I found Mount & Blade incredibly difficult. So much that the tutorial frustrated me. I think it was the swords on cavalry part. I just failed at hitting the scarecrow things with them.
To be honest, I skipped the tutorial when I played the demo and went straight into a battle. It's difficult to learn but relatively easy to master, at least for me.
I love Mount and Blade to death. My main character is level 39 and leads an army of 160-170. The funny thing is that I have heard people say the only way to support an army this size is to raid villages, but I have not found this to be the case. With a large city and two villages, occasional trading, a tournaments, I easily suppport over 400 troops (approximately 165ish, as stated above, with me at any given moment). Rivacheg alone pays me something like 2500 weekly, which more than pays for the elite troops that protect it.
They do go through food like nobody's business though. You have to have lots of inventory management to field an army this size
Man, I don't know who wrote the wiki, but they have no idea what they're talking about. They talk about Rhodoks having the highest HP, which might be true if they do indeed have higher Iron Flesh, but at most we're talking 3 to 4 hit points out of 50+. That's negligible at best, especially considering that they use spears, which do just about 0 damage at close range against heavily armored troops (i.e. any elite troop or named NPC). The only thing Rhodoks are good for is their crossbowmen.
Further, their info about the Nords is -completely- wrong. He says Nords are incredibly powerful melee fighters, with shields that "make archers useless", yet he says Rhodoks are better siegers because they have more HP?
What he doesn't realize is that Nord Huskarls have like 4 more points of power attack than even the most elite Rhodok infantry, which means they do 40% more damage. I'm sorry, I would not trade 40% more damage, higher strength (meaning even more damage), higher athletics, and axes/swords as weapons for 3-5 HP, marginally better armor, and spears (which are absolutely, 100% useless in melee combat outside of attacking cavalry, or attack from horse-back).
He says their weakness is open field combat, but who takes infantry into the field against cavalry, unless they have to?