You guys are sitting on the best game franchise of its genre of all time!!! Your combat system is amazing, the characters, items and locations are gorgeous. Please, please make this game what it should be! Flesh out the world, include lots of quests (quest chains, rise to power quests, trade quests, diplomacy,.. MORE MORE), include more kingdom management options, lots of them! The strategic layer of the game should be far more easy to expand than the combat/interface. It is just lines of text with dialogues and options, come on! Include more battle commands and formations!
If modders can do these things you can do it even better. With simple text mods have created great kingdom management options, diplomacy options, new quests,... Please make M&B II complete and the best game ever!
Look at Paradox and their Crusader Kings/Europa Universalis franchise. For a long time they have been niche games that only extreme strategy lovers would touch, but when they decided/could really invest in their games they became main stream games that are all over the gaming news. They went from being obscure strategy titles to launching a new era of strategy gaming on the PC. You can do the same for the action/strategy simulation! In Crusader Kings the core gameplay (managing your dinasty and conquering land) did not change, same as the combat in M&B only needs minor improvement, but then they redid the UI to be more player friendly and more important included lots and lots of events that make players feel like each game is a unique story they create and the game just blew in sales. This is what you can do. Flesh out the locations, those beautiful locations you have shown in the screenshots? Give is something to do in there! Make more quests and events! Lots and lots of them! Marriages, treason, random events, opportunities to be a hero or to be a scoundrel. Make each game play a unique story that gives us the feeling it is ours, we live it, and it will be different that anyone elses. Do this and you will make the best game ever!
I believe you can do it!