I would say Viking Conquest was far more of a RPG, several different quest lines, multiple starting points and stories, et cetera. Downside being no armored horses nor nice sabers.
Agreed. I respect a lot of what PoP devs achieved and they're really nice people. But I just don't enjoy playing PoP at all. All it is, at least as I experienced it, was hammering the player with high level shit from the start and constantly spawning massive armies of incredibly overpowered troops. There's a lot of cool stuff like the procedurally generated knightly orders, or the achievement system.
But it's just pointless/boring to me, I can't find a reason to keep playing.
It could well be I've played too much of the game in various mods and in native over the years. (thousands of hours, plus testing our own mod for hundreds of hours)
Viking Conquest had the right amount of story and length not to get boring and repetitive and it had enough new features to keep my interest. Plus the whole structure with an actual story, stat and skill checks and so on hasn't been done very well before.
It's much closer to a conventional cRPG and I liked that.