As someone who greatly enjoyed Battle Brothers, I feel that this game is both easier and deeper. Even on higher diffuclty settings, it won't beat you up in combat once you grasp the mechanics, but it does a much better job than similar games of building a sense of place and letting you sink into it.
It does a great job of allowing you to wander around a province, take on missions, and solve the local issues while your mercenary company grows. The only major shortcomings are: 1) that the combat / build options become limited (note I've probably sunk a clean 60 to 80 hours into this on a higher difficulty, so your mileage may vary); and 2) it does just a good enough job of the worldbuilding that the lack of reactivity becomes noticeable.
For example, early in the game you can recruit a farmer who is dying of the plague and quickly cure him. Even once you cure him, however, if you go back to his wife she acts as if he's a dead man walking. A lot of the game is siloed like this, where you enter a location, complete the quest, and nothing matters after that point. I believe this is just a product of a limited budget / dev time, but it does stand out because the world is just engaging enough to make you notice.
By way of a quick summary, this is good, not great, but I adore it and hope the developers get more money and more time to do the same thing better. It's clear there's real talent behind this game, and I want to see what the folks who made it can do next. Battle Brothers is a perfect, tight nugget of a game, this is sloppier and larger, but it also has more places to go.
Also, it has a DLC that lets you run a tavern, and I'm the exact kind of goblin that eats that sort of stuff up!
