Bannerlord slows down abruptly after the first few levels, to the point its early pacing could've used a lot more smoothing out. After immediately recruiting your party, polishing off a few looter bands, doing a quest or two and some trading, you just as suddenly fall into the murder hobo routine by sheer necessity, favoring opportunism over planning. Pretty soon you run into M&B2's most noticeable addition to the original's gameplay, clans:
While renown used to affect maximum party size (and occasional interactions) it now also acts as XP for your clan tier levels. This in turn limits your owned workshops and number of named companions, which in turn can now autonomously lead trade caravans and quest.
Overall, Bannerlord leans too heavily in favor of passive moneymaking instead of personal trading / loot sales. Unable to pass up the chance to wolf-guard something sheep-related I bought my recurring quest-giver's wool weavery... only to find any shop can now be repurposed to other goods. While I'm generally in favor of giving players more control, this does cut into each town's regional charm, e.g. Uxkhal or Praven's fame as grain-town and beer-town. Moreover you no longer contribute goods directly to a business' supply pile, and while you can probably indirectly depress local supply costs by flooding the market, you're still somehow given less control via more control, less cause than ever to visit your properties.
Similarly, depending on your companions' skill levels they can now autocomplete quests for you, heavily encouraged by quest descriptions often lacking location info (meaning you rarely know whether you'll be sent in the wrong direction from your other tasks) so questing itself now seems to have been redefined as a companion activity. And, while splitting off part of your army for a week or even two at a time would balance this over-ease out in theory, not paying wages to quest detachments makes it free money even with companions' chance of failure.
You can also send them off trading with a caravan... but once again it's a fire-and-forget affair. Pay the initial cost and your companion keeps running around the map trading indefinitely.
My impressions might change as I join a faction and wars render the world more dangerous, but so far? The first level of renown's +15 party size instantly places you into near invincibility over early game looters and other bands seem few, far between and sparsely populated to boot. I can't even skill up my medicine anymore because so few of my crew are being wounded. After a short trade run from my starting area of Danustica / Onira toward Razih and Hubyar I set off through Khuzait lands, then a third trade run up to the Sturgians and the other two Imperial factions, then another and another down through Aserai and Battanian towns, all the while encountering no enemies to speak of and raking in risk-free cash.
Now, in fairness, this is not entirely unexpected. The features on which Mount&Blade made its name fifteen years ago (historical allusions, physics-enabled first-person-slasher combat, open-world adventuring, managerial integration, genre mashups) have all been picked up during Bannerlord's lengthy development by other developers who even do any particular feature better. So I'd guess my early observations reflect a necessary shift in focus for Bannerlord to remain fresh and competitive... but I have yet to see the payoff.
It's not all bad. My jaunt through Khuzait villages, picking up cheap herds of livestock, rudely awakened me to the new weight-based (instead of slot-based) inventory system's vagaries: my party's speed dropped from 5 to 1 in only one week. Herds, as it turns out, require handling and are therefore dependent on your party size... and horses, pack-horses and mules count toward that total. The real challenge becomes juggling party size against herd size against cargo capacity, and you're gonna want a lot of cargo capacity. Where you'd routinely buy up towns' entire specialized production in Warband, now towns produce far more than you can liquidate... but given the significantly larger map, you're also encouraged to diversify your stock as you go and alter routes more than you would in Warband's regular periphery circuit... which means more mules and more soldiers to herd them... which means more renown to increase party size.
Everything seems to come back to renown now.
Farming rep is a long-term proposition to be sure. Unlike the old guild masters, the newfangled craftsmen and traders in each town are not guaranteed to offer quests. Looter fights give a measly 1 renown on average (and you need 100-200 even for level 2-3) so you'll jump into tournaments every chance you get.
By level 12, three years after I first face-planted into Danustica, it feels like I've pretty much won the game. Without a measurable bandit presence and with the ability to send your expensive top-tier troops off on quests, you can keep making money indefinitely. I'll probably amass a million denars' worth of troops and armor before bothering to wheedle my way into the warring states.
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