This game actually is a pile of broken shit.
The platform they built the game on has potential - the map, the factions, the battle sub-game - but everything they build on top of that is total and complete nonsense and is almost unplayable.
The overworld map promises strategy, intrigue, challenge, and emergent gameplay but ends up delivering NONE of this.
It all boils down to a grind. Grinding reknown and grinding NPC reputation, constantly polling questgivers for the mere privilege of being able to do a repetitive pointless shallow quest to bump up your reputation with an NPC one point out of 100.
You need NPC reputation so you can automate some of the empire maintenance in the late game, and you need reknown so you have an army big enough
I reiterate: this game is a total pile of shit failure.
*You are constantly punished for succeeding for absolutely no reason other than the mental retardation of the developers.*
Examples:
Grinding reknown destroys NPC reputation inevitably as every lord throws a fit every time you challenge them, so you have to choose between NPCs you want to grind for increased army size and ones you want to grind for rep to try to get them to follow you later. Meanwhile the NPCs constantly change factions, so you will be forced to fight NPCs you want rep with or let them rape your land because they will shit themselves if you challenge them to combat.
Also NPCs freak out about literally anything and everything. There are tons of mechanisms to automatically lose rep with NPCs and basically zero mechanism to automatically gain rep.
You are penalized for winning constantly. The only properties you can hold are cities. Castles and villages are a net loss, they somehow end up as a negative drain on your finances due to "tax inefficiency", which you can't do anything about.
If you give away your conquests you will suffer a massive loss of rep with all of your lords unless you grind through the NPC chat menus and are lucky enough to get the retarded cunts to all agree that one lord should get the property, and this is basically impossible for even one property.
Meanwhile there are cities you can conquer that give you 6 fiefs at once and the entire game is going on at the same time.
You end up being forced to play a game on rails within the sandbox, or forced to abandon your tens-of-hours save game because it's just too psychotically autistic to try to maintain the entire map singlehandedly.
Also the economics of the game make zero sense, it's almost impossible to get enough money fast enough to make armies to progress on the map at a non-autistic pace.
Seriously, this game promises so much, has the ability to deliver, and the retarded autistic commie devs just take a huge shit on it all.
It literally doesn't do one thing right beyond the game engine and the very basics, which they just copied from other games.
Every single thing they try to do on their own is a complete failure.
What pile of shit game, fuck everyone who thinks this is good. This is a proof of concept, not a game.
Bannerlord looks like it's just going to fall into the same trap: we are at the mercy of the autist programming the AI.
Bannerlord looks like what Skyrim is to Morrowind. They're focusing on the polish and not the scale and complexity of gameplay, which is the only justification for the game to begin with.
Also it will never be released.
God damn the video game industry is garbage. God damn are its consumers retarded. God damn.