This sounds awesome, I'm sure I read somewhere that DW wanted people to help with the mod.
There is a whole section for suggestions, it may give you some ideas.
My ideas for you
1/ Change the crappy units that you hire from castles, towns, villages and freelancers - merchant, scout, village hunter? to good cheap fighting units. Gives the player a good reason to walk around.
2/ Get rid of the massive charge stats and HP of horses.
3/ You could try all npc's the same starting stats - instead of 1 troop having 15 strength with poo armour and the next having 100 with great armour. ( armour should win them the day)
4/ Sort the weapon stats so 1h weapons aren't better stats than 2h etc
5/ I tried this for myself and its quite good fun. Awesome for roll play I gave the new troops the name Kalredians from Kalredan castle area and tried to only recruit them to take the castle and start my empire, you don't need to use the same name and castle if you don't want to
this refers to idea 1/
This is good news A New Dawn is my and my kids fav mod for a very long time now, Good luck.