Late game, top faction on the map and some fool family leaves your faction with 2 towns and 2 castles. In the middle of your controlled area. You even have relationship 100 with them, but they join up with a faction with no estates or income, not even their "home" faction, but just a random bankrupted faction. Makes 0 sense and kills my motivation for playing this game, because it keeps happening.
A few other things late game, that causes mental meltdowns for me:
- Wars, like it's okay to have a war now and then, but not all the time with 3+ factions. It just get annoying going from one battle to another over and over again.
- AI behavior is bad, like our faction have so much cash, influence and members, but still we only have max 5 braindead armies. We could make 20+, braindead armies but no, let's keep it fair for the other factions. It's war, not hide and seek. It's all in or nothing. AI should also take into account, that a larger, much larger faction, is proberly not the best opponent for a war.
- It seems like, when at war with a faction, and you crawl your way up the stream of endless armies and you finally reach the point (holding +50 captive enemy lords), where you can start dealing with their cities or castles, then either your faction king or their king declares peace. At war it takes two sides to make peace, not just one side saying, okay let's have peace. There is no consecquence for the AI and no negotiation, just peace because one side says so. Again makes 0 sense. Few days later, you do the same again with another faction and again with the faction you trashed earlier - repeat - repeat - repeat - repeat...
For the record, I dont chop off heads, but it's like the AI and game mechanics forces me to pick that option. Sadly, because that just not how Mount and Blade should be played (in my book). Really loved some of the game mechanics in Warband... Actually think I will install it again.