I've been playing a lot of M&B2 this week, easily put in 30-40 hours. I managed to break the smithing skill by forging two handed "long Falx blade", ends up giving a TON of experience as well as giving you ~50-60,000 gold when you sell it.
For only 6-8 ingots and charcoal, it's stupidly easy to produce in large quantities, I made a dozen and I'm now 257 smithing level.
Obviously still plenty of balancing work needed in the game, but still very enjoyable outside of the game-breaking bugs like when a single faction controls 90% of the world after 3-4 years in-game.