Being able to viably AFK a video game, and win, as a positive just makes you sound like you don't want to play it.
Who actually
liked grinding every single settlement in M&B? It is almost zero challenge past a certain point, there is no interesting gameplay involved once no faction (or combination of factions) can meaningfully oppose you and every victory makes you that much more unassailable. If you think fighting the same sieges where you make 0 meaningful decision is interesting, cool.
I sure as hell don't.
It is
awful game design and the entire M&B experience would be 100% improved if the game was called when you were more powerful than the AI factions rather than having to paint the map via repetitive sieges. The last few Total War I played did just that, successfully, by having the objectives be three kingdom capitals. Everything revolved around taking them once the late game is declared, which not only gaves a very obtainable set of end goals but also provided a very interesting set of goals in the mid-game as players jockeyed for a better late game position.
It's not exactly a common viable option in Bannerlord either, unless you use exploits. Multiple relief doomstacks will show up, or you'll run out of food first, or your stuff will get sieged elsewhere, etc. So this (being able to rarely outright skip siege gameplay by just sitting and waiting) is a very minor pro.
It is a completely viable option now. This time last year, yeah, it was basically impossible under all but the most favorable of circumstances but that's been fixed. I've
demonstrated it.
Player-made doomstacks can reliably (and sometimes effortlessly) beat the AI's doomstacks and the AI generally only fields one or two armies at once. Sure third and fourth armies (and fifth, etc.) armies might form-up and reach you, but they won't be stronger than the first couple and significantly weaker (~30% less power) is typical. If you don't think it is possible, throw me your savegame and I'll record myself successfully sieging down a town.
As for running out of food, the game is ridiculously generous with how much food you can carry -- easily over 100 days for an army of 1100.
It takes roughly a season to starve out a settlement, so anything over 30-40 days of food is fine -- enough for the siege itself, along with a healthy buffer in case something goes wrong. And I'm just going to drop an shonen anime-style "this isn't even my true power!" here because if I cared to optimize things that could go up to 300+ days of food -- enough to take on a whole faction worth of town, one after another.
Having to hunt for nobles (in fact, specifically the clan leader) around the whole map, rather than having them just visit your hall, is Bannerlord's equivalent of this gripe.
...Nobles visit your hall in BL. What makes you think they don't? ? And I had to chase down lords in WB all the time, which was infruiating because there were a number of game mechanics that made it more difficult, like the scatter of armies post-siege when you had to talk to them to gain relations from fighting together, or the way character locating barely worked.
However, Bannerlord has introduced the new problem of some skills such as Engineering and Charm being far more pointless and (because of learn-by-doing levelling, which I don't actually dislike) also more of a pain in the ass to level than the weakest Warband skills.
Engineering is certainly weak but Charm is one of the easier skills to level. Just drop full power votes in favor of a different clan and it shoots right up past 150, fast as hell. And BL still avoids that trap of the single optimal character build that WB had.
In terms of troop balance you can't honestly claim Bannerlord as some kind of big upgrade on Warband when the armor makes all combat massively skewed in favour of ranged troops, and that plus bugs makes lance cavalry, spearmen/pikemen, and mercenaries like Hired Blades a total joke. Khan's Guard, Fians and Sharpshooters are the Bannerlord equivalent to Swadian Knights and Nord Huscarls. Overall, the balance between different types of troop was better in Warband, with infantry, cavalry and ranged all playing a more equal role than Bannerlord, and troop tier also definitely making more of a difference. And while the choice was obviously less, the differentiation between factions was greater for the very reason that each faction has something they do clearly well and can't do at all in Warband, but in Bannerlord, every faction can do almost everything, and their strengths and weaknesses are far less distinct. Plus, three factions are literal clones that occupy the center of the map and lower the variety as a result.
Yes, I am making that claim. Khergits had no armored troops and only low-tier infantry in Warband. It made them near useless in certain battles and a complete clownshoe pushover faction for the player who wanted to siege their settlements early on. And because ranged was somewhat weak while armor was strong, Khergits weren't even good in field battles. It was ridiculously unbalanced.
And infantry,cavalry and ranged all playing a more equal role? Are you joking? You could beat the entire game using exclusively Swadian Knights. And I know because I did just that in native. Sure, there was another faction with a very similar troop type that filled the same niche, but ultimately, you had three OP troop types and everyone else was niche or plain busted. Certainly BL hasn't done that much better making actual combined arms a thing in their battles but at this point I doubt many (if any) players care that much.
At least in BL, I have a reason to use infantry
some of the time (garrisoning and construction speed for low recruiting/wage cost) and while ranged dominates, every faction has usable ranged troops. Not equal by any means, but still viable. You can still delete whole other armies with massed Sturgian archers compared to, uh, Nord... did they even have archers? (sarcasm)
In the end, for all the differentiation, most players spammed one of the two (or three, if you count Mamluks) best troop types because that's what the game taught them.