Look up "opportunity costs". Yes, the battles are heavily flawed. If Taleworlds don't waste any more time on board games, that frees up some time to keep working on the battles and making them more fun.
And the "including the tavern games" is the part I'm specifically taking issue with, because they've already wasted enough time on that area for something the vast majority of players don't touch again after the first try, if they even try it at all.
Here is a list of things about this game that need attention far, far more than the board games do.
* Troop Combat AI is broken
* Siege pathfinding is broken + siege towers are useless
* Morale is nearly nonfunctional
* Armor damage model is broken
* Smithing sucks
* War is constant with almost no peace
* Mounted melee combat is super inconsistent
* Strategic map AI is stupid
* Formation AI is stupid
* Player relations with NPCs are broken or nonsensical
* Economy is totally broken
* Castles are almost useless
* Tactics are a pain in the ass to execute
* Enemy lords escape imprisonment like they're covered in grease
* Autoresolve battle system is totally unrepresentative
* Overall game flow and pacing is extremely grindy and unsatisfying
* Mod tools aren't done
* Most town, castle, village, tavern, field, and hideout scenes are unimplemented
* Game still has lots of bugs and performance issues
I didn't think listing any of this was needed initially, because surely you would be smart enough to work out for yourself that board games are not the highest priority in the game right now?
Wait, do you really think that adding chess to Bannerlord is going to make its Twitch viewers shoot up? If not, why even mention it?
You can play chess in a million places. You can only play Bannerlord in Bannerlord. So Bannerlord needs to focus on improving what makes it unique, not on improving its ability to do things you can already do elsewhere.
If you really think they've used up much time on board games and that's why the battles are crap you must be joking. Every feature feels like a placeholder atm. Board games have "difficulty options", they are not polished at all so you can't say they spent a lot of time on them. There has been no patch that I remember at the moment that said "We've been working hard on board games lately". Board games were in at the start of the early access and they're not much better now, they haven't used any time on that. They did use some time creating and polishing quests, but that's pretty much it.
As for battles, AI used to be more challenging at the start of the beta, at least in small battles/tournaments, but they dumbed it down intentionally. At this point you don't even know if they want to improve the AI anymore (apart from fixing the siege pathfinding which they said they will), so your best bet will probably be mods even by the end of early access, even though I hope I'm not right on that one.
They started developing another game, and also use time on console stuff, so whatever you say about them wasting time on features like board games is simply not true. They work slowly in general and work on many things at once. Even if they wouldn't take their time to add a board game or two, they would be doing other stuff anyway.
The morale system is worthless and it's at most an annoying feature. It leads to situations where you fight a small party of looters, kill a couple, and then spend 10 minutes chasing them out of the battle map if you want their loot or combat experience. They shouldn't prioritize this feature at all, they should completely remove it from the game. It should have never been a feature, it's just an annoyance at best. I don't know how they would turn it into a non-annoyance, but imo we could have lived pretty well without a morale-system to begin with.
Smithing is broken, but as TW said: not a priority. Why? It's just one small part of gameplay, so even though that is your preference it should still objectively not be more of a priority than any other feature. They said it themselves. Same with trading, which is something "just a small portion of players do". They're used to make money. Meanwhile board games are used to make money and build relations. If they were to be improved, you could have more fun time improving relations with NPCs, so this at least ties in to another system of the game somewhat.
"Overall game flow and pacing is extremely grindy and unsatisfying" it is also what I mentioned, progression.
The reason that I mentioned chess as an example is because you saw my suggestions and decided to stop at "board games, LUL", and that was all your response, not even thinking or asking for my perspective on things. And I mentioned the twitch thing because you're literally making fun of board games that are more popular and fun than the current bannerlord, that's all. Minigames have been part of games for years, and they are simply attention to detail that makes good games great. In World of Warcraft you had mining, you had fishing, you had alchemy and many others. At its time it was one of the greatest games, it was and is the biggest MMORPG still, and had a peak of 12 million subscribers when the game still had a soul. The game had attention to detail and had side-activities, a.k.a things to do that are considered fun and can snap you out of the main objectives of the game (the battles in Bannerlord's case) that would get boring if not for the side-activities.
Imagine if bannerlord at least had one more feature where you can walk around the towns/villages in different parts of the map, where different kinds of herbs reside. Just walk around those scenes that you so much want, gather herbs and create potions or medicine. But the game doesn't really have a disease system, does it? We can all agree that the game lacks plenty atm, but you clearly underestimate the value of side-activities in a game. Look at Valheim, most popular game as of late. You have underground dungeons to explore, you have building, you have cooking and potion-making, grind, upgrade gear, bosses, farming in a way, sailing. It's a very simple game, very basic graphics, but there is variety, which keeps it fun. Yes, right now many people are waiting for more content, but the game was already worth it for the money.
The things you mention are basic features, many no more important than even something as trivial as board games. Town and village scenes, seriously? Most players don't even enter a town or a village. I too only talk to an NPC at the center of a town and go straight to a workshop and that's pretty much it, and many players do the same. There are still features lacking, like giving athletics exp while you walk through a town. Giving a reason to actually walk around.
I spoke against the autoresolve when it was the easiest thing at one point and no troops of the player died anymore, after people complained their high level troops were dying against looters. But I only saw people complain that their high level troops were dying, wanting the game easier. So if what you really want when you mention this is an army of high-tier cav stomping looters with 0 casualties then I wouldn't consider it a priority either; Auto-resolve is a non-feature, it literally should not be a priority in any way. It's a way to skip one of the only features in the game, which is combat. And you want that as a priority somehow, ok..
As you see, we can both find faults in what the other said based on our perspective. So don't be so quick to judge, next time just ask and move the conversation in a more productive direction.
Other than this, you suggested some basic things, and also some things that the devs already announced they will fix sooner or later anyway. Imprisonment will be longer at one point after they make sure there will still be AI to build armies and fight in the captured lord's place, if I reckon correctly and that wasn't just a player suggestion. Siege AI will be fixed, but it's difficult to do so, yet they will. Smithing will be fixed, but it's not a priority, the devs said so themselves. Mod tools will come at one point, closer to EA ending probably as they have mentioned.
War has also already been talked about. We can't have longer peace without having things to do during peace, so for now they're keeping the constant wars. (but no, let's NOT focus on creating more side activities, in no-shape or form should that ever be a priority, duh)...
The things you mentioned are definitely in need of improvement, but not all that you mentioned are clear priorities, just as not all that I mentioned are clear priorities for you. Still, no reason to make fun of it just because you don't understand what I truly mean by it.