From my understanding, the entire questline mechanics improved up until the first 2/3 objective is reached. After that it's a hell broken loose with a insane FFA Zerg Rush where whomever zergs faster wins. The problem with that is that the time-limit for the minor quests before the 2/3 objective's reached can utterly destroy your efforts to recruit more clans and build up viable companion vassals. So the quest will basically force you into permanent war before you even get a chance of properly stabilizing your realm.
From the birth & death, the campaign's excrutiantingly bad in that regard because apparently we need to have our family members in party with spouses + sit in towns doing absolutely **** to get a ever lowering chance on them having kids. For the PC that's somewhat okay, but for the others this requirement is a deadbeat hinderance that will eventually culminate into family members having no kids. The feature's also virtually useless unless you hope to curb the number of enemies overtime through RNG battle deaths, other than that the Campaign's "rushed" nautre quest doesn't allow for a long enough time-frame for your kin to grow. Your own kids / brothers' kids won't even reach adulthood until you are far into the final stages of the quest even if you rush marriages, making the mechanics revolving around the kids quite useless (except for brother and sister)
It's also hard to deal with vassal bordergore considering that the most fiefs any vassal should hold at any given time for optimal management from the AI + optimal stability's a town with neighboring 2 castles at most for each (and that if their Clan Tier's at least 5, otherwise they won't have enough parties to even patrol their lands, nor enough Clan members for governors). If you don't force yourself into ownership of everything you're going to be shoehorned with bordergore arbitrary votes that will ultimately destroy the new owner clan's efficiency for both campaigning and managing fiefs. Which leads to:
Need of Trading 300 perk so you can re-shuffle lands properly if there aren't enough vassals in the realm - but that also means you'll often be forced 10~ million denars if the settlement they've "stolen" is prosperous. The issue with that is if you don't grind 50+m prior to starting the conquest quest phase, you won't have enough to deal with that, and there are only 2 ways of doing so, one of which involve exploits because nothing in the game's truly profitable unless you game the game, except for Smithing, which translates into countless wasted focus pts on both PC and Companions to make it viable to grind for parts (+ more years and years of grind on top of trading - can be done simultaneously to less effect on both, and IF, and only IF, you're lucky with smithing orders + if you're using debug mode/cheat mode to prevent game breaking bugs, you'll clutter both your save-file and your inventory screen with countless identical crafted items, making the save file gigantic overtime and opening the possibility of it getting corrupted the more you craft).
So far, Birth & Death seems non-viable for Campaign story meta, Trade 300 is a must which means you're already locked-out of 5 focus pts and into a massive grind for many in-game years. Both of those on top of reaching clan Tier 4 and capturing a fief + dealing with the unnatural quest's time limits.
Okay, past that point, you'll probably need companions nominated as vassals, but that brings another level of nonsense into the equation: Often, too often, vassal companions will switch gear to nonsense cultural trash in the most retarded ways possible, IE: Horse Archer built Khuzait will ditch the bow to grab a 1 handed sword - Sturgian foot archer build will grab a horse even though the idiot doesn't have the perk for any bows on horseback while keeping his Longbow. That means the game basically generates useless army units for fielded battles, and destroys these companions previous usefulness as captains and as effective troops for getting kills. That should be fixed by allowing players to fiddle with companions loadouts without allowing the players to take the gear from them, or by simply removing "gear downgrade upgrade" on nomination. Totally do-able, unlikely to happen.
Still on vassal companions: You'll be dependant on pure RNG to even roll companions that can be built into decent vassal roles (their skill levels, attribute pts and focus pts auto-distributions are utter garbage compared to any noble in-game, that means most companions can't make for even a viable vassal because they lack average skills to lead parties and/or govern settlements). We can still shoehorn them into such "roles" by naming them, but they'll be utter crap at everything a noble's supposed to do.
Now, onto the later phases of the Campaign quest, the game becomes a clusterfk of bat**** nonsense, AI vassals, even if you outnumber the opposing realms, will fail at even reaching targets with armies before they dismantle. Their decision making will go crazy and they won't be able to siege nor defend sieges because they don't calculate distance + travel time at all, they just try to reach sieges that'll take them 10 days to reach. They'll also often try to siege with too small armies and be destroyed by defending armies with ease. That means the player has to manually do everything, and lack of control over what vassals do means you'll be soloing the entire thing most of the time unless you get lucky at AI decision rolls (which have a diminishing chance to happen the more wars are active at the same time)
Finally, "Kingdom Tactics" and nothing are virtually the same, they seem to only work to encourage AI to raid if on offensive, other than that Defensive & Balanced both do nothing (armies will still rush to take settlements, ignore raids, ignore sieges, etc). Since we can't suggest actions in any way to AI parties, that means you'll be just as overwhelmed as if you were running a kingdom solo. Again, the main reson for all of this BS is the lock on 3 wars at the same time ad minimum (because if you were at war with a kingdom not involved with the conspiracy, you will get locked into that war too)
So, as I've "suggested" 500 million times before, this game can't be any good if the features don't synergize with each-other. Players need more control, AI has too much autonomy and too little quality to be even acceptable to be the way it is currently.
More control = change vassal gear loadout; have ways of recruiting companions that didn't spawn or have static companion hoster; suggest AI actions directly, not through some arbitrary button in Kingdom UI that doesn't work; nominate who gets to compete for a fief's voting process; remove "in-party" requirement for pregnancy; have more ways of making significant amounts of gold in-game with all money-making mechanics being viable for it; extent Campaign Quest time-frame so it makes more sense and feels less as a constant rush; expand main quest's time limits to make those at bare minimum viable to complete without cheating or getting lucky; give player control over who gets bethroad or not on marriage proposals (Clans will always force old infertile women who are single over the young ones, that should be selectable).
Well, from this theme, I think that's about it. Thanks for not listening TW, peace!
