In terms of their progress in making a fun game, Bannerlord still has a long way to go. While things have certainly gotten better in the last 10 months, and roamer/mercenary is enjoyable, the vassal/kingdom phase is still repetitive, grindy, and unsatisfying: players' skill in fighting, tactics, and strategy/politics doesn't have enough impact in getting them to victory quicker, instead gameplay is too based on luck or exploits to progress and too drawn out.
Or if you mean time until the list is completed, I would say at their current pace of work, if they worked on this list instead of new random stuff, they
could get most of it done in about 20 months. It took them 10 months to complete roughly a third of the list.
Yeah, it's really weird that your companions and even wife sit at like 4 relations and always give you a non-committal look, while in Warband my wife had about 50 relations with me IIRC from quests and poetry (ha) and coming back to visit.
It is nice though that ennobling companions in Bannerlord shoots them to 100 relations.
An easy solution would just be that hiring a companion increases your relation by 20 or so, marrying someone increases relations to 50, and your relations rise by 5 for each year that you know your wife and companions.
I would argue that the current state of slashing polearms, where they combine ease of use, high damage, high speed and high range all in a single weapon, seriously hurts weapon balance. Why pick any other melee weapon?
When we discuss dominance in history, in the time period of Bannerlord (600-1100AD) long slashing polearms were not common in Europe and the surrounding areas. Stabbing polearms such as spears or lances were much more common weapons
.
One of the weapons Bannerlord portrays as a slashing polearm, the Menavlion, was actually a stabbing pike in real life. Voulges were also a high middle ages weapon. The billhook was a repurposed agriculture tool.
Spears definitely need a major buff, and the ability for bracing to work against infantry in some capacity to enable the push of like would be very good.