At first look, it has all the things I enjoy:
Swords and sorcery, item collection, an interesting premise, colourful companions, customizable companions, quests and conquest.

However, after playing through the first few maps, I realized just how bad this game is!
I'll put the problems into the following categories:

MECHANICS:
--The whole follower/mercenary system is heavily flawed.
You have to pay once for followers, arbitrarily limited to 5 + the number of castles you own and only get to keep them for one map.

Then you can hire mercenaries to fill in the rest of the spots, but they charge their full hire price every single day!
That's like charging a years wages in real life every week; it's ridiculous and makes them useless except for end of map sieges!
These mercs should, at the very least, stay with you for a full week before asking for more payment.

--Moving from map to map deprives the player of their units.
I took HOURS in the third map to get my party up to max tier before choosing to reconcile the wolves and moneygrubbers.
I then finish the map and only get to take two of them with me.

This is crap comparable to making a person playing an RTS re-research everything each time they advance to a new map in the campaign!

--Moving to the next map also deprives the player of all items and gold, despite the fact that the party was hauling all that stuff around the entire time and should've still had it on them!

--The cursed icon is FAR to punishing!
If it only stole stuff once a day, or every few days, it'd be acceptable.
As it is, on the map where it first activates, it steals things 3 or 4 times a day, which is complete shit!
This is far to punishing!

STORY:
In the map were the wolves are, you have a choice of befriending two of the factions and stomping the third.
I choose to befriend the wolves and the money grubbers, while stomping the church.

During this time, you run into a guy going through the same things as you and you two do some investigating to find out that the chancellor is an evil bastard; big surprise, cause you already knew that.
What is absolutely batshit stupid, is that your character chooses to believe chancellors slanderous story about your parents; this guy has proven to be a power hungry, ruthless, lying piece of shit beforehand and you expect people to believe ANYONE would side with him?!?!

... not only that, but you MURDER the guy who's in the same straights as you.
It's absolute BUULLSHIT!

BUGS:
-- The fourth map, where you change your name, has you patrol the road.
A particularly annoying bug causes the game to keep re- talking to the people traveling along the road over and over and over and over....
This bug was basically the straw that broke the camels back... IE I quit the game when I ran into this.

If the above changes were made, I might play with game... but for now I'm going back to Mount and Blade: Warbands for this type of atmosphere.

I also found losing my armies at the end of each scenario a bit frustrating. The developer is very active on steam and explained the reasoning behind it which included if people 'game' the scenarios its difficult to balance the next ones. I didn't agree with everything but I do appreciate developers who take the time to talk to buyers.

Not sure I get the complaint about the mercenaries. It doesn't really matter what the time period is its a mechanism for stopping you hire a big merc army or elite troops right away. I just found I had to adapt my play.

Most maps are balanced enough that you do not need to hire mercenaries. They are only intended to be in your party for a day or two to help you with a really tough battle. I only ever needed to hire them once and that was to defeat the big bad conqueror (Landgrave Enderlin i think).

You don't have to murder the man that accuses the Chancelor, you are perfectly free to take his side. If you do the Chancelor arrests you and takes all your money and followers away, but the man you helped will help you in a later map. You can actually put all your followers in a tower and spend all your money on items before doing this quest, so the consequences are not too bad. However that is the type of "gaming" the developers try to discouragte.

This a different noble and a different case.

@Ast486
Your Char don't choose to side with the chancellor he is blackmailing your char with stuff that would result in excommunication for your whole familiy...and by whole all remaining ants,uncles,...even children he might have one day are included. And Eisenwald is playing in a version of the late middle ages...