Why do you keep releasing DLC without revisiting previous DLC? Just look at the fief: an amazing idea, poor execution, and there haven't been any real attempts to revisit it and address concerns. While one may question discussing dlc on a base game, the current update cycle is 'release new dlc', so might as well review the base game.

For what its worth, the base game is fun. But I don't like the direction, and so I can't recommend it in its current path.

I really like the base game, Please stop adding new dlc's. Take a break and work on whats in the game please.

It's a grinding game with a very slow and repeatative gameplay loop.

1. Way too long battles without any possibility to automate them (let's say Heroes 3 style). You either bribe attackers and skip them entirely or fight for an hour a battle that doesn't necessarily moves the plot anywhere. Literally, you can fight for 40 minutes with some boars you couldn't run away from. It's okay if you couldn't skip quests-related stuff, but the routines? Give random injuries, make happiness penalties – whatever, but let skip at least something.

2. Auto-leveling. If you play the adaptive mode those hypothetical boars will always be hard enough to fight them for a freaking hour. So, basically, it doesn't matter how strong your team is. And if you set the region-locked mode, soon you'll find that your team gets too strong too fast to visit some regions at all – enemies there are just too weak. Isn't it possible to allow player to have an advantage sometimes without breaking the pace and losing interest entirely?

3. No way to automate starting positions of your troop. So, everytime you need to spend some time to move your party on a battle map. And if your troop is big enough, you won't be able to position them tightly making them stand close to each other. Obviously, if just one of your guys stands too far there won't be anyone to cover him.

4. On the pros side there are many different gameplay mechanics. However, every such mechanic requires a team member that has that profession. So, see the previous point: battle maps punish your for having too many units. And take a look at the point number two: the enemies will have a similar fighting power anyways, so you can't outnumber them. You'll just have to fight longer battles.

How I would solve it:

a) autobattles that waste bombs, oils or whatever based on enemy's difficulty. when there're not enough supplies, you either get injuries or have chances that someone will die. you can even set the number of skips per rest.
b) to make the previous point sensible, not every enemy should have the same amount of power. some fights should be easy to skip, the others should be risky even within the same region.
c) even with the autoleveling option enabled some regions should still have higher leveled enemies, so some parts of the map should be meant for end-game. equally leveled everything with equally leveled enemies everywhere is just not interesting. think of it like a region-locked mode, but there should be no such thing as underlevelled regions anyway, no matter when you reached them.
d) a secondary profession that has an upper limit you can reach, so smaller troops could cover every gameplay mechanic.
e) a way to be more powerful than avarage eneimies at least for some time: let's say whenever you reach a region the game measures your power. if you hire more mercs or something the difficulcy should lag behind for a while. or, all in all, the enemies power should be calculate of how powerful you were N days ago: if you haven't progressed you'll get an avarage, some fight should be harder, some easier. but when you have progressed, at least for N days players will have an upper hand, at least slightly.