Oh... That explains why combat is so unnecessary difficult. Because skilled players can overcome whatever mechanics there are, meanwhile the game has been rendered unplayable for the normies. We're finding all that's wrong right now via all the normie feedback, but there's no time to fix prior to launch. Good game, great way to receive feedback. Really takes a rocket scientist to realize you will get very one-sided feedback by doing so.
That goes for multi-player, I'm sure plenty of players are still going to enjoy the SP.
This can't be any further from the truth. Most of the skilled players and Warband veterans are striving to make Bannerlords combat system simpler and easier to understand, similar to one Warband had, even improved upon it. They try to do that since the start of the Beta.
Instead what we got from the beggining was this "physics" based combat, stances introduced, chain attacks that are slower than spam attack, thus-useless, variable stuns, inconsistent damage outputs and illogical bounces , all of this based on countless factors not even genius could calculate in midst of a battle....i could go on for ages naming ways in which Bannerlords combat is not only harder than Warband, but impossible to understand, let alone master.
I highly recommend everyone to check out this thread
Modified Combat Parameters , and see to which lenghts the veterans, competitive and just skilled players are going to try simplify the combat at least a bit, make it responsive to players actions, logical, and actually make it possible to master the combat by practicing, which is in the current state impossible, because inconsistencies derive from dozens of variables noone understands, let alone "normies" as you say, who will give up on Multiplayer in the first 5 minutes they see their character is not responsive to their actions, and dont understand why they sometimes deal much damage, sometimes less, why their weapon bounced of an enemy when it obviously should have dealt damage instead, sometimes they are stunned for longer than other times and so on....