A fun and unique mix of roleplaying, kingdom/mercenary company/trade caravan building, and small to large scale field and siege battles where you can issue commands and order troop formations in sandbox and multiplayer modes that often still feel like an early access title years later with basic improvements and quality of life features still missing. They have spent their two years of early access making the game function more than making large improvements. On top of this problem they also manage to explain how many parts of the game functions (running caravans, buying and running workshops, certain traits and skill perks, smithing, etc) even more poorly than a Paradox grand strategy game explains its features.
Even the most obvious features like saving troop formations, saving troop assignments, giving troop or companion characters basic combat scripts to follow (I gave you the long reaching fast swinging scimitar for a reason so stop trying to use the throwing axe as a melee weapon on horseback). With formations and shield walls and the other orders available to you you can make have some effective and well thought out tactics, making it all work or having options explained or learning what the AI is actually capable of is the more difficult thing and some of the formation types can get rather buggy. You can do some more basic tactics fairly easily, getting into shield walls, switching to wedge or square formations, advancing with skirmish troops that will throw a volley of javelins/axes just before reaching enemy lines, having skirmishers and ranged units fall back while continuing to throw or fire weapons at advancing enemies. The battle commands do feel better suited for multiplayer where people can command their own formations while working together rather than you trying to give all the orders yourself to a wide variety of units that can be somewhat scattered around the battlefield. It's also going to naturally be a better fit in multiplayer where unit types can be more limited to a given army unlike in single player where you might have a wider troop variety from different factions and former bandits where the game will not allow you to properly manage each type of troop into individual formations. For some reason, outside of attacking bandit hideouts, where you have a small limit on who can come with you, you can't even enter battles while leaving certain troops behind if you wanted to try to improve your companions or to fight a weak army with lower tier troops to get them experience. The pre battle formations also seem to start having bugs when trying to assign certain formations and then move units or when trying to transfer units to other groups.
There is a partially great search function built in where you can look up kingdoms, heroes, unit types that unfortunately has no proper way to sort or highlight specific things you want (highlighting nearby hirable heroes of a certain skillset would be a lot more useful than having to go look at every single person listed). When people are giving you missions many will require you to go to a certain area, being able to look up where that is is not an option while you are talking so you will have to refuse, back out to your map, find the location they were talking about, and then go back to accept the mission again. You might get a message with an offer to join a war or to marry someone in your family to someone and if you click the message you are locked into a yes or no choice without any option to look up who or what the message is even talking about. Trying to hire people to manage and run caravans or to give a governor job to can be made needlessly complicated by the terribly assigned focus and attribute points of characters before you hire them, that you can't look up before hiring them (they give so many characters high skill or points into Roguery which is almost completely useless outside of your own character) (edit: roguery was changed to have a way to form and set leaders to town gangs a few months after this review). You can at least easily respec character perks for some money in the town arenas, though the game does not tell you that this is a thing. The little things you have to know to do well are as easily missed as this, your party size is one of the most important things you can increase to do well since it means more troops and ranking up a larger army to their maximum unit tiers. You can raise your party size by increasing your clan rank through renown gain or with certain perks you find in different skill perk trees inside the bow, two-handed, leadership, athletics, and scouting trees but the main way to get more soldiers is to raise your stewardship skill. The primary way to do this is by getting a massive XP bonus each day by having a supply of all nine food sources in the game, and to be sure to not take any perks that reduce daily food consumption percentages.
The main quest is on a time-limit, a long one, but new players won't know that and trying to get through it as you can will likely lead to having many factions declaring war on you while giving you side missions to run around clearly out hideouts long before you are prepared unless you know to not follow the main quest immediately. Playing in the sandbox mode can remove and main quest concerns and allow you to start as a stronger but older character and playing custom battles allows you to set up two armies on a wide variety of locations, though you are limited to a few character archetype options with their own default equipment sets and no ability to choose skills.
Some great mods can really improve the game, and being able to put in cheats that can help to alleviate busywork or poorly thought out elements, such as allowing you to unlock all smithing part recipes, helps as well. It's a fun and addictive game that it makes needlessly difficult to get into and to understand how everything works (or if things work as not too long ago some skill perks just didn't do anything and I don't know if all of them have been fixed).
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1596827582070403073
Even the most obvious features like saving troop formations, saving troop assignments, giving troop or companion characters basic combat scripts to follow (I gave you the long reaching fast swinging scimitar for a reason so stop trying to use the throwing axe as a melee weapon on horseback). With formations and shield walls and the other orders available to you you can make have some effective and well thought out tactics, making it all work or having options explained or learning what the AI is actually capable of is the more difficult thing and some of the formation types can get rather buggy. You can do some more basic tactics fairly easily, getting into shield walls, switching to wedge or square formations, advancing with skirmish troops that will throw a volley of javelins/axes just before reaching enemy lines, having skirmishers and ranged units fall back while continuing to throw or fire weapons at advancing enemies. The battle commands do feel better suited for multiplayer where people can command their own formations while working together rather than you trying to give all the orders yourself to a wide variety of units that can be somewhat scattered around the battlefield. It's also going to naturally be a better fit in multiplayer where unit types can be more limited to a given army unlike in single player where you might have a wider troop variety from different factions and former bandits where the game will not allow you to properly manage each type of troop into individual formations. For some reason, outside of attacking bandit hideouts, where you have a small limit on who can come with you, you can't even enter battles while leaving certain troops behind if you wanted to try to improve your companions or to fight a weak army with lower tier troops to get them experience. The pre battle formations also seem to start having bugs when trying to assign certain formations and then move units or when trying to transfer units to other groups.
There is a partially great search function built in where you can look up kingdoms, heroes, unit types that unfortunately has no proper way to sort or highlight specific things you want (highlighting nearby hirable heroes of a certain skillset would be a lot more useful than having to go look at every single person listed). When people are giving you missions many will require you to go to a certain area, being able to look up where that is is not an option while you are talking so you will have to refuse, back out to your map, find the location they were talking about, and then go back to accept the mission again. You might get a message with an offer to join a war or to marry someone in your family to someone and if you click the message you are locked into a yes or no choice without any option to look up who or what the message is even talking about. Trying to hire people to manage and run caravans or to give a governor job to can be made needlessly complicated by the terribly assigned focus and attribute points of characters before you hire them, that you can't look up before hiring them (they give so many characters high skill or points into Roguery which is almost completely useless outside of your own character) (edit: roguery was changed to have a way to form and set leaders to town gangs a few months after this review). You can at least easily respec character perks for some money in the town arenas, though the game does not tell you that this is a thing. The little things you have to know to do well are as easily missed as this, your party size is one of the most important things you can increase to do well since it means more troops and ranking up a larger army to their maximum unit tiers. You can raise your party size by increasing your clan rank through renown gain or with certain perks you find in different skill perk trees inside the bow, two-handed, leadership, athletics, and scouting trees but the main way to get more soldiers is to raise your stewardship skill. The primary way to do this is by getting a massive XP bonus each day by having a supply of all nine food sources in the game, and to be sure to not take any perks that reduce daily food consumption percentages.
The main quest is on a time-limit, a long one, but new players won't know that and trying to get through it as you can will likely lead to having many factions declaring war on you while giving you side missions to run around clearly out hideouts long before you are prepared unless you know to not follow the main quest immediately. Playing in the sandbox mode can remove and main quest concerns and allow you to start as a stronger but older character and playing custom battles allows you to set up two armies on a wide variety of locations, though you are limited to a few character archetype options with their own default equipment sets and no ability to choose skills.
Some great mods can really improve the game, and being able to put in cheats that can help to alleviate busywork or poorly thought out elements, such as allowing you to unlock all smithing part recipes, helps as well. It's a fun and addictive game that it makes needlessly difficult to get into and to understand how everything works (or if things work as not too long ago some skill perks just didn't do anything and I don't know if all of them have been fixed).
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1596827582070403073