Warband is great for what it is, but there's a LOT of limitations. It's a shame that you need mods to get basic formations. And they're VERY basic, as you can't specify what direction they face, which makes it REALLY hard to defend strategic positions when you can't tell them to face the right way. The AI is pretty lacking, horses are ridiculous (I've watched them scale near-vertical inclines to get me), the sieges are pretty limited (seriously, only ONE ladder or siege tower to assault the walls? No trebuchets, bombards or other artillery?), battlefield maps often don't match the travel map (IE, gigantic rivers and cliffs in the middle of an open plain), for that matter, no topographical features ON the minimap in combat.
It's unique as strategy games go, but Bannerlord needs to address a lot of these problems before I'd be interested in buying it.
M&B's first unique is the mounted combat. When I was first playing 0.808 version, which must have been about 10 (more?) years ago, it was far ahead of anything else. Most games back then avoided mounted combat, saying that it can't be done in a satisfying way.
The second unique was the ground melee combat - far better and more complicated than anything else at that time. In Elder scroll games you have: left click to swing, right click to block, and some extra effect if you hold LMB long enough. In M&B you manuall control the 4 swing directions, have to block manually in 4 directions to match (unless you have the auto-block in offline), and you have active blocks which are parries-ripost moves. Damage is calculated according to the location of the hit and the dynamics of the weapon (the speed it hits and the location along the blade). In term of a melee game, there are some new ones that imitate it to some degree (and also attempts to imitate the mounted combat), but M&B is still better in pure melee.
The M&B engine is old - very old for a computer game, and was made by a couple of devs in a basement in Turkey. M&B: Warband has seen some upgrades, but it is still the same game, the online gamplay being the major addition. In term of eye candy it cannot compete with games 10 years younger made by AAA studios. Much like HTC, Taleworlds were very careful to keep the game playable on old machines. They even kept support for DX7 for this purpose - I was able to play it using a laptop with an Intel on-board graphics.
In terms of content, Taleworlds realized very early that their limited resources will not allow putting huge amount of content into the game. Instead, they focused on making the engine and modding tools, and leave much of the content to the lively modding community the game has attracted since very early on. Some of the content mods have developed into official expansions: "With Fire & Sword" and "Napoleonic Wars". The M&B vanilla is really just minimal content, a starting point and "demo" for the modders.
