Just played even further during the weekend and I've came to a veredict:
VC is extremely superior to Vanilla, yet the Player Kingdom system is just as flawed, and even more Grindy...
Sure I can take up days of plain grinding to gather rtr, lords friendship, and gold, but the only consistent way to make gold in VC is to go full Ruthless, else take the trader route which is as boring as fk... That being said, grinding relationship with lords becomes priority, but without a tweaked Cooldown for Lord quests it can become the most boring task in a game ever...
So here goes a pletiful of interesting ideas:
1st and foremost, allow players to switch fiefs with other lords -> This is a need to circumvent retarded AI behavior from your own vassals or comrade vassals from the same faction...
2nd there is a urgent need of full diplomacy module merged with VC, sure you can dismiss the trainer and recruiter for better systems, still it's a must have. Managing the Kingdom where you were forced to fight Irish while your Capital lies at the other side of the map is completely retarded. In my save I would get backstab zerg raiding at Friese while I was conquering the whole map from some scrub faction (srsly, irish and pict troops in VC are just annoying butter... You cut through them easily, but they zerg like mongoloids.) Needless to say that I've told you so about patrols, it's a must have. One perfect addendum that isn't in Diplomacy at all would be some form to send emissaries and manage some basic stuff from your own camp, doesn't make sense you having to rush back to the capital just to send one of your companions on a diplomatic mission, it's stupid.
3rd is the ultimate need of Campaign AI improvement, Lords act like moths, they only attack villages or fiefs with small garrison, I'v read about some system in VC to make the marshall take troops from them, not working on AI fiefs apparently.
4th either auto-garrisson or some sort of garrison management from distance.
5th fix the family bs Bryt devs made, supposedly all Ragnarsons should be brothers, all of them should share family bonds, it doesn't make sense that 90% of the lords are single, only child without kids. Rly, this looks like something that was ignored so to rush the DLC into sales.
6th implement lord assassination so to cleanup useless masterless lords who only serve to pester you with 20men troops village pillaging...
7th make all special smith gear superior to everything or exact copies in terms of numbers from the "uniques" found within the game.
8th add all of the items (except for uniques) into the merchant list.
9th reduce all of the quests CD.
10th Add some thematic companions with abilities, like a Berserker companion (preferably capable of using Troll's Axe) / Heroic "inspiring" companion / Tough "shield taunt" companion.
11th remove Asbjorn trait of being against pillaging. Following the Storymode he is in favor of Viking culture, tho if you do that in Sandbox he gets pssed off, whcih makes no fking sense at all...
12th fill the fief gaps on the map, possibly turn event isolated castles and villages into actual fiefs.
13th Allow the player to purchase neutral lands like mines and farmsteads scattered on the map for profit$.
14th add the missing features from Commander mod (like skirmish AI and similar).
15th Disable Faction relation loss due to fking religion, make it relationship hit with lords on a personal level. The constat war declaration without the Liege's consent probably is one of the reasons the AI gets so messed up...
16th make dog immortal (there's no point on having it able to get killed, it doesn't add anything but cosmetics and some sort of immersion just to see it getting killed doesn't sound very appealing, it could easily be called clutter-content. Else you should remove it completely for the Dog glitches tons of things.
17th Shield Bash
18th reform some of the siege scenes with non-sense bottlenecking either by fixing the navmesh or adding extra entry points so as NPCs do not get Stuck.
19th make ports conquered by enemies to block access from NPCs to sea, and from the sea to land throug that port.
20th add creative methods of regaining rep or losing rep intentionally, like quests with options etc...
21st Fix navmesh for Naval Sieging.
22nd buff Shield HP for round and rawhide, nerf H shield and small shields HP, remove Bashing from small shields (bucklers), H shiled could be negated the Shiled Bash too, but that could bring some crying...
23rd tweak the AI so to make them attack near home, by either increasing morale loss rate of AI armies or by make the AI not like to go far to wage the war (this could be good or bad, idk rly)
24th add Shieldmaiden troop tree into Norse factions, make it like in Friese where you can get Norse of Frisians from fiefs. Make them the female equivalent of huskarls...
25th A nice touch would be to make High King trophies somewhat substantial.
Currently it kinda sucks, 8k gold isn't enough to get you anywhere, I am steamrolling 11+k per each mega battle just from selling prisioners, so it doesn't make any sense to be awarded 8k fro something that should be considered an epic feature. None the less, to actually rule the towns you set out to conquer for this quest it means at least war with 3 nations, problem dealing with the "curb other realm's power" war trigger, and the complete lack of descent lords (90% of this DLC has bad rep lords or neutral, meaning that actually managing your kingdom becomes extremely annoying. Add that to the religion fktard factor, and the relation hit over almost ANYTHING you cando in the game, you are set for some insanely difficult situation forced by accomplishing this task) at min I think each should award 100k g, at least some substantial rtr, 1 lvl for 30lvl+ character in Exp, and massive reputation. If not that, switch it over for all lords from the nations that each town originally belongs to into deflecting to your realm. Either of those would make it worth it, as of now it's feels like a bad-prank from the devs... It's worthless rly...
At first glance I thought this would be Epic, and trigger some sort of never seen before content, something exclusive to the DLC or whatnot, in reality it's just plain worthless, sure you can feel that you've achieved something, but no, in reality it's just the same as conquering chunks of the map with all it's negative effects kicking in regardless of being a set quest that pretends to be epic. It's plain stupid to waste time trying to achieve it... Even the RE Morigan quest rewards better than this bs...
26th Now, one crucial sugestion I can make is to adopt 1257ad's Lance system, it's a thousand times su perior to this bs pick 5 peasants / useless t2 troops. This is one of the reasons why being goodypants can hinder you drastically, for fast recruiting of crucial troops able to either siege or protect fiefs you need to hire vikings, else you are doomed with the ethernal loop of losing 1 huskarl for each you manage to lvl up, completely impractical ethernal loop...
27th Uncertain idea: Make it possible for kings to pledge alliegeance. It only makes sense if you become a "high king" or "emperor", so there's that, never fully understood why that wasn't in the vanilla already.
All I can think of as of this moment.
