I for one am excited about the path they are taking the political system. I love the combat, but this political systems seems like it could have a lot of purpose in the game overall. One of the best ways to develop an interesting mechanic/system for a game (that I've seen at least) is to create several interacting basic mechanics using a common archetype.
What I mean by this is that by say creating the Influence resource and then giving several options in how to use it gives a much better experience and form of flexibility compared to a complex system based upon action/reaction. By giving the player a raw "resource" to spend in whichever way they please it sets up a basic mechanic that interacts with multiple people in different ways. Sure, you can use it to simply have a lord follow you, but what happens when someone begins to understand the system's choices to overlap into better positions? Instead of having a lord follow you, you could instead have another lord follow a companion or head to an enemy town as a way to distract what you believe to be an enemy army approaching to halt YOUR siege of town X.
Thinking ahead instead of having a nearby lord assist you in fighting off the town garrison AND an untold amount of reinforcements you take a different path using the same system. You tell the lord to go travel to a nearby town where you believe the enemy army/reinforcements are coming from. The AI heads in that direction, and when they are confronted by the enemy armies attempt to flee while the enemy AI basically plays chicken with your scape goat.
The Influence system has a lot of potential because it's based around how you use it, rather than "It does only X/Y" while acting like a customized resource that can be spent on various things. This, of course, will depend on how it's implemented. I want to see how many various ways you can spend the Influence itself, because from my experience in game testing mechanics the best solutions are to have several simple options to spend them on, and then allow the player to turn these simple options into complex steps and plans for execution.
There are a lot of things I could see being done with that system, and I hope we get some more about it soon! I'd like to put in my own thoughts on it as well