Mount and Blade but with a focus on smaller war-bands where everyone in your army has characteristics, personalities, strengths and weaknesses and compatibilities between other characters. Rather than just having a mass of soldiers from different nations and ranks you would arrange your soldiers into units small units and promote individuals with potential to lead those units and division commanders to lead a number of units.

When you recruit from a village you can actually talk to the individual recruits and see what they look like and what their personalities are like, you would invest in people reading skills that (or promote a companion to "recruiter" and have them develop these skills) so that you could learn more about the potential recruits and uncover those with latent leadership skills or specific competencies.

You could also focus on developing relationships with villages and invest in their infrastructure so that when you recruit from their people the quality of the recruit is much higher and specialized than other villages, build armorers to maintain your gear or archery ranges to increase the base ranged skills of recruits.

Handle disputes between different unit commanders to ensure that they can work well together on the field of battle, ensure that people with strong bonds are assigned to the same unit to increase their performance in battle. Rather than recruiting premade companions from a tavern let me select my own companions from my army and that I've decided I like. After a major battle make it so that everyone gets a massive boost to camaraderie from having shared the experience.

After a battle review your casualties and feel the pain when you realize that among your dead is a soldier commander who joined you in the very first hour of your playthrough, review their accomplishments, all the men they trained under their command and enemies killed. Hold funerals and fly your flags at half mast to honor them.

character limit.