I think it is an improvement over the base-game of Warband.
Features/Ideas I find that are interesting and keep me around playing Bannerlord
. Life and death, dynasty system.
.Better sieges - anything is better than vanilla Warband sieges. You can build siege engines
. Rebellions
. Quality of life features, for example, seeing the number of troops an opposing kingdom has. An entire encyclopedia that is more intuitive than the tabs in warband. More information.
. Larger battles and decent graphics for the number of troops on the screen
. More development options
. Smithing (even doe its broken)
. Army system - much better than just random lords running close together like in Warband.
. Worldmap is larger and more expansive it seems
. Better battle scenes. Warband had auto-generated terrain which was good and bad. Sometimes you would get very ****ty battlefields to fight in
. Better battle command is spilt between lords. So you can control the archer formations while another lord takes command of infantry
. New recruitment system
. Morale is actually more present. Routs are more common which is realistic
. The greater modding potential down the line
I like Warband and Bannerlord. I think it's unfair to compare both games but yet people do it and just ignore all quality of life features that Bannerlord offers.
Bannerlord, in its current state, is not an
improvement over the basegame of Warband, it's an expensive
sidegrade. It does a handful of things better, especially visuals; but a lot of things worse.
Bannerlord is currently missing from vanilla Warband:
* civil wars and claimants
* feasts
* handcrafted companions
* in-depth lord dialogue and the ability to order them to attack/defend a location without you
* deserters
* manhunters
* having to fight your way out in civilian gear when failing to sneak into a town
* prison break quest (this is announced but not in the game yet)
* political quests and denouncement quests
* deeper courtship
* lord duels
* skill books
* sword sisters
* keep battles (announced, but not in the game yet) and street battles
* "And much more I don't want to sit here writing this out for an hour"
And has the following problems relative to vanilla Warband:
* Worse combat + pathfinding AI/navmeshes - for example spear cavalry being horribly inaccurate in charges, or units forgetting their primary weapon exists, or mass scale jittering, or troops refusing to use the ladders during a siege, or going up a siege tower in a way that completely negates its strategic usefulness, or superhumanly accurate troops in inappropriate situations where they should be missing, or archers being unable to see cavalry units that are just slightly too far away, troops being terrible at defending themselves, etc
* Worse overworld strategic AI - lords make way more dumb decisions- and no casus belli. In Warband you would see kingdoms give basic reasons for attack such as "(Y) is declaring war to curb the power of (X)" or "peasants complain they are mistreated by (X) and appeal to (Y) for protection, giving them provocation to attack (X), if they want it." Overworld strategic AI is probably the place Bannerlord has made the most progress since launch but is still flawed.
* Worse economy balancing - high tier armor not spawning because cities are perpetually too poor to produce it, or castles not giving reasonable tax so they have no reason to exist, for example
* Worse combat/damage balancing - for example even the highest tier armor in the game offering extremely little damage protection
* Less distinct factions, with 5 out of the 8 factions in the game all being "generalist" factions with almost exactly the same types of troops that don't feel different to play at all. And since the 3 factions in the middle of the map are all cloned, your armies tend to look very Empire troop-heavy too. So replaying the game as different factions feels more samey than Warband.
* Lots of town/castle/field scenes still aren't made, and there is still placeholder dialogue.
* Bannerlord memory leaks can sometimes cause horrible performance issues.
* More buggy than Warband, obviously because it's still in EA.
Re: your points:
* The dynasty system brings nice roleplaying but little gameplay value as of yet- children are just companions that take an incredibly long time to be useful, and an heir is just a worse version of yourself, and if you bother to play a game long enough for you to take control of your heir, by that point you should have almost conquered Calradia already and have no enemies left to fight. Dynasty system will be a good addition to the game if they add more enemies for the player to fight in the endgame (civil wars or invasions).
* Half of the new Bannerlord siege features don't actually work yet- such as siege towers being strategically useless or troops ignoring the front door. Warband sieges were just one ladder/tower but at least they properly used it, damn it! Also you hardly ever get to experience defensive sieges in Bannerlord.
* Bannerlord's field battle scenes are better crafted than the random ones it's true, but on the flipside there is a tiny number of them compared to the endless variety of the Warband random system, so I'd call that a wash. Will be a straight pro once they finish adding scenes.
* Development options are a partial reskin of the removed village/town improvement options, which you used to be able to do for every fief.
* The army system is basically just a quality-of-life fix of Warband's marshall system, I would list it under your general heading of "quality of life changes."
* Morale in Bannerlord isn't really an improvement since in both BL and WB, it doesn't make a difference until the battle is basically already won, 99% of times.
* Other lords taking control of your troops would be a nice feature if their AI wasn't garbage! Right now it's a downside, not a positive.
Do I think Bannerlord
might one day be a direct improvement of vanilla Warband if TW gets their act together? Yeah.
Is it a direct improvement on vanilla Warband now? No.