Don't know if its dead but playing past a certain point is just an exercise of tedium which is offset by good influence management and having smithed your way to 10 million dinars prior to setting up a kingdom. The AI is just straight up retarded, and in real life these people would be executed for incompetence when it comes to decisions declaring war or peace or killed as a matter of popular unrest as a result of their decisions.Having too many vassals is just setting yourself up for infinite failure, because they really are just that bad at the game. You need to be able to override all of the stupid things they do as they try to derail everything you are doing(you know A COHERENT play pattern with an actual aim beyond endless war for war's sake).
The marriage system is broken to the point where its worthless after you marrying yourself first generation(I have two sons as king, but i have to trek across the entire map to find a lord who will marry them to a daughter of a reasonable age which is impossible because they won't let me marry them until they marry off this 60 year old woman that's for some reason a top priority for them) I am frequently spammed with offers to marry women WHO I know nothing about because i've never met them (Game won't display anything despite sending me the marriage offer.) There's no messenger system, so you have to do all of what you want personally(Make a vassal join, marriage, etc) and its made way worse because of the huge map they made(Which should be a positive, but at some point, it just gets in the way of all the systems they made. You get raided infinitely unless you execute every last lord of a faction which itself is ridiculously tedious and they did everything they could to prevent you from ending the nonsense.At least in warband you could ask a lord if if they've seen X vassal or their whereabouts, in this there's no option, so finding someone is guesswork unless you try to call them into your army(Sometimes option isn't even available)
if you asked me, this game SHOULD be dead, and i don't say that lightly since the "fight battles" aspect of this, aka the core of the game, is fun and i absolutely want a game like this to succeed. They just did a whole bunch of stuff designed to make the game NOT fun and just make the game feel UNFINISHED. If you literally deleted some of the stuff they added that are meant to be features, you'd at least reduce the tedium and make at least feel like the systems you are forced to engage with aren't poorly designed or unfinished. Some of the things they did are just straight up worse than what they did in warband(even unmodded). Honestly, i feel like offering their QA team my save where i've conquered a third(More, but at least this) of the world, have stabilized my income over 10 mill, have all the marriage issues mentioned and tell them to go play it out for 24 hours of actual game time since they for some reason think the decisions they made related to this stuff is good. Guaranteed they'd change their minds after being raided by a fiefless faction for the 10th time. Some of the decisions come across them as not even having played their own game. I'm just kind of at a loss with this game, this is what it looks like after years of early access? this is what i come back to?
I don't think i'll ever play this again after finishing my first world conquest without significant tweaks from taleworlds, and i'm just doing that to "Finish" the game. But i could just walk away from it entirely and not look back, because at some point paint the map becomes the same thing except its deliberately disrupted by tedious vassal management.
