>>2198877
>besides cities and castles which are fixed, there should be a plethora of locations scattered about the map which may hold a village, a hideout, a small fort, or just be empty land. Being able to actually destroy villages, sponsor the creation of new ones, hold hideouts or baby castles would be amazing.

Among the many, many things Bannerlord should have just taken from Viking Conquest one of the most significant for me is locations that aren't one out of the three current ones(hideout/village/city). Besides housing factions and generating other types of revenue it's just so fucking samey when you can't just visit other places and have things happen on them, because nothing ever happens outside of battles and sieges. In VC you have monasteries, ancient ruins, plantations, random points of interests, and they all have some quest or some scene happening there, especially monasteries which let the whole religious plotline play out. Baennerlord suffers especially bad from how much they avoided the whole topic despite the inspiration for the game being deeply, intrinsically defined by religion, even if we ignore orders, the land holding role of the church and its political pull, you still have the local church being the rallying point and center of every single town.

Were it up to me i'd pepper the whole world with such things but i'd actually break down the whole castle/town with villages as fiefs system. I'd have:
Settlements
>village - some houses, chapel of (faction cult), no walls, 2-3 resource production, player and NPCs can own plots and houses in them. Has a village Elder and a priest and captain of a small militia.
>town - more houses, average church, a small wall or pallisade with a ditch, minor services like an inn and a blacksmith, player can own plots of land and houses and invest in the shops. Has a town mayor, a priest and a sheriff in charge of a guard.
>City - Essentially what towns are now. Has a council of notables with a hall and a temple.