Just had a bunch of singleplayer suggestions:
The player statistics should be broken down into the following:
* Faction kills
* Faction wounds
* Soldier Type (for each faction) kills and wounds
* Accuracy (for types of weapons)
* Average damage (for types of weapons)
* Time spent traveling
* Average distance between events
* Average distance between battles
* Battle log: Details every battle you were present in
* Action log: Details every action taken (such as looting, talking, stealing cattle, battles, etc.)
* Time spent on horseback, on foot, etc. while in combat
Get rid of the skills for characters that aren’t useful (or change the game so that the skills are useful) like Inventory Management. It seems like there are too many skills, like Path-Finding and Spotting, that do too little to be useful. You might want to consider consolidating Path-Finding and Spotting or raising their effectivenesses.
Change the siege tactics of the AI so that whenever they mass an attack on a town, they always try to attack the defenders instead of starving the town to surrender.
Be able to rebuild a looted town and reward the player by making the town like them more.
Be able to build more buildings and sponsor businesses so your town could become more prosperous.
Make siege equipment that works in sieges.
Change movement speed so that a party full of horsemen moves faster and a party that contains horsemen moves faster than one without.
If a character decides to leave your party, you should be able to sign a contract with them, turning them into a mercenary. There should be a variety of different contracts, such as receiving commissions on actions that they participate in, a weekly wage or a promise that they will recieve fiefs when you become a lord, etc
If a town is too poor to be able to give you any items when you loot them, the option to loot them should be removed.
You should be able to build your own villages and castles.
You should be able to promote your own villages or castles to towns.
By shift clicking on an item in your inventory, you should be able to sell all instances of that item at once.
By shift clicking and dragging cursor, you should be able to select all of the items from an action and buy them.
There should be some way to tell how much an item is worth when you pick up the after battle or looting items so that you know exactly how much you can sell it for at a nearby town.
Some villages should be rich enough that you could sell things to them.
Doing business with a village should increase your relationship with them.
When you fight on the battlefield, all of the equipment that the enemy drops should automatically be included in the after battle spoils report.
You should be able to have your characters do actions independently and form a separate party that follows you around or will meet you. If they were a separate party, they could level up faster by marauding on their own or make money for you and then report back. As a consequence, this should make them more independent.
Change the skills so that they all have some minor effect on the party. If there were characters devoted to your cause, then a percentage of their persuasion would be tacked on to yours when you are trying to convince an unruly character to stay with you (as the loyal character would chime in and help you present your case).
Some actions should automatically level up skills. For instance, stealing cattle, taking supplies and looting from towns should level up your looting ability. In another instance, carrying large amounts of supplies should slowly increase your inventory size by leveling up the inventory management skill.
Your inventory size should be determined by your inventory management skill, the number of loyal characters in your party and the number of caravan masters in your party.
Carrying large numbers of items should slow you down as the weight weighs down your party’s members. The weight of every item should be included (food needs a weight, but weapons and armor already have them).
Athleticism should speed up your party’s movement speed. Athleticism should be raised by the amount of movement that you do while on the world map and in combat. See the horseback suggestion for movement speed.
There should be a logistical element to your warband. There should be pack animals, such as mules, camels or donkeys, as well as messengers (which could be your own characters to save from paying new people to be messengers).
There should be an option to hold everyone hostage in a village or town (well, only if you have a bunch of people that could sneak in) and then loot it so that you get more items than stealing, but you don’t burn the place down.
You should be able to wipe any village, castle or town off the map by completely destroying it.
You should be able to send out messengers that will attract characters from other towns to go to a certain town, where you could sign contracts with them so that they would follow you or simply pick them up.
You should be able to have romantic relationships with your party’s characters.
You should be able to have skills or shops (or whatever) that would allow you to build your own weapons. There should be some kind of game that the player could play to make the weapon’s stats better.
Costs for buying business enterprises could be reduced if you had skills related to the trade and you helped train the artisans/trademen. There should be more trades. There should also be caravans or messengers that deliver your money to you instead of it being automatically credited to my account. These messengers/caravans should also exist for every other lord, so that you could have the possibility of looting those, too. You would obviously need to be able to precisely control the people defending those messengers/caravans. The messengers/caravans could also be treacherous, which would add intrigue/annoyance to the gameplay. You should also be able to set up an unlimited number (well, maybe like 10, tops) of businesses in a town.
You should be able to talk to the soldiers that you have and change their equipment.
You should be able to request weapons, armor, horses and goods from town and be able to pick them up in a week, two weeks, etc. so that you could mass upgrade your characters, your soldiers, etc.
Building materials should count as goods so that you could upgrade your village/town/castle. Furthermore, you should also be able to choose more upgrades for your towns: walls, barracks, forge, NPC businesses, etc. so that they could survive longer without being raided or harassed or whatever.
You should be able to hire hosts of mercenaries in addition to individual mercenaries.
The mercenary NPCs should occasionally be organized into clans or unions.
If you steal cattle from a village, you should always be able to see them after you get the prompt saying that you’ve driven whatever number of cattle away from the herd.
You should always have the option of looting and/or burning a village. Otherwise, it just seems political.
Leading close (within five members) of your maximum party size limit should help level up your party size. Furthermore, there should be an amount of party leading experience that you should get by winning battles (multiplied by the amount of battle disadvantage you have so that the more of an underdog you are, the more experience you’d get) so that getting large numbers of men in your warband should be easy.
Renown should be more important to the NPC characters. If the player’s character has more than 1,000 renown (or make up a number, I don’t care), any allied NPC (except for the king and those extremely loyal to him) should always be welcome to the player’s orders and suggestions. At a certain amount of renown, the king should either be ousted by the rest of the faction’s lords, succeed the throne willingly, or not protest when the player’s character becomes king of the faction.
The text prompts that come up alerting you to quests or feasts or whatever SHOULD NOT STOP GAMEPLAY. It’s really annoying to tell your party to move all the way across the map (which takes three minutes, at least) and then come back to find that EVERYTHING STOPPED BECAUSE OF ONE FREAKIN’’ FEAST NOTICE.
Attacking horses should give some amount of XP (maybe 30?).
You should be able to design and change the color of every piece of armor, weaponry, etc. that you are in control of (your warband, your banner, etc.)
There should be no limit to the number of different types of troops you can command (as in Nord Huscarls count as one type, Rhodok Sharpshooters count as one type, etc.).
Some castles should have villages inside them.
There should not be a fullscreen prompt every time that you steal cattle from a village.
If you loot and burn a village, it should give you all of the rewards that you would get from stealing supplies and stealing cattle (and then slaughtering them) in addition to the normal rewards.
If you control a village, you should always be able to draw recruits from it.
You should be able to give prisoners to other lords in your faction and then they will pay you a fraction of the money that they make by selling the prisoner back to the faction or to ransom brokers (if you’re giving a character prisoner to another lord, then you get paid later, but if you’re giving a normal prisoner to another lord, you get paid a smaller percentage immediately upon giving them the prisoner(s)).
You should be able to give villages food and money to increase favor with them.
