but there's a bit too much maintenance and management and not enough ME HIT COOL SWORD GUY NOW (and other epic battles).
I guess I feel the opposite. I'm regularly doing 200+ battles and auto-resolving them because I know: a) with no companion death, I don't need to worry about them b) my losses are trivial and easily replaced. I fight the battles manually because it IS epic, but after your 30 or 40th large battle you're like....do I even need to bother? All I'm really guaranteeing at that point is that I'm going to lose HP, and possibly get knocked out, and not be able to participate in tournaments until I heal up. Now that my skills are so high I don't even have the skill up incentive to shoot guys with a bow or cut them down with melee weapons.
In a way I think it's similar to like, Total Warhammer 2. Tough game when you HAVE to fight the battles out, but then you just get a numerical advantage in the # of troops or armies you're bringing and suddenly everything can be auto-resolve without much worry, and then the game becomes a grind. The difficulty is rather front-loaded.
Like I feel like there's not a lot to maintenance and management in Bannerlord. Have enough gold to build the right projects in your fiefs to offset the problems they're facing, pick a good governor, swing back through every week or so to top off their project reserves. There really isn't any management to be done from my perspective.
About the only real annoyance I find is that once you've got some fiefs, if you want them to be optimal, you're constantly having to protect them from raiding from enemy kingdoms. Which is fine. Except when you have to ride back and forth across your fiefdom, and as soon as you reach one end of your fiefdom to defend one village, one on the opposite side gets attacked. Sure, I could make a new party and order them to be defensive and they'd protect my fiefs....until the AI just straight up derps and gets into fights it can't win, gets captured, you lose that party and that companion until you can pay their ransom and put them back into play.
But frankly, the Merc/Ass Kicker is the easiest and most profitable way to play IMO. The bigger the foes you tangle with, the more money you can make. And then you add in supplementary income from trading, workshops, caravans, smithing, prisoners and fief ownership and the world is pretty much your oyster.
Also another weird/dumb observation: auto-resolving battles means no escapees, ever. If you don't like bandits escaping, or lords escaping, auto-resolve. If you win, they'll never escape the battle. It's way better for the "Needs Manual Laborers" quest to just auto-resolve battles against looters and what not, because on average (unless you're rocking a blunt weapon and doing most of the work) way more of them will survive as prisoners than if you fight the battle manually. And it's about 5x faster doing it that way than fighting every single battle you can't possibly lose and having to run down all the routed bandits in the battlescape.
Like... if you have workshops you should have problems with thugs and the local nobles, etc. quests revolving around that stuff to keep it interesting and different than say a merc or a lord.
What keeps coming back to me is...if you visit a city with really low loyalty, there should be random events where you're attacked in the streets by unhappy citizenry. There's exactly zero reason for civilian clothes and equipment if you're not doing criminal activities right now.
If supplies of raw materials are cut off by villages and caravans being raided, that should *hurt*. If the town changes hands... I'm not even sure what should happen.
Pretty sure that when a city you had a workshop in gets conquered, by anyone, you just straight up lose the workshop.