1. Due to a bug, cavalry of all weight classes does almost infinite damage on the charge and takes none, making infantry basically useless.
Either I haven't noticed this or didn't realise it was a bug. Any other inf unit than spears/polearms or swords in shield formation gets rekt by the lightest cavalry but that's still less egregious than it was in Medieval TW's.
2. The AI can siege you for one turn with one unit and damage your buildings without you being able to respond, because of how the turns work. This makes frontier settlements a liability because the AI can just annoy you with feint sieges that you cant recover from.
It's annoying that it happens but I haven't encountered this all that often, and when it does you can simply pursue the enemy army anyway. I've always seen that barbarian frontier frustrations as part of the experience though. WRE playthrough just is pain and suffering, that's a fact of life.
Also the damage done to buildings increases with the number of turns the town has been besieged for, the damage done in a single turn is annoying but it's not devastating.
3. The building system is terrible, easily the worst in the series, and generally there is only one viable settlement build for each faction.
Again it's that commitment to reflecting roman style of governorship (whole of illyria instead of just one settlement). Not that I'm a big fan but how is it terrible though? Being a minmaxer "viable" probably means most efficient to you, but if so then 1212MK has the same issue, regional incomes can just be maximised with a single default build with maybe the exception of region-specific resources like wine. I feel like I've had more variety with buildings in base game / Radious than I have in MK1212 because of the "1 large town 2 bread basket settlements" layout.
4. Every single unit in the game has the wrong stats, or a typo somewhere that gives it broken abilities. This is barely an exaggeration, and it's why Attila multiplayer is practically nonexistent, while people still organise Rome 2 tournaments.
I was so used to mods I never even tried getting into stats and unit descriptions. Tier, exp and abilities (formation) is all you need to go on tbh.
5. Agents are ridiculous, they can wipe out entire armies for free. The AI spams them like crazy, and they can even block bridges.
I don't remember much about agents at all, I don't even recall using them in vanilla.
6. Almost all the factions and battles are basically the same. As the Western Roman Empire you will be fighting cookie-cutter Germanic enemies for the entire campaign, with the same germanic spear spam, in the same defensive sieges with the same settlement maps. It gets boring extremely fast.
The spear spam was mostly on my end lol. I don't know, for the most part I enjoyed sièges and looked forward to them. They make for intense moments even if you know you're eventually going to pull off that exact same flank for the umpteenth time. I love the emphasis on timing and the grinding of my teeth waiting for that encircled general to die before his reinforcements can crush my army, and watching the action close-up with the hud off. It may be repetitive now that I think about it but it's damn fun. I think the stakes help a lot with that, losing a settlement can set you back quite a bit and you may lose an important choke point, or be cut off from the Spanish provinces, or lose your last port in Britain or something. I'm engaged in the game to the point every battle and siege and treaty means something, but I understand it's not something I share with many.
Fully disagree. Makes the world always exciting. As in RL, enemies dont scale to you, if you know there are more advanced enemy nearby, take precaution.
But I ****in don't. Especially coming from Native. How on earth was I supposed to guess that the reported "local bandits harassing some merchants" were a death cult worthy of the most top tier units and my weapon doesn't even as much as make a dent in their black plate armour, AND they have the athletics to keep up with me in robes so I can't even get a safe distance from them when kicking's not an option. I tried anything I could but just ****ing ctrl-h'd my way through in the end because it was becoming more frustrating than getting outplayed in a competitive shooter. In my opinion that's bad design, to make quests (which are in essence early-mid game) impractically hard, without warning. A lot of quests are practically locked to you because you haven't invested hard into a combat build and get shagged by any "bandit" faction you come across, even guildmasters' quests.
Like if you need to thru the Jatu lands - travel light and watch where you go, make sure you have an escape route in case they lock in on you as they can outrun most people.
I agree with this example, even though I learnt of the Jatu the hard way after mindlessly strolling into the suspiciously empty bit of the map. But this isn't what I mean when I talk about exaggerated difficulty hindering progress.
I guess considering what you prefer -they do have an intended market
What do I prefer? Not straying too far into fantasy? Not finding a top tier enemy who's armed two centuries ahead of everyone in my army under every rock? The difficulty in Pendor and especially Perisno is for its own sake and that's just not tasteful to me.