SP - General How to Fix Early Game

[Heafodban]

Here's how Bannerlord's early game works. You mass recruit villagers, grind them against looters who you basically can't lose against, and do tournaments for easy gear, easy money, and easy renown. Do this for a bit and you've completed the early game. I feel like TaleWorlds has lost sight of what used to be so fun about Mount&Blade. I remember in the original's beta there were no villagers to recruit, so you had to scrounge together money for your first mercenaries. Every little skirmish mattered because your men were expensive, and because there were no looters to prey upon, only dangerous bandits to fight.

Here's what I suggest to bring back the early game fun:

1. Buff looters. Many looters should pose a real threat to the player and their men. In exchange for this increased difficulty, looters should drop better gear and reward more experience. This would result in fewer but more meaningful and exciting skirmishes with looters.
2. Shift mass recruitment to mid game or late game by requiring a hefty amount of renown and/or reputation to access even the lowest tier recruits. After all, why would a villager join a weak, poor, inexperienced nobody? I think the player's first warband should be a ragtag collection of freed captives, recruited prisoners, and mercenaries which the player painstakingly pieced together. The player would make a name for themself this way, and that would justify the mass recruit function being available later in the game.
3. Bring back manhunters. Manhunters serve two important early game functions. First, manhunters function as a friendly faction that opens up opportunities for the player, especially when the player is very new and can't defeat bandits alone. Second, manhunters give bandits a source of captives which the player can then rescue and recruit.
4. Have fewer tournaments, and fix the problem where tournaments are super easy to win because enemy fighters can't deal with the player walking in circles around them.
5. Bring back stat requirements so that levelling up feels more meaningful. Having skirmishes with bandits is funner when you know it will pay off with experience, and in turn the ability to use a weapon you're working towards.
6. Remove easy money quests, like the one where you simply go to a town, buy a few items, walk back to the lord and get a bunch of free money.
7. Add new "roamers". Read more here: https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/new-roamer-types.453989/