I pay little attention to the armor, to be honest. I just take the best, the town may offer and running around with it, because there's no point of using any armor with lower stats.
Yet, in the late game you just can't ignore the clone wars, because almost every lord has about 5-7+ children who look absolutely same. This, plus a lot of same placeholders battle scenes on the map - and you get the expression that you are caught in an endless one and the same loop - same locations, same characters, same maps and same actions every time.