Hello,
Wanted to share my general thoughts, obersvations, and ideas so far. 16 hours into the single player campaign. I've put significant hours into both the original Mount and Blade, and Warband. There's a lot of things I love about Bannerlord and a decent number of things that feel like they still need work. I've tried to organize all my thoughts, good and bad, below.
General:
Brightness - The brightness settings are really horrible for me. Battles that take place at dusk or nighttime are a real pain because I just can't see anything. There's a real issue with light when moving from indoors to outdoors and vice-versa. In general the indoor and darker lighting is quite difficult. The game boards in the taverns are quite dark as well. I've tried adjust the brightness settings, but the calibration method is unintuitive and doesn't seem to affect brightness the way I've come to expect. No matter what I try battles in the dark in particular are impossibly frustrating.
Auto-Save System - I quite miss the old 'realistic' save system that saved after every town and battle. Especially given that it's early access and there's a decent chance of crashing.
UI - In general I really love a lot of the UI changes. I love being able to access important people from the town menu without having to walk around. I love being able to see if they have quests and what those quests are before talking to them. Trade screen menu works well although I find it a little odd that shields and bows are in the same category. Personally I would've imagined all weapons to be in one category and shields maybe put with armor if they don't have their own category. Not a big deal though, as mousing over the buttons tells you what's included in each section. The three big general UI things I find difficult are the Encyclopedia, the Kingdom Button, and Upgrading Troops.
Encyclopedia - I really like the new encyclopedia - it's organized well, looks good, and gets me all the info I want - but I wish there was an easier way to access it. I found the keyboard shortcut (default 'n') which helps, but I really want a button on the main screen. Before finding the shortcut, I had to visit a town and click on the owner's name to access the encyclopedia. It was easier to access when I was in a kingdom and could use the kingdom screen.
Kingdom Button - I just find it odd that I can't access it at all when I'm not in a kingdom. I would much prefer to be able to open the menu and have it just say "You are not a part of a kingdom yet" or something and maybe have a little background info on each faction and how they operate/how to join. The politics of kingdoms and joining factions and such is such a core part of the singleplayer gameplay and a large part of what is different about Bannerlord compared to the previous games. I feel like disabling the button completely is more likely to be frustrating or keep a new player in the dark. I think it would be a much better teaser of all the cool things you can do once you're in a kingdom if you could see a bit more.
Upgrading Troops - It just feels a little small and awkward right now. I'm not exactly sure why. The experience meter of the troops is a bit confusing - just playing casually so far I have no idea how many of my troops are ready to be upgraded, so I just click as many times as I can. I think I'd like a clearer indication of how many troops from a stack can be upgraded, and maybe a bit more info one what they'll turn into after upgrade. Especially when the troop upgraded tree branches into two different lines, I would love a small description of the troop when I hover over it, or a comparison of the changes like when you hover over new equipment, or something of that nature. It feels very 2000s right now how I sort of have to just figure it out and learn what the troop types are and what the upgrade trees are.
For all of these UI things, I'm sure it's very possible there are functions that would address my concerns already in the game that I've simply missed. If that's the case though, I think it's a bit telling that the player might need some more guidance on how to access these functions.
Campaign Map Gameplay
Map and Factions - Overall I love the new map, I love the size and the way the factions are set up. As someone who didn't really follow any of the singleplayer dev blogs, I came in pretty blind to the map. The balance of power between the factions seems a bit off, but I know from reading the forums and reddit and hearing other people's experience that the faction AI often ends up with one factions dominating the field, so I'm not sure how much of the power balance is do to the early war AI.
Towns/Castles/Villages - I like the town, castle, and village maps I've visited so far. Without counting, I did get the feeling when playing that castles are more rare than towns and villages. The impression when playing the previous games was that there were mostly castles and villages, and the large towns were sparser. The impression when playing Bannerlord is that the towns are more tightly packed and common. I've read that if you count all the towns, castles, and villages that isn't true, but that's definitely the feeling when running around the campaign map.
Looters/Bandits/Hideouts - I generally agree with what I've read on here so far. Hideouts are frustrating and in general the bandits are more difficult than I've come to expect playing previous games. I've personally found hideouts to be trivial once you have upgraded enough troops so that your top troops are all level 2-4. Even though you only take a few troops into the hideout, the upgraded troops have no problem in my experience dealing with the bandits. My general understanding of the bandit system is that recruit level troops can take on Looters and that's really it. Once you have leveled them up by simulating battles with Looters, then you can take on the other types of bandits but you still have to make sure you outnumber them. It's much harder to solo kill large parties of bandits than in previous games. I'm not sure if I think that is a positive or negative.
Armies - Love the system. Love the call for armies pop-up on the right. Love being able to just join and follow the army. Very fun.
Recruiting - I quite like the new recruitment system as well. It's a little strange how the troops slots are connected to individual people in that if feels like I'm buying troops from the merchant or the guild master rather than recruiting from the town itself, but I do like the system of improving my relation with the influential people in the town in order to gain more recruitment slots and higher tiers of recruiting. I've been playing on realistic recruitment settings so far and it seems pretty fair - completing one quest for an npc will get you one more slot at the beginning.
Combat - Simulated Battles, Real Time Battles and Tournaments
Simulated Battles - Very much an improvement from the previous games. The stats are easier to digest, and the system for determining what happens seems a bit closer to what would happen in a Real Time battle. It does seem like troops gain much more experience from simulated battles than Real Time Battles. I'm not sure why this is or how I feel about it. Prior to getting the training skill equivalent or being able to recruit higher tier troops, the best way to level up troops seems to be simulating battles with Looters. In my experience looters almost always wound my troops instead of killing them and the recruits level up fairly fast.
Real Time Battles - Overall combat feels good, mounted combat is super fun, and the graphics look great. I'm going to split this one up into a few categories
Vision - As I mentioned before, it's incredibly difficult to see at night or at twilight/dusk. I understand there's a bit of a realism argument to be made for this, but for me it's ridiculously unfun because I can't see the enemies.
Commanding Troops - New UI for the troop commands seems pretty good. I haven't played around with it too much as it still feels a bit clunky to me, but that's likely just because I'm not totally used to it. I would like a way to practice/learn the system outside of a real fight. Perhaps a tutorial option that pops up when you enter your first fight or something added to the initial tutorial. There's very little time to practice in a real fight because enemies spawn very close and charge immediately unless they're a caravan.
Enemy Spawns - Worth another category imo. Enemies spawn very close and the battle begins quite quickly compared to previous games. I know that there's eventually a pre-deploy skill, but I don't have it so I can't really comment on it.
Mini-map - The backspace mini-map is gone! I love the alt function but it's not totally reliable (only seems to find large groups). I don't think I mind the mini-map being gone, especially if the enemies spawned a bit further away and I had time to scout out the landscape and enemy troop movements a bit before the charge.
Dying/getting knocked out - Love it. Spectating the battle feels smooth, and I'm very happy to not immediately lose a fight if I get knocked out.
Tournaments - I absolutely love the new system for the tournaments. I like being able to see the rounds and the teams, and knowing my team can do well enough in some circumstances to move on even if I get knocked out. It's much clearer to me when that will happen compared to the previous games. There are two issues. First, everyone retains their armor when going into the tournament. My sword and my one-handed skill is not high enough to hit the high level guys. I glance constantly, and it's incredibly frustrating. What's worse is the AI seems to know when I will glance, and will just poise through the shot and keep swinging. Early on when you don't have good armor this leads to a lot of tournament losses because you can't beat the AI's armor. Later on, this leads to 10 minute glancefests in the final round because neither of us can hit each others armor. I haven't done tournaments in every faction, but the Empire tournaments have this problem in a big way. And if I do go to other tournaments, my party members will fight in the tournaments, so I'm often facing an Imperial Crossbowman in the final of a Battanian Tournament. Quite annoying.
The second issue is that apparently you don't gain experience toward your skills fighting in the arena. I don't know if this applies to tournaments or practice fights or both, but that is a huge oversight imo. That's one of the main uses of the arena and tournaments - level up your weapon skills and athletics skill without risking your life.
Character and Skills
Character Creation - Really awesome. I love being able to see what the choices will affect before making them. Watching your character grow up is super fun. Face and body creation is more than enough for me.
Skill System - Overall I like it, though I think it could be improved a bit. I like the idea of the learning limit and having the ability to increase your limit with the focus points. I do very much wish for a skill point that I could use to improve a skill to the point of the next upgrade. Maybe something like every 3 or 5 or even 10 levels getting a true skill point that lets you improve a skill up to the next perk choice. The reason I find this necessary is because of how difficult and time consuming it is to increase some skills compared to others. I've listed some in particular below that feel like they need tweaking.
Steward - This one jumps out because I passively increase this skill so fast compared to anything else. It seems like you gain Stewardship experience every day when you pay your party. This creates two issues - first, I end up spending focus point on it simply because it's reached the limit and won't be able to improve further without the points. Second, I end up making perk decisions far too early in the game. All of the perk choices, including the very early ones, are related to taxes, villages and building improvements, armies, vassals, etc. And because this skill increases so quickly and completely passively, I end up making choices like do I want more influence as a vassal or more production from farms long before I actually own a farm or have a high enough clan level to become a vassal. The timing is incongruous with the gameplay.
Scouting - There's no active way to really work on leveling this up other than maybe running mindlessly back and forth through moutains/forests, which is not really a game mechanic. Just seems unfun. If I wanted to play a character that focused on scouting and being a scouter and tracker, I see no way to really work on that ingame. Ideally I should be able to pick a skill and actively work on leveling it up, especially if the whole system works so that the only way to increase a skill is to gain experience in it in the game (and not by skillpoints). I'm struggling to see how I could restart a character and be any further along with Scouting the way I could, for example, focus on increasing my crossbow skill by using a crossbow.
Charm - The issue with this is that there are consequences to leveling it up. I haven't actively tried to level it up though questing yet, but theoretically that should work because it is "improving relations with people." If that works well then this is probably fine. I'm not exactly sure how to socialize with nobles unless that means playing the tavern games with them, which would be quite an annoying way to have to level charm. And from what I can see, the barter system isn't particularly fun or interesting, and it's incredibly expensive, so not really a great way to improve the skill either. Honestly not really sure what to make of this one.
Athletics - I am so slow on foot it's crazy. When I do the mountain hideouts I end up running behind my troops like Gimli following Legolas and Aragorn when they chase down Merry and Pippin. They rush around from spot to spot while I run up the side of the river like a turtle. I think a big reason this is frustrating is because I do fight on foot quite a lot in the arena tournaments, but from what I've seen and heard you don't gain experience during that time. Maybe you do and it's just very slow.
Medicine - Same issue as scouting, it seems purely passive and I have no way to truly focus increasing that skill. I understand that the focuspoints increase the multiplier, but the effect feels minimal right now.
Quests
I don't have too much to say about quests - I don't do a lot of them and they've never been my favorite aspect of the game. I'd enjoy more quests and more variety of quests, but I assume that will come with time. I've described the few quests I've done below:
I apologize, I don't know the names of the quests
Take these goods and sell them at another town cause it's illegal for me to do it - I've done this twice and was caught leaving the town both times. I don't know if you're always caught, or perhaps with a high Roguery skill that won't happen. As it is now, it seems like the quest is just the choice of increase 5 with one guy and lose relations with the other AND become a criminal for 10 days or decrease 5 with one guy and gain 2 with everyone else. Easy one to ignore because it's stupid and not fun.
Find the Spy among the arena combatants - First time I did this, I assumed it would be similar to the nervous man in previous games. I talked to two or three people and got the same generic response, so I figured it was worthless talking to people. I went to the backstreets because I thought he might be there, found a guy named Bold Combatant and had the option of exposing him as a spy. I did it, killed him in the duel, and surprisingly failed the quest and became a criminal. I was very confused. I did it again, and figured out how to gather the clues. I got all three clues and the quest said "you have enough info to identify him, look in a backstreet or alley." I found 3 combatants but none of them fit all the clues I had gathered (bald, beard, no face markings). I searched the town for roughly half and hour and couldn't find anyone else. I chose one that I thought could maybe be right (one guy was bald and had no face markings, but it looked like he didn't have a beard. I thought maybe he had the 5 o'clock shadow beard that my character has and it was just hard to tell). Of course, I was wrong and became a criminal again. I've since decided this quest is a huge waste of time and potentially not finished, so I ignore it.
Guard the Caravan - Good quest, good payout. Obviously I wish there was a 'follow' option on the campaign map. Also I wish the merchants wouldn't send their caravans through enemy territory to get to another faction, but oh well.
My daughter was kidnapped/ran away with a boy - Good quest, nice use of persuasion system, very small moral dilemma, and easy to do using the alt function.
Train these troops for the town - Good quest, I messed it up the one time I got it by having my 50 man army fight 20 forest bandits in a simulation. Everyone died. Whoops.
Bring me sheep, the prices are too high - Stupid quest. Both times I did it, I just purchased three sheep from the town where that merchant was in. He paid me more than it cost to buy the sheep from the same town.
Find someone else to use these mercenaries - Only did it once, I like that it uses the persuasion mechanic. I succeeded on the first try. Don't really have a good sense of this one yet.
That's really all the quests I've done that stick out to me.
That covers everything that I can think of right now. Like I said, I'm sure there are already ingame solutions to some of my problems that I'm just missing, but the fact that I'm missing them suggests to me that they might benefit from being more easily found.
Thoughts? Disagreements? Different experience?
Wanted to share my general thoughts, obersvations, and ideas so far. 16 hours into the single player campaign. I've put significant hours into both the original Mount and Blade, and Warband. There's a lot of things I love about Bannerlord and a decent number of things that feel like they still need work. I've tried to organize all my thoughts, good and bad, below.
General:
Brightness - The brightness settings are really horrible for me. Battles that take place at dusk or nighttime are a real pain because I just can't see anything. There's a real issue with light when moving from indoors to outdoors and vice-versa. In general the indoor and darker lighting is quite difficult. The game boards in the taverns are quite dark as well. I've tried adjust the brightness settings, but the calibration method is unintuitive and doesn't seem to affect brightness the way I've come to expect. No matter what I try battles in the dark in particular are impossibly frustrating.
Auto-Save System - I quite miss the old 'realistic' save system that saved after every town and battle. Especially given that it's early access and there's a decent chance of crashing.
UI - In general I really love a lot of the UI changes. I love being able to access important people from the town menu without having to walk around. I love being able to see if they have quests and what those quests are before talking to them. Trade screen menu works well although I find it a little odd that shields and bows are in the same category. Personally I would've imagined all weapons to be in one category and shields maybe put with armor if they don't have their own category. Not a big deal though, as mousing over the buttons tells you what's included in each section. The three big general UI things I find difficult are the Encyclopedia, the Kingdom Button, and Upgrading Troops.
Encyclopedia - I really like the new encyclopedia - it's organized well, looks good, and gets me all the info I want - but I wish there was an easier way to access it. I found the keyboard shortcut (default 'n') which helps, but I really want a button on the main screen. Before finding the shortcut, I had to visit a town and click on the owner's name to access the encyclopedia. It was easier to access when I was in a kingdom and could use the kingdom screen.
Kingdom Button - I just find it odd that I can't access it at all when I'm not in a kingdom. I would much prefer to be able to open the menu and have it just say "You are not a part of a kingdom yet" or something and maybe have a little background info on each faction and how they operate/how to join. The politics of kingdoms and joining factions and such is such a core part of the singleplayer gameplay and a large part of what is different about Bannerlord compared to the previous games. I feel like disabling the button completely is more likely to be frustrating or keep a new player in the dark. I think it would be a much better teaser of all the cool things you can do once you're in a kingdom if you could see a bit more.
Upgrading Troops - It just feels a little small and awkward right now. I'm not exactly sure why. The experience meter of the troops is a bit confusing - just playing casually so far I have no idea how many of my troops are ready to be upgraded, so I just click as many times as I can. I think I'd like a clearer indication of how many troops from a stack can be upgraded, and maybe a bit more info one what they'll turn into after upgrade. Especially when the troop upgraded tree branches into two different lines, I would love a small description of the troop when I hover over it, or a comparison of the changes like when you hover over new equipment, or something of that nature. It feels very 2000s right now how I sort of have to just figure it out and learn what the troop types are and what the upgrade trees are.
For all of these UI things, I'm sure it's very possible there are functions that would address my concerns already in the game that I've simply missed. If that's the case though, I think it's a bit telling that the player might need some more guidance on how to access these functions.
Campaign Map Gameplay
Map and Factions - Overall I love the new map, I love the size and the way the factions are set up. As someone who didn't really follow any of the singleplayer dev blogs, I came in pretty blind to the map. The balance of power between the factions seems a bit off, but I know from reading the forums and reddit and hearing other people's experience that the faction AI often ends up with one factions dominating the field, so I'm not sure how much of the power balance is do to the early war AI.
Towns/Castles/Villages - I like the town, castle, and village maps I've visited so far. Without counting, I did get the feeling when playing that castles are more rare than towns and villages. The impression when playing the previous games was that there were mostly castles and villages, and the large towns were sparser. The impression when playing Bannerlord is that the towns are more tightly packed and common. I've read that if you count all the towns, castles, and villages that isn't true, but that's definitely the feeling when running around the campaign map.
Looters/Bandits/Hideouts - I generally agree with what I've read on here so far. Hideouts are frustrating and in general the bandits are more difficult than I've come to expect playing previous games. I've personally found hideouts to be trivial once you have upgraded enough troops so that your top troops are all level 2-4. Even though you only take a few troops into the hideout, the upgraded troops have no problem in my experience dealing with the bandits. My general understanding of the bandit system is that recruit level troops can take on Looters and that's really it. Once you have leveled them up by simulating battles with Looters, then you can take on the other types of bandits but you still have to make sure you outnumber them. It's much harder to solo kill large parties of bandits than in previous games. I'm not sure if I think that is a positive or negative.
Armies - Love the system. Love the call for armies pop-up on the right. Love being able to just join and follow the army. Very fun.
Recruiting - I quite like the new recruitment system as well. It's a little strange how the troops slots are connected to individual people in that if feels like I'm buying troops from the merchant or the guild master rather than recruiting from the town itself, but I do like the system of improving my relation with the influential people in the town in order to gain more recruitment slots and higher tiers of recruiting. I've been playing on realistic recruitment settings so far and it seems pretty fair - completing one quest for an npc will get you one more slot at the beginning.
Combat - Simulated Battles, Real Time Battles and Tournaments
Simulated Battles - Very much an improvement from the previous games. The stats are easier to digest, and the system for determining what happens seems a bit closer to what would happen in a Real Time battle. It does seem like troops gain much more experience from simulated battles than Real Time Battles. I'm not sure why this is or how I feel about it. Prior to getting the training skill equivalent or being able to recruit higher tier troops, the best way to level up troops seems to be simulating battles with Looters. In my experience looters almost always wound my troops instead of killing them and the recruits level up fairly fast.
Real Time Battles - Overall combat feels good, mounted combat is super fun, and the graphics look great. I'm going to split this one up into a few categories
Vision - As I mentioned before, it's incredibly difficult to see at night or at twilight/dusk. I understand there's a bit of a realism argument to be made for this, but for me it's ridiculously unfun because I can't see the enemies.
Commanding Troops - New UI for the troop commands seems pretty good. I haven't played around with it too much as it still feels a bit clunky to me, but that's likely just because I'm not totally used to it. I would like a way to practice/learn the system outside of a real fight. Perhaps a tutorial option that pops up when you enter your first fight or something added to the initial tutorial. There's very little time to practice in a real fight because enemies spawn very close and charge immediately unless they're a caravan.
Enemy Spawns - Worth another category imo. Enemies spawn very close and the battle begins quite quickly compared to previous games. I know that there's eventually a pre-deploy skill, but I don't have it so I can't really comment on it.
Mini-map - The backspace mini-map is gone! I love the alt function but it's not totally reliable (only seems to find large groups). I don't think I mind the mini-map being gone, especially if the enemies spawned a bit further away and I had time to scout out the landscape and enemy troop movements a bit before the charge.
Dying/getting knocked out - Love it. Spectating the battle feels smooth, and I'm very happy to not immediately lose a fight if I get knocked out.
Tournaments - I absolutely love the new system for the tournaments. I like being able to see the rounds and the teams, and knowing my team can do well enough in some circumstances to move on even if I get knocked out. It's much clearer to me when that will happen compared to the previous games. There are two issues. First, everyone retains their armor when going into the tournament. My sword and my one-handed skill is not high enough to hit the high level guys. I glance constantly, and it's incredibly frustrating. What's worse is the AI seems to know when I will glance, and will just poise through the shot and keep swinging. Early on when you don't have good armor this leads to a lot of tournament losses because you can't beat the AI's armor. Later on, this leads to 10 minute glancefests in the final round because neither of us can hit each others armor. I haven't done tournaments in every faction, but the Empire tournaments have this problem in a big way. And if I do go to other tournaments, my party members will fight in the tournaments, so I'm often facing an Imperial Crossbowman in the final of a Battanian Tournament. Quite annoying.
The second issue is that apparently you don't gain experience toward your skills fighting in the arena. I don't know if this applies to tournaments or practice fights or both, but that is a huge oversight imo. That's one of the main uses of the arena and tournaments - level up your weapon skills and athletics skill without risking your life.
Character and Skills
Character Creation - Really awesome. I love being able to see what the choices will affect before making them. Watching your character grow up is super fun. Face and body creation is more than enough for me.
Skill System - Overall I like it, though I think it could be improved a bit. I like the idea of the learning limit and having the ability to increase your limit with the focus points. I do very much wish for a skill point that I could use to improve a skill to the point of the next upgrade. Maybe something like every 3 or 5 or even 10 levels getting a true skill point that lets you improve a skill up to the next perk choice. The reason I find this necessary is because of how difficult and time consuming it is to increase some skills compared to others. I've listed some in particular below that feel like they need tweaking.
Steward - This one jumps out because I passively increase this skill so fast compared to anything else. It seems like you gain Stewardship experience every day when you pay your party. This creates two issues - first, I end up spending focus point on it simply because it's reached the limit and won't be able to improve further without the points. Second, I end up making perk decisions far too early in the game. All of the perk choices, including the very early ones, are related to taxes, villages and building improvements, armies, vassals, etc. And because this skill increases so quickly and completely passively, I end up making choices like do I want more influence as a vassal or more production from farms long before I actually own a farm or have a high enough clan level to become a vassal. The timing is incongruous with the gameplay.
Scouting - There's no active way to really work on leveling this up other than maybe running mindlessly back and forth through moutains/forests, which is not really a game mechanic. Just seems unfun. If I wanted to play a character that focused on scouting and being a scouter and tracker, I see no way to really work on that ingame. Ideally I should be able to pick a skill and actively work on leveling it up, especially if the whole system works so that the only way to increase a skill is to gain experience in it in the game (and not by skillpoints). I'm struggling to see how I could restart a character and be any further along with Scouting the way I could, for example, focus on increasing my crossbow skill by using a crossbow.
Charm - The issue with this is that there are consequences to leveling it up. I haven't actively tried to level it up though questing yet, but theoretically that should work because it is "improving relations with people." If that works well then this is probably fine. I'm not exactly sure how to socialize with nobles unless that means playing the tavern games with them, which would be quite an annoying way to have to level charm. And from what I can see, the barter system isn't particularly fun or interesting, and it's incredibly expensive, so not really a great way to improve the skill either. Honestly not really sure what to make of this one.
Athletics - I am so slow on foot it's crazy. When I do the mountain hideouts I end up running behind my troops like Gimli following Legolas and Aragorn when they chase down Merry and Pippin. They rush around from spot to spot while I run up the side of the river like a turtle. I think a big reason this is frustrating is because I do fight on foot quite a lot in the arena tournaments, but from what I've seen and heard you don't gain experience during that time. Maybe you do and it's just very slow.
Medicine - Same issue as scouting, it seems purely passive and I have no way to truly focus increasing that skill. I understand that the focuspoints increase the multiplier, but the effect feels minimal right now.
Quests
I don't have too much to say about quests - I don't do a lot of them and they've never been my favorite aspect of the game. I'd enjoy more quests and more variety of quests, but I assume that will come with time. I've described the few quests I've done below:
I apologize, I don't know the names of the quests
Take these goods and sell them at another town cause it's illegal for me to do it - I've done this twice and was caught leaving the town both times. I don't know if you're always caught, or perhaps with a high Roguery skill that won't happen. As it is now, it seems like the quest is just the choice of increase 5 with one guy and lose relations with the other AND become a criminal for 10 days or decrease 5 with one guy and gain 2 with everyone else. Easy one to ignore because it's stupid and not fun.
Find the Spy among the arena combatants - First time I did this, I assumed it would be similar to the nervous man in previous games. I talked to two or three people and got the same generic response, so I figured it was worthless talking to people. I went to the backstreets because I thought he might be there, found a guy named Bold Combatant and had the option of exposing him as a spy. I did it, killed him in the duel, and surprisingly failed the quest and became a criminal. I was very confused. I did it again, and figured out how to gather the clues. I got all three clues and the quest said "you have enough info to identify him, look in a backstreet or alley." I found 3 combatants but none of them fit all the clues I had gathered (bald, beard, no face markings). I searched the town for roughly half and hour and couldn't find anyone else. I chose one that I thought could maybe be right (one guy was bald and had no face markings, but it looked like he didn't have a beard. I thought maybe he had the 5 o'clock shadow beard that my character has and it was just hard to tell). Of course, I was wrong and became a criminal again. I've since decided this quest is a huge waste of time and potentially not finished, so I ignore it.
Guard the Caravan - Good quest, good payout. Obviously I wish there was a 'follow' option on the campaign map. Also I wish the merchants wouldn't send their caravans through enemy territory to get to another faction, but oh well.
My daughter was kidnapped/ran away with a boy - Good quest, nice use of persuasion system, very small moral dilemma, and easy to do using the alt function.
Train these troops for the town - Good quest, I messed it up the one time I got it by having my 50 man army fight 20 forest bandits in a simulation. Everyone died. Whoops.
Bring me sheep, the prices are too high - Stupid quest. Both times I did it, I just purchased three sheep from the town where that merchant was in. He paid me more than it cost to buy the sheep from the same town.
Find someone else to use these mercenaries - Only did it once, I like that it uses the persuasion mechanic. I succeeded on the first try. Don't really have a good sense of this one yet.
That's really all the quests I've done that stick out to me.
That covers everything that I can think of right now. Like I said, I'm sure there are already ingame solutions to some of my problems that I'm just missing, but the fact that I'm missing them suggests to me that they might benefit from being more easily found.
Thoughts? Disagreements? Different experience?
