The early game is too short and uneventful for my liking. Part of the inspiration for this post is this side character I made. I'm playing with the settings on realistic, I only rely on auto-save, and I've downloaded a mod that gives me a fairly high chance to die in battle, yet without much effort I'm already a lord and have a fief. I don't feel like I had to earn it. Here's what I suggest.
- Make men more expensive to recruit and upkeep. It would be cool if early on many players end up forming their first warband out of looters they took prisoner. Putting together a warband one man at a time like that could be fun and rewarding, and it could make the player feel more like they earned their later success by starting from nowhere.
- Make more sub-factions/minor factions. It would be cool if there were: poachers; deserters; highwaymen; cultists?; smugglers; and so on.
- Make tournaments harder and rarer. It's very easy to earn a lot of money and renown early on by doing tournaments. This is mostly because the AI units don't turn quick enough, so the player can walk in circles around individual enemies and they can't really fight back. I also recommend making tournaments more varied by having things like ranged-only matches.
- Fix the exploit where the player can retreat over and over and regain their horse's health, and their projectiles. Also, retreating in the middle of a battle (as opposed to retreating by physically running away) should be an automatic loss for the player, and prevent them from attempting another fight.
- This suggestion is more outlandish than the others (since it would take a lot more work), but maybe have some minor factions you could join. So before the player is renowned enough to join a main faction, they could skill up and gain renown by fighting in small conflicts between minor factions. One faction could be the smugglers I mentioned in suggestion 2. Your main enemy as a smuggler might be patrolmen. The game already has hideouts, so there's some precedence for sub-faction territories where these kinds of fights could happen. One thing I have in mind is the ruins of an old castle in the woods. Maybe locations like this could be permanent, but since they're so worn down no main faction would be interested in capturing them. So that would leave minor factions free to have turf wars on a level below the main wars between the main factions.
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