The Honorable Advantage

[Occam]

Having high honor is a great advantage when you have your own kingdom.

You gain honor by releasing lords you capture on the battlefield, by turning down the reward offered when you rescue a village from bandits, and a few other ways thru quests (which I rarely do so I don't really know about them).

Some lords will have higher relations with you the higher your honor is.
You get +1 relation with them for every 3 honor so once you have over 200 honor you will have over 60 relation with them even the first time you meet them.
If you have released them on the battlefield or rescued them from prison or taken castles alongside them before your relation will be even higher.
This will make it easier to recruit them to your kingdom.

Once they have joined your kingdom it is easy to get their relation to 100 by giving them a few fiefs and holding a few feasts.
These lords will stay at 100 relation even when you give fiefs to other lords.

Lords who have positive relations with you are good, but lords whose relation with you never goes down are great.
When you're on a campaign just turn the castles and towns over to them as fast as you capture them, you don't have to worry about garrisoning the castles, you don't have to worry about them defecting with the castles, and it makes your lords even stronger.

Also, these devoted lords will rally to you every time you start a campaign and will stay with you as long as they still have troops left.
You don't need a big personal army if you have a bunch of powerful lords following you closely and jumping into every fight with you.
Right now my honor rating is 238. My party size limit is only 102 but I have over 20 devoted (100 relation) lords and in sieges and field battles I usually have 2-3000 troops on my side.

 

[Rhodok Sergeant]

Thanks for the info.

 

[MickDick]

And there is absolutely nothing but downsides to having no honor...  The one and only advantage you can claim that exists is that you can raid villages without worrying about jack, but then with the money you make doing it none of the lords like you at all so you can't make enterprises so you can make money so you don't have to raid villages anymore.

It's a vicious cycle.  Reminds me of how it is to be a criminal in real life.

 

[The Lich]

There is one downside to being honorable. As honorable lords like you if you are honorable, cunning lords like you less (or at least it was like that in previous versions).

 

[Tripida]

There is one downside to being honorable. As honorable lords like you if you are honorable, cunning lords like you less (or at least it was like that in previous versions).

I don't see reason for cunning lords to hate such lords, maybe you meant sadistic and bad-tempered lords from earlier versions?

 

[The Lich]

Ah yes. My bad

 

[Filou]

But they cap their 'hate' at -3 while honorable lords can be raised to 99 with honor. 

The other very important point about honor when you are king is that it helps to get peace and generally avoid war since it's taken into account by the AI. 
With negative honor you'll be at war against all faction very fast and won't get any peace unless you eliminate a faction.

 

[Occam]

I also make good use of lords that hate me.
Lords that come to me with low positive or negative relations I accept but give just one village, or no fief if I don't have any extra. I figure they are going to defect eventually so this way they can't take anything with them.
These lords don't come with me when I call a campaign but they do patrol around their fief chasing way enemy raiders, suppressing bandits, and keeping prosperity higher than it would be if all the lords were with me on campaign.

 

[Mecha Magos]

I like your thinking in regards to doing the honorable thing; not just from a mechanical point of view, but it's the right thing to do! For justice!

Anyway, the only exception I'd be making towards this is in regards to letting lords go. If you want your faction to win, I mean really gain ground, take villages, castles and towns and the like, you'll want to keep these enemy lords prisoner so they can't rally up another force and come back to stomp you. You'll be doing even better if you're holding their marshal captive, which would be akin to cutting off the head of the enemy faction, the only resistance you'd receive when attacking castles would be the garrison and MAYBE the owning lord's army.

I'm in total agreement with you, the advantages are on the whole better if you just release them. If they defect, they'll be liking you very much. But hey, there's a few situations where being a bastard would serve you better.