Strange, I swear I actually responded to this. I must have done it in a dream or something equally stupid.
I was going to say something similar to what Noudelle said. It looks more like a moderate to fast paced RTS with some building stuff, which is a weird combination, like how grand ages medieval was just a strange mess of a game.
My final vision is to make an interconnected set of systems where you play as a group of characters and can work your way up to becoming a king, but I'm going to start by designing the mechanics for high level stuff like armies and city building before doing low level RPG stuff.
Ideally I would like something where individual characters can't actually progress that much very easily, for example a slave might become a freeman or escape to being a nomad if he's lucky, but then allow you to play at the rank of any character you've fully befriended in a playthrough. After seeing what happened to bannerlord I really want to avoid the thing where the player is encouraged to grind social mobility to skip the early game. There should be things you can do as a peasant that you can't do as king, and "higher level" characters should just be a different experience, not just a flatly better one.
My plan is also to completely do away with numeric player stats and instead have a series of named "traits" which each have a small hidden value assigned. Even health could work this way. So instead of having "stealth 50", most characters would start out without a stealth stat at all, and when it is first assigned it will read as "good at hiding", then tick up to "practically invisible" or something. Even health could work this way. I much prefer qualitative stuff like this, it's definitely easier to get a full picture of a character by reading a list of 10 or so traits than to see an array of numbers. I hope that by doing this I can avoid the alienating numbers game that most games have.
To add to this, it's even sillier how in total war there are no truly decisive battles. Despite it being so much about racing against the AI, armies can be spammed out so quickly that a massive 5:1 casualty victory will only net you a couple of settlements. You execute a perfect strategy in a battle and suffer minor losses, but you know it's just a matter of time before you'll have to do the same thing again. In fact in Shogun 2 (and i think some of the later games), the AI actually gets free veteran units in the fog of war. You're always fighting against something they didn't earn, and you have to annihilate them to stop the troop factory.
