The game starts of relatively strong. You're set in the world and get the basics from the tutorial, then figure out the rest as you go. It's easy to get lost for a good few hours just roaming around, trying to figure things out. It's quite fun. The combat system is fairly simple, but complex enough considering it's supposed to be about armies fighting. However, a lot of the game mechanics end up leading to just "grind some more". The quests are all terrible, mostly fetch quests, delivering letters (so opposite of fetch?) or herding cows in a poor minigame. Your army's size is hard capped to ~50 in early to mid game, and the only way to increase it is by grinding "renown", which is done through said quests as well as fights. Fights get tedious as the unfair odds always mean you are required to go in front of your army, wading through dozens of enemies on your own to soften them up for your force. In a lot of cases, you're actually better off not even bringing an army if you want to grind that renown, which is just... weird and tedious. Fighting with the same few moves over and over, through hundreds of enemies that all behave the same gets boring, and it seems to be the only way to progress past the mid-game. You can have all the money you might need, you can be skilled at fighting and have a skilled (if small) army, but the only way to progress appears to be sinking 10-20+ hours into just being allowed to increase your army size. That's kind of a dealbreaker for me, since you end up playing "towards" a goal of sorts, and then have this hidden obstacle revealed to you. All in all, fun to pick up and spend some time with, but an egregious time sink of repetitive actions to get anywhere past the mid-game content.
