Most significant imbalances remaining post-release

[anoddhermit]

1. Battanian culture bonus (forest speed) which absolutely dwarfs the general utility and power of every other. It's subtle, but I'd still put it at the top.
2. Swinging vs. thrusting reach weapons on cav especially. Take 50 Khan's Guards, hold fire and F1+F3 vs. 100 Noble Cav(any) in a custom battle. This is the most obvious imbalance issue in the game currently.
3. Archer noble units get substantially more damage(more/better bows/arrows) and durability over T5s while Cav only get significantly more durability(about the same or even literally the same weapons as T5).
4. Mounted unit favorability in auto-calculations and for map speed. Mounted units cost more, I get it, but the advantage here is much too high such that if you're inclined to make liberal use of scouting and tactics, you can eventually just kind of point and click and take prisoners to effortlessly wipe out most enemy AI in the field, and then siege with nigh impunity. You can achieve superior results to manual battles with very little effort or strategy involved, granting it's a boring way to play that skips all the fun of real time battles. It also overly favors already strong factions due to their cav heavy parties - Vlandia, Khuzait, Aserai.
5. Shield durability. Despite archers being all the rage, a patient player can use shield squares to grind remarkable odds to death by kinda just sitting there. Anti-shield units do not work at all in this role - they almost always either kill the shield units before any substantial number - if any at all - are broken, or they die to the shield units in basic meat vs. meat combat due to more brute numerical superiority in non-shield related aspects. Archers will also rarely break most shields (T3 unit+ roughly) even firing at close ranges, emptying entire quivers.

I think all of these could be fixed (to the point of not being so major or so obvious anyway) without any big or complicated changes - just tweaks to some numbers here and there. That's my two cents, anyway. I have about 1500 hours played and these are what continues to stand out to me from beta to post-beta, aside from odd nitpicks.

 

[xdj1nn]

• Battanian culture bonus (forest speed) which absolutely dwarfs the general utility and power of every other. It's subtle, but I'd still put it at the top.

has to do with TW's choice for both map distribution and style. Fantasy-esque leaning take would have empire lands have a patch of each terrain - instead they've opted for the cliche of having all of it under moderate climate and with zero deserts / steppes within it's territory - makes for a poor distribution because to add "variety" they've added a lot of forests, which ended up covering most of the map, the worst part is that they've even added forests on their artificial narrow passages / surrounding passages which makes that batt buff very OP.
The correct thing would be to have sturgians godlike on snow terrain much like batts with forests, that would bring "some" balance - yet batts would still take the trophy due to their other buffs and irrelevant debuff..

• Swinging vs. thrusting reach weapons on cav especially. Take 50 Khan's Guards, hold fire and F1+F3 vs. 100 Noble Cav(any) in a custom battle. This is the most obvious imbalance issue in the game currently.

That's due to both their own and player-base stubbornness over having a less comedic dmg system by taking it closer to a realistic system - yet they've always ignored it and some players have thrown toddler tantrums over even talking about the fact that swords would become mostly useless in battle.

• Archer noble units get substantially more damage(more/better bows/arrows) and durability over T5s while Cav only get significantly more durability(about the same or even literally the same weapons as T5).

TWs archery bias has been present since WB - in BL the major difference isn't even those items, but a lack of any t6 infantry unit that can withstand them, the armor thing I just mentioned, and the fact that bows shoot like semi-automatic rifles. Fixing that bias isn't really hard, but will require meaningful changes to the game itself. - as per observable pattern, TW won't do anything about it other than bad number tweaking that will "sugar coat" the issue without fixing it and introduce more imbalance on another side. And since they have a strong anti-player bias, it'll all be done through nerfing up until a point everything sucks.

• Mounted unit favorability in auto-calculations and for map speed. Mounted units cost more, I get it, but the advantage here is much too high such that if you're inclined to make liberal use of scouting and tactics, you can eventually just kind of point and click and take prisoners to effortlessly wipe out most enemy AI in the field, and then siege with nigh impunity. You can achieve superior results to manual battles with very little effort or strategy involved, granting it's a boring way to play that skips all the fun of real time battles. It also overly favors already strong factions due to their cav heavy parties - Vlandia, Khuzait, Aserai.

Well, if they tell you "costs more" as some sort of excuse to explain these flat-earther notions of how warfare worked in medieval times, than you should just middle finger them to death. Srsly, it's no excuse, sandbox games shouldn't have such urgency to shoehorn stupid logic just for "economy" - it could be passable in case of a table top game, but that isn't the case and these things make no sense. The auto-resolve's crap, highly exploitable, and if you play a campaign for long enough with the AI zerging you endlessly, you'll probably see how tempting it is to simply use that to counter their anti-player bias. - thing is that balancing with that sort of logic only works for arcades, and I hope they didn't do that for "balancing" delusions in this game...

• Shield durability. Despite archers being all the rage, a patient player can use shield squares to grind remarkable odds to death by kinda just sitting there. Anti-shield units do not work at all in this role - they almost always either kill the shield units before any substantial number - if any at all - are broken, or they die to the shield units in basic meat vs. meat combat due to more brute numerical superiority in non-shield related aspects. Archers will also rarely break most shields (T3 unit+ roughly) even firing at close ranges, emptying entire quivers.

it requires high level late-game specs to pull that off - again, it's their bad balancing. Although I've always found the "shield breaking" to be ridiculous, I agree it is needed for the game doesn't have any reasonable mechanic to counter a shield - as such you can easily assess the rage inducing hardest level AI and how ridiculously fast they react at blocking - you can literally spend 15 minutes without being able to penetrate their blocking (hence why exploiting the "player exclusive" kicking / shield bash / pommel strike becomes a necessity rather than a choice - unfortunately your own troops AI won't ever use it neither, so the shield breaking's kind of a necessity)

I think all of these could be fixed (to the point of not being so major or so obvious anyway) without any big or complicated changes - just tweaks to some numbers here and there. That's my two cents, anyway. I have about 1500 hours played and these are what continues to stand out to me from beta to post-beta, aside from odd nitpicks.

No, they cannot. They need to make major changes to pull any sort of quality balance, that because their systems were broken from the drawing board... Sure, they will tweak most of these over-time, yet I guarantee you the game won't ever be properly balanced. Once they change one thing they'll mess another... And if they refuse to change their systems (which they likely will), I'm sorry to say but than the game will remain as hot garbage when not modded...

The conclusion to me is quite simple: WB was a step in the right direction which made me hopeful for what they would bring in the future - future arrived and they've managed to make a worse game than the previous - since I own the game and have a taste for the genre-style I'll likely keep playing, but only with mods - yet I'd never buy anything from them again, not even if they were the only game developer left in the world. - this didn't need be, and many of the community have tried to suggest "not hard to pull off" quality additions / changes and references ever since the BL forums were created (that was years ago - can't remember how many) - And they've basically ignored feedback and suggestions since than, well, it was their choice, and they've sealed the deal with this poor release state, at least to me. I'll lurk even if I quit playing for a while, yet I don't have any faith that they'll come around and do the changes that are necessary;

As is I'm waiting to see if they fix the modding tools in a timely date, if it takes more than a month than I'll be gone, if not I'll try to make a mod to try and fix as much as I can from what bothers me the most. Likely I'll never make the mod, though.

 

[geala]

The only point that bothers me is No. 4. While cavalry can march faster than infantry it is not logical that a combined force of infantry and cavalry is faster than a force of infantry. That's a piece of crap what the game makes with it.

I could live with the higher importance of cavalry in auto-calc if other factors would also be included in the formula, like armor and the kind of weapons. As it is, with level and number, it is just annoying.

 

[Halvdan]

1. Battanian culture bonus (forest speed) which absolutely dwarfs the general utility and power of every other. It's subtle, but I'd still put it at the top.
2. Swinging vs. thrusting reach weapons on cav especially. Take 50 Khan's Guards, hold fire and F1+F3 vs. 100 Noble Cav(any) in a custom battle. This is the most obvious imbalance issue in the game currently.
3. Archer noble units get substantially more damage(more/better bows/arrows) and durability over T5s while Cav only get significantly more durability(about the same or even literally the same weapons as T5).
4. Mounted unit favorability in auto-calculations and for map speed. Mounted units cost more, I get it, but the advantage here is much too high such that if you're inclined to make liberal use of scouting and tactics, you can eventually just kind of point and click and take prisoners to effortlessly wipe out most enemy AI in the field, and then siege with nigh impunity. You can achieve superior results to manual battles with very little effort or strategy involved, granting it's a boring way to play that skips all the fun of real time battles. It also overly favors already strong factions due to their cav heavy parties - Vlandia, Khuzait, Aserai.
5. Shield durability. Despite archers being all the rage, a patient player can use shield squares to grind remarkable odds to death by kinda just sitting there. Anti-shield units do not work at all in this role - they almost always either kill the shield units before any substantial number - if any at all - are broken, or they die to the shield units in basic meat vs. meat combat due to more brute numerical superiority in non-shield related aspects. Archers will also rarely break most shields (T3 unit+ roughly) even firing at close ranges, emptying entire quivers.

I think all of these could be fixed (to the point of not being so major or so obvious anyway) without any big or complicated changes - just tweaks to some numbers here and there. That's my two cents, anyway. I have about 1500 hours played and these are what continues to stand out to me from beta to post-beta, aside from odd nitpicks.

Really for defeating Shields we should be using thrown weapons. Historically they would throw things like pilums that would bend after impact and then make a shield useless

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

Battanian culture bonus (forest speed) which absolutely dwarfs the general utility and power of every other. It's subtle, but I'd still put it at the top.

TW need to change the other culture bonuses to make them equally useful, it obvious the devs who designed them had no idea how the actual game plays.
Saving campaign time basically equals all kinds of other bonuses so something like '-10% price malice reduction on Tuesday" is silly.

1. Swinging vs. thrusting reach weapons on cav especially. Take 50 Khan's Guards, hold fire and F1+F3 vs. 100 Noble Cav(any) in a custom battle. This is the most obvious imbalance issue in the game currently.
2. Archer noble units get substantially more damage(more/better bows/arrows) and durability over T5s while Cav only get significantly more durability(about the same or even literally the same weapons as T5).

This is the same basic issue, many troops need buffs to be worth using, both offense and defense and IMO survivability (less death chance). Cav has been improved but still depends on the RTS mod to be good, more offense and defense would be better and why can't they use shield to block swinging polearms? I don't disagree that it's 1 sided brawl when KH go up again Cav, but what's the point of them having shield if they can't block?

Mounted unit favorability in auto-calculations and for map speed.

The AI's already in stalemate, with only battania sometimes getting a beating (needs changes iMO). IMO they player doing anything isn't a problem because they player can just not do that if it's boring or not fun. People as if Auto-calc is viable, well yeah, you're just playing like the AI does.... it's gonna suck but you can do it.

Shield durability. Despite archers being all the rage, a patient player can use shield squares to grind remarkable odds

That's kinda good though. I agree shield HP in bannerlord is kind of silly compared to warband, but you can also easily flank and manipulate the AI to shoot down the infantry. So if the player wants to do this....

My main things is that changes need to improve troops or perks, abilities and what not. The player needs good troops and abilities to feel satisfied against the cheating, bloated AI that send endless armies everyday and doesn't use any of the games system that the player has to use. It's the only good and enjoyable thing in Bannerlord is that you can get good troops and abilities and use good tactics and defeat the AI. If they make the troops or abilities worse is will just make the game suck too much to play.

 

[five bucks]

1. Battanian culture bonus (forest speed) which absolutely dwarfs the general utility and power of every other. It's subtle, but I'd still put it at the top.
2. Swinging vs. thrusting reach weapons on cav especially. Take 50 Khan's Guards, hold fire and F1+F3 vs. 100 Noble Cav(any) in a custom battle. This is the most obvious imbalance issue in the game currently.
3. Archer noble units get substantially more damage(more/better bows/arrows) and durability over T5s while Cav only get significantly more durability(about the same or even literally the same weapons as T5).
4. Mounted unit favorability in auto-calculations and for map speed. Mounted units cost more, I get it, but the advantage here is much too high such that if you're inclined to make liberal use of scouting and tactics, you can eventually just kind of point and click and take prisoners to effortlessly wipe out most enemy AI in the field, and then siege with nigh impunity. You can achieve superior results to manual battles with very little effort or strategy involved, granting it's a boring way to play that skips all the fun of real time battles. It also overly favors already strong factions due to their cav heavy parties - Vlandia, Khuzait, Aserai.
5. Shield durability. Despite archers being all the rage, a patient player can use shield squares to grind remarkable odds to death by kinda just sitting there. Anti-shield units do not work at all in this role - they almost always either kill the shield units before any substantial number - if any at all - are broken, or they die to the shield units in basic meat vs. meat combat due to more brute numerical superiority in non-shield related aspects. Archers will also rarely break most shields (T3 unit+ roughly) even firing at close ranges, emptying entire quivers.

I think all of these could be fixed (to the point of not being so major or so obvious anyway) without any big or complicated changes - just tweaks to some numbers here and there. That's my two cents, anyway. I have about 1500 hours played and these are what continues to stand out to me from beta to post-beta, aside from odd nitpicks.

Well said OP

Solution to (1) is to reduce the forest speed bonus by about half, and also the Khuzait bonus should be buffed a bit.

Solution to (2) is to nerf the damage of the Glaive and possibly remove it from the Khan's Guard and replace it with a saber. I also like the idea someone else had of giving the Sturgian Druzhinas a glaive-like or bardiche-like weapon.

Solution to (3)... Hmm I don't think it's necessarily a problem since Fian Champs are the only noble unit that's not mounted. If arrow damage to armor is fixed, Fian Champs will not be much better than other noble units. Maybe even weaker due to footslogging.

Solution to (5): reduce shield health across the board by about 15%, though only after fixing arrow damage to armour.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

Really for defeating Shields we should be using thrown weapons. Historically they would throw things like pilums that would bend after impact and then make a shield useless

Pilae and other solid metal javelins would actually penetrate shields and potentially kill the user even if he held a shield at arms length. Their deadliness is rarely modelled in games especially compared to their short range.

In bannerlord they have insane damage but it gets completely nullified by shields unless you have the relevant perk. I feel like shield-penetrating javelins would go some way in preventing the more or less stagnant shield melee fights.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

Well said OP

Solution to (1) is to reduce the forest speed bonus by about half, and also the Khuzait bonus should be buffed a bit.

Solution to (2) is to nerf the damage of the Glaive and possibly remove it from the Khan's Guard and replace it with a saber. I also like the idea someone else had of giving the Sturgian Druzhinas a glaive-like or bardiche-like weapon.

Solution to (3)... Hmm I don't think it's necessarily a problem since Fian Champs are the only noble unit that's not mounted. If arrow damage to armor is fixed, Fian Champs will not be much better than other noble units. Maybe even weaker due to footslogging.

Solution to (5): reduce shield health across the board by about 15%, though only after fixing arrow damage to armour.

Really? You want garbage perks and garbage troops? You could just uninstall the game and stare at your garbage can all day

 

[five bucks]

Really? You want garbage perks and garbage troops? You could just uninstall the game and stare at your garbage can all day

Don't recall saying I want anything to be garbage. Battanian forest speed bonus would still be useful and noticeable even if halved, Khan's Guard would still be strong even if they had a saber instead of the glaive.

Also I said the Khuzait bonus should be buffed (because it genuinely is garbage) - maybe you missed that part.

 

[Brano]

IMO javelin vs shield is not understood correctly by devs. Proper use would be:
1. As already mentioned, to penetrate the shield to an extent that would harm the shield user
2. To force shield user to drop it, as sticking javelin or two make it unweildy,unbalanced and heavy

Similar issue is with 2 handed axes, billhooks (wrong representation in game) and voulges. Idea that those weapons were used to mindlessly bash against enemy shield thinking it would disintegrate to shreds is...naive. Axe heads, particularly their pointy "beards" were used to hook the edge of enemy shield and either knock it off enemy hand or in better case to tear enemy down if he clings to the shield too much.

 

[Halvdan]

IMO javelin vs shield is not understood correctly by devs. Proper use would be:
1. As already mentioned, to penetrate the shield to an extent that would harm the shield user
2. To force shield user to drop it, as sticking javelin or two make it unweildy,unbalanced and heavy

Similar issue is with 2 handed axes, billhooks (wrong representation in game) and voulges. Idea that those weapons were used to mindlessly bash against enemy shield thinking it would disintegrate to shreds is...naive. Axe heads, particularly their pointy "beards" were used to hook the edge of enemy shield and either knock it off enemy hand or in better case to tear enemy down if he clings to the shield too much.

A shield disarm ability would be an awesome thing to see added to the game. Instead of having to literally break somebody's shield to pieces you should be able to knock it out of their hand with a forceful enough below or as some o
Experiments by Connolly suggest the pilum bent when hitting level ground, the point would penetrate dirt a bit then halt, then the heavier shaft would cause the shank to bend about halfway or closer to shank/shaft juncture, the angle bent making it useless until reheated and straightened. But D.B. Campbell's Osprey book on the pilum says the opposite, that hitting dirt wouldn't cause the bend, that they'd be caused by soldiers advancing who'd shove down the semi upright pilum shaft to make it easier to walk past.

Penetrating a shield wouldn't cause a bend, but wrenching on it to remove the pilum could bend it significantly.

A pilum hitting a shield or armor and not penetrating could cause the point to deform or a bend in the shank immediately after the point.
f the other individuals have stated filling it full of thrown weapons that make it too heavy and unwieldy

 

[JunKeteer]

Shields are way too strong, and honestly, still don't know exactly how useful/less 'size' is as a factor given how their hitboxes work.
Shields shouldn't be able to take 30 javelins and not break or 100 arrows, or even still be wieldable. They're not capable of implementing a weight/drop factor in battles, then make them break after ~5 javelins or something, especially since skirmisher infantry are horribly underutilized already; then add perks with axes being more effective, etc...
I've had a few hundred hours so far, have yet to see a unit actually have their shield break that I wasn't a part of it.

 

[anoddhermit]

has to do with TW's choice for both map distribution and style. Fantasy-esque leaning take would have empire lands have a patch of each terrain - instead they've opted for the cliche of having all of it under moderate climate and with zero deserts / steppes within it's territory - makes for a poor distribution because to add "variety" they've added a lot of forests, which ended up covering most of the map, the worst part is that they've even added forests on their artificial narrow passages / surrounding passages which makes that batt buff very OP.
...
The correct thing would be to have sturgians godlike on snow terrain much like batts with forests, that would bring "some" balance - yet batts would still take the trophy due to their other buffs and irrelevant debuff..
...
TWs archery bias has been present since WB - in BL the major difference isn't even those items, but a lack of any t6 infantry unit that can withstand them, the armor thing I just mentioned, and the fact that bows shoot like semi-automatic rifles. Fixing that bias isn't really hard, but will require meaningful changes to the game itself. - as per observable pattern, TW won't do anything about it other than bad number tweaking that will "sugar coat" the issue without fixing it and introduce more imbalance on another side.
...
They need to make major changes to pull any sort of quality balance, that because their systems were broken from the drawing board... Sure, they will tweak most of these over-time, yet I guarantee you the game won't ever be properly balanced.

While I agree it could much better with more substantial changes, my main claim is that minor changes can still make things more enjoyable and balanced by toning down the most dramatically powerful things or bringing enough other things up to their level. I'm not really looking for or expecting proper balance, just moderately better. I could still give cultures better movement bonuses that stack up to Battania, improve troop balance by equipment swapping, bandaid buff spears, etc. etc. without a total overhaul of anything major.

This is a game I play while listening to lectures and podcasts, and it's a great grindy game for that purpose. I don't know of any games as good that blend first person combat with real time management of decent size groups of AI troops, which I find an engaging combination. I also find its overall aesthetic charming, and all the mix of different systems - as barebones or janky as some may be - still adds up to a whole that's more than the sum of its parts for me.

I do think there should be far more non-debuff pathing options across the map, it makes little sense for forest to densely cover an obvious and frequently used route with no significant clearing of a path, such as between major fiefs. That I think would be relatively manageable. They could also make forests more forgiving on the map - making it so you don't get the debuff until you're further into them rather than just around the edge areas.

 

[anoddhermit]

TW need to change the other culture bonuses to make them equally useful, it obvious the devs who designed them had no idea how the actual game plays.
Saving campaign time basically equals all kinds of other bonuses so something like '-10% price malice reduction on Tuesday" is silly.

This is the same basic issue, many troops need buffs to be worth using, both offense and defense and IMO survivability (less death chance). Cav has been improved but still depends on the RTS mod to be good, more offense and defense would be better and why can't they use shield to block swinging polearms? I don't disagree that it's 1 sided brawl when KH go up again Cav, but what's the point of them having shield if they can't block?

The AI's already in stalemate, with only battania sometimes getting a beating (needs changes iMO). IMO they player doing anything isn't a problem because they player can just not do that if it's boring or not fun. People as if Auto-calc is viable, well yeah, you're just playing like the AI does.... it's gonna suck but you can do it.

That's kinda good though. I agree shield HP in bannerlord is kind of silly compared to warband, but you can also easily flank and manipulate the AI to shoot down the infantry. So if the player wants to do this....

My main things is that changes need to improve troops or perks, abilities and what not. The player needs good troops and abilities to feel satisfied against the cheating, bloated AI that send endless armies everyday and doesn't use any of the games system that the player has to use. It's the only good and enjoyable thing in Bannerlord is that you can get good troops and abilities and use good tactics and defeat the AI. If they make the troops or abilities worse is will just make the game suck too much to play.

Yeah I'd love it if they entirely scrapped all of the culture bonuses that make one thing cheaper. They're boring and they suck. Not be hard to think of superior replacements that are far more interesting and noticeable in gameplay.

Players can choose not to use something, but it's nice to not have to worry about keeping a mental inventory of a set of "house rules" to make up for lack of balance. Plus it's a lack something better that's noticeable - like if I think Khan's Guards are too broken to not count as cheating, I effectively don't get a Khuzait T6 unit.

I'd agree I don't want nerfed generic troops as the ultimate balancing tool, but I also do want defeating the AI armies in manual battles to be a challenge(sometimes - not always, wrecking an army full of new recruits has a comedic charm to it as well), so there's a limit to how powerful specific troops can be without them becoming boring IWIN buttons when stacked. The Khan's Guard definitely goes beyond that limit for me, where I just kind of know if I have enough of them, I will defeat insane odds without needing tactics in many cases. Though I think it's good for some compositions to require less complex tactics than others for people with different tolerances for micro managing things.

 

[anoddhermit]

Well said OP

Solution to (1) is to reduce the forest speed bonus by about half, and also the Khuzait bonus should be buffed a bit.

Solution to (2) is to nerf the damage of the Glaive and possibly remove it from the Khan's Guard and replace it with a saber. I also like the idea someone else had of giving the Sturgian Druzhinas a glaive-like or bardiche-like weapon.

Solution to (3)... Hmm I don't think it's necessarily a problem since Fian Champs are the only noble unit that's not mounted. If arrow damage to armor is fixed, Fian Champs will not be much better than other noble units. Maybe even weaker due to footslogging.

Solution to (5): reduce shield health across the board by about 15%, though only after fixing arrow damage to armour.

Druzhina would be great with a big bardiche-ish weapon for sure. Other noble cav would need some nice things too to stack up, but certainly the weapons already exist in game to do something like this for them to be properly equipped for effectiveness at melee while mounted, rather than having weapons that really just don't work for it due to reach problems. The short one handed weapons just need to be traded in for something serious, they're not just sidearms for dismounted combat the way the game currently plays, since cav make heavy use of them while mounted in many common-enough situations.

If you're building an army, do you pick an archer that's twice as effective as your regular archers and doubles as a shock infantry, or a cavalry that's a bit more durable than your regular cavalry? I have a hard time seeing the latter as a good choice. Even if archers get nerfed a bit indirectly I'd still be picking the Fian(or of course Khan's Guard, assuming I'm interested in sheer power).

 

[Brano]

This is a game I play while listening to lectures and podcasts, and it's a great grindy game for that purpose.

Exactly. You are my man. Have a

 

[anoddhermit]

Exactly. You are my man. Have a

Cheers!

 

[Brano]

I'm having one right now. Cheers my brother from another mother

 

[xdj1nn]

While I agree it could much better with more substantial changes, my main claim is that minor changes can still make things more enjoyable and balanced by toning down the most dramatically powerful things or bringing enough other things up to their level. I'm not really looking for or expecting proper balance, just moderately better. I could still give cultures better movement bonuses that stack up to Battania, improve troop balance by equipment swapping, bandaid buff spears, etc. etc. without a total overhaul of anything major.

that's a philosophical "cup half full" / "cup half empty" issue. You look at it positively, while to me it's about "sucking less" which doesn't make it good.

This is a game I play while listening to lectures and podcasts, and it's a great grindy game for that purpose. I don't know of any games as good that blend first person combat with real time management of decent size groups of AI troops, which I find an engaging combination. I also find its overall aesthetic charming, and all the mix of different systems - as barebones or janky as some may be - still adds up to a whole that's more than the sum of its parts for me.

I prefer to do useful productive tasks instead. Wasting my time in a game's an absurd concept to me.
Podcasts, TV, shows, and other shenanigans that don't require my full attention will be consumed while I wash dishes, wash backyard, wash bathrooms... Whatever tf I need to do that is tedious will likely be accompanied by them.
A useless game that requires the same coping strategy makes me cringe, and it ultimately translates into bad entertainment/total waste of time.

I do think there should be far more non-debuff pathing options across the map, it makes little sense for forest to densely cover an obvious and frequently used route with no significant clearing of a path, such as between major fiefs. That I think would be relatively manageable. They could also make forests more forgiving on the map - making it so you don't get the debuff until you're further into them rather than just around the edge areas.

I don't mind it if it's logical, say TW tells us that batts are isolationists, if they are surrounded by forests it wouldn't strike me as odd. But if they tell me Sturgians are traders and have their entire territory littered with them without roads, than I have a problem with it.
It falls back to the 101 script-writing rule of "can you answer why X element is in your story?" "if you can it's perfectly fine, if you can't you are a bad writer; if you came up with an excuse later, than your story's bad"

 

[Kissaki]

Pilae and other solid metal javelins would actually penetrate shields and potentially kill the user even if he held a shield at arms length. Their deadliness is rarely modelled in games especially compared to their short range.

In bannerlord they have insane damage but it gets completely nullified by shields unless you have the relevant perk. I feel like shield-penetrating javelins would go some way in preventing the more or less stagnant shield melee fights.

I have only just started playing Bannerlord, but this is something that is already sticking out like a sore thumb. It needs to be fixed. And the physics - not sure if it's tied to the insane damage or if javelins get special treatment here - are ridiculous. It's like they get hit with a wrecking ball. It makes for a good laugh, but it does reduce my overall enjoyment of the game. Javelins were much more sensible, in every respect, in Warband.