As someone coming from Warband and having beat that original campaign and several mods like PoP, Perisno and Gekokujo I like tens of thousands of fans was looking forward to the release of Bannerlord. In the early days when BL was announced I was still using "chans" with gaming threads and Warband was always just something everyone loved and we dared not hope for the actually arrival of Bannerlord.
But one day is arrived, first in dev vids and then in early access. I tried EE and I couldn't bear it because it was compared to Warband quite souless. EE was so unbalanced I just had no interest in getting very far so my first real attempt to make a go at "winning" only happened after things like cutscenes added a modicum of soul. I made the mistake of thinking the actually mechanics were balanced and working. However as everyone who actually plays the game knows it's not.
For reference in this playthough that I am giving up on I have 30 cities and 30 castles give or take, 15 above average sized clans and my own clan has something like 40 adults in it. But I will never actually win, for actually so many reasons, but I'll share as many as I can think of.
The AI voting system is horrible. They vote for all the wrong policies and all the wrong wars and try to force peace when you have most of their lords captured.
The AI voting system continually gives the same 3 AI losers all the fiefs and they do nothing to protect them, they don't garrison, they don't form armies to protect their estates,
in fact for some reason despite having over 100 nobles in other clans they fail to make armies to either defend or press an advantage effectively.
additionally the AI lords do not head the "offensive/defensive/balanced" war strategy at all, they just do what they want which is usually nothing at all.
The AI lords from opposing factions always have armies flooding into your lands no matter how many you capture there is always another army on the way.
At one point I had 200 NPC lords personally captured, this did basically nothing for reasons stated above. My own lords also constantly do nothing even though essentially none of them were captives.
When an AI ally lord proposes peace it doesn't even tell you the terms of the deal, and the terms are never fair anyways, some fiefless faction gets paid because you they constantly respawn with 50 soldiers and attack your villages and no matter what they are always on the get paid end of things.
Auto battle is really bad, you can lose 20 elite troops with a 1000 man army against some random 50 unit whatever.
Several times I was hit with negative -9812378927390237 reputation bugs while rescuing lords (usually I would reload a save)
Nearby Ally lords jump an army far too early causing a massive lose before I can get my army into range and sometimes I'm purposely waiting and don't want to engage at all.
Ally lords being called to an army will easily get distracted by very small enemy parties and chase them around for days before joining properly.
My clan party leaders donating 10%-ish of their own troops every time they empty an empty allied fief, yet my actually "allied lords" don't every arrive to garrison it.
Battles themselves are ridiculous, every single map the player is in a crappy spot, the AI is in a good spot, and if you on the offense often have to cross a large map and if that battle involves reinforcements THEIR reinforcements will appear behind you and YOUR reinforcements are back on the other side of the map.
When you tell your infantry force of 200 to charge they will split up into several groups, often half of them will turn back to chase down a mounted archer or something instead of crashing what is in front of them. If you give them a position to go to they WALK, if you tell them to CHARGE they run in all different directions, it's insane.
Merceny clans are auto recruited by enemy kings magically. If you manage to find the LEADER of one clan who ISN'T working, you might be able to hire them but they will be gone in a few days.
The player clan doesn't seem to work well after a while, none of my sons or nephews were able to have 4 children and I think it was more like 1 or 2.
Marriage offers also don't come often enough and you often are looking at at "????" for what is being offered.
NPC lords would offer you 60 year old widows to your 18 year old son, because well Bannerlord is half coded and half not.
My NPC clans were so awful, with 15 clans it was VERY lucky if I had 2 mediocre armies formed besides mine only clan member army, they never formed an army like enemy factions did meaning stacks of 1500-2000.
50% of kingdom policies are self destructive especially to war torn fiefs, yet the allied clans vote for them constantly.
There is a HUGE inflation in the number of lord in the world over time to rebel clans joining NPC lords, cause lol, that can't be allowed for the player.
Of course also native clans are having children and such so, it seems like there is almost twice as many lords as in the start of the game now.
For some reason it's not useful for the player faction, at least for me they do nothing, while NPC factions send everyone out to raid.
Force to make the choice of giving up 50 prisoners and making peace for a deal that's only going to last 5 days max or paying over 1000 influence.
Peace deals are just awful absolutely broken things, just as the voting system in general is just garbage.
Rebel clans are poorly conceived balance killers.
Cities in the no mans land end up with like 1000 prosperity and never recover because the AI doesn't invest/garrison it .
Poor, fiefless clans with high relationship cannot be converted at some point, I tried several and they just flat refuse, I own half the map but have something
like 20% of the available lords.
Why do family clan members have more attribute points then the player at the same level and hired companions have less than the player?
Finally the world map is just bad, with the Aseri and not-Viking having 2 ins and outs it's one more aspect of the endless wack -a-mole of BL.
TLDR: Bannerlord at it's base really has a lot of potential, but whoever is balancing it and putting the final touches on it needs to be fired.
Hopefully it gets sorted in the next year or so, I have my doubts because some of this stuff is just obvious and just needs to be tweaked but hasn't been fixed.
I dunno, maybe hire back whoever made Warband.
There is a bunch of things I missed on this list, but I've spent enough time on it and don't except anyone who is responsible for these things to somehow suddenly realize stuff needs to be fixed since I've seen plenty of posts just like going back forever.
