cost and high wages. (Recommended Amount = 1-2 or as few as possible, as they are outclassed by the categories above it)
  
• Desperate hires explanation: Nomad (Ranged): Decent chance at slightly above average melee skill and melee defence, average hit points, and can double as an archer if stars roll ranged, but chance at low fatigue and poor resolve (Arena Needed), and has a noble troop event that could result in a party wipe/renown hit it not prepared, Converted Crusader: High-end starting melee skill and melee defence, and all other stats are average, but can only achieve one through a late-game crisis event, Hunter: Chance at above average fatigue, otherwise average melee unit potential, not at all ideal, but if your hunter hire rolls into melee you can choose to make use of them if desperate, Poacher: Ever so slightly above average melee skill chance, otherwise average melee potential, but chance at bad resolve, if your poacher hire rolls into melee you can choose to make use of them if desperate, Cultist: Can be used for a couple unique events that can result in legendary armours and free perk points, and has a large stat range that could be either decent or bad (besides resolve & initiative), will try to convert your peasant backgrounds, and will conflict with a monk/historian, Flagellant: Chance at high fatigue and resolve, otherwise average stats, can start with low hit points, but has a good handful of events that can add hit points and melee skill for it to be worth it, but also conflicts with monk/cultist, Thief: Chance at high starting defence stats, decent thieving events, and average stats, but a chance for below above average melee skill, noble army event that could result in a party wipe/renown hit if not prepared, Caravan Hand: Higher chance at average starting stats, an equal chance at below average stats, and can permanently increase party inventory size once per playthrough via an event, Butcher: Potential for a slightly above average melee skill, other stats are average, and ranged attack talent star exclusion, Messenger: Good fatigue, and chance for slightly above average melee defence, but a chance for low or average melee skill, and resolve in need of fixing (Arena Needed), Gravedigger: Higher chance at slightly above average fatigue/hit points/resolve, other stats are average with a chance to be low, Graverobber: Barely above average stats overall, has an event with Historian to obtain instantly free famed items, but has a noble troop event that could result in a party wipe/renown hit if not prepared. (Recommended Amount = You will likely only be hiring these backgrounds in the early to early-mid-game if struggling to find a viable hire and should be replaced later in the game, unless used to farm events)

(Character Build Recommended Amount = 4)

Following up with your Two-Hander classes:

• The exact same as the Duelist class, but with a slightly heightened priority on hires with high-end hit points/resolve (Hedge Knights, Wildmen, Brawlers, Lumberjacks, etc.).
• Noting that non-AoE two-handers can get away with less resolve making backgrounds like the Farmhand included in the list of preferred hires.
  (Character Build Recommended Amount = 3)

♢ Capable Backgrounds to Hire: Part 2 ♢

Additionally, you have your Heavy Polearm class:

• The same pool of hires as your Duelist class, but with a lower value on hires that were valued high because of their base melee defence (For example the Thief). Again, the higher tiered recommendations from the Duelist category are preferred.
  (Character Build Recommended Amount = 2-4)

As for your Archer class:

• Great: Hunter.
• Okay: Ranged Nomad, and Witchhunter.
• Desperate: Poacher, Bowyer, Beast Slayer, Squire, Militia, Sellsword, and Shepherd.

Reasoning:

• Hunter: (Pros): The only archer class hire worth hiring for the end game, highest starting ranged skill, comes with a tier 2 bow, and generally positive events. (Cons): Somewhat costly. (Character Build Recommended Amount = 2-4)
• Okay Hires Explanation: Ranged Nomad: A chance at exceptional ranged skill, and above average defensive skills, but has some negative events, including a noble army event that could result in a party wipe/renown hit if not prepared, lower fatigue and resolve than a hunter, and is expensive compared to a hunter, Witchhunter: Unique positive events, and similar stats to a Poacher except with more resolve, but more expensive. (Recommended Amount = You will likely only be hiring these backgrounds in the early to mid-game and could be replaced later in the game)
• Desperate hires explanation: Poacher: An overall worse hunter, Bowyer: Chance at a slightly above average ranged skill, but a chance for very low or below average fatigue and resolve, Beast Slayer: Chance at an average ranged skill, a chance of average to above average fatigue, high resolve, and several positive events, but costs as much or more than a Hunter, Squire: A chance at above average ranged skill and fatigue, and high resolve, Militia: Chance at a low to average ranged skill, Sellsword: A chance at above average ranged skill and resolve, high defensive skills, but requires a Paymaster to avoid wage increase events, Shepherd: Chance at a low to average ranged skill, but a chance at low to average fatigue.
  (Recommended Amount = Only if desperate for a body, and you want to make the best out of the starting stats/talent stars the hire was given)

(Character Build Recommended Amount = 2-4)

Lastly, one mustn’t neglect the Nimble Tank class:

• Great: Hedge Knight, and Lumberjack.
• Good: Wildman, Adventurous Noble, Squire, Brawler, Farmhand, Beast Slayer, and Manhunter.
• Okay: Sellsword, Gladiator, Thief, Messenger, Butcher, Caravan Hand, and Barbarian.

Reasoning:

• To make an efficient tank character, there must an importance on high melee defence, fatigue, and hit points, as well as a slight attention to resolve.

(Character Build Recommended Amount = 3 in reserve)

Additionally, you need your Banner Carrier class:

• Great: Adventurous Noble, Wildman, and Squire.
• Good: Starting resolves above 45 with consideration to hit points and fatigue.
• Desperate: Starting resolves above 40 with less consideration to hit points and fatigue.

Reasoning:

• To make an efficient banner carrier, your unit must have excellent starting resolve, and fatigue, with a slight attention for hit points and melee defence.

(Character Build Recommended Amount = 1)

♦ How to Manage Fodder & Imperfect Hires: Part 1 ♦

In your campaigns, it is without a doubt that you will hire troops without the correct talent stars, that come with harmful traits, or have mediocre base stats. These people will be leveled, stat & perk wise, according to their strengths and weaknesses.

The Value of Nimble for the Early & Mid-game:
With the survivability of your troops always being a concern throughout the entirety of one’s campaign, there may be brief periods in the mid-game, where your Battle Forged troops are transitioning between mid to high-tier armour. This is where building up Nimble troops from early on in the game comes into play, as Nimble characters are easy to build to their near full potential, and at a slightly faster rate than Battle Forged.
With this in mind, you will without a doubt run into units that roll Hit Point talent stars instead of their ideal talent star allocations. In these cases, it is likely going to be more efficient to build them into Nimble users, along with their intended roles. Nimble will allow you to gain an edge against a majority of units in the mid to late-game until they are to be replaced with their Battle Forged counterpart if the respective role is more efficient as a Battle Forged build. (See the Nimble perk description for more information on the value of Nimble).

Talent Stars:
It is important to note that talent stars aren’t everything, but they do direct your units stat potential into a reliable or at least semi-reliable build direction. Without talent stars, you can build a strong & even possibly an efficient build, but it isn’t reliable and you will be at the mercy of stats rolling poorly in most cases. With this in mind, it is often better to roll with the talent stars provided to you with the hire, rather than roll for stats you may never get, with some exceptions of specific talent stars temptations that should be avoided (see below).

• Missing Fatigue Stars:
  If your frontliner unit has melee defence & melee skill talent stars, but is missing talent stars in fatigue, you may have to build a suboptimal low fatigue impact build. This meaning that you ought to invest into perks that would otherwise be skippable with an efficient frontliner build (aka. Brawny, Gifted, non-ideal weapon masteries), avoid using perks that have an added fatigue cost (aka. Adrenaline, Rotate, Indomitable, etc.), and/or use subpar weapons that cost very little fatigue to use effectively (aka. two-handed flanged mace, greataxe, etc.). You will miss out on builds that take advantage of high damage weapons, weapon skills, strong fatigue perks, luxury perk points to spend, and the ability to overall do more damage in battle.
  Additionally, if your unit rolls hit point talent stars instead of fatigue, you can choose to build a Nimble variant of your frontliner build, with only a minor caution to how you spend your fatigue. Just note the weaknesses of building a Nimble frontliner (see Nimble in the perk sections).
  If your ranged build is missing fatigue stars, you could seek to build them normally with the understanding that you ought to pick up the perk Recover, as you will actually need to use it in longer fights without a high fatigue pool.
  When it comes to a polearm unit without fatigue stars, you should seek to use a single target polearm like a billhook to save on fatigue usage, as you will not be able to effectively use the AoE of a swordlance or the secondary skills of a polehammer often enough to merit using them. That said, you can aid your Battle Forged polearm/banner carrier units with Brawny or Gifted for the added fatigue help if wanted.
  As for a tank unit without fatigue stars, you will struggle to use active perks effectively, so you will have to rely on your melee defence more often, and it might be better to build a Nimble Overwhelm tank that focuses their AP usage on debuffing your opponent.

• Missing Melee Skill Stars:
  If your frontliner unit has melee defence and fatigue stars, but is missing talent stars in melee skill, you ought to seek to build this unit into a damage absorbing tank. Whether this unit is built Nimble or Battle Forged is dependent on if this unit has talent stars in hit points for Nimble, or if they don’t have hit point talent stars for Battle Forged. While the effectiveness of Nimble versus Battle Forged can go either way, the need for a preference should be determined by how many Battle Forged or Nimble frontliner users you have in your company already. The more Battle Forged frontliners you have in your ranks, the more of a need to hold off high armour penetration damage in relevant fights, and the more Nimble frontliners you have in your ranks, the more you might need stable, high-end heavy armour protention.
  If your company already has enough damage absorbing tanks, you ought to replace this hire, unless you want to roll with a subpar build. The only real builds that thrive without melee skill, besides ranged weapon specialists, would be tanks and banner carriers.

• Missing Melee Defence Stars:
  If your frontliner unit has melee skill stars and fatigue stars, but is missing talent stars in melee defence, you can build this unit as a subpar low enemy contact unit. Your unit will still be able to deal damage efficiently, you will just take damage much more often and be extra vulnerable in dangerous fights. An example of a low enemy contact unit would be a two-handed flanged mace user, as they would be able to daze the one of opponents they are in contact with, which helps reduce the damage threat they may receive. Alternatively, you could just put this unit in a center “pocket” in your frontline so that they are guaranteed to be limited on the amount of units next to them; However, it is important to note that you cannot employ this strategy in every battle without it being detrimental to your other units due to the large number of enemies that are present in difficult late-game battles.
  As an alternative to building a subpar frontliner, you can seek to turn this unit into an efficient polearm unit. It is largely dependent on what your company’s needs are.

• Don’t be tempted by stars in: Ranged Defence, Initiative, Resolve (non-banner), Ranged Skill
  The stat known as ranged defence is a unique case, as it does not provide enough value to be worth the stat point investment. This is mainly because there are not an abundance of ranged heavy fights & threatening ranged foes in Battle Brothers. Additionally, it is because we are limited on stat points to distribute, as leveling ranged defence isn’t a negative thing, it is only a bad play since there is a low stat benefit & we are limited on stat points to distribute.
  When it comes to initiative, you can use this as a side focus of certain builds such as a fencing sword user, but the main issue with leveling initiative is that we are limited on how many stats we can level up. So with a fencer, you will be wanting melee skill, then you will want melee defence to survive, then you will want to level initiative for dmg output, then you will want high fatigue to be able to even benefit from weapon skill use, and then you will want hit points for a Nimble build as you will not be able to go a Battle Forged build due to heavy armour draining initiative. Often losing out on two key stats. There are other initiative based builds like dodge tanks that exist, but are far from effective when compared to their regular stat building counterparts.
  With resolve, you will want to stick to limiting yourself on overleveling it, as there is only so much value you can gain from leveling resolve. Similarly to ranged defence, there are just not very many resolve punishing enemies that would merit spending a noticeable amount of points into resolve beyond a basic amount (50+).
  As for ranged skill, one shouldn’t build units with low base ranged skill into units who use ranged skill (<43) when better options exist.

♢ How to Manage Fodder & Imperfect Hires: Part 2 ♢

What to do with Fodder or hires without redeeming qualities:
When it comes to hires that do not meet the potential for an efficient character build, you must seek to make use out of the money that you spent, if indeed money is still a relevant issue in your campaign. Having a unit with no potential implies that your unit has talent stars in unuseful places and/or has unfortunate base stats (although, you should always hire from a good background with your potential hires).

The role of a fodder is to assist and protect your troops that you want to keep with you into the late-game. So, you will still want to use them effectively, as taking unnecessary damage and losing troops is usually a big net loss, and you will likely lose their armour/weapons in addition to the money spent on hiring them. The idea is that you should make the best usage out of your hires in the earlier portions of the game and train them in ways that they are still useful for your company until you get a better replacement (for each failed hire) in the late-game.

When building your fodder you will need to be flexible on how you build them, as you will level their stats accordingly to their needs.
Here are some example fodder builds that will help you build your units based of various shortcomings at the start of the game.

Semi-Important Notes:

• You may not want to get Berserk & Killing Frenzy if you intend to funnel the kills to more valuable hires, as they will see very little usage. That said, if you have no qualms against funneling experience into your fodder units that you will eventually fire, then a handful of these suggested fodder builds would need mild revision, as Killing Frenzy & Berserk are tremendous damage output assets.
• While Student is a great perk that can allow you to skip past picking too many perks in the early tiers, the problem with assigning Student to a fodder hire is that they will not be having a focus on gaining experience, as you still want to funnel as much experience into your more valuable hires instead. That said, you still can pick Student without breaking too many ethical bones, you will just be depriving your fodder unit of getting certain starting perks earlier to gain a perk advantage before you seek to replace you fodder hire, and they will only get harder to get rid of cost wise.

Low Melee Skill, Talented Hit Points Fodder Archetype: (only redeeming talented stat is hit points)
Perk Order (Duelist):
Fast Adaptation → Dodge → Rotate → Gifted → Underdog → Nimble → Colossus → Duelist → Indomitable → Recover
Perk Order (AoE Two-Hander):
Fast Adaptation → Dodge → Rotate → Gifted → Underdog → Nimble → Colossus → Reach Advantage → Fearsome/Pathfinder → Recover
Perk Order (Single Target Two-Hander):
Fast Adaptation → Dodge → Rotate → Gifted → Underdog → Nimble → Colossus → Quick Hands → Pathfinder → Resilient
Main Stat Priority: Melee Skill → Hit Points → Melee Defence → Fatigue (on very low rolls of other stats, if Fatigue is a max roll)
Summary: This unit will be a failure in terms of performing offensive and defensive feats that talented units can perform; However, this unit has the potential to contribute to your company’s damage output in meaningful ways, as well as absorb attacks for your company to better protect the more promising units. This build can go in multiple directions depending on the weapon role you want to give them. They could be a Duelist that can also be a flexible Indomitable + Recover unit. They could be a AoE Two-Hander (most likely greatsword), but they would not take Quick Hands, but instead would take Fearsome/Pathfinder + Recover. They could be a Single Target Two-Hander, which would take Quick Hands for situational polearm usage with either Pathfinder & Resilient for their final perk to help aid them in various niche situations. Overall, this is your typical low melee skill hire for the early to middle portion of your game or until you replace them.

Low Melee Skill Fodder Archetype: (maybe he rolled ranged defence, initiative, resolve, or ranged skill as his three talents, unlucky)
Perk Order (Duelist):
Fast Adaptation → Gifted → Rotate → Brawny → Underdog → Battle Forged → Duelist → Indomitable → Recover → Colossus
Perk Order (Single Target Two-Hander):
Fast Adaptation → Gifted → Rotate → Quick Hands → Underdog → Battle Forged → Head Hunter → Pathfinder → Colossus → Weapon Mastery
Main Stat Priority: Melee Skill → Melee Defence → Hit Points → Fatigue/Resolve (on very low rolls of other stats, if Fatigue is a max roll)
Summary: This is one of the worst outcomes you can get when rolling for talent stars. Although, good base stats can bring a build into a viable strength on the correct background, it is something one mustn’t settle on if you are trying to secure the best company you can reasonably achieve. As for the chance you get no redeemable stats with talent stars, you can salvage this unit into either a Duelist or a Single Target Two-hander for the best results. As a Duelist, you will be very survivable with their flexible Indomitable, but they will still be able to perform some meaningful damage output. With this unit being build into a Single Target Two-Hander, you will be able to gain the situationally flexible Quick Hands into a polearm tactic, as well as remain primarily fatigue neutral with a single target attack per turn. What makes this variant of fodder different from the hit point talented fodder, is that you will be building this one Battle Forged and you will be either supplementing your Fatigue drain with Brawny or you will be going fatigue neutral.

High Melee Skill Fodder Archetype: (has a star or two in Melee Skill, nothing else important)
Perk Order (Battle Forged):
Pathfinder → Gifted → Rotate → Polearm mastery → Brawny → Battle Forged → Berserk → Killing Frenzy → Fearsome → Recover
Perk Order (Nimble):
Pathfinder → Gifted → Rotate → Polearm mastery → Colossus → Nimble → Berserk → Killing Frenzy → Fearsome → Recover
Main Stat Priority: Melee Skill → Fatigue → Hit Points/Resolve (stop at 50+ Resolve, Arena Included) → Melee Defence (luxury)
Summary: With a unit that has a high melee skill start or has talent stars in melee skill, but has no other valuable talent stars, you will be best off building this unit into a polearm unit. This unit can be either Battle Forged or Nimble depending on if you get a talent star in hit points or not. That said, this fodder build is one of the only fodder builds I would ethically recommend picking up Killing Frenzy & Berserk on, as they have the potential to deal a lot of damage output and can serve in your company as a scuffed polearm unit into the late-game. With this in mind, the primary difference between this and the official Heavy Polearm build is that the Heavy Polearm build has more expendable fatigue & would typically use an AoE swordlance. While this build should still utilize the AoE swordlance, they will run out of fatigue, be without perfect mobility (Pathfinder), more health security (Colossus), a lack of sidearm flexibility, and may be better off using a billhook (dropping Fearsome for Pathfinder or Colossus).

Talented Hit Points & Fatigue Fodder Archetype: (only redeeming talented stats are hit points and fatigue)
Perk Order:
Colossus → Dodge → Rotate → Shield Expert → Underdog → Nimble → Indomitable → Overwhelm → Dagger Mastery → Recover
Main Stat Priority: Hit Points → Melee Defence → Fatigue
Summary: You essentially build this archetype to be a Nimble Tank, but since you cannot perform that well with low Melee Defence, then spending your AP to Dagger Mastery Overwhelm your opponents, while having Indomitable as a tactical option is more efficient.

♦ Traits in Review: A-C: Part 1 ♦

I figured it would be good to talk about the different traits in the game, as they can either make or break certain character builds. Do note that each trait will be evaluated in relation to the context of this guide. If you are looking for an introduction to each trait and their mechanics, seek the Battle Brothers wiki or similar services.
Traits:
Much like the perks sections below I have a set of rating keys that revolve around the limited trait potential of an efficient late-game company:(0-4).

• 0 = Complete garbage, 1 = Bad but it could be worse, 2 = Not useless but not positive, 3 = Good but usually a better option, 4 = Great if you can get it.
• ♛ = Frontliner, ♝ = Polearm, ♞ = Banner Carrier, ♜ = Nimble Tank, ⚡ = Archer, ♟ = Fodder, ♿ = Reserve, ☸ = Core Trait for Alternate Meta/Memeable Builds.

Starting off with:

• Addict: (Terrible:0): The trait Addict can be obtained by an event after your unit becomes drunk or consumes potions/drugs at least 4 times in your unit’s lifetime, with the condition that the event that causes the trait to be added has to happen within 3 days of becoming drunk or consuming a potion/drug. As for the trait’s effects, you are looking at some serious debuffs to your units combat potential, as well as some very bad events tied to the trait. Starting with the combat debuff, it is a loss of -10% to melee skill, -10% to ranged skill, -10% to melee defence, -10% to ranged defence, and -10% to resolve. As for the events tied to the trait, there are only negative events, and one of them involves the chance of the death of your unit if you are unaware, or the loss of items. With that said, the trait is removable if you cease for 14 or more days to give your addict troop any drinks that cause him to become drunk or a potion/drug. While tavern drinks are necessary, and potions/drugs are very helpful in riskier fights, the chance of your unit gaining the Addict trait is present, which leads to a loss of combat stats and potentially irreplaceable/valuable items.
• Ailing: (Bad:1): With the trait Ailing, you will see the effects of poison last an additional turn. This meaning that you will be under the effects of poison for longer when hit by goblin ambushers in goblin fights, and you will take additional tick of poison damage when up against webknechts. Other than those niche situations, you will not see any other poisons in the game, besides perhaps friendly firing upon an ally while you use a poison vial. That said, this trait is removable with a monk or beast slayer background related event, and there are worse traits that your unit could have.
• Asthmatic: (Terrible:0): With -3 fatigue recovery per turn, the trait negates any tolerance to be had with a recruit that is Asthmatic. Fatigue recovery will always be a priority for a unit that intends to make themselves useful in combat, and Asthmatic is the antithesis of this.
• Athletic: (Good:3,♛,♝,♞,⚡,♜,♟): The trait Athletic will reduce the fatigue drain from traversing a tile by 2, which can add up if you need to charge, retreat or reposition in a fight. Otherwise, it is a pretty alright trait to have on just about any class, but it isn’t crucial to the success of any build.
• Bleeder: (Bad:1): There is not an advantage to have an ally bleed during combat, and with Bleeder you will receive bleeding damage for one additional turn, on top of the normal 2. Bleeding naturally does 5 damage per turn, but when facing enemies with cleaver mastery you will take 10 damage per turn. So, you will essentially take 15 to 60 damage with the Bleeder trait, instead of 10 to 40 damage (without an enemy with cleaver mastery). Ultimately, having Bleeder on a troop won’t completely ruin a hire, but it is best to avoid having the trait on anyone. This is thanks to the late-game dangers of orc, barbarian, human, necrosavant, and ancient undead cleavers.
• Bloodthirsty: (Poor:2,♛,♝,♟): With Bloodthirsty your slashing and crushing units will be able to decapitate/brutalize all enemies you kill, which is pretty powerful against the undead. This is because decapitating wiedergangers, or any unit that can turn into a zombie will stop the unit from resurrecting (except for fallen heroes). This can be triggered from swords, axes, and cleavers (bludgeons can also bash open opponents). Additionally, there is a negative event when near a town that causes your troop to go on a rampage, costing you some reputation and/or gold. Otherwise, the trait is fairly specialized for wiederganger fights, and the decapitations are mostly aesthetic, for those who are into that…
• Brave: (Poor:2,♛,♝,♞,⚡,♜,♟): The trait Brave is very much a okay trait to have on any character, as +5 free resolve doesn’t hurt anyone. There may be an event or few that benefits from your character being brave, which can be nice. Otherwise, there are better traits for your characters to have, including the more impactful Fearless, in which provides a +10 resolve boost, or earning Arena Veteran for the free +10 resolve.
• Bright: (Good:3,♛,♝,♞,⚡,♜,♿,☸): The permanent 10% experience buff that Bright has to offer for your troop is strong, as the buff will last with you throughout the entirety of your run with that character until max level. More experience will always result in the bettering of your troop’s stats, which will allow you to be successful. Once your stats start to soft cap, it may lose some of its value, but overall it will serve your troop well. Additionally, for most builds, obtaining late-game perks faster is greatly beneficial for survivability and damage output.
• Brute: (Good:3,♛,♝,♞,☸): The trait Brute can be classified as a give and take trait, as you receive +15% damage upon hitting the head with a melee weapon, but you sacrifice 5 melee skill. In the long run, this trait can be alright for dealing Dps once you’ve made up for the loss in melee skill; However, you will likely notice the lack of melee skill during the early leveling of the character. In a build of efficiency geared towards a late-game, this isn’t something that you need to worry about too much, but it is bad when your unit doesn’t deal their Dps. This trait will work out well for a unit running Head Hunter, but that isn’t really a perk that can fit into every build. Additionally, there is also a negative town event that can occur with having Brute, which can cost you a bit of gold and relations with the town.
• Clubfooted: (Bad:1): With Clubfooted, your unit will build up 2 fatigue for each tile traveled, which is an unnecessary crutch to have on any troop that wants to move about the combat map. Although, you can have a playstyle where you don’t move around as much, unless you want to reposition to a more advantageous location. The trait will make the unit heavily fatigued very quickly if you are intending to retreat from a fight and could put the unit in danger if he falls behind. Otherwise, there are worse traits out there to have, but for certain, having a unit be Clubfooted will not help you win any battles, especially on bad terrain.

♢ Traits in Review: C-E: Part 2 ♢

• Clumsy: (Bad:1): A trait that’s sole purpose is to reduce the efficiency of your melee skill can understandably be determined to be a bad trait. While this may only apply to melee troops, if you happen upon a ranged unit with Clumsy, you can afford to be indifferent about the trait. Otherwise, there is no benefit to the -5 melee skill trait, but there are harsher traits to have on your troops. Additionally, your brother will have the chance to injure himself in a couple of negative events.
• Cocky: (Terrible:0): With Cocky being a give and take trait, you will have to value how much losing 5 melee and ranged defence in exchange for only 5 resolve is worth to you. I would argue that there is no build that could benefit from losing melee defence. The +5 to resolve is not worth the trade off, and there are other traits that give you additional resolve with no downside, including free Arena Veteran resolve.
• Craven: (Terrible:0,♿): The trait Craven is not worth having on any brother you want to keep in the long-term, as a -10 to resolve is very damaging in keeping your brother steady during combat. The only bonus to having Craven is that your troop will be forever content in reserve, which is valuable for a meme background that you just want to keep around for the events.
• Dastard: (Poor:2,♿): The trait Dastard is commonly used to allow some troops, mainly meme backgrounds, to stay in reserve without taking hits to morale. The downside is that your troop will always start with a wavering morale. In terms of traits used for reserve sitting, this is a better deal than the -10 resolve loss from Craven. Additionally, you will be able to remove this trait via a couple different events if you have the right backgrounds.
• Deathwish: (Good:3,♛,♝,♞,♜,♟,☸): With the ability to not take a morale hit from taking damage to your hit points, you will be able to avoid the debuffs associated with a wavering morale. While it is likely that with a strong resolve, and a good defence, you will not take morale hits too frequently, the Deathwish trait simply makes it so that morale hits happen less often, generally speaking. This makes Deathwish a generally good trait to have on any member of your company that intends to absorb damage and is especially key for HP Nimble builds.
• Determined: (Good:3,♛,♝,♞,♜,⚡,♟): The trait Determined is largely undervalued. This is because starting with a confident morale every battle (if your mood is content and above), gives you a +10% buff to melee/ranged skill, and melee/ranged defence. This could happen in every battle if you can manage your troops’ mood properly. The only downside is you may lose your confident status over the course of a battle, and one can normally achieve a confident status without the trait. Otherwise, it is a solid trait for any role to gain the edge in the start of a fight.
• Dexterous: (Good:3,♛,♝,♞,♟): The deal with the trait Dexterous is that you will be receiving a +5 to your melee skill, which is pretty solid for any melee fighter. While you will soft cap on melee skill eventually in the long run, you will always have the +5 to melee skill to help you out in the short term, and in the case that you are being debuffed. Otherwise, there are better traits that a melee fighter could have, despite melee skill being a highly valued stat.
• Disloyal: (Terrible:0,♿): With the trait Disloyal you will be able to keep one of your troops in reserve without them naturally falling below content, but you run the risk of your troop abandoning your company if your mood, money or food runs low. Otherwise, it is important to compare Disloyal to the Craven and Dastard traits for their ability to hold people in reserve.
• Drunkard: (Poor:2,♛,♝,♟): When it comes to the trait Drunkard, it is difficult to put an accurate value on the trait that pleases everyone. On one hand, the trait is loved for its +10% bonus damage, in which can impact various battles over the course of a campaign and works well with other bonus damage sources. In addition to the bonus damage you gain +5 resolve, which works well against resolve checking enemies. On the other hand, your hire will lose -5 melee skill, and -10 ranged skill, which is fairly annoying, but a worthwhile trade off in the long run. The main problem with the trait that makes it difficult to put a value on is the random events where your Drunkard hire will have a chance to discard a random item equipped on him or in your company’s wagon inventory. The reason why this makes Drunkard a poor trait is because it makes carrying valuable or famed items in your inventory very problematic, and weapons on that character will have to be ones you are okay with losing. In other words, no famed item for that guy, which can result in missing out on bonus damage from the famed items. The trade off with this event is that you have the option to scold your Drunkard, which can result in him losing the trait. There are some minor factors to consider such as the chance that your Drunkard becomes drunk after a single tavern visit, and other events. In the end, it comes down to how attached you are to your famed greatsword, and how much you value a +10% damage buff.
• Dumb: (Bad:1): The trait Dumb is simply put a negative trait, as a -15% debuff to experience gain will not benefit any campaign intended for this guide. That being said, the trait can be removed if you have a Historian or Monk background via a series of random events, and will wear off once you reach max level.
• Eagle Eyes: (Poor:2,⚡): With the trait Eagle Eyes, your mercenary will be able to see one additional tile range of vision. This is helpful when one’s vision is penalized at night time, from a vision impairing injury, or when your unit is poisoned by goblins. With the introduction of a -1 vision penalty helmet, in most standard daytime fights, you archer’s bow range will not be harshly limited thanks to increase in max vision from the Eagle Eyes trait; However, with the archer being able to utilize the 120 sallet helmet without any vision penalties, there is no reason to utilize the opportunity to wear a -1 vision penalty helmet, unless it is a famed armour. In conclusion, the trait is beneficial to have, but not very impactful compared to other traits.

♢ Traits in Review: F-I: Part 3 ♢

• Fainthearted: (Bad:1): The trait Fainthearted should be judged in the context of how much does this trait take away from your hire. If we are looking at it from that perspective, we see that the trait causes the troop to receive -5 resolve, in which we can sum up to about a max roll of a resolve level up, or a patch up via arena trait. With resolve being a good stat to have a decent base of for frontline troops, you definitely do not want this trait, but on a troop in the backline this trait could be almost negligible. In the long run, there are worse traits to have on your hire, but one should still avoid obtaining this trait.
• Fat: (Bad:1): The Fat trait should be avoided for all troops, but if your mercenary has the trait it isn’t the worst trait to have. This is because a +10 to HP is pretty decent, but it comes at the cost of -10 to fatigue, in which is not an acceptable exchange. With the effects of the trait out of the way, it is important to note that the Fat trait can be achieved by troops with the Gluttonous trait, but also the Fat trait can be removed via a random event. Additionally, there is the trait Tough, in which grants a no-nonsense +10 bonus to HP, making the Fat trait shrink in value even further.
• Fearless: (Good:3,♛,♝,♞,♜,⚡,♟): The trait Fearless adds to your hire a +10 bonus to the resolve stat, in which is helpful for securing a solid base resolve to work with. Having to spend less level ups, if any at all, into resolve for an ideal candidate that is to be for an efficient character build is less efficient than spending your level ups in other more important stats (with the only exception being a banner carrier build). Even if you hire comes with an ideal amount of resolve, additional resolve is still very valuable for taking on hexes, alps, geists, ancient undead, large swarms of enemies, and even becoming confident easier. Fearless is rated as good, because of the positive value you will get out of a +10 bonus to resolve; However, it is important to keep in mind that every hire’s individual base stats will determine the ideal traits that are best for that particular hire & that the arena traits can be a fix for resolve instead.
• Fragile: (Terrible:0): With the trait Fragile, you will gain nothing of positive value, as a -10 to your total hit points provides no benefit. With the current list of possible backgrounds to hire, obtaining Fragile cannot be ignored, as there is no background that is capable of obtaining the trait Fragile that can afford to lose 10 hit points, without ruining the future potential of an efficient character build candidate.
• Gluttonous: (Poor:2): When considering the value of the trait Gluttonous, you must consider the role of the character build in your company. If it is a Nimble build, you can utilize the event that can occur to make the unit obtain the Fat trait for the bonus hit points. Otherwise, having to spend more on food, running the risk of your unit abandoning you during times of low provisions, and the chance of a couple primarily negative events occurring is not a valuable exchange for the trait slot. To clarify, this trait is bad on most builds, but won’t ruin your build. This is because the Fat trait can be trained off of your unit, and the trait Gluttonous does not affect the stats of one’s unit until they become Fat.
• Greedy: (Terrible:0): The problem with the trait Greedy is not necessarily the 15% increased daily wages for that hire, but more so the events & effects that come with it. Your unit will be quick to leave the company if your gold totals drop too low, which shouldn’t really ever happen, but there are situations where you are cashing out for a famed item. The main issue with the Greedy trait is that a unit with Greedy will eventually demand for raises in pay and will continue to repeat that event indefinitely. With Greedy being a trait that can be obtained by most backgrounds through other company events, it is a trait that is sometimes hard to avoid, but one that one should seek to avoid by hiring the Paymaster for your retinue. Additionally, your Greedy units will gain a bad mood if you stop a hedge knight fight by spending gold, which could result in your unit abandoning the company.
• Hesitant: (Poor:2): The trait Hesitant is simple in its debuff as it solely removes 10 initiative from its bearer. There are some minor, hyper specific event interactions that can be affected by the trait, but all is negligible. With that said, having -10 initiative is not a big deal, even on an archer.
• Huge: (Good:3,♛,♝): With the trait Huge you will gain the all valuable bonus damage for melee attacks. It comes down to a +10% increase in damage dealt, which would stack nicely with other bonus damage sources such as the perks Killing Frenzy & Executioner. While 10% isn’t going to matter all the time, but it will have an impact on the amount of hits to kill an enemy throughout your many battles. With this in mind, you will be sacrificing -5 to your defenses, most notably you will be losing -5 to your melee defence. It is a more valuable trait for polearm units, as they can spare the loss of melee defence for the extra damage output, but don’t shy away from obtaining Huge for one of your duelists or two-handers.
• Impatient: (Good:3,♛,♝,♞,♜,⚡): Having Impatient on any of your hires is fairly valuable, as there are a number of situations where being able to act first at the start of the round is beneficial. Some situations would include but are not limited to are: being able to instantly call a working retreat at the start of the fight, setting up your units to defend against ranged units, and being able to out initiative high initiative units such as: hexes and direwolves. With that said, there are stronger traits to have on most of your units, and you can achieve this effect with the deserters alternate start.
• Insecure: (Bad:1): With the negative effect of the trait Insecure being that your unit will never reach a confident morale, it is safe to say that Insecure is a bad trait to have. This is mainly because you will be missing out on the 10% bonus to melee skill/def and ranged skill/def that you can obtain easily at the start of or in battle. It isn’t the worst trait to have, but it does lower the combat potential of your unit.
• Iron Lungs: (Great:4,♛,♝,♞,♜,⚡,♟): The trait iron lungs is generally regarded as one of the best traits to have on your hires due to the extra 3 fatigue that you regenerate per turn. This regeneration allows you to use your fatigue heavy abilities more freely, take less turns where you are using the perk Recover, and allows for niche builds to exist where you are able to have exactly the amount of fatigue in order to use a combination of abilities every turn. Whatever the reason you use Iron Lungs, it is simply a great trait to have on any build.
• Iron Jaw: (Good:3,♛,♝,♞,♜,⚡,♟): By lowering the threshold of receiving an injury upon taking a hit to your life points it makes Iron Jaw a valuable trait to have for a Nimble build, with Battle Forged units when being attacked by armour penetration, or any unit in the early-game when armour is low. With that said, there are better traits that do more for your late-game units, as the value of lowering the threshold of receiving injuries really only matters if you are taking hp damage, which isn’t typical of a late-game Battle Forged unit. Of course, there will still be encounters where your unit will take hp damage, but it isn’t going to be a trait that is valuable for every battle.

♢ Traits in Review: I-Q: Part 4 ♢

• Irrational: (Bad:1): With the trait Irrational you receive either a -10 or +10 on morale checks while in combat. This meaning that your unit can either increase his morale insignificantly (you will almost always end up at confident in the late-game without this trait), or your unit will lower his morale irrationally (knowing dice rolls, there will be times of unfortunate failures in morale, while the good streaks remain insignificant). That said, in the long run the trait Irrational will not benefit you enough to merit taking up a trait slot, as the impact of this trait is poor.
• Loyal: (Poor:2,♿): The trait Loyal is very much a neutral trait, as it doesn’t provide any noticeable effects when a unit has this trait. The idea of this trait is to allow for a unit to resist desertion if they are unhappy. With that said, you should not ever be at the risk of a unit deserting your company, as it is relatively easy to manage the moods of your company with the occasional tavern visit. An added benefit of this trait is that it allows for your unit to have a barrier in-between the company daily wage increase event failure and gaining the Greedy trait. In other words, your unit will lose his Loyal trait instead of becoming Greedy on the first time this event procs. In the end, the impact of Loyal will not be noticed, but at least the effect is not negative, other than taking up a trait slot.
• Lucky: (Poor:2,♛,♝,♞,⚡,♟,♿): With the trait Lucky you will slightly increase the odds of dodging an attack by having a 10% chance for the attacker to have to make two attack rolls on your Lucky unit. To be more specific on the gains received, you will gain at most 2.5 melee defence, as that is only if the enemy has about a 50% chance to hit you. The trait is next to worthless if the enemy has a really good chance to hit you, but the perk does have it’s highest value when the enemy has a 5% chance to hit. This is because it surpasses the cap of 5% to be hit to be much closer to 4.5%, which isn’t much, but it is essentially almost a 10% increase in avoiding being hit on an already very low hit chance. With that said, there are better traits to have on the majority of your builds; Although, it can be particularly good for a tank unit with exceptional melee defence.
• Mad: (Bad:1,♿): The trait Mad will be used in three aspects: an unnoticed boost to resolve of +15 or a damaging -15 resolve when up against a morale check, immunity to fear and mind control abilities (Ancient Priest and Hexe resolve attacks), and the ability to trade The Black Book gained from the Sunken Library in exchange for a good famed shield (with daze foe upon block), two mysterious jugs that grant one free perk point each, or 50k gold. As a trait all together it is not worth having on your unit, as it really isn’t that great to fail resolve checks, and the immunity to fear and mind control abilities isn’t very impactful. With that said, it’s primarily bad in the sense that it can only be gained on non-efficient backgrounds, as you will need either a level 2+ Historian or a level 9+ Cultist to claim the trait via an event. Just use the trait as the one time opportunity to gain two additional perk points with the mysterious jugs to put one or two units above the perk cap (see the section “Miscellaneous: Answered Questions & Helpful Comments: Part 5” on how to spend those perk points the most efficiently).
• Night Blind: (Bad:1): When it comes to losing -1 vision at night from Night Blind, there isn’t much of a burden on your combat efficiency as any unit other than a long distance archer who wants to snipe a high priority target such as: necromancers, hexe, enemy archers, goblin shamans, etcetra. other than that situation there isn’t any real situation where having -1 vision is bad on a melee build, besides the loss of a trait slot, unless you are wearing a heavy helmet and are inflicted with a vision penalty from poison, in which you may not be able to perform two tile distance strikes.
• Night Owl: (Bad:1,⚡): With the trait Night Owl you will regain +1 vision on your unit during nighttime, which the normal vision penalty at night is -2. This does make nighttime fights slightly more viable for an archer build or for scouting your enemies without a falcon; However, this trait does nothing to stop the -30% to ranged skill, which greatly inhibits one’s ability to use archery during the night, despite the -30% lost to ranged defence that occurs as well. While this trait isn’t negative in value and there are worst traits to have, it does attempt to aid an inefficient strategy in only a very small way.
• Old: (Terrible:0): To start, it is pretty safe to say that the Old trait is an extremely negative trait to have. While it is a trait that is essentially exclusively received by the Swordmaster background, it is a trait that I wanted to discuss, as a minus to core stats on an already stat punished background is unforgivable. Almost as fast as it is achieved, it can be removed with a limited supply of water skins filled with the waters of life. The trait provides no real value other than a token 10 to resolve and the ability for the Swordmaster to be content with sitting in reserve. For more information on the Swordmaster background visit the Backgrounds to Consider section.
• Optimist: (Poor:2,♛,♝,♞,♜,⚡,♟,♿): The trait Optimist is in general a positive trait. With that said there isn’t a lot of value to be had with a +5 bonus to resolve upon receiving a positive morale check. This is because both in and out of battle it is fairly easy to maintain mood and morale without the need for a trait. Overall it can be a helpful trait to have in getting to those better morale/moods, but it will cost you a very limited trait slot.
• Paranoid: (Good:3,♛,♝,♞,♟): The main benefit of Paranoid is that it gives an increase of +5 to melee defence (also +5 ranged defence), which more melee defence is always of high value on any build for shortening the gap of times hit per battles and times dodged. There is a major initiative penalty of -30 for having the trait, but for most builds there is debatably no downside to having lowered initiative, as going later in the turn order can synergize well with certain perks like Reach Advantage and Indomitable. That said, you wouldn’t want this trait on a Nimble user with the perk Dodge, or on an archer as turn order can matter for sniping opponents. While this trait isn’t as universally good as Sure Footing, it is still a very strong trade off to gain melee defence in exchange for initiative, and a few possible mood related events.
• Pessimist: (Terrible:0): With the trait Pessimist you will receive a -5 to negative morale checks, in which simply makes the negative rolls very punishing. It is all the bed effects of irrational and the opposite of Optimist. In addition, your positive moods will go away quicker than default, which is not good for maintaining your chances of a confident morale buff at the start of a fight. Overall, the trait provides no value to your unit, and will only eat away your morale, unnecessarily.
• Quick: (Poor:2,⚡,☸): While an extra +10 initiative isn’t usually that helpful for most completed character builds, a small boost to initiative does provide value to some. Some builds that would benefit the most from this trait would be builds that use Dodge as a means of defence, a fencer who uses initiative for extra damage, and other builds that benefit from having a small boost in turn order such as archers trying to get the edge on an enemy crossbowmen. Other than those scenarios most builds don’t see much benefit from receiving the trait, even though the value is not negative.

♢ Traits in Review: S-W: Part 5 ♢

• Short Sighted: (Poor:2): With the trait Short Sighted it isn’t always a deal breaker when having this trait on one of your troops, as frontline units will not be overly impacted by a -1 to vision. Although, it is important to note that archers and polearm users will be negatively impacted by a penalty to vision. This is because an archers max range will be limited during night fights, as well as If you are trying to take advantage of high ground snipes, or as a polearm user you might be limited by a heavy vision penalty from wearing a helmet, rendering you unable to attack the two tile distance of a polearm. Otherwise, it is a trait best avoided on most, but it is not always a deal breaker.
• Spartan: (Poor:2): The trait Spartan is an okay trait to benefit from as eating food at half the rate as a typical troop is pretty nice in terms of maintaining your food economy. Additionally, your Spartan unit will be less likely to leave if you run out of food, which can be valuable for extended wilderness runs in the late-game. With this in mind, you are giving up a trait slot for a non-combat trait, as well as this trait clogging up your events with a repetitive event that can result in exclusively neutral or negative outcomes.
• Strong: (Great:4,♛,♝,♞,♜,⚡,♟,♿): Arguably, the trait Strong is one of the best traits you can have on any unit in your company, as the extra +10 to fatigue is welcomed in by any role in your company. The trait is important for Nimble builds who can’t afford to put stat points into fatigue over their other core stats, and heavy armoured units will almost always benefit from additional fatigue to spare. The trait also comes with a few positive events to help strengthen the value of having the trait on members in your party. All in all Strong is a great trait to have and there is usually not limit to how much fatigue you can utilize.
• Superstitious: (Terrible:0): With the trait Superstitious you will be at a -10 disadvantage against resolve punishing enemies that make a roll against your resolve. This would make it harder to face off against such foes throughout your campaign, and hurt your performance with that unit. Circumstantially, that isn’t the worst part of the trait, as there are a few harshly punishing events that can occur on a unit with Superstitious. This would include events resulting in a bad mood for the unit, applying a -50% resolve debuff for a few days, and the chance to lose some gold. Overall, this trait is not beneficial to have on a unit in your company.
• Sure Footing: (Great:4,♛,♝,♞,♜,⚡,♟,♿): The trait Sure Footing is an all around good trait to have on any unit, as a +5 to melee defence can be useful on any efficient character build. The extra +5 to melee defence is always static despite any possible debuffs and is a strong base to work with from start to finish of your build.
• Survivor: (Poor:2,♟,♿): With the ability to survive with a 90% chance when hit points are reduced to 0, one may consider this trait to have value in the long run; However, you are better off not getting your troop into a situation to where his hp would be reduced to 0. By not putting your troops in an incredibly disadvantageous position you are negating the chance of your unit’s hp from reaching 0, in which makes the trait Survivor never become valuable. While it is easy to say that you won’t put your troops into a disadvantageous fight, but if you are skilled at Battle Brothers and have reached an end game company, you really shouldn’t be at a large disadvantage in any fight. In addition, the main reason why this trait is rated as poor is because you will be revived with a permanent injury debuff, in which can be removed by limited use water skins, but are otherwise typically greatly negative.
• Swift: (Poor:2,♛,♝,♞,⚡,♟): With the trait Swift, you will be gaining +5 to ranged defence, which on it’s own as a trait is very negligible, but there is nothing too wrong with the trait, other than it taking up a trait slot. More ranged defence will allow your unit to dodge slightly more against ranged attacks, but also make it so that your ranged opponents will likely just target a different unit that is easier to hit.
• Team Player: (Poor:2,♛,♝,⚡): The trait Team Player is allows you to lower the chances of hitting your ally in an AoE attack or friendly fire situation by 50%. This meaning if you were to swing your weapon for a 80% chance to hit, and your ally has 40 melee defence, the attack would have about a 20% chance to hit your ally instead of a 40% chance. With this in mind, you do not want to be making attempts at friendly firing at your allies. It encourages bad actions that you should not attempt to risk, and these situations that may be more efficient to perform that involve the chance of friendly fire are very rare. That said, the worse harm this trait causes is the filling up of a trait slot, and there are much worse traits to have on your units. This one just doesn’t see much efficient use.
• Tiny: (Poor:2,♜,⚡): When it comes to the trait Tiny, you are trading 15% melee damage in exchange for a bonus of 5 melee and ranged defence, which can be useful for non-melee attacking builds such as banner carriers, archers and tanks. Looking at this trait from an efficiency-based perspective, it is only really a bonus to melee defence, as ranges defence is negligible in a late-game company, and with it only being a plus 5 to melee defence, you will notice there are better traits for achieving a bonus to melee defence that do not come with a harsh negative.
• Tough: (Great:4,♛,♝,♞,♜,⚡,♟,♿): The trait Tough will provide your unit with a bonus 10 hit points. While hit points are not the most important stat, it does provide value to a unit whom’s base hit point roll is less than the ideal starting amount, which can save you on future stat rolls. Overall, more hit points is always useful for any build; However, it is only the case as long as it isn’t in sacrifice for more important stats.
• Weasel: (Poor:2,♛,♝,♞,♜,⚡,♟): When talking about the trait Weasel we are talking about an incredible increase in melee defence; However, this +25 melee defence gained is only applied when you are in a fleeing state in terms of morale. With this in mind, it is seemingly hyper situational, but it can provide some value to a unit fleeing from a geist scream, and needs to avoid taking attacks of opportunities. With this mind, avoiding a fleeing state in a late-game company is commonplace. One will also avoid reaching such a state in the first place with the use of a banner carrier and 50+ resolve on one’s melee units. Additionally, it is worth mentioning that one cannot obtain the Hate for Undead or Hate for Greenskins traits. That said, there are worse traits to have and having Weasel is fine, just not the best use of your trait slot.

♢ Traits In Review: Grouped Traits: Part 6 ♢

• Pit Fighter: (Good:3): The trait Pit Fighter is the promise of a bonus 5 to 10 resolve in the future (other bonuses included), despite this tier of the trait providing no actual value yet. In order to obtain Pit Fighter you will have to earn it by gaining victories in the Southern city arena. Since this trait is obtained, it will be added to your current unit’s trait bar, even if they already have multiple traits. It is important to note that some backgrounds with low resolve will benefit/rely on gaining arena victories to improve one’s resolve without the investment of character level ups or perks. With this in mind, there is no efficiency-based reason not to try to obtain the arena traits for the extra resolve.
• Arena Fighter: (Great:4,♛,♝,♞,⚡,♜,☸): With Arena Fighter replacing the trait Pit Fighter after gaining 5 arena victories, you will gain +5 resolve to any build that meets the arena victory requirements. An extra +5 to one’s resolve is welcome on any efficient character build, and should be worked towards when convenient or when there is less of a demand for being efficient with your time for economic gains. With this said, it will be replaced by the next arena trait, Arena Veteran for an even larger bonus.
• Arena Veteran: (Great:4,♛,♝,♞,⚡,♜,☸): The trait Arena Veteran is a free obtainable trait that replaces Arena Fighter after you reach 12 wins in the arena with your unit. The trait provides a bonus +10 resolve, and the added 50% chance to survive with a permanent injury if killed by a non fatality attack. With this in mind, obtaining Arena Veteran is extraordinarily worth obtaining on every active company member, as it typically comes with very little risk to obtain with a leveled unit. As mentioned in the Pit Fighter trait explanation, this tier of the trait will bring more value to low resolve backgrounds, and it will allow you to patch up their resolve to 45-55 without spending any level up points on resolve. In terms of the +50% chance to survive a non fatality if killed, it isn’t something you should aim to ever use, as risk management and proper tactics will be able to prevent from reaching 0 hp (see the trait Survivor for more information).
• Fear of Beasts: (Bad:1): The Fear of Beasts trait is one of the more impactful fear themed traits as the -10 to resolve is particularly impactful when trying to resist charms from hexes. The resolve loss will also make it so you take more damage from alp encounters and is generally not positive to have on any build. Overall, there are worse traits to have on your units, but with that said, you can remove this trait via an event, as well as gain it after a tough loss against beasts.
• Fear of Greenskins: (Bad:1): With the Fear of Greenskins trait you will gain nothing of tangible value from having a -10 to resolve against orcs and goblins. This trait can be gained through big losses against greenskins, as well as lost through events. Otherwise, lowered resolve is never great, but there are worse traits to have, as long as you are not a Fearsome user.
• Fear of Undead: (Bad:1): When talking about Fear of Undead, the trait will impact your fights with a -10 to resolve when it comes to succeeding resolve checks against the ancient undead’s Fearsome and the geist’s screams. This could result in morale panics, but it is not terrible compared to some other negative traits, and much like the other fear traits it can be removed or gained.
• Hate for Beasts: (Poor:2,♞): With the trait Hate for Beasts you will have a bonus +10 resolve when fighting against beasts, which can be particularly valuable when facing against hexe and alps, whose abilities revolve around resolve. Much like the fear themed traits, this can be gained by losing units to beasts; However, it may be not very worthwhile to attempt to gain said trait, unless you can prevent bad moods easily and conduct the loss of troops safely. Units who have this trait cannot become fearful against beasts, which is a small plus.
• Hate for Greenskins: (Poor:2): The trait Hate for Greenskins will give you the added +10 resolve in fights against orcs and goblins. That said, the bonus resolve against greenskins is not particularly useful, as it isn’t usually resolve that is tested against these units. Like the other “Hate for” traits, this can be gained through heavy losses when against the associated units; However, it is not worthwhile to attempt to farm this additional trait, as it isn’t worth the bad mood management or time investment.
• Hate for Undead: (Poor:2,♞): When talking about the Hate for Undead trait in comparison to the other “Hate for” traits, the +10 bonus resolve against ancient undead and geists can be fairly decent have. That said, there are better starting traits to obtain in an efficiency-based campaign, but if you happen to come across or obtain this trait through the loss of sacrificial units, it would not be put to bad use.

♦ Perks: Tier 1: A Min-Max POV: Part 1 ♦

While perks deserve in-depth explanations of how they function and how they could be used in all scenarios/builds, this portion of this guide is going to be focused on the strengths and weaknesses of each perk in relation to an efficiency based playstyle/builds relative to this guides parameters of an efficient late-game company (See disclaimers section). Additionally, each perk will be valued and rated based off of their value to an efficient late-game build, in which is limited on perks, instead of seeking value out of usable perks that do not excel in their category of use. If you need an introduction or in-depth data presentation of each perk with a neutral evaluation I would suggest you go to the resources section at the bottom of this guide.
Perks:
For the sake of simplicity, I made a couple of sorting keys:(1-5)

• 0 = Avoid using, 1 = Not efficient to use, 2 = Usable but not recommended, 3 = Okay but possibly a better option, 4 = Good but not absolute, 5 = Absolutely top tier.
• ♛ = Frontliner, ♝ = Polearm, ♞ = Banner Carrier, ♜ = Nimble Tank, ⚡ = Archer, ♟ = Fodder, ☸ = Core Perk for Alternate Meta/Memeable Builds.

Starting off with:

Tier: 1
• Fast Adaptation: (Bad:1,♟): Fast Adaptation is a perk that only hires with low Melee/Ranged Skill benefit from. Additionally, this perk is really only meant for the short term as hit percentages eventually start to cap at 95%, and with veteran levels on your already good talent starred troops, you should not need to worry about hit chances unless you are up against some rare high melee defence units or if you are still in the construction phases of your company. The common problem with this perk is that people give it to their units in hopes that they will hit somebody after a couple misses. The reason why this is bad is because you are relying on failing to do something that should happen on the first go around. In addition, there are better ways to increase your chance to hit besides Fast Adaptation. This perk is not entirely useless as it can be very useful for trying to make untalented fodder troops useful for the duration of their stay in your company.
• Crippling Strikes: (Poor: 2,⚡,♟): From what is understood about Crippling Strikes is that it will allow you to increase the odds of you inflicting an injury on an opponent. That said, with most weapons you will already inflict injuries without the perk investment, but having Crippling Strikes can make a difference with lower-end damage attacks or when against enemies with high HP pools. Another factor to consider is how the value of injuries vary, and they are randomly pulled from pools of injuries dependent on the weapon type. Injuries can be good, by hindering a difficult opponent, or increasing your chances in defeating your foe. They also synergize with builds or ally units that have the Executioner perk, as it will allow you to set up enemies to die in less hits. Sometimes injuries can be inferior, and not affect the effectiveness of an opponent, or an injury could also come too late in damage order, as if they’ve gotten to the point where they are injured, it is possible they die very soon anyways. Overall, most builds will not need the 33% injury threshold boost, but there are some niche builds that can take advantage of it to score injuries on important late-game foes, like barbarian chosen.
• Colossus: (Okay:3,♛,♝,♞,♜): The most important thing to note about Colossus is that additional Hit Points are always welcomed, as long as they are not taking away from your build potential. That said, Colossus is a decent perk, because it provides a 25% percentage increase of HP for anyone who is in need of a moderate boost to HP for non-Nimble builds. The reason why Colossus may be picked for non-Nimble builds would be largely because of armour penetration damage. As when taking damage, depending on the weapon and perks, you will likely take hit point damage as well as armour damage, especially so when hit in the head. And with good armour and the Battle Forged/Indomitable/Additional Fur Padding attachment damage reduction combo you are going to be able to take more hits in battle against armour penetrating foes than without the added hit points. As we know, more hits means taking more hits to your hit points, and the little ticks add up over the course of a battle, especially with bleed and other DoT damage effects. So, taking Colossus allows you to boost your HP roughly by 16 to 20 stat points on an efficient hire, without having to invest hardly any rolls, if at all into the Hit Point stat. In return you allow yourself to save 4 to 6 max rolls into HP and get your HP to a healthy 85 to 100+, in order to avoid a majority of the more dangerous armour penetration strikes in the game, in which can reach very high numbers. Additionally, this perk reduces the chance of receiving injuries by increasing your HP, in which injuries can prevent you from taking consecutive fights in a row and can force you to be extra vulnerable in combat. While Colossus is a valued perk, it isn’t a must have perk for all frontliners, as some builds can get away with using only Indomitable, or a select few could avoid contact entirely for situational periods.
  That all being said, Colossus is a must have perk for HP Nimble builds to greatly increase the suvivability of one’s Nimble hire, even if they aren’t typically targeted in most fights, they will be targeted at one point, and it is better to have the room for extended survival.

• Nine Lives: (Bad:1,♟): Upon first time inspection, Nine Lives sounds like it would be useful for keeping your characters alive in dire situations, but in actuality this perk does not really help you survive battles throughout the game. As you go further into a campaign as a prepared company, you will not likely get low enough to where Nine Lives will proc, aside from .1% headshot armour penetration damage Rng. In general, if you get low once, it is likely you are going to die within the same round or the following turn from any attack landing on your unit. Most enemies strike more than once, they may go before you in the turn order for the next turn, and of course there is likely more than one enemy trying to kill your fighter. Additionally, if you are getting that low in the first place it is a good sign that the fight was a little too difficult to take on at your current level, and/or you may have misplayed on your positioning. The main reason why this perk is not deemed useless is because it can be used to heighten your chances of surviving against high armour penetration two-handed weaponry headshots, typically in builds where your hp is low, despite the main flaw being that one more attack will be enough to take you out, even with the small boost to stats you gain for the turn the perk is triggered. With this in mind, there are better perks, such as: Colossus, or even Steel Brow to help protect against unlucky headshot, armour penetration damage Rng, as Nine Lives provides no value, until it is triggered upon death’s door.

♢ Perks: Tier 1: A Min-Max POV: Part 2 ♢

• Bags & Belts: (Bad:1,♞,☸): The function of Bags & Belts is to allow you to carry two extra items in your inventory without being fatigued by their existence, not counting two-handed weapons or shields. While the perk provides nothing but positives, it lacks in actual value, considering you are spending an entire perk point to acquire it. The reason why Bags & Belts lacks in value is because you really do not need anything in your inventory slots other than perhaps a throwable (pots/nets), a dagger, in which a dagger is already weightless, or perhaps a backup weapon/whip. Before you go into a battle you must always consider the enemy type you are going to be fighting against and arm your company accordingly. Let’s say you are to fight ancient undead, you should arm your men with blunt weapons. If you are to fight beasts, you would arm your company with high base damage weapons. Typically, in the late-game you will not need to worry about weapon choices too much, as you will most likely have specialized your weapon build, while only switching weapons/specialist units out in rare encounters. The only time you need more than one weapon in a fight is if you are concerned about the durability of your weapon, or with special niche builds. The perk is a positive perk, but there are much stronger perks to award your late-game orientated crew.
  One added use for this perk, and it is for your troops in permanent reserve. This would be, so they could hold a couple more special items in their inventory and allow for slightly more space in your company inventory for carrying loot during wilderness runs.

• Pathfinder: (Okay:3,♛,♝,♞,♜,♟): Pathfinder is valuable for positioning your melee troops, using less fatigue when traversing around/retreating from fights, and for allowing you to conserve action points to move and attack with a 6 AP strike on unfavorable terrains. Pathfinder may not seem to directly impact the outcome of your fights, but it will allow you to be more tactically efficient with your movements. The reason why Pathfinder is valued high is due to its use on saving AP on efficient, meta melee builds, and because you will see the perk shine if you are in a swamp, forest, snow or sand battle map. It is important to note that you can often decide whether or not you want to fight on that terrain, but you will sometimes be pressured into a fight in a location with bad terrain, in which Pathfinder will give your company a good advantage. Such fights would include, fights against orcs & ancient undead in forests, fights against the ijirok & barbarian chosen in the snow, fights against goblins & kraken enemies in the swamps, and fights against nomads or the city states in the deserts. In a case like these just remember that there are sometimes terrain spots to use in each punishing biome that allow you to move more advantageously. It is a useful perk to have on your troops, but again you will have to decide if it is worth not getting another potentially more valuable perk in exchange.
• Adrenaline: (Poor:2,♛,♟,☸): Adrenaline is a perk that is situationally employed to gain a minor advantage in turn order against your non-Adrenaline opponents. It is important to note that using Adrenaline costs 20 fatigue & 1 AP just to go first in the turn order of the next turn, which can help in situations where you can afford to exchange fatigue for dealing damage before an opponent gets a chance the following turn. Let’s start by saying that, in Battle Brothers, the most efficient form of survivability is stacking armour, obtaining Battle Forged, and running Indomitable/Colossus on your melee squadron. Wearing heavy armour will decrease your working initiative in battle so that you will likely go last in the turn order. This can allow you to attack an opponent twice in a row, which is valuable if you damage their formation strength in those turns. This can be powerful for builds that don’t use high fatigue cost perks & abilities, but by doing this you will be taking out a large pool of your working fatigue and making it so that you can’t afford to use weapon abilities or other fatigue perks as the constant fatigue build up is costly. Using Adrenaline will force you to take your Recover turn much quicker than what is good to do during a fight, as your first handful of rounds of actual fighting are crucial for gaining the upper hand. Otherwise, the perk can be used in rare situations to make the first move in order to save a struggling troop, or to make a more impactful follow up turn of attacks at a heavy cost to fatigue. In the end, Adrenaline is a perk that is viably impactful in certain sections of the game, but is outclassed by other high value fatigue intensive perks or abilities.
• Recover: (Okay:3,♛,♝,♞,♜,♟): This is the perk that allows you to use fatigue heavy perks & abilities with more freedom during a fight. With the ability to regain 50% of your working fatigue, you’re able to run heavy armour and at the same time be generous with your fatigue heavy skill & perk usage. Recover is useful on just about every build that will last throughout your campaign, due to rough terrain & elongated encounters. That being said, it isn’t always a perk that will fit into every build, as not every efficient build will have a high fatigue drain to merit spending a perk point for recovering fatigue. The main downside to Recover is that you will have to spend a full turn of AP for recovering your fatigue, but It is important to note that Recover can be comboed with Berserk procs when wielding a 4 AP cost weapon for an efficient Recovery turn. That said, Recover won’t see use in every battle, but will be crucial to the success of many fatigue guzzling builds in fights that would merit the need for a late-game build.
• Student: (Good:4,♛,♝,♞,♜,⚡): When determining the value of Student on your character build, you must seek one or more of two reasons. The first reason being, that if you’ve planned out your builds beforehand, you will be able to determine if you need to pick up Student to skip past any tiers of perks. By planning out your perk build you can pick Student early in the game and use the bonus perk point later to skip having to pick from the lower tiered perks early on. This meaning you can go straight to the late-game perks without picking any unnecessary perks along the way. Most of the time you do want to skip over your weapon mastery perk, until you have your end-game weapon type available to use, and the ability to utilize the fatigue reduction from using those weapon skills. That said, not every build will need to skip past the lower half of the perks, which brings us to our second reason for why you might want Student on your build. The second reason being, that when you pick this perk you get a 20% bonus to your experience gain, in which will greatly help your unit gain valuable stats, and better perks at a faster rate. The gaining of high-end defensive/offensive perks & stats will serve as a tremendous help in allowing you to take on end-game content earlier with that unit. Of course, the experience boost doesn’t last into your veteran levels, but it does still serve as a means to obtain a level advantage quickly. One consideration when choosing who gets Student is to keep in mind, if you want this character will benefit greatly from an increase of stat points, or perks that would merit the increase of contract difficulty. This is because having units with no potential get higher in levels is not good as you likely aren’t getting good stats for your level ups or perks to greatly enhance the value of the unit enough to merit the investment, as it will take away combat experience from better hires, who will make better use of the boost. Not to forget to mention, that it may be worth picking up fodder benefited perks early on instead, in order to benefit the short term.

♢ Perks: Tier 2: A Min-Max POV: Part 1 ♢

Tier: 2
• Executioner: (Okay:3,♛,⚡): With the perk Executioner, you will be gaining 20% more damage against enemies that have sustained an injury. With a more Duelist centered company, you will often inflict injuries on your opponents upon the first or second hit, or with the help of an ally with Crippling Strikes. It is important to note that it would be far more useful to rely on bonuses that happen before you first strike an opponent, rather than once he is already injured and doomed to die within the following strike or two; However, with certain late-game enemies such as barbarian chosen, you will benefit a great deal from the bonus damage to help finish off an opponent, especially with one-handed weapons that are likely to require 3-4 hits to kill an opponent without Executioner. This is not always the case with two-handers as you will not likely have inflicted an injury on your opponent and still need to attack them more than once, unless you had help with setup strikes from an ally. That said, two-handers benefit greatly from the increased damage gain, but it usually is marginal on affecting the hits to kill, as most bonus damage results in overkill. In the end, it comes down to how much one values a slight to moderate increase in hits to kill in comparison to other next in line perks.
• Bullseye: (Poor:2,⚡): Bullseye can be seen as a regrettable pick up for an archer in your company, as it primarily just improves your percentage hit chance for hitting targets hiding behind terrain or bodies, which doesn’t usually provide value in fights without distance priority targets. The distance priority targets that Bullseye seeks to gain value from are: necromancers, barbarian beastmasters, goblin shamans, hexes, marksmen and any other targets who like to hide in the back ranks or behind obstacles. The perk pretty much provides an all-around bonus towards hit chance against targets that are sometimes the only reason why you would bring along archers in the first place. It is known that hit chances are not a problem for an efficient late-game build, but enemies behind cover reduce your chance to hit by 75%, which would usually be roughly a 25% chance to hit. With Bullseye your chance to hit would only be reduced by 50%, making your odds to hit your opponent closer to the behind cover max of 47.5%, which can make a difference when dealing with distant high priority foes. With Bullseye being a percentage increase, it is something that a simple stat buff can’t fix. It is also worth recognizing that in some cases it is better to attack the unit in front of your distance target, in order to clear your path for shooting them; However, this is not always the case, and can lead to your high priority targets lasting a lot longer than they should. With that said, this perk usually will not be as valuable as the other perks available to an archer build, but it can make its way into builds that utilize a warbow with sufficient Ranged Skill.
• Dodge: (Okay:3,♜,♟,☸): When talking about the perk Dodge, you have to look into the context in which the perk can be used. With Dodge, to get the most value out of the perk, you would have to run a build centered around Initiative. The only builds that are somewhat viable that revolve around Initiative are Nimble fencers or low fatigue usage Nimble builds. This is because they will likely not be tested by needing to dodge hits every round; However, these builds are not considered an efficient usage of your party composition. That said, the more Initiative you have the more you benefit from this perk, and you can synergize it with different perks accordingly. There are issues with this, as Initiative is not favored by the player throughout a battle or against certain high Initiative foes, as when performing actions you will become fatigued and your Initiative will fall as well. Initiative is also tricky to fit into a stat build, as there is usually too large of a spread in stat distribution to merit leveling Initiative over other higher priority stats such as: Melee Defence, Melee/Ranged Skill, Fatigue, Hit Points (Nimble), and possibly even Resolve. In addition, no matter how high your dodge chance is, you will be hit eventually, and so it is not good to rely heavily on Dodge for your main defence. With this in mind, you do not have to use Dodge as your main defense in an efficient character build, but you can use it as an added bonus to Melee Defence with your base Initiative, in which could grant your build an added 10-15 Melee Defence for the early sections of your fight. That being said, the perk can also be picked up for lightly armoured fodder troops to some effect for the added Melee Defence advantage. With all that considered, this perk isn’t a must have for lightly armoured troops, but on the right build it can add onto the potential of one’s important Melee Defence to some minor success.
• Fortified Mind: (Poor:2,♞): The perk Fortified Mind is a pretty self-explanatory pick up for any build focused on rallying troops or carrying the company’s battle standard. You will most definitely pick this up for your banner carrier for the significant percentage-based Resolve boost, as this will make rallying your troops more reliable, as well as increase the Resolve shared from your battle standard to help your allies reach a confident status, boosting one’s combat related stats. That being said, the perk is primarily limited to builds that utilize the Rally the Troops perk, but if you are worried about low Resolve on your un-ideal frontline melee builds you can pick Fortified Mind as a patchwork perk; However, usually there is no room for this perk. Either way, this perk is essentially a Resolve stat boost for 25+ Resolve on one’s banner carrier. Additionally, the Resolve boost will help protect your troops from charm attack rolls from hexes, late-game enemies with fearsome and attacks from Alps.

♢ Perks: Tier 2: A Min-Max POV: Part 2 ♢

• Resilient: (Bad:1,☸): The perk Resilient provides a general service against negative status effects, but otherwise, doesn’t see very much value on an efficient character build. With the rarity of negative status effects being accounted for, the ability to reduce the duration by one turn to a minimum of one turn of those status effects is minute, as status effects actually applying to your Battle Forged end-game troops is not very often, and cutting their duration by one is not powerful enough to merit the perk point investment. That said, this perk is a partially viable solution to bleed damage, and goblin poison for HP Nimble builds. Otherwise, on a build that revolves around using heavy armour, you are not likely to be affected by bleed, or poisons, as you will not likely receive the damage to your HP required to trigger those status effects, and if they did, they would be met with a high base Hit Point reserve. When it comes to staggers, stuns and dazes, you are likely not going to endure the two turn variants very often in the game, and they will not likely make too much of an impact on your fight to wish for Resilient. With that said, there are tactics that can be employed by Resilient users that trivialize said status effects, involving waiting on your turns, being hit by a status effect, and then wearing off the status effect at the end of your waited turn. This is mainly used as a partial counter to hexe charms, but you are better off saving yourself the perk point and employing better tactics.
• Steel Brow: (Poor:2,♞,♜): Steel Brow is one of those perks that aren’t really worth picking up due to the superiority of other defensive perks, but it still can be good on builds that specialize in defence, or in niche frontline melee builds. While Steel Brow provides your unit with the ability to avoid critical hits to the head, and lowers the chance of receiving a head injury, the perk doesn’t really show its usefulness too often. This is because it only works if you are struck in the head, while other perks like Colossus or Indomitable provide additional value, while also protecting against head hits. With this in mind, Steel Brow can somewhat exceed the value of other perks in it’s genre when it comes to repeated attacks of high armour penetration damage headshots. This would mainly be in fights against barbarian chosen or when against exceedingly high damage champion headshots amongst the top 1% of famed weaponry attacks. In terms of defensive builds, the perk is an option to mitigate the hyper rare repeated headshot critical damage but is not an ideal usage of your perk point, when there are other defensive options that cover 99% of the other headshot dangers, while Steel Brow caters to the ultra rare. If you can fit this into your character build, it is of course a welcome addition for defensive purposes, but it is often that you do not have the room, except for select defense orientated builds.
• Quick Hands: (Okay:3,♛,♝,⚡,☸): The perk Quick Hands allows you to save 4 AP when swapping to an item in your inventory, and saving AP during combat can open up possibilities in efficient AP usage in increasing damage output. With low AP melee units, you can use Quick Hands for special weapon combinations, like swapping to a whip to disarm an opponent, builds that utilize Head Hunter to set up damaging headshots, or for niche situations where using a polearm over your primary on a frontliner is slightly more efficient. The use of Quick Hands on an archer would be to swap to your next set of projectiles/throwing weapons to maximize damage output, but it does come down to spending an entire perk point to avoid spending 4 AP, in which it depends on competing perks on whether or not Quick Hands is picked up. While it opens up the possibilities for weapon swapping combinations, it typically isn’t a good use of your limited perk points, nor is it often the most efficient strategy to employ, when preparing yourself for a different action may be simply better. For more elaboration on using Quick Hands with polearms seek the Q&A section on “Popular Meta Builds” or builds that feature Quick Hands. Additionally, you can use Quick Hands for preparing throwables, while sometimes still being able to perform an action in the same turn, but again it is usually better to save the perk point in these cases. In terms of deciding what weapon to use, one should determine this before combat is initiated from the safety of a paused world map. So there is no real benefit from carrying the same function weapons in your inventory that will only weigh you down, and without the additional investment in Bags & Belts, you won’t benefit from the carry weight.
• Gifted: (Okay:3,♛,♟): Simply put, Gifted is a minor boost in three self-selected stats typically invested in Melee Defence (3), Melee/Ranged Skill (3,4), Fatigue (4), or Hit Points (4). It is safe to say that a customized stat boost is going to have value, but with the investment of an entire perk point, it is usually not worth giving to anyone who you intend to have any sort of permanence in your company, as most efficient end-game builds will be great without the distributed limited boost of typically 10 to 11 total stat points between three stats. That said, there are efficient character builds that will use Gifted to further their primary stats, due to the value of stat distribution being unique to the needs of a build. Other than that, the boost of a few dispersed max rolls isn’t going to build too much momentum for your end-game company, and in most cases it does not merit the spending an entire perk point to gain. I would heavily recommend this perk for un-ideal hires or for fodder troops who are trying to make themselves useful before they are replaced in your min-max company.

♢ Perks: Tier 3: A Min-Max POV: Part 1 ♢

Tier: 3
• Backstabber: (Poor:2,♟): When considering if Backstabber is worth picking up on your troops, you have to consider that the perk is only really effective for inefficient or early-game builds. This meaning that Backstabber is meant for aiding your low Melee Skill mercenaries in hitting an already surrounded target. In the late-game, once you are surrounding an opponent you are likely not really going to need the bonus hit chance, as your troops should already be able to hit enemy units with their high Melee Skill. Additionally, with a high number of foes you typically are going to be the ones that are surrounded, in which wouldn’t yield very much value from only two or at best three units surrounding a foe.
• Anticipation: (Terrible:0): The perk Anticipation is mainly used for back row units to avoid archer fire when without cover. Anticipation also scales with the leveling up of your Ranged Defence, which if you already have Ranged Defence, you are not likely to be targeted in the first place/need more Ranged Defence. It is also notable that the perk will always provide a minimum of 10 Ranged Defence. While extra Ranged Defence is technically not bad, many issues with leveling Ranged Defence will limit the value of doing so. First off, leveling Ranged Defence takes away from leveling up better, more relevant stats, in which there are more enemies that punish you for having low stats of other categories. Additionally, by leveling up Ranged Defence, you are only going to change the target your opponent will target, as well as Ranged Defence not actually providing very much value in terms of ranged hit chances in general. Lastly, with good armour and defensive perks you will not have to worry too much about taking damage from archers (see the Q&A section at the bottom of the guide). As for an archer, your defence against ranged will come from leveling up your Hit Points for the use of the perk Nimble. This perk does have the potential to make a difference against mass archer fire, but otherwise it can be ignored entirely.
• Shield Expert: (Poor:2,♜): The main problem with picking Shield Expert on one of your characters is that you would have to be wielding a shield to benefit from this perk. This means that you will go without using a two-handed weapon, or gaining the Duelist buff, which would severely limit your damage output. This is because when leveling your melee defence, using the perks Colossus, Battle Forged, Indomitable, and/or with/without Reach Advantage (combined with heavy armour & attachments), your defensive needs will be more than fortified for a melee Dps role. The purpose of a shield is to provide extra Melee/Ranged Defence. With an efficient base unit, after a certain amount of leveling up of your Melee Defence, and by using alternative perks your dodge chance will eventually cap near 95% against most enemies. While more defence is always good, the added defence of a shield will not be a sufficient replacement for sacrificing significant damage output. Additionally, you lose the benefits of Shield Expert when your shield is broken. It is acknowledged that a tank build will benefit greatly from Shield Expert, but for the reasons above you will not benefit in combat efficiency for other units. If you do want to utilize a famed shield in your build, this would be a perk to increase the durability of the shield in a fight, and the Blacksmith in your retinue can save them if they were to be broken. That said, Nimble Tank users with Shield Expert can be helpful in distracting large numbers of schrats, unholds, barbarian chosen, lindwurms, and other difficult opponents, making Shield Expert a situationally efficient perk.
• Brawny: (Poor:2,♟): With the perk Brawny, you will obtain a moderate percentage-based boost to fatigue and initiative that was taken away from you by wearing armour. This will allow you to wear heavy armour on units with low Fatigue and still be able to maintain a working amount of fatigue. It is preferable to skip over Brawny, as with efficient character builds with high base fatigue, you will not struggle with fatigue as much, especially with certain famed heavy armours providing a reduction in fatigue loss. In the end, this perk is still considered a good usage of a perk point for most heavy armour users, as it does provide +19 working fatigue when wearing 320/320 armour, but, again, it will fall off in value on an end-game ready build, and it is preferred to be skipped, due to the high cost of a valuable perk point.

♢ Perks: Tier 3: A Min-Max POV: Part 2 ♢

• Relentless: (Bad:1,⚡,☸): With the perk Relentless, we do not see very much value come out of reducing the loss of initiative when using fatigue by half, as usually having the potential to go before your opponents does not provide too much value overall. There may be situations where going before an opponent can allow you to finish them off before they may get a hit in, but it is situational in value. Typically tho with Relentless, you will be using it on a Nimble build, as heavy armour units will have extraordinarily low working Initiative compared to their opponents.
  With viable builds that can make use of Initiative, there are perks that benefit from your initiative staying high such as: Dodge, Overwhelm, and situationally Rotate; However, those are perks that are not made that much stronger by using Relentless. Some efficient build uses of Relentless would be for a unit to more reliably apply Overwhelm, or maintain turn order against high Initiative enemies like hexes. Otherwise, Relentless can be ignored on all non-initiative heavy builds, and your perk points can be spent elsewhere.

• Rotation: (Okay:3,♝,♞,♜,♟): In the case of Rotation, you typically want this perk for your supporting characters to help in alleviating disadvantaged company members. This role is generally given to the more flexible back row units as they aren’t always taking on full aggro from melee units, but it is also commonly used on tanks who do the opposite. The perk inherently, is a neutral perk that will take away from damage efficiency and will not always serve as a blanket defensive perk. That being said, being able to rotate a damaged troop into a safer position is a pretty valuable tool and shouldn’t be passed up on your less damage-oriented positions such as the Banner Carrier and Nimble Tank builds. The perk also synergizes with Indomitable and a good defence with Battle Forged as you can bulk up after swapping a unit out that was in a bad position. Alternatively, you can use this perk aggressively to move a damage orientated unit into a valuable position; However, you do not want to build your main Dps units with this perk, as you will be burning a large amount of valuable Fatigue and AP that could be better used elsewhere, as well as the fact that you will be sacrificing a perk point on a perk hungry position.
• Rally the Troops: (Good:4,♞): The usage of the perk Rally the Troops is specific, and you should only be used on your banner carrier. This is because you will require a heavy focus on leveling up your Resolve stat for the perk to reliably rally your wavering troops. Additionally, your troops should not really panic all that much as you should have secured a 50+ resolve on your hire with one or no level ups into Resolve, as well as exceeding that amount with arena traits and the AoE of the battle standard. This will mean that the only time your troops will actually flee in a late-game battle is if you made miscalculations on the difficulty of the fight you wanted to take, or perhaps some positioning misplays that caused them to waver. Your troops may waver when surrounded by enemy troops but that is not particularly avoidable other than: keeping your company in a good morale, becoming confident, good supportive positioning, and the correct enemy to party strength matchups. This being said, the main reason why you want to be able to rally your troops is because of the geist enemy. You will want to avoid fighting this foe often until your company’s banner carrier can effectively rally your troops in a fight. All in all, it is a specialized perk that will carry you in tough situations where your troops do end up wavering, but can still be useful in difficult fights, as Resolve checks always have a minimum of 5% chance to fail.
• Taunt: (Bad:1,♜): When talking about picking Taunt, the idea is great as grabbing aggro from enemy units is ideal, but in actuality the perk falls flat in effectiveness as the single target distraction perk has too many downsides. The first downside of using Taunt is the AP & Fatigue drain, and while other perks also have a similar Fatigue drain problem, the ability to draw the attention of a single target is lackluster compared to other active perks, as it is not naturally difficult to draw the attention of a unit. This is because when you are in a fight you should always consider positioning so that the troops in your company with the lowest Melee Defence (or is the more desirable target to hit) is either protected or diverting the attention away from your allies. This is very easy to tell which ally your opponent will target and thus expert positioning will allow you to direct the flow of damage in combat. Only very situationally you want to make use of Taunt to catch the attention of a nearby unit that is motivated to attack an ally instead. On top of all this, the perk can be inconsistent, which is the opposite of what makes this perk gain value. That said, the one ability that is keeping Taunt from being nearly useless is its ability to keep necrosavants from teleporting to more vulnerable targets, unless the necrosavant becomes surrounded or is right next to a more vulnerable target. Inherently it isn’t a bad concept for a perk, but a reworking of the perk’s mechanics would make it a more worthwhile defensive perk to use on your tanks.

♢ Perks: Tier 4: A Min-Max POV: Part 1 ♢

Tier: 4
• General Weapon Masteries: (Okay:3,♛,♝,⚡,☸): When talking about if a weapon mastery is worth picking up, you must first look at the value of the weapon in terms of: damage output, utility contribution, and additional applied effects/statuses. If the weapon is deemed valuable, then seeking information on if the weapon mastery provides: valuable fatigue reductions, exclusive abilities, or other bonuses that might make it worth the perk point investment.
• Mace Mastery: (Bad:1): If you were to use a mace, it wouldn’t be the worst choice, as the dazed effect is very useful for the hard hitting two-handed mace and a mace Duelists can crush ancient undead very efficiently. When it comes to the fatigue reduction, it is helpful, but only if you are utilizing the stun ability often, which you should not be doing due to stunning being largely ineffective in the late-game, with the exception of barbarian chosen. The late-game foes such as orc warriors/warlords, lindwurms, ifrits, unholds, and schrats are unaffected by stuns and usually it is better to just deal damage, rather than to try to stun. With the focus on using primarily basic attacks, you will not need to pick Mace Mastery on your mace users, as their low fatigue, basic attacks are the ideal usages of the weapon and the mastery doesn’t provide a very noticeable fatigue reduction.
• Flail Mastery: (Bad:1): The problem with committing a unit to using a flail is that there is not currently a strong flail that is worth building for in the late-game, as the one-handed variants are the weakest & most unreliable, tier 3 damage dealing weapons currently in the game. Additionally, the ability to ignore the defensive bonuses of a shield is minimal with high melee skill and with the low amount of foes that wield high melee defence shields. The two-handed variant has subpar damage, an AoE skill set that is nearly unusable, and utilizes an unreliable stun chance, in which is non-effective on a majority of late-game foes. That being said, one-handed flails are easy to obtain from raiders and are great for taking advantage of unhelmeted melee troops in the early to mid-game. If your opponent does end up having armour, you are going to end up doing very low amounts of damage. The mastery doesn’t really provide enough benefits to merit committing a perk point, due to flails being a weak late-game weapon.
• Hammer Mastery: (Okay:3,♛): Hammer Mastery is a surprisingly usable perk to pick up if you are going to run a hammer user in your company. The reason being is that in the late-game, a good portion of the enemies you are going to be fighting are going to have large amounts of armour that you will have to go through. With Hammer Mastery, you will be able to do additional armour damage with the one-handed hammer and the polehammer; However, if you are a hammer Duelist you would be exclusively using the basic attack due to the high armour penetration. Unfortunately, the two-handed hammer does not benefit from the mastery in terms of bonus armour damage; However, for a two-handed user you will still benefit from the fatigue reduction for your AoE shatter skill, in which makes it still worth picking it up.
• Axe Mastery: (Bad:1): The reason why Axe Mastery is rated as bad is, because the two-handed axe move set is supremely subpar when compared to the greatsword, the two-handed hammer, and even the two-handed mace. This is because the axe uses a round swing AoE attack that hits everyone around them, with the exception of the bardiche which uses a two target line attack, which might be worth building for the fatigue reductions. Round swing might sound good, but in practice you are likely going to need to at least have one ally next to your axe wielder, if you do not want to suffer major issues of defence debuffs and morale checks. As for the one-handed axe and the longaxe you will not be dealing top Dps with these company roles. Additionally, splitting shields isn’t a good use of your attacks (besides when fighting schrats), as dealing damage to your opponent is better than attempting to shatter a shield that they may waste a turn using shieldwall with. Other than the poor move set, a weakness with axes is that they distribute damage evenly between head and body upon hitting the head, in which is an inefficient way to take down an opponent.
• Cleaver Mastery: (Good:4,♛): Using a tier 3 cleaver is a decent way to deal raw damage with Duelist, and there are large upgrades in damage with a famed orc cleaver for a late-game Duelist build. Other than one-handed cleavers, you can find success with using the barbarian two-handed cleaver, which is a two-hander that will allow you to reliably use Indomitable, but you just won’t be running at maximum efficiency for a damage dealer. In addition, you will be able to use Cleaver Mastery for the hit chance bonus & fatigue reduction for disarm attacks when using the whip. With the full utilization of cleaver weapon skills and orc cleavers being used, the fatigue reduction is a strong point of the Mastery. In addition, you will gain bonus bleed damage output, but it is important to note that not all enemies will bleed, primarily the undead faction, as well as a fair amount of foes possessing the perk Resilient to reduce the duration. Overall, you will gain a good deal of value out of Cleaver Mastery for a one-handed cleaver build.
• Sword Mastery: (Okay:3,♛): To start off, let’s establish that the greatsword has the most versatile move set, based on AoE attacks and that AoE has fatigue issues. This being said, on the two-handers that you do have, you will be spamming your AoE attacks to get the benefits of Reach Advantage and deal damage to multiple targets in an efficient manner. You will greatly benefit from the fatigue reduction for when you do spam those attacks, but not so much for one-handed swords. With this in mind, one-handed swords simply do not compete with other late-game weaponry due to their low damage output against late-game foes. Additionally, you do gain a small percentage buff of bonus accuracy for AoE two-handed sword weapon skills.
• Dagger Mastery: (Poor:2,♛,☸): The functionality of a build centered around puncturing an opponent requires a highly specialized build. You will be using a one-handed dagger to puncture your opponents, and by doing so you will build up tremendous fatigue with the ability to puncture 3 times in a row. With the weapon being one-handed, you would be tricked into thinking Duelist would be a good perk to use, but the skill puncture will not benefit from it as you are already doing exclusively HP damage. When compared to the effectiveness of a duelist or two-hander, you will not be taking down more than one enemy at a time and with a dagger you are only going to be taking out a single high armoured target at a time at a higher fatigue cost. As for the Qatal Dagger, you can dish out noticeable damage with deathblow, but it does require a strong setup to initiate the skill bonus, in which most of the time you are far better off using a different tier 3 weapon. That said, it is used to efficiently spend excess AP for dealing extra damage when paired with a two-handed flanged mace. It is also viable to have a dagger master in your company for the Overwhelm effect to help with champion swordmasters, but it is not the most efficient use of your party member or active AP.

♢ Perks: Tier 4: A Min-Max POV: Part 2 ♢

• Polearm Mastery: (Good:4,♝,☸): With Polearm Mastery, you will reduce the amount of fatigue build up for your back row polearm users, lower your AP usage with polearms from 6 to 5, and negate the one-tile attacking debuff when using polearms against adjacent enemies. While the fatigue reduction from Polearm Mastery isn’t impressive on basic attacks, it can be very powerful on weapons like the warscythe/swordlance for it’s frequently used AoE. That said, you should consider Polearm Mastery primarily for the AP reduction for synergy with Berserk, Quick Hands, and movement.
• Spear Mastery: (Bad:1,☸): The Spear Mastery perk is actually alright when it comes to what functionality you gain from picking up the perk. As being able to spearwall and continue to have an effective spearwall when an enemy breaks into your zone of control is pretty valuable as a fail-safe. That being said, you will not want to use spears in the late-game or on troops that have 60+ melee skill, as the spear doesn’t do very much damage to foes, especially opponents with armour and enemies do become easy enough to hit without the spear bonus hit chance. With this in mind, if you do use a spear focused build, you will want the Spear Mastery for the fatigue reduction & associated mastery abilities.
• Crossbow & Firearms Mastery: (Okay:3,☸): When understanding the value of this mastery you must understand the value of crossbows and firearms as weapons. To start, a crossbow you will not be able to: snipe down high priority targets at the most optimal distance or consistently deal more damage overall than a multi-shot warbow or heavy throwing weapon user. With a crossbow, you will be able to wear a slightly heavier helmet without sacrificing noticeable vision penalties, but in doing so you are put at a middle ground armour level, which doesn’t always benefit from Nimble or Battle Forged in the most efficient way. Additionally, you do not efficiently benefit from the mandatory damage dealing perk Berserk when compared to a bow, as you are forced to reload every other turn beyond the first procing of the perk. Some would argue that crossbows are better than bows against goblins, due to the crossbows ability to kill a goblin in one shot (most of the time with perk help), but in reality, a skilled bow user can mildly outperform the crossbow with goblins killed per round (same perk help). By picking Crossbow Mastery you will be able to do some extra puncture damage, and by using a crossbow you will have a higher chance to hit your target with a lower ranged skill; However, you still are going to be stuck in an awkward area in between the optimal range of a bow and the penetration damage of heavy throwing javelins, while still lacking in the max efficiency of your damage output. With that lengthy, but necessary talk about crossbows, there is a second part to this perk, and that is the multiclass of firearms. The primary firearm is the handgonne, a rival archer build strategy that would involve enmasse Fearsome & Overwhelm procing onto your opponents. With the mastery reducing the 9 AP cost to 6 AP, you will make the handgonne a viable ranged weapon that can shoot every turn without moving by walking. In terms of raw damage, the handgonne will still be outclassed by the crossbow, warbow, and heavy throwing weaponry in practical scenarios; However, it is worth it for the debuff potential involving additional perks. Handgonne users can also switch to a crossbow out of combat for fights where a crossbow will be more efficient, allowing for a flexible ranged build. Overall, this mastery is worthwhile on the applicable builds, but the weapons themselves are slightly subpar compared to the leading damage dealers for ranged.
• Bow Mastery: (Good:4,⚡): With Bow Mastery you are receiving solid value out of your weapon mastery perk. This is because the bow will allow you to take out high priority targets from a longer distance, such as hexes, necromancers, barbarian beastmasters, goblin shamans, goblin overseers, ancient undead priests, enemy archers, and other vulnerable targets with ease. With Bow Mastery you will be able to do that with an additional tile distance. Additionally, the fatigue usage reduction is valuable for any archer build as it will allow you to be greedy with spending your fatigue for rapid fire shots, especially regarding the usage of the perk Berserk.
• Throwing Mastery: (Good:4,⚡): At end the weapon masteries, we have the Throwing Mastery, in which it is important to establish that normal throwing weapons are a largely inefficient weapon group in Battle Brothers, with the strong exception of heavy throwing javelins (heavy throwing axes are subpar, but still strong). The reason why a normal throwing weapon is an ineffective ranged weapon is because you will not have any distance advantage over your foes. You will not be able to take out high priority targets before they get into melee range with your company, and you will not be doing more damage than a bow, or a crossbow with normal throwing weapons. Using normal throwing weapons in any way besides establishing a fake ranged advantage, in order to trick the AI into advancing would be pretty inefficient. This being said, the heavy throwing javelin weapon has a very good damage output against heavily armoured opponents thanks to the focus on armour penetration. The use of heavy throwing javelins is made possible thanks to the tile thrown distance to damage ratio bonus that Throwing Mastery provides. Additionally, if you are going to incorporate heavy throwing weapons into your build, you should be using the perk Duelist for the additional armour penetration.

♢ Perks: Tier 5: A Min-Max POV ♢

Tier: 5
• Reach Advantage: (Good:4,♛,☸): With the perk Reach Advantage in your perk build, your two-handed melee fighters will be able to receive a flat buff of 5 melee defence per hit landed, with up to 5 stacks. Reach Advantage essentially makes AoE two-hander units able to reliably dodge incoming attacks while being partially surrounded. The perk mainly synergizes heavily with AoE strikes from the greatsword, and the two-handed hammer, as well as a perk synergy with Berserk refunded AP. With the need for a strong defensive perk for two-handers, Reach Advantage fills the gap and increases your dodge chance by an average of 10 to 20 Melee Defence when wielding a good two-handed, AoE hitting weapon. The main reason Reach Advantage is only good and not great is because two-handers are not the primary frontline unit meta, as units that can utilize Indomitable are stronger on the damage output to survivability meta balance. Additionally, you may often opt into building non-AoE two-handers such as: a two-handed cleaver (can use Indomitable) or a mace two-hander (daze) for their ability to mitigate damage with perks or skills.
• Overwhelm: (Okay:3,☸): The perk Overwhelm is to be primarily used by light armoured builds, due to the nature of light armour leading to a larger pool of available initiative. By using Overwhelm, you will be able to apply the overwhelm debuff with your attacks that apply -10% to an opponent’s Melee/Ranged Skill, in which is valuable when it comes to suppressing the hit chances of heavy hitting targets. Applying the overwhelm debuff is particularly useful against: unholds, schrats, ancient undead pikemen, champions, arbalesters, other archers, orcs, hammer users, two-handed weapon foes, and pretty much anyone you don’t want to be hit by. This essentially gifts you an extra 6 to 16 dodge bonus when the overwhelmed opponent attempts to hit you. There are some flaws when it comes to relying on Overwhelm such as: you aren’t always before your opponent in the turn order for applying Overwhelm, works poorly with fatigue heavy builds due to stamina and Initiative being tied together, some ideal targets for Overwhelm will have a higher working Initiative than you, and leveling up Initiative being a poor use of stat points (armour attachment is also weaker than other options). You can gain value out of Overwhelm on dagger tanks, AoE polearms and multi-hit ranged weapons, but you will lose out on Overwhelm value after you run low on fatigue or there might be better usages of your AP than applying Overwhelm, not to forget to mention that there are, in most cases, stronger perks to utilize instead.
• Lone Wolf: (Bad:1,☸): When talking about the perk Lone Wolf, you would automatically think that this perk is really good, because having a percentage buff to your combat stats is pretty great. The problem with that is in reality, when using Lone Wolf, you have to be three tiles or more away from any ally. This will lead to your unit being surrounded and without direct combat support. Your troop will most likely get surrounded, take on too many surrounding debuffs, and then start to fatigue out or route without anyone to help them. With this being the case, Lone Wolf will never be picked up on an efficient meta build, as the three-tile distance requirement is too detrimental to the safety of your fighter; However, there is some value in the perk for semi-sacrificial tank units that hold off a group of units at a distance.
• Underdog: (Good:4:♛,♞,♜): One of the core perks for making a good frontliner is the perk Underdog. This is because you will inevitably be overwhelmed by large numbers in the late-game as enemy parties become larger, and due to being surrounded you will suffer a hefty loss in chance to dodge. Additionally, being partially surrounded isn’t actually the worst thing to happen to your tanks and AoE two-handers, as you want to have three or more enemy units in an arc around your AoE two-handers in order to get enough targets to deal efficient damage and still get the full benefits of the perk Reach Advantage, while a tank mitigating the damage of more than one enemy is great. As for units that may only see contact with a minimum of two units at a time, you will still gain valuable artificial Melee Defence to help keep your units thriving in combat. With that in mind, Underdog will remove any debuffs your troop will receive from being surrounded, with the exclusion of the morale checks from enemies entering your zone of control; However, if your opponent has Backstabber, the two perks cancel each other out for an even fight.
• Footwork: (Bad:1,☸): With the perk Footwork, you can use it to move around the zone of control of an enemy unit by spending 25 fatigue and 3 AP. While the value of this is good, the perk Rotation also allows you to move around the zone of control of an enemy and more with the cooperation of an ally; However, with Footwork all you need is an empty tile. This makes Footwork more ideal for units with room behind them to move back to, and nobody nearby to use Rotation. That said, Rotation provides more tactical value for supporting units to spend their AP and Fatigue, rather than your damage dealing units spending their more valuable AP and Fatigue, as well as taking up a valuable perk point. For an archer Footwork can help you with orc warriors pushing past your armoured frontline, and when large quantities of troops slip in between or around your fighters, and everyone is locked in zones of control. Some players have found success using Footwork on melee users in their companies, but when compared to Rotation it is a rather selfish perk.

♢ Perks: Tier 6: A Min-Max POV ♢

Tier: 6
• Berserk: (Great:5,♛,♝,⚡): The perk Berserk, in almost any situation, is going to be worth picking up on most of your damage focused character builds. This is because Berserk refunds you AP for successful kills, which allows you to deal additional damage, move around, or use additional items & skills. The perk synergizes the most with attacks that cost 4 AP to strike, due to the Recover perk’s 9 AP cost, but it can still be heavily utilized by weapons that cost more than 4 AP, as you can still chain attacks for added value. Another damage build, utilized perk that synergizes is Indomitable, as you can attack multiple times and get a kill, and use Indomitable if the situation calls for it. With all this being said, Berserk is an all-around solid perk to pick on any build in order to deal additional damage, and utilize item & perk synergies, as additional AP to spend freely upon meeting a condition that will happen anyways is always going to be good.
• Head Hunter: (Okay:3,♛): When considering taking Head Hunter, you have to remember that headshots are nice for dealing additional damage, but sometimes they can make it take longer to kill an enemy. This is because when you are fighting an opponent, you want to take them out by using the quickest route through one area of armour. This meaning that if you hit them in the body, you are going to want to continue hitting them in the body as that would likely be the weaker armour durability of the two. The more you hit the other areas of one’s armour, the more your damage is spread out, and the longer it will take to kill an opponent. That said, being able to consistently hit the head two times in a row is a valuable ability to have. In most cases, your unit dealing more damage is very strong, but it does need to be reliable in order to overcome Head Hunter’s damage spread weakness against highly armoured opponents. One way to do this is to make it so that the damage you deal is primarily armour penetration damage. This would be good because you are always dealing a good amount of damage to an opponent’s hit points. A specific viable implementation of Head Hunter units is to guarantee headshots with the initial setup of a one-handed flail; However, it is somewhat of a subpar usage of your AP and perks in most cases. Additionally, you can stack this perk with the brute trait for added success and various factors that result in a higher chance to hit the head. With that said, additional damage is always good, as long as it is reliably substantial, in which Head Hunter is not consistently so, and is typically passed up in favor of more valuable damage dealing perks.
• Nimble: (Great:5,♛,♜,♝,♞,⚡): With the perk Nimble, you will be able to have a character build that revolves around low armour and high Hit Points. With Nimble relying on how much your equipped armour weighs, you will want to plan to have enough armour to protect your mercenary from DoT affects & strikes, as well as keeping your armour Fatigue total low in order to keep your Nimble HP damage reduction at around 40% to 45% depending on the build & encounter. This is most effective with an archer build as you will not likely be hit too much over the course of a battle, and with the damage reduction at a decent percentage, it will have been worth picking up to save your unit from ranged and melee attacks. For an archer wielding a warbow, you will be able to wear a 115 mail shirt and a 120 sallet helm, and still be at an ideal Nimble percentage. You will be able to increase your Nimble builds survivability by wearing famed armour that weighs less, and provides more armour that the enemy has to get through before they can get to your HP. With a Nimble build, one gains a large advantage against unholds, schrats, high damage archers, and most armour penetrating focused attacks. The problem with choosing this perk for melee fighters is that you will be hit a decent amount throughout a fight, and you will be at a disadvantage when fighting some of the common late-game bleed or poison focused enemy types such as: goblins, necrosavants, orcs, ancient undead, or anyone with cleavers due to the extreme weakness to bleed, poison, other HP pure damage attacks, and as well as Fearsome resolve checks. In comparison, wearing heavy armour and the appropriate perks will be a more reliable defence against frequent hits received, rather than relying on HP as armour, as Nimble will cost you more in tools for repairing, as your armour will constantly be zeroed out against any meaningful opponent, while armour can be swapped out and be ready to go immediately; However, Nimble will carry you through tough situations against high armour penetrating attacks and be easier to build for in the early-game. In full recognition of the value that the perk provides mid to late-game, it falls off further into the late-game when you are properly equipped with Battle Forged & heavy armour. Despite this drop in value, Nimble is a valuable perk that allows for an efficient tank build that one can utilize along with your Battle Forged frontline to lessen the impact of high armour penetrating attacks, as well as backline builds that aren’t attacked as often.
• Battle Forged: (Great:5,♛,♝,♞): The perk Battle Forged is one of the best defensive perks in Battle Brothers for any character that can afford to wear heavy armour. This is due to the percentage scaling, armour damage reduction of 5% of your combined current armour value, as well as the inherent bonuses to damage reduction while wearing heavy armour. Not counting the usage of unique armours, you should be utilizing a 320 decorated full helm (or a 300 full helm), and a 320 coat of plates for your frontliner, banner carrier, and other heavy armour builds. This should net your company about a 30-32% damage reduction at a full armour durability, as well as the reduction of damage in the formula that is based on total armour remaining. Additionally, you can utilize the perk Indomitable, Colossus for additional Hit Points to extend your life against armour penetration, and/or the armour attachment Additional Fur Padding (-33% penetration damage taken) to cover the armour penetration weakness of Battle Forged. Over the course of a battle, the damage reduction of Battle Forged does lessen as your troop takes damage, but it should carry you through in reducing damage for a large portion of your fights. Additionally, Battle Forged will scale with armour attachments and famed armour, which can net you nearly a 40% to 45% damage reduction. Just remember, other than the damage taken, you are also reducing the amount of money you will need to spend on tools with defensive perks such as: Battle Forged, and Indomitable.

♢ Perks: Tier 7: A Min-Max POV ♢

Tier: 7
• Fearsome: (Okay:3,♛,♝,☸): When considering using Fearsome, you may think that it would be a powerful perk pick up, as making your opponents route is strong for ending fights early; However, the impact of the perk is somewhat lesser than it may appear. If we briefly & generally overview the mathematics of the added Resolve morale drop chance on a 50ish Resolve unit, we are only looking at an added 10% to 12% increase chance to cause an enemy to fail a morale check, which can turn a barbarian chosen from a 13% on the first hit to HP (roughly 10 damage) into a 23%, or greater increases as the enemy loses more HP. With AoE strikes allowing for multiple hits, you are more likely to inflict morale penalties on your opponents, even if it seems like 10% isn’t a lot, it will greatly impact the overall times you break an opponent’s morale, applying those nice negative combat debuffs of a -10% to -30% in Resolve (easier to break further), Melee/Ranged Skill (a stronger Overwhelm effect), Melee/Ranged Defence (easier targets). With the right combination of perks and weapons, Fearsome will allow you to cause an extra bit of disarray amongst the ranks of humans, beasts, and greenskins, but it is important to note that you will not be able to route any of the undead units. With this in mind, some of the more worrisome opponents like orc warriors, and barbarian chosen are affected by the morale checks of Fearsome. With Fearsome being utilized on a build that takes advantage of hitting multiple opponents at once, as well as a standard late-game Resolve amount of 65+ (resolve necklaces, banner carrier buff & arena included), you can noticeably increase the odds of an orc warrior or barbarian chosen failing one of their morale checks. As for the ability to make a morale check with attacks below 15 damage to Hit Points, most late-game weapons that one would consider using do more than the minimum damage to Hit Points, in which a morale check would be proced. In the long run, there are usually better perks to pick for your hires, especially considering that you are at the top of the perk tier list which allows you to pick freely any perk one may require.
• Duelist: (Great:5,♛,⚡,☸): With the perk Duelist, you will be able to have an added 25% of your one-handed weapon damage become armour penetrating damage, if your offhand is free (not counting nets or throwables). An AoE two-handed frontliner build will slightly outclass your Duelist build in terms of damage output; However, a Duelist will hold the highest rank in terms of survivability to damage output, due to partial AP synergy with Indomitable. That being said, you can build some excellent Duelist builds that dish out high armour penetration damage (with the correct weapons), that are nearly on par with AoE two-handers, while keeping your defensive tactical options available to use when needed (Indomitable, Recover synergy). There are some downsides with the perk, as you will have to spend a perk point to enable the extra armour penetration damage with Duelist, while other Dps builds may not have to spend a perk point to enable their damage potential. Additionally, Duelist does nothing against opponents with no armour, such as high tiered beasts; However, builds are typically built around the strongest threats, and the heavily armoured barbarian chosen & orc warriors are very weak against armour penetration. Melee aside, when using Duelist in combination with heavy throwing javelins, you will be able to deal more armour penetration effectively against heavily armoured foes. Thus, making it a fairly important perk for a build that uses heavy throwing weapons and ranged skill.
• Killing Frenzy: (Good:4,♛,♝,⚡): The perk Killing Frenzy is simply a great perk for any efficient damage dealing build. Once you kill a single unit you will be able to deal 25% additional damage for two turns (turn of kill is counted as one turn), with a resetting timer for each kill. To put it simply, more damage is always good for any unit that is able to deal damage efficiently. Killing Frenzy will come into use the most when entering the late-game, as you will be taking out large amounts of enemies at a time. The only time when Killing Frenzy is not very useful is when you are facing enemies that are low in numbers, and are very difficult to kill, such as lindwurms or schrats. The value of Killing Frenzy will be similar to the value of Executioner, as they are both close in frequency with conditional bonus damage gains, but there is usually little reason to not have both perks for increasing your damage output. On a side note, when leveling up your characters, it is sometimes better to pick Killing Frenzy before you pick up Berserk, if you are having problems with early fatigue management.
• Indomitable: (Great:5,♛,♞,♜): Last, but definitely not the least important, we get to Indomitable, which is typically one of the more undervalued perks in the Battle Brothers community. With Indomitable, you gain a 50% reduction in damage received, immunity to being stunned, knocked back, and grabbed until your next turn. This all costs 5 AP, and 25 fatigue, which is a bit demanding, especially so for 5-6 AP two-handed weapons. But for 5 AP, you will be able to use Indomitable in combination with 4 AP weapons, Berserk AP refunds, and on turns where defence is prioritized. With the 50% damage reduction you will be able to be a little bolder when facing up against notoriously heavy damage dealing opponents. The 50% damage reduction, in combination with heavy armour, and Battle Forged will reduce some of the strongest attacks into needle prick damage, and will often give you much more damage reduction than 50% due to how the mathematics is calculated. Additionally, this defensive combo takes away the risk of fighting enemy archers as you will be able to literally ignore incoming archer fire, and thus allow you to never spend a single level up point into ranged defence. Additionally, Indomitable has become very valuable against deadly barbarian weapons making you last a lot longer when being hit by their strongest attacks, and as well as the armour penetrating attacks from champion units, unholds, schrats & other sources of high armour penetration damage. Not only is Indomitable good for your frontline troops, but you can also use it on your Nimble tanks to greatly increase their survivability & tanking effectiveness. With the 50% damage reduction you will be able to save on tools in the late-game, as reducing damage also means reduced durability loss that you would have had to repair. Other than being able to last longer in fights with the survivability aspect of Indomitable, you will be able to fight orcs without stuns or pushes, stop unholds from stunning/pushing/tossing your units, other various displacement immunities, and all with the main bonus of greatly reduced damage. With all this in mind, you will be building up a decent amount of fatigue if you spam Indomitable every turn, so you will likely be using it situationally, yet still in every battle. Some ways to mitigate the fatigue costs of Indomitable are: to use the perk Recover as a way to regain efficiency after a few heavy rounds of fighting, have an intimate understanding of how enemies target your troops, and determine what attacks are going to be the most damaging so that you can use the perk accordingly. Additionally, Indomitable reduces damage before any other damage reductions, which allows for the perk to gain maximum value in reducing the incoming damage, unlike other damage calculations. That being said, Indomitable is the most valuable defensive perk in the game, and is almost a must have for anyone who is going to be subjected to receiving damage often (if they are able to manage the 5 AP cost), especially so when talking about high damage encounters.

♦ High Damage Ranged Attacks: Answered Questions & Helpful Comments: Part 1 ♦

This section is here to highlight some questions that I’ve answered that might be helpful for understanding this guide. You are free to leave comments and constructive criticism in the comment section and I will gladly take into consideration your logic and reason-based responses.
Additionally, if you are looking to do a full peer review for this guide, I am sure it will only make the contents of this guide stronger and potentially more accurate. As, if possible, the guide will be consistently maintained as efficiency metas, and game mechanics change over time, including DLC.

Answered questions so far:

• How does one avoid high damage crossbow shots?

The best way to briefly talk about avoiding high incoming archer damage is: avoidance, positioning, hit points, armour, and perks.
So, starting with avoidance, it is easy to tell if a fight on the world map will include a ranged unit of any caliber. The game allows you to hover over an enemy unit, or visible camp to tell you what the unit types are. I can get into a lot of detail about what fights to take at certain points of the game, but for the sake of keeping it short, you really shouldn’t face off against tier 2 ranged opponents until your party has either ranged superiority and/or is at least equipped with 105 to 110 head and body armour. If you are experienced with the risk taking aspects of choosing your fights, it is definitely okay to gamble on if the tier 2 ranged units are going to be using tier 2 ranges weapons or if they will still have tier 1 ranged weapons. Of course, the larger the number of opponents is going to determine the difficulty of the fight to get to the archers.

In the case of positioning, if you really need to fight sharpshooters, and marksmen before you are ready, you should position your troops in a formation to where the shield-less, or range vulnerable troops are behind your shielded troops (In the later game, shield users may not be a troop in your party to reliably hide behind, but good hit points, perks and armour should get you through those fights with no problem). Additionally, if there is a wounded ally, or extra vulnerable brother you can retreat him out of harm’s way by moving him further back in the battlefield or into a bush (without performing further actions to reveal your location).

When talking about armour, you should have gone the route of heavy armour and Battle Forged for your frontline (archers and other secondary units may use Nimble) in order to mitigate damage. So, the more amour you have the less you will be affected by enemy blows. While Battle Forged is not an early-game perk, good armour and a good base HP can prevent a good amount of damage, in which would put you at risk of archer damage. Additionally, the armour attachment “Additional Fur Padding”, Reduces damage ignoring armour by 33% for body hits. As said though, avoidance is the best strategy for avoiding taking on ranged foes before you are ready in terms of hit points, armour, party composition, and perks.

Which brings me to some perks that definitely make high damage ranged opponents easier to face. Once you make it to the mid game you should, thanks to the experience buff of Student, have obtained Battle Forged for your melee folks, and Indomitable to mitigate nearly all types of ranged damage (including arbalesters). With 320/320 armour, and Battle Forged you will take as little as 16 damage to hit points from a hit to the head from a tier 3 crossbow shot due to the improved mitigation formula of armour remaining, and that is not including the 50% damage reduction you can take while using Indomitable, or the Additional Fur Padding attachment on a body hit. Now, for Nimble, you will want to go for building up your hit points to 125+ and choosing the perk Nimble to deal with high armour penetration (not recommended for frontline melee troops, for reference see Perks: Tier 6: A Min-Max POV). That being said, you really should avoid fights your party cannot take, and that learning what your party strength is will come with time.

As for leveling up your ranged defence, you really should avoid spending any points into the ranged defence stat on any build. Besides the obvious of spending points that would be best spent elsewhere, spending points in ranged defence is not actually going to make much of a difference in hit chances unless you actually spend a good amount of points into the stat, and that isn’t wise due to the low amount of ranged units that are typically fought in the game, as well as there being significantly stronger melee units that are better to be prepared against, rather than prepping for the occasional high damage ranged attack that can be mitigated with other means of protection. With that said, a strategy that could be employed is having an extraordinarily low ranged defence unit that runs a Battle Forged or Nimble, and Indomitable in your front row for a couple turns as a way to draw out archer fire to somebody who can definitely shrug off all arrows blows for the company with Indomitable activated.

One should also hire from backgrounds that are well suited with a decent base hit points. These backgrounds would include Brawlers, Lumberjacks, Hedgeknights, Wildmen, and Farmhands. If the build calls for it, one might even add on Colossus to protect one’s troop against higher-end armour piercing damage, or repeated attacks. This will typically net you around 95+ hit points with perhaps a couple max roll investments into hit points, 85+ without the stat investment.

So, in conclusion, leveling your troops with the right stats & perks, equipping the best gear you can obtain, positioning your men in such a way that the desired targets for archers are harder to hit, and straight up avoiding risky confrontations is a path you can take to avoid unfortunate losses. It is still possible to lose troops early to mid-game, even if you are sure of the battle outcome, but in the case that you are at a major disadvantage before your battle lines clash you can always hit the retreat button or move your troops to the edge of the map to reset or retreat from the fight.

♢ Armour Attachments: Answered Questions & Helpful Comments: Part 2 ♢

• ”What is the reasoning behind your armour attachment priorities?”

If you are looking to min-max, perhaps I could offer my perspective on armour attachments for a few core builds.

Battle Forged Frontliner: Additional Fur Padding (-33% penetration damage taken, for fights against armour penetration like barbarians, unholds, schrats, pikes, and crossbows) attachments.

Banner Carrier: Additional Fur Padding (-33% penetration damage taken, for fights against armour penetration like barbarians, pikes, and crossbows) or Light Padding Replacement (-20% fatigue on body armour; for more fatigue for more perk spamming) attachments.

Polearm: Bone Platings Additional Fur Padding (-33% penetration damage taken, for fights against armour penetration like barbarians, unholds, schrats, pikes, and crossbows) or Light Padding Replacement (-20% fatigue on body armour; for more fatigue for more skill spamming) attachments.

Nimble Tank: Bone Platings (absorbs first hit, good for pre-end game Nimble armours), Horn Plate (-10% melee damage on hits to the body, best for end-game armours) or Unhold Fur Cloak (-20% ranged damage received, good in fights against mass goblin archers)

Archer: Bone Platings (absorbs first hit, good for Nimble armours & most fights as the backline doesn’t get hit too often), Light Padding Replacement (-20% fatigue on body armour, can be used on famed armour that goes over 15 fatigue to get a better Nimble percentage, very situational), Unhold Fur Cloak (-20% ranged damage to body & +10 durability, for goblin ambusher heavy fights to help stay off the goblin poison) attachments.

Direwolf Pelt Mantle/Serpent Skin Mantle/Hyena Fur mantle are great for the early & mid game on medium armours, or Noble mail/assassin gear until you get max durability/famed armour/better attachments.

♢ Backgrounds to Consider: Answered Questions & Helpful Comments: Part 3♢

While every hire should be able to field themselves in battle, there are some backgrounds that are worth hiring to keep in your reserve simply for their events. Depending on the level requirement of the events, you should limit the amount of experience these hires receive, in order to keep daily wages efficient.

Event Meme Hires:

• Worthwhile Constant Value: Historian, and Monk.
• Mainly For A One Time Event: Bowyer, Witchhunter, Caravan Hand, Graverobber, and Swordmaster.

Reasoning:

• WCV Event Explanations:
  Historian (level 2-3+): Can trade away the black book for mysterious juggs (perk points) or legendary daze shield, Graverobber event synergy, some generally positive/mood boosting events, and can read the map purchased via another event leading to treasure.
  Monk (level 0-4+): Very positive interactions in background/general events, crafts blessed water, and stops conflicts via event options, including preventing Hedge Knight conflict.
• MFAOTE Event Explanations: Bowyer (level 6+): Can make a single masterwork bow, or a wonky bow via a rare event, Witchhunter (any level): Specific event for unique famed greatsword with Rebuilding a Company origin, Caravan Hand (level 6+): Good for the inventory expanding event, Graverobber (any level): Event with Historian to obtain event-based free famed shield, and another graverobbing event for a chance at some decayed armour or gold, and can score some valuables in the hidden cache event, but has a noble troop event that could result in a party wipe/renown hit if not prepared, Swordmaster (level 4+): Event with Squire/Adventurous Noble to gain about a level ups worth of melee defence (once per Squire/Adventurous Noble), but will have a high upkeep.

Honorable Mention: The Swordmaster class:

• The Swordmaster is categorized here as an honorable mention instead of being distributed into the background sections due to an abnormal abundance of key base stats, an extraordinary low amount of a primary & secondary base stats, and the ability to lose some of those base stats via a one time event.

Reasoning:

• Pros: The stats that the Swordmaster excels in is a range of: 72-77 melee skill, a range of 10-20 melee defence, and a slightly worth mentionable 42-50 resolve. Has an event that cuts his wages in half and the old trait can be removed by using 1 of your extremely limited Water Skin consumables, in which are gained by encountering the Grotesque Tree legendary location.
• Cons: The stats that the Swordmaster is held back by is a range of: 38-48 hit points, and a range of 75-90 fatigue. That said, he will get worse with the Old trait (+10 resolve, -10 hit points, -10 fatigue, -10 initiative, -1 vision), in which he gains through an event. The Swordmaster also cannot gain key combat traits like Strong, Tough, Iron Lungs, or Huge.
• Conclusion: While the Swordmaster’s melee skill & melee defence are beyond desirable, but the base hit points and fatigue can completely ruin the build for any efficient Battle Forged (fatigue & armour penetration) or Nimble build (low effective hit points value). Not to mention you will not be able to regain hit points or fatigue value back from good starting traits. Additionally, you will eventually gain the Old trait event and lose even more stats out of your Swordmaster’s hit points and fatigue. Although, you can remove the Old trait and make the Swordmaster viable again for an non-efficient campaign that, again, suffers from the severely low hit points and fatigue. So instead of being a background that is suggested for an efficient playstyle, the Swordmaster remains an inefficient hire that can, with preventative measures, can be a mediocre dagger tank, a fatigue neutral Dps unit, or just be used for training each Squire/Adventurous Noble for an extra 1-4 melee defence.

Honorable Mention: Event-based Stat Building:

• With Battle Brothers being a limitless experience, it’s important to understand your parameters for how long of a campaign you want to play. With time comes events, and with the existence of repeatable events that benefit the player’s units with permanent improvements, there is a viable strategy to improve your units beyond the standard leveling formulas.
  Reasoning:
• Pros: Given that you want to allow enough days to build up a few or more units via events, there is the melee fighter Farmhand event farming, which involves the following events: Brawler Teaches (1 time per unit: One mid tier level up for either fatigue, hit points, or melee skill & melee defence), Farmer Old Tricks (Repeatable: +2-4 melee skill), Combat Drill (Repeatable: +0-2 melee skill & melee defence, can choose ranged skill or fatigue & initiative, but those are lesser options for this background). With already high starting hit points & fatigue potential with this background, melee skill & defence can be the focus of improvement with these events. You can choose to use other backgrounds that have the potential to improve from events such as Apprentices or Lumberjacks, but with the ability to trigger the Farmer Old Tricks event, the Farmhand has a significant advantage.
• Cons: The most punishing downside of this strategy is that it requires for your Farmhand to be level 2 or lower in order to be eligible for all 3 events. This results in the Farmhand needing to stay in reserve for the duration of their stat gaining, until you wish to use them. This opens up a handful of efficiency issues.
  The first issue is that they will be in your reserve taking up a slot per unit that could be used for reserve units (tactical flexibility). While that on it’s own isn’t too terrible, you will need to manage their resolve without putting them into combat (likely attempting many tavern visits), as well as feed & pay them, and also deal with the results of your fights accounting for an additional level 1-2 unit in your company strength calculation, for better or for worse (mainly an issue early game).
  The next issue involving their stay in the reserve is that they will be in there for a long time (many hundred days per unit based on procing of event Rng & Rng of the Combat Drill event). This time is mostly undetermined, as it is a lengthy & unreliable testing process, but it is generally perceived as 350-450 days per unit until they have gained a strong melee skill & melee defence advantage over the higher end options for a lot less pay. That said, there is the following issue of depriving yourself of a good unit in the first 100 days of your campaign, where a good stat base Farmhand shines. Essentially, you will want to be building your Farmhands as early as possible to maximize the event cooldowns, but for it to be worthwhile you will want to also find a Farmhand with decent stats, talent stars and maybe even traits, in which would be a strong addition to the rooster in the crucial stages of the game.
  Going back to the roots of the events involved, each event has their requirements that make the event eligible to proc. Starting with the Brawler Teaches event requires a new level 3 or higher Brawler & student for each teaching session with a cooldown of 70 days with a low end chance to proc. Next we have the Combat Drill event that requires you to have 3 or more level 3 or lower units (level 2 or lower is needed for the other 2 events) with a cooldown of 60 days. Lastly, we have the Farmer Old Tricks event which has a lengthy cooldown of 100 days and a very low event chance.
• In the End: This strategy is valid if you intend to play a very long campaign (750+), but otherwise not worthwhile in a more common sub 400 day campaign where you will not likely see the units at full strength or be able to use them for a reasonable amount of days.
  It is noteworthy that it’s likely an unintended exploit.

[Under Construction] ♢ Popular Meta Builds: Answered Questions & Helpful Comments: Part 4 ♢

Is this Meta Build strong & efficient? Yes. Is it the best use of one’s build potential? No.

• It is important to acknowledge that no matter the build, any attempt at using viable battle tactics can net you victories in late-game encounters. Also, if you make a build that uses high value perks for the correct roles (melee/ranged damage dealers, banner carriers, tanks, etc.), you will no doubt see success in many encounters in the game of Battle Brothers. With that said, in the field of min-maxing, there is always a more efficient strategy or way to complete things. The goal of this guide is to showcase the absolute best meta builds and party composition strategies, but that doesn’t mean that every other build isn’t any good, as like many have said, there is no one way to play and succeed at Battle Brothers. This section addresses several popular meta builds that are still very efficient and strong, as well as to explain why they are slightly less efficient than an absolute meta build.

Planned Elaborations:

• Quick-Hands to Polearm on Two-handers (mainly Greatsword, some Hammer)…
• Debuff Handgonners and their strength…
• Why Crossbows are not used in finalized builds, despite slightly higher dmg output against armoured foes…
• Melee & Ranged Hybrids…
• Pathfinder or Taunt instead of Gifted on a Nimble Tank…
• Dagger Overwhelm Nimble Tank…
• Dagger Puncture Specialist…
• Nimble Polearm…
• Nimble & Attack Banner Carriers…
• Nimble-Forged…

[Under Construction] ♢Miscellaneous: Answered Questions & Helpful Comments: Part 5 ♢

• “You mentioned you had played a lot of map seeds. But I noticed you didn’t list any. Was curious do you have any nice seeds you can share with the masses?”

Hey, thank you for checking out my guide!
Previously, I’ve crusaded 500+ map seeds and posted them to a user made website approved by the Battle Brothers community; However, that was pre-DLC and they are no longer valid seeds. Either way you can check out the stickied post that leads to the user website for seeds posted by others here: [link]
Additionally, if you are looking for a more customized experience you can use this seed filter created by Wlira: https://old.reddit.com/r/BattleBrothers/comments/eftwiy/new_tool_perfect_seed_finder/
In my playthroughs I tend to focus on having Blast Furnaces and locations to purchase armour.

• “Generally, how should one go about haggling contracts?”

When generally talking about haggling contracts, you can always ask for a singular increase in price every time (Perhaps avoiding doing so on caravan contracts, as they are usually not worth taking if you aim to play efficiently, or optionally with towns that have cheap premium gear that you intend to raise relations with greatly to purchase from now or the near future). The reason why you will want to ask for a price increase once per contract is because you will not suffer any meaningful consequences (only a 1-3% hit to relations (about 2.5%), which is nothing) if you only make a single haggle attempt once per contract. Whether it is a successful attempt or not, you will agree on the terms and move to the next step. At this point, you will decide whether the contract risk (based primarily on the type of contract, and your current party strength) is worth its weight in gold and if so then you should accept it. If you are unsure, without any consequences, you can tell them that you will think about it, and you can always pick up the contract anytime if it is still there, with perhaps a similarly small 1-3% penalty for letting the contract disappear some time later after having left it. It is best to avoid declining a contract, as it will disappear on its own naturally, without much consequence.

I remember reading from a reliable source that it is mathematically better to ask for more pay, instead of going for the “in advance”, “when it is done”, or “per head options”.

With the negotiator retinue hire you can avoid the relations hit when haggling and you will have 3 safe price increase asks (third ask is a 99% to succeed (if they say no at any point, you must stop there).

• “How would one efficiently use the Mysterious Juggs for the added perk points?”

…

• What is the reasoning for picking Colossus on Battle Forged frontliner builds?

Well, if I were to go into more detail than what is in the perks section of this guide on Colossus…

♦ Links to other helpful guides & Credits ♦

Guides:

• [link]
  For learning more about the technical side of the perks and nuanced mechanics of Battle Brothers, In-Depth Perks Guide (2020) written by Turtle225 & Abel, will provide you with knowledge needed to make your own decisions regarding perks & builds. It is important to note, there are some generalizations/biases displayed in the tone of their perk guide that doesn’t align with the playstyle intended for this guide, which would call for a elongated campaign and a mind for min-maxing for the most optimal builds; However, it is still a very helpful source of information for all Battle Brothers players alike.
  As a side note, Turtle225 does feature an up to date damage calculator for understanding the best offensive and defensive options in terms of measuring damage. There are additional options for damage calculators that are out of date with specific information (perks, & weapon information presets & missing defensive options), but I would recommend Turtle225’s calculator is you can manage to load it. If not LordMidas’s damage calculator works as a substitute with the acknowledgement that perks like: Nine Lives, Nimble, Weapon Masteries and Head Hunter are out of date, as well as the problem of having to manually input correct weapon preset information.

• [link]
• [link]
  Seemingly, the information age of Battle Brothers has arrived thanks to the creation of modding tools from the guide “modding game scripts” by Adam & “Modding, Crafting, Customization, Inventory Decoding, Legendarys, Quests, DLC” by Chief & The Psijik. With the ability to view game files, there will be answers to the many inconclusive questions in Battle Brothers such as: character backgrounds, difficulty scaling, and much more. I am not sure how this effort is viewed by the developers of Battle Brothers, but from what I’ve gathered it is seemingly acceptable to support this cause. If it is something that is not acceptable to promote, do contact me and I can remove this information from my guide. With that said, any modifications to one’s game is not supported by the contents of this guide.

Credits:

• All visual aids contain either screenshots, manipulation of, or direct game asset artwork from Battle Brothers. I do not claim ownership over any of the visual aids I’ve created for the purpose of this guide, and I do not benefit financially from the creation of this guide. All visual aids belong to Overhype Studios and their creators, if that is preferred. If there is any problem with the usage of any of these screenshots, or artworks contact me, and I will be in full cooperation in their removal.

• Huzzah! I just wanted to say that I’ve enjoyed slaving away for the many months over the creation of this guide and the additional years since then that I’ve spent refining the guide after release & game content updates. I’ve had the pleasure to have logged a great deal of hours to my Battle Brothers play time thanks to this guide and it’s testing needs. Anyways, I hope that my guide can help promote additional thoughts on, or future incorporation of efficiency-based playthroughs, thank you for your time.~