In between you have to manage the company finances, mercenary morale, equipment and outfitting, and resolve the many, many narrative events that crop up along the way. Then, assuming you can beat the tutorial fight against the bandits, all hint of scripting disappears and the procedurally generated overworld takes over entirely: you travel to a town, stock up on supplies, and take a contract, most of which (but not all) will pitch you into at least one tactical combat segments where your company faces down anything from bandits to orcs to the ancient undead. These contracts are procedurally generated from a list of templates, but the starting contract you get is scripted and holds your hand through the process of hiring new blood into the company - there’s always a pool of manpower available, although the quality of that manpower will vary based on their individual backgrounds - and outfitting them with some basic equipment. Or to provide a simple escort for a trading caravan making its way across the continent to another settlement. Or to retrieve valuable items from monster lairs.
This introduces you to the contract system, which forms your main source of income for most of the game: bandits, wolves and even scarier beasties will be plaguing a settlement, and you’ll be hired to hunt them down and stop them.
These survivors promptly trudge back to a nearby settlement on the world map, where they get a new contract from the town leaders to go back and finish the job by taking revenge on those dastardly bandits. Every new company starts the game by picking a name and a wonderfully detailed banner (that you can eventually construct in game and have carried around by your sergeant) and then doing the training contract, where the remnants of the previous company get wiped out by a group of bandits leaving only three survivors. To explain how Battle Brothers works I might as well tell the story of Bjarni the Learner of the Face Manglers, one of the unassuming stars of my first successful mercenary company - because what Battle Brothers is ultimately about is telling stories. Battle Brothers is the low-fantasy mercenary company management game I always wanted.
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