Completely off-topic, but this was the very biggest issue to me in native warband, and something I feel very few mods even tackle:
Fief incomes. They're too low.
You're telling me that one dyeworks, producing a few rolls of velvet every week, is making me more money than the rents of an entire goddamn countryside?
Potentially thousands of people are paying me money for the privilege of my not beating them to death, and even the very richest fiefs in all Caladria can't even scrape together enough money to outmatch the incomes I receive from a few of my dyeworks?
This isn't greed on my part: it seems like a huge problem for a game where the player's main goal is to capture land. There was absolutely no incentive to own a castle or town, when the cost of having one properly defended vastly outstripped the profits it made you. In Native, I often just let the enemy take my castles, so I only had pure money-making fiefs [ which just got raided all the time, no matter how hard I tried to protect them ].
It was even worse with mods like Floris, where you could simply buy land without having to fight for it. It completely threw me out of the medieval immersion to be able to make more money as a common mercer than as a lord owning a castle and huge swathe of countryside. As well, there were very few ways to improve a fief to make it more wealthy and desirable than a very basic one.
The only mod that handled this appropriately in my book is Anno Domini 1257. No buying land, you had to fight for every scrap of it. The most you'd ever see from a business operation was 250 denars, and that would be with dyeworks in the best possible town to sell velvet. Fiefs, on the other hand, got you assloads of money, even if they were very poor. What's more, they provided you with lances. You couldn't just go from town to town recruiting *****es: you either bought some professional mercs from a town or tavern, or you captured land so you could have a ready supply of recruits. Plus, there were tons of ways to upgrade your fiefs, and you could ask your peasants to provide you payment in good instead of just pure money, allowing a shrewd lord to potentially make vast incomes.
It truly made capturing land important purely for the sake of owning land, as opposed to 'it's just what you're supposed to do in this game.' And it made fiefs that you spent a great deal of time and money investing in all the more worthwhile to defend. That, and it allowed you to grow a bond with the land and people you ruled. I found myself truly caring for the smelly little peasants, instead of just seeing them as a useless burden.
I apologize for the random outburst, but I couldn't continue my days knowing that potentially no-one was thinking about this. M&B is currently my favourite game of all time, and I absolutely cannot wait for Bannerlords. Bless your souls, devs; you're doing the Lord's work.
EDIT: I thought the Rhodoks were supposed to be the Italians, while the Swadians were supposed to be German. The latter, I believe, was named after an old Latin tribe, while the former was named after the Duchy of Swabia, which was the dominant power in the early HRE, as it was the seat of the prestigious House Karling.
If the Vlandians are meant to be the proto-Swadians, they have my sword in the coming conflicts.
Banned
