Stuff like looters having rocks that do damage through armor keeps coming up, even though it is pretty low damage overall and almost 100% avoidable. It is a low-bar challenge to deal with but it damages the sense of progression because people don't want a challenge; they want the power fantasy of effortlessly killing through masses of inferior troops without risk.
We complain about armor being weak
in general (not just vs. the masterwork looter stones) because it makes battles too short, is bad for balance between types of troop, is blatantly unrealistic and makes no sense considering how much high tier armor costs. Looters are the most obvious example, is all.
In addition, it makes higher-tier troops less challenging opponents. It flattens the difficulty curve of the game.
Just because people don't want to be challenged by T0 enemies once they're wearing
endgame gear doesn't mean they don't want to be challenged at all; they want to move onto bigger challenges. Looters should only be a challenge in the very early game. They're meant to be the weakest possible thing besides farmers.
What I want to be challenged by in the late game, while wearing my high tier armor and using my strong weapon, is an enemy noble troop or lord who has effective armor (that I can't oneshot while riding by with my glaive), a highly damaging weapon as well (instead of a stab polearm they're too stupid to use correctly), and combat skills vaguely comparable to mine (right now even T5 troops only use something like 35% of the weapon stats iirc). Yes there is an element of power fantasy when you chop your way through T1 troops to get to them, but power fantasy and genuine challenge can exist in the same game.
Warband also allowed players to draw effectively infinite reserves of manpower and turn them into top-tier killers in a week by mid-game. The economy of Warband was basically "here's your free money." And that's fine. But it isn't challenging and dudes pretending it was are lying to themselves
Was Warband actually mentioned in the particular discussion you're quoting?
There's a middle ground between "get Swadian Knights in a week" and "take a year to get T5 troops unless you cheese a Stewardship perk".
To be clear, I don't think Mount and Blade is a game that is (broadly speaking) improved by adding challenge, regardless of the nature of it.
I think most people are going to disagree with this. The core of games is challenge. A game with no challenge at all where you just grind your way to an eventual fully painted map is boring. A game with a reasonable amount of challenge where you can pat yourself on the back for playing well and improving at the intuitive mechanics is fun and "rewarding".
Back when snowballing was the big thing, I tweaked a few numbers and formulas involving war decs against the largest/most powerful faction and it worked pretty well to curb that. In fact, it worked way too ****ing well: as a player kingdom, the AI would recognize your faction's strength pretty well ("player-like AI" as mexxico put it elsewhere) and absolutely dogpile the **** out of you, exactly as you would to the top faction. Waiting for you to be involved in multiple wars, war-deccing you, then targeting settlements less on distance and more based on perceived weakness.
Actually playing through that was almost the least fun I've had in a Mount and Blade title. Having the AI beat the **** out of you isn't really fun in M&B because the AI doesn't care if it loses its party five times in a row, has to chase a half dozen companions all over the map or gets its "home" fief taken away then given to another clan when they recapture it. And the outcome of losing all the progress you made was -- to me, at least -- not a fun feeling. My first thought was, "****, gotta grind all those sieges again."
Here's the problem in that line of thinking. My argument is that Bannerlord is full of luck or grind, that people would like
replaced with genuine challenge.
Your counterargument is that Bannerlord in its current state, with genuine challenge
added to the current mix of luck and grind, wasn't fun for you.
Of course not, but I said "similar resources to the player" and "intuitive game mechanics".
Bannerlord AI gets various cheats. They don't have to personally track down mercenaries and vassals, instead contacting them over their Linkedin cellphones. They get a core of free troops back if their army is wiped out. IIRC, they don't have to provide warhorses for troop upgrades still, and wouldn't have pre 1.5.8. Etc. So if you give them comparative intelligence to the player without fixing the problems the player has to go through and they don't, of course they're going to feel massively unfair to deal with.
When it comes to intuitive game mechanics, the player still lacks the ability to do things that make sense to deal with the problems the AI can throw at them, like send their parties to guard/attack a particular location which they know would help, or directly invest into rebuilding their villages after enemy raids, or send patrols out of their castles to hunt down bandits, or covertly recruit lords to their faction
before openly declaring independence. Options for skillful gameplay. Having fiefs taken and given to other clans is another thing which falls under the umbrella of random luck-based bull**** that people complain about and would like to be
replaced with actual challenge.