Ok, so here's the thing, VC is great in that the battles in this DLC/Mod are in fact way more fun and interesting, and to some extent, more tactical than any other mod/DLC for Warband.
I have to give praise and a shoutout to all the strong points of the DLC, like spears becoming a more viable weapon, javelins being useful (which is untrue to all mods I've played, and vanilla itself due to the low ammo and extremely low accuracy). A fun way to make steady income without playing a Lord / King. Interesting interactions with NPCs, some scenes (not all, many are glitched and bland, but some scenes are incredible).
The whole special gear crafting thing inherited by Brytenwalda. Some mini-quests involving neutral scenes (like the Strange Stones, Odin's Cave, etc. The only one that leaves a bitter taste is the copy-paste from Brytenwalda's Strange Ruins)
The whole Morigan quest's also really appealing, even though counter-intuitive in both it's "lore" and how it plays-out (specially the invincible mini-battles that only serves the purpose to force the player to be gamey by avoiding combat or as a troop-sink that doesn't do anything but harass the player for no reason at all).
Then there's the storyline which has the most cheesy cringe-worthy story I've ever seen in a game (oh, mom, save mommy, mommy is crazy). Personally I couldn't care less about my "characters motives", and it's straight-out bad writing from start to finish. Also, within the main story, the whole capture fort for 20 days is one of the most useless and non-sensical things i've ever seen. I get the whole excuse of "distracting the enemy", but that's hardly effective in realistic circumstances, even more so in the game where the AI just do random stuff regardless of what the player does, except for the biggest Warband flaw of all-times: Zerg raiding player's fiefs, that is always consistent...
Then again, the whole reputation system attached to relations plus religion is off and broken to a point of no return. Once you commit to certain play-style you're destroying your end-game. It doesn't become difficult per-se, it simply makes the end-game a boring chore of chasing enemies. Which leads to the reason why I've came to make this topic:
The whole shenanigans involving pagan religion... So, none if maybe a couple lords that are Pagan have any decent personality traits, and if they do, your reputation doesn't influence their relations. This alone breaks any end-game for a player who choses to go the Pagan way, forcing you to relinquish both paganism along with the most appealing addition in this mod compared to brytenwalda: Ship + Raiding. This alone makes the mod sour, to say the least, in fact once I've reached real end-game I've quit, tried to come back into it multiple times, but it's pointless to fight against such a cheaty way of handicapping the player.
So, what's wrong with all that? Pretty much everything... If you use the whole raiding strategy to amass fortunes so you can have a decent fleet and spare money for upgrading fiefs, well, you can't have lords, meaning you won't be able to actually play the whole end-game of forging your own kingdom. Currently in my save I have 99 RTR (easy peasy lemon squeasy) but that doesn't help at all, sure I can cater for deflecting / evicted lords, but the realtion stains with cristians make it impossible to manage the kingdom unless you take upon yourself the chore-grinding of single-handedly raising such relations with a combo of massive gold spenditure along with grinding quests (and even using both, effectively more gold than quests, the quest cooldowns make it into a in-game chore of years upon years). So, you take that happy quest of unifying Scandinavia, k, cheasy one, but RP wise, to effectively unite them along with the lords, you gonna have massive penalties and micro-management becomes overwhelming too fast. The only way to avoid harass from Christians is the gamey "timber for monasteries" grind, which's also non-sensical and annoying.
Even after you grind relations to christians seeking to avoid an constant war with everyone in the map (after uniting scandinavia that is), you are off to dealing with a massive hoster of countless lords carrying grudges against you, in fact, I've failed to find a single lord that I hadn't grinded relations beforehand (as a vassal of Nothumbria and before that in Danmark) with positive or even neutral relations towards my toon. All of this leads to a listing of biased problems with the DLC to it's very core, which's the basegame of Warband.
The listing goes as this:
1- AI cheats, some may disagree with this statement, but the truth is that the AI plays by much more forgiving rules than the player, and they can in fact bypass so many things that they always have the upper-hand, no matter how good you are at the game. The major "cheating" aspects is that they don't suffer attrition in the biased sieging mechanic introduced by the DLC. They don't have to worry about food or morale. They can raid villages with 1 troop. They can avoid fights without serious penalties to morale (fleeing). Once they've fled enough, they have so little troops that they can outrun anything in the game, and go straight to raiding villages endlessly like a zerging bee...
2- 90% of the interesting difficulty mechanics introduced by VC affects exclusively the player, IE: Injuries, Armor Penalties (they only take effect in battles, so only the player and his direct opponents actually get hindered by it, making it another advantage for AI on Map). No matter how many troops you leave in a fief (this is inherent to Warband / M&B in general), AI always succeeds in Sieges, and not by forcing a white-flag, but by assaulting, this makes the whole "sieging" mechanic a hindrance towards the player, discouraging any attempt to capture anything in-land, due to the fact that the only way to avoid that is to attack by sea. Lords don't have to maintain ships nor do they have to buy them. If a lord has 1500 troops, it can travel by sea without issue even though it's physically impossible in the game to do so considering the maximum ship-limit + their troop limits. This allows for Irish lords from realms that don't even have ports to travel with ease all the way to Danmark, which's not only unrealistic, but annoying and nonsensical.
3- Unresponsiveness from Battle AI combined with Glitched scenes where AI spawns outside the scene limits. Imo this is the most broken part of the whole DLC, you can actually get stuck in a battle for not having a clear sight of an AI that spawned outside, so the only option is to flee from battle, which only adds to the whole shenanigan of the sieging attrition. But that's not the worst case scenario, you can actually get wrecked in field battles due to glitched responsiveness of your own troops AI. Sometimes they'll do nothing, standing like sitting ducks, sometimes they won't obey the formation logistics and keep walking back-and-forth like a bunch of idiots for minutes. At times they'll break formation out of the blue and you won't be able to regroup them before loosing a massive amount of troops in the process...
4- Lack of Upstanding/Goodnatured lords: This one alone makes creating a kingdom an almost pointless effort. You'll be, 90% of the time, forced to be gamey when both distributing fiefs (that you can't exchange) and bribing lords (because you won't have time to do quests for them). The whole thing becomes a gold sink that'll eventually leave you broke, and with the biased "reform kingdom" mechanic, you'll eventually lose all territory, or be forced to kill your income due to tax inefficiency as to avoid losing conquered territory.
5- Ally AI unresponsiveness in the Map. Basically your marshal will constantly do mid-sea standing campaigns that last a week, and do nothing, not defend nor attack... Some lords will get lost in the sea and sit there for months at a time without moving even to defend their own fiefs.
6- Lack of forms to boost relations with vassal lords aside from marriage + feast grinding... This also makes it into a chore, due to the fact that you'll have to grind feasts at peace times to avoid your worthless lords from deflecting, which, in the end, is only useful when you are the marshal of your own kingdom... Even so, it's more effective to carry around a hoster of elite troops than it is to grind relations + wait for lords to come to you for any campaign... I've found that I am more effective alone than I am with any AI help.
7- No way to curb Christianity due to the biased mechanic where temples and monasteries force convert nearby fiefs. Yet, we are encouraged to convert fiefs due to inherent bonuses and the whole relation drop over-time within fiefs that are not from your religion...
I think that's all I can remember for now. Summing up, I do think that VC is broken because it reinforces warbands flaws with it's own new features. Whenever you start a kingdom the game becomes unmanageable until you either create enough patience to be gamey and micromanage everything, or simply give up and start a new one. So, the play-ability of VC is basically limited to restarts unless you find chore-grinding a fun experience...
Just my 2 cents on the DLC after years having it sitting in my Steam without ever touching it (except for the first time when I've played only the story and uninstalled)
I have to give praise and a shoutout to all the strong points of the DLC, like spears becoming a more viable weapon, javelins being useful (which is untrue to all mods I've played, and vanilla itself due to the low ammo and extremely low accuracy). A fun way to make steady income without playing a Lord / King. Interesting interactions with NPCs, some scenes (not all, many are glitched and bland, but some scenes are incredible).
The whole special gear crafting thing inherited by Brytenwalda. Some mini-quests involving neutral scenes (like the Strange Stones, Odin's Cave, etc. The only one that leaves a bitter taste is the copy-paste from Brytenwalda's Strange Ruins)
The whole Morigan quest's also really appealing, even though counter-intuitive in both it's "lore" and how it plays-out (specially the invincible mini-battles that only serves the purpose to force the player to be gamey by avoiding combat or as a troop-sink that doesn't do anything but harass the player for no reason at all).
Then there's the storyline which has the most cheesy cringe-worthy story I've ever seen in a game (oh, mom, save mommy, mommy is crazy). Personally I couldn't care less about my "characters motives", and it's straight-out bad writing from start to finish. Also, within the main story, the whole capture fort for 20 days is one of the most useless and non-sensical things i've ever seen. I get the whole excuse of "distracting the enemy", but that's hardly effective in realistic circumstances, even more so in the game where the AI just do random stuff regardless of what the player does, except for the biggest Warband flaw of all-times: Zerg raiding player's fiefs, that is always consistent...
Then again, the whole reputation system attached to relations plus religion is off and broken to a point of no return. Once you commit to certain play-style you're destroying your end-game. It doesn't become difficult per-se, it simply makes the end-game a boring chore of chasing enemies. Which leads to the reason why I've came to make this topic:
The whole shenanigans involving pagan religion... So, none if maybe a couple lords that are Pagan have any decent personality traits, and if they do, your reputation doesn't influence their relations. This alone breaks any end-game for a player who choses to go the Pagan way, forcing you to relinquish both paganism along with the most appealing addition in this mod compared to brytenwalda: Ship + Raiding. This alone makes the mod sour, to say the least, in fact once I've reached real end-game I've quit, tried to come back into it multiple times, but it's pointless to fight against such a cheaty way of handicapping the player.
So, what's wrong with all that? Pretty much everything... If you use the whole raiding strategy to amass fortunes so you can have a decent fleet and spare money for upgrading fiefs, well, you can't have lords, meaning you won't be able to actually play the whole end-game of forging your own kingdom. Currently in my save I have 99 RTR (easy peasy lemon squeasy) but that doesn't help at all, sure I can cater for deflecting / evicted lords, but the realtion stains with cristians make it impossible to manage the kingdom unless you take upon yourself the chore-grinding of single-handedly raising such relations with a combo of massive gold spenditure along with grinding quests (and even using both, effectively more gold than quests, the quest cooldowns make it into a in-game chore of years upon years). So, you take that happy quest of unifying Scandinavia, k, cheasy one, but RP wise, to effectively unite them along with the lords, you gonna have massive penalties and micro-management becomes overwhelming too fast. The only way to avoid harass from Christians is the gamey "timber for monasteries" grind, which's also non-sensical and annoying.
Even after you grind relations to christians seeking to avoid an constant war with everyone in the map (after uniting scandinavia that is), you are off to dealing with a massive hoster of countless lords carrying grudges against you, in fact, I've failed to find a single lord that I hadn't grinded relations beforehand (as a vassal of Nothumbria and before that in Danmark) with positive or even neutral relations towards my toon. All of this leads to a listing of biased problems with the DLC to it's very core, which's the basegame of Warband.
The listing goes as this:
1- AI cheats, some may disagree with this statement, but the truth is that the AI plays by much more forgiving rules than the player, and they can in fact bypass so many things that they always have the upper-hand, no matter how good you are at the game. The major "cheating" aspects is that they don't suffer attrition in the biased sieging mechanic introduced by the DLC. They don't have to worry about food or morale. They can raid villages with 1 troop. They can avoid fights without serious penalties to morale (fleeing). Once they've fled enough, they have so little troops that they can outrun anything in the game, and go straight to raiding villages endlessly like a zerging bee...
2- 90% of the interesting difficulty mechanics introduced by VC affects exclusively the player, IE: Injuries, Armor Penalties (they only take effect in battles, so only the player and his direct opponents actually get hindered by it, making it another advantage for AI on Map). No matter how many troops you leave in a fief (this is inherent to Warband / M&B in general), AI always succeeds in Sieges, and not by forcing a white-flag, but by assaulting, this makes the whole "sieging" mechanic a hindrance towards the player, discouraging any attempt to capture anything in-land, due to the fact that the only way to avoid that is to attack by sea. Lords don't have to maintain ships nor do they have to buy them. If a lord has 1500 troops, it can travel by sea without issue even though it's physically impossible in the game to do so considering the maximum ship-limit + their troop limits. This allows for Irish lords from realms that don't even have ports to travel with ease all the way to Danmark, which's not only unrealistic, but annoying and nonsensical.
3- Unresponsiveness from Battle AI combined with Glitched scenes where AI spawns outside the scene limits. Imo this is the most broken part of the whole DLC, you can actually get stuck in a battle for not having a clear sight of an AI that spawned outside, so the only option is to flee from battle, which only adds to the whole shenanigan of the sieging attrition. But that's not the worst case scenario, you can actually get wrecked in field battles due to glitched responsiveness of your own troops AI. Sometimes they'll do nothing, standing like sitting ducks, sometimes they won't obey the formation logistics and keep walking back-and-forth like a bunch of idiots for minutes. At times they'll break formation out of the blue and you won't be able to regroup them before loosing a massive amount of troops in the process...
4- Lack of Upstanding/Goodnatured lords: This one alone makes creating a kingdom an almost pointless effort. You'll be, 90% of the time, forced to be gamey when both distributing fiefs (that you can't exchange) and bribing lords (because you won't have time to do quests for them). The whole thing becomes a gold sink that'll eventually leave you broke, and with the biased "reform kingdom" mechanic, you'll eventually lose all territory, or be forced to kill your income due to tax inefficiency as to avoid losing conquered territory.
5- Ally AI unresponsiveness in the Map. Basically your marshal will constantly do mid-sea standing campaigns that last a week, and do nothing, not defend nor attack... Some lords will get lost in the sea and sit there for months at a time without moving even to defend their own fiefs.
6- Lack of forms to boost relations with vassal lords aside from marriage + feast grinding... This also makes it into a chore, due to the fact that you'll have to grind feasts at peace times to avoid your worthless lords from deflecting, which, in the end, is only useful when you are the marshal of your own kingdom... Even so, it's more effective to carry around a hoster of elite troops than it is to grind relations + wait for lords to come to you for any campaign... I've found that I am more effective alone than I am with any AI help.
7- No way to curb Christianity due to the biased mechanic where temples and monasteries force convert nearby fiefs. Yet, we are encouraged to convert fiefs due to inherent bonuses and the whole relation drop over-time within fiefs that are not from your religion...
I think that's all I can remember for now. Summing up, I do think that VC is broken because it reinforces warbands flaws with it's own new features. Whenever you start a kingdom the game becomes unmanageable until you either create enough patience to be gamey and micromanage everything, or simply give up and start a new one. So, the play-ability of VC is basically limited to restarts unless you find chore-grinding a fun experience...
Just my 2 cents on the DLC after years having it sitting in my Steam without ever touching it (except for the first time when I've played only the story and uninstalled)
But then again I was educated in the subject, went to Uni to study Game Development, Game Design and etc. So I am that kind of annoying dude who knows stuff, but has a salty attitude 24/7 
