Sure, renown was scarce, but that's not the problem here, the problem is that clan survival is ultimately meaningless, it doesn't matter if you end with 50 or 500 people, they're there just for you to roleplay fantasy refugee manager.
It mattered to my
feelings, mate. I wanted to keep my guys alive, I guess you could call that immersion but you might as well think of it as some sort of score system.
Right. At first I wasn't sure if I liked how the peasants seem useless, but really, when you think about it, what use exactly
could they possibly be? The whole point is that the caravan trailing behind you is, from an objective standpoint, more trouble than it's worth - no good in a fight, unable to feed themselves on the road in a foreign land, infrequently mutinous, perpetually unhappy and a constant drain on your dwindling resources. Really, it should be obvious that a lean band of 80 fighters is far more managable than 500 villagers, and the only reason you put up with the peasants is because it's the right thing to do. They're there to make things harder for you, which leads to interesting decisions like "do I warn the people of this village that the enemy is coming, because if they do they might come along and I have to figure out a way to feed them too". One of the highlights of the game as far as I'm concerned! Having said that, it
would be better if the game offered some recognition of your efforts, like there being some special item you can only get through a special scene if you manage to get to Boersgard with 450 peasants alive or something. But it should be no more than a token reward, because ultimately trying to keep everyone alive shouldn't be anywhere near an optimal strategy.
But yeah the macro/strategical side of the game outside of combat is really terrible, and the C&C is pretty shit too - it's just one best option. But I'm not sure if that's how KoDP was, if that's where it gets its influence from.
The strategy side could be better, yeah - it's more of a diversion from the fighting every once in a while than a proper game in its own right. It's also not quite tied enough to the combat - morale is not
insignificant, but with Rook's party I hardly ever had decent morale anyway, so I gave up on trying to keep it up. That said, the decisions themselves are actually pretty close to the way they are in King of Dragon Pass, in that to figure out the best choice you often have to put the options in cultural context. The interesting part isn't really management but figuring out the right option from contextual clues, which is why it was generally fine that KoDP often had some clearly bad options and one or two with clearly superior consequences. A key element in KoDP, though, which is lacking in Banner Saga, is that whether the best choice actually worked as intended usually depended on the makeup of your clan ring and the decisions made during clan creation at the beginning, so what the best choice was, and whether you could even pick it, would depend on the situation.
Banner Saga would've been much improved if it had something like that in it - for instance, if the best choices in random travel scenes were tied to specific characters, and if the character in question wasn't around, you'd be out of luck. Actually, something like that
does happen in some story scenes, but it's more an exception than a rule, when it should be the other way around. It would have been even better if having a character injured meant they couldn't be counted on in travel scenes; that would mean there'd be some negative consequences from fighting all the time, whereas now, picking every fight you can is the best option by default because you get extra Renown and have a much easier time leveling up and buying stuff that way.