I downloaded the Fire & Sword game and gave it a go (trial mode, since I haven't bought it). I really wanted to like it, since the premise sounds like fun - but I was disappointed. Granted, I haven't experienced some of the new features - wasn't able to try the explosives thing on a castle (I assume you need engineering skill at a certain level or something?) or do much large scale combat due to the level limit, but from what I saw it seems pretty poorly polished.
I ordered a mace from the arms merchants in town and it gave me a poleaxe labeled mace. I ordered a polish poleaxe and it gave me a fighting pick labeled as a poleaxe. The send-a-caravan makes making money ridiculously easy once you have a small bit of coin saved up, I found two neighboring castles with vastly different prices for velvet, and was able to buy a velvet caravan for about 8k and bring it to the destination (which, as I said, was adjacent - a very short ride away) and get 88k. I was able to repeat this and get 1 million credits within a few weeks. It's the only way I see to make decent money though. Quests pay so little that its effectively nothing (50 thalers to kill a group of bandits? yay). Loot is worth a little bit, but not enough to be worth fighting bandits for it - even with cheapo marksmen recruits armed with nothing but the cheapest musket I lost more re-recruiting them than I got from the battle, even if I only lost 1 or 2 guys and killed 30. Trying to fight with sword wielding infantry against the gun-armed bandits didn't end well, and the decent melee weapons are just as expensive as the guns.
I played around with the custom mercenary system, and it was a bit funky as well. They start as recruits and can be upgraded (which makes their wages go way way up, and costs upgrading fees) even though they have the same equipment no matter the tier, so upgrading them only adjusts their skills very slightly - I found recruits to be pretty much equivalent to the elites, the type of gun I bought them mattered more than the troop level. All the rest of the upgrades just seems to needlessly add cost to recruiting troops, since the actual boosts they get is minimal. Troops with full armor die vs a gun shot just as easily as those with no armor, yet the armor costs so much you can get several unarmored troops for every armored one. I guess it might help if you're fighting against archers. The more expensive musket costs twice as much as the cheapest one, so you can have 2x as many troops with the cheaper one as you can get with the more expensive one - and the difference seems to be minimal. It's difficult to compare, seeing as finding the actual stats of the weapons you're buying for your troops seems to be impossible. Even checking the shops until you find a gun with the same name, you can't be sure if they're the same as the ones the troops will get, since there are multiple differing guns with the same names. There also doesn't seem to be a way to restore the troop to the original, unupgraded version - so if you gear up a type of troop, they'll never be as cheap to hire as they were at the start.
I tried one siege, but obviously couldn't do much due to the level limit. With a group of 60 troops I built ladders and assaulted the castle, and there were plenty of ladders - but trying to actually climb any of them was suicide due to all the gun armed troops shooting at you. With 60 infantry with the best possible gear charging the castle, they all got gunned down before even one managed to reach the top of a ladder. Going again with 60 marksmen with the best equipment resulted in a very one sided gun battle, where all my marksmen got shot before managing to hit a single enemy. Going in armed with 4 stacks of small grenades finally resulted with a few enemies dead, since you can hit the wall and still somehow have the blast kill the troops on the other side. Only 3 of those to a stack though. Siege difficulty is definitely way way up - not sure if thats a good thing or a bad one. I guess if I had the engineering to do the alternate siege mode (blow hole in wall) it might be easier.
Haven't tried any of the stories, since I doubt I'd get far before leveling too high for the trial mode. So I can't comment on them.
All in all, the trial doesn't make me want to purchase the game - even at future bargain bin pricing. The base Warband game is great, but this new mod for sale just kinda sucks in pretty much every way.
The annoying non-skippable tutorial sucks too.