I don't care how many video game enjoyers asked for these features, they're very poor and contribute basically nothing to the game.
Prison breaks are just something to grind a skill of dubious value and has no martial value: releasing one lord early per cool down period is not very useful.
Keep battles are just a momentary distraction
Aren't video games themselves just a distraction though?
Both keep battles and prison breaks are
FUN distractions that provide needed variety. Changes of activity/scenery are necessary to make the game not feel repetitive.
They are both also challenging fights in interesting environments (claustrophobic dungeons or vertical throne rooms), which make the player's combat skills more relevant through smaller-scale fights, as opposed to a 500v500 battle where your performance as an individual fighter doesn't really matter.
Keep battles/prison breaks add immersion to the game world. They both make underused content (civilian outfits/keep scenes/prison scenes) more useful, while also tying into the main gameplay loop. Prison breaks give you 20 relation and yes, Roguery XP (even though I agree roguery is weak). Before prison breaks, if someone you wanted to talk to got captured, you had to wait out the entire term of their imprisonment. Now you can take matters into your own hands.
We're all on the same page here that Taleworlds hasn't made enough progress, and sure these particular features could be better, but they're still good features.
and chance for something to cheap shot a good troop. Even after adding the deployment screen it's bad because it will still spawn in clan members and other troops when your disposables go down (and they will).
Armor protection being **** is what's to blame for high-level troops getting killed unexpectedly in keep battles.
Prison breaks are worse than they were in Warband, since they exclude the part when you have to make it to the city gates instead of teleporting you from the dungeon to the world map.
I'd call them a sidegrade. Instead of a fight through the city, you fight through the dungeons, which wasn't there in Warband.
In fact, the first few times I did prison breaks in Warband I remember being disappointed you couldn't fight in the dungeons, so I consider it an acceptable trade-off.
Spear bracing - in my long campaign I haven't seen a single AI soldier using it. Haven't noticed the difference at all.
Yeah, agreed, same experience in my campaigns. The player can do it, though.
The AI troops not spear bracing is mainly due to troops using long pikes being too uncommon,
something which the troop trees need to be reworked to fix, as I recently made a thread to say.