1) load times and loading screens. Aside form general optimizations, the best solution is to cut out UNNECESSARY things being loaded. For example, when you get into the town you can see the portratis of notable NPC's for quick and easy acess...except it's not quick and easy. There is no need to load the town and drop the player into the town for this. Just load the NPC model and put a static image in the background, go trough the dialogue and close. The player never has to leave the main town screen. No loads.
2) Faction war and doomstack armies. When an faction gets an upper hand, it just steamrolls. Steps must be taken to prevent this. This has to apply to the player as well. Basically, maintaining a big standing army should be VERY expensive, and as such, most troops would be leavies. Leavies should be gathered from villages/towns, and those levies are active only temporary.
Factions should avoid warring during harvesting season, as they need their peasants on the field, not in their army.
The longer a levy remains raised, the greater the morale and cohesion drop, and desertion starts. Economy should being to suffer.
So basically, army consist of professional/mercenary core and leavies. Leaveis are temporary, but can be raised in great numbers. Sieges should take longer. A lot longer. In RL, castles would often take 10-20x the attackers and months to take.
If anyone has better ideas how to solve this, shoot.
