The problem I’ve always had is they have a really good banner creation system and I’ve tried desperately to recreate the heraldry I made for a Cavalier I played in a Pathfinder campaign once, but they broke the mod that gave you access to the full banner creation stuff and it crashes if you use one of the incredible ones you can make. And every time I try to start a campaign I inevitably try to get it working, it fails, I get salty and I sour on doing a campaign.
I think last time I played I did sandbox mode as I want to save the campaign for when the game releases.
That and I prefer sandbox mode as it feels more like Warband lol. You just go into the game and do what you want from the start. My last game I got to a vassel stage and stopped when they gave me a town but it was ugh outside of my starting faction or something like that I don’t remeber exactly and I kept losing the trust of the town as I had a pentaly for being a foreigner.
As for mods I have never really gotten into those.
Are you into town-building stuff? Rimworld is sort of a 2d cross between Minecraft and Stardew Valley where you play as an in-game faction, so you start the game with like two dudes and an old woman who’s heavily crippled by her addiction to peyote and you end up having towns across the continent and extract tribute from all the tribals in the region.
You should check out Native Expanded at the very least.