Fighting in battle is a death sentence

[Raczynski]

I think balance is fine for the human player. You take some risks, but there are potentially nice rewards for fighting. Much better than pre-HF when personally commanding was always a terrible choice.

Of course the biggest problem is that the AI is very bad at managing this (like almost everything).

 

[A_Dane]

For all the people saying that rulers frequently died in battle during this time period: sources please? Yeah, combat was bloody and up close but rulers were usually mounted and protected. In the game they die like any other commander and it doesn't seem to have any basis on the type of battle or anything. You'll see stuff like a 24 martial, strong commander of a 2000-man flank die while killing some raiders. That stuff needs to be fixed because that's what's killing the AI and it makes no sense for rulers or commanders to be dying so randomly. I swear more than half the time they get the 'fell on own weapon' event.

Never claimed it was perfect - and I do believe duels should lead to more captures, but if memory serves me right, I can think of a few danish kings, some Norwegian ones, and at least 1 swedish from the period. And a couple of English ones also bit the dust leading their troops.

And that's just counting rulers, not the lower level nobles.

 

[JaedenETech]

The Holy fury update is an amazing expansion on the game but the rate at which rulers of different nations die makes making alliances almost impossible...

There should be a way of at least reducing the chance that a ruler leading an army is killed. At this rate, kings would be made every 2 years per country due to aimless deaths during war.

 

[mario1789]

According to files, to lead a troop you'd better:
1, Be top rank in a warrior society or having berserk trait
...
The 1st one totally deny your chance to be killed. The rest reduce the chance to be killed.

Not entirely true. You can still die by certain events. I had a Wolf Warrior Hero die in a berserk event. You can also of course get wounded in events and die from infection. Chances may be lowered by being top rank--I don't know--but it isn't invulnerability.