Bannerlord offers a lot of different paths to take during your adventures in Calradia. You can start as a sellsword and do minor quests, become a champion of the arena, accumulate wealth by being a merchant or work your way up the social ladder by interacting with nobles. The issue is that if you want to expand your clan and have more renown, the game forces you to farm it by beating looters or spending your whole time in the arena. So this means at some point, even though I bought 3 businesses in a kingdom and am becoming the richest man in the region, people will not know my name because I didn't fight anyone...
What I am proposing, is to have a way of getting renown regularly, proportional to the wealth that is accumulated, the businesses owned, or maybe allowing the player to be a servant of a lord as the governor of his/her settlement. Good management skills should bring interest to the player's clan (aka renown and morale). Now, wealth cannot buy everything. At some point, if the player wants to go higher on the ladder - tier 4 and higher clan - this renown trickle or whatever the form it takes, should stop or be less important. A noblewoman/man has to prove her/his valor in combat to become a queen/king.
All of this is to say that being a merchant is there to just make money and becomes boring after a few hours, I've yet to see anyone focus on being an engineer or a healer and there is no other way to recruit more men than fighting, thus making the game focus to much around combat and leaving the social and intelligence sets of skills as secondary or support for the combat and cunning sets.
What I am proposing, is to have a way of getting renown regularly, proportional to the wealth that is accumulated, the businesses owned, or maybe allowing the player to be a servant of a lord as the governor of his/her settlement. Good management skills should bring interest to the player's clan (aka renown and morale). Now, wealth cannot buy everything. At some point, if the player wants to go higher on the ladder - tier 4 and higher clan - this renown trickle or whatever the form it takes, should stop or be less important. A noblewoman/man has to prove her/his valor in combat to become a queen/king.
All of this is to say that being a merchant is there to just make money and becomes boring after a few hours, I've yet to see anyone focus on being an engineer or a healer and there is no other way to recruit more men than fighting, thus making the game focus to much around combat and leaving the social and intelligence sets of skills as secondary or support for the combat and cunning sets.
