Game:

The Banner Saga (2014)

Duration: 9:20

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Banner Saga's war system is a bit half-baked and it's iterated on in both sequels. You're given three approaches for the fight, more difficult approaches have scarier enemy formations but reduce the casualties you take to your caravan. There is a hidden 'danger' stat, influenced by decisions you make, which affects how scary the enemies are. When you caravan is smaller, enemies are more dangeorus- this means that taking easy fights early on makes later fights more difficult as you'll take casualties.

After the fight, you're given the option to fall back before the enemies regroup or to fight another wave. Fighting another wave reduces casualties further and awards an item, but the new wave of enemies is substantial (often larger than the initial wave), you don't get to heal up or adjust formation, and they get the first turn. This means there's nothing stopping the game spawning a high-strength Dredge Scourge right next to a squishy unit and immediately moving and donking them.

In practice, this means that this is a complicated system that we will barely engage with. The correct choice is almost always to charge and not take the second wave. This is true even in casual runs of the game- the chance of getting injuries or even losing outright on the second wave is quite high and the item rewards aren't going to be worth it.

This map introduces three new units. Don't be fooled by Ludin's cameo earlier on, he's a great unit and will see consistent deployment in this caravan. Being human when you have so many big 4x4 bodies getting stuck on each other is an advantage. Ludin's Impale special does strength damage with no chance of missing and one damage per tile moved- it's particularly strong against an enemy type we haven't met yet, but even against regular enemies it adds up to a lot of damage. It's also cool that if an enemy kills themselves by walking on their turn, priority passes back to us- it's an efficient way to kill things.

Yrsa is the only ranged unit in Hakon's caravan and so she's a staple unit. She has 3 break and also has an excellent special that does strength damage at range in an aoe. While she's offensively sound, she is a defensive liability- many dredge are able to clean one-shot her if they reach her, even the weak grunts can kill her in two hits. It's good we have a lot of bulky 4x4 guys to stop that happening.

Bersi shares Gunnulf's strong class but it's hard for him to compete when Gunnulf has had so much XP already- like look, in this map Gunnulf is 10/17, Bersi is 9/12, those are lousy stats for a varl. He also has a worse strength cap so he's weaker even with investment. Gunnulf is fairly easy to get killed on a blind run- Bersi feels like an inferior replacement designed to sub for a dead Gunnulf. It reminds me of how Fire Emblem 1 has a bunch of inferior units like Tomas or Samson there in case you got all your good units killed. We'll use Bersi here but never again.

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