Malovane

Well, I've been handing Aloth the +Cold Resist cloak you get off the beginning inn. This helps his survivability a good deal against the shadows. Later on, this combined with his elemental resist spell makes him virtually immune to them. Otherwise, you can typically avoid the teleporting by having your main tank engage everything, and keep Aloth way in the background until the shadows have settled in on their target. At this point you can usually sneak to their back and hit them with a couple fans of flames.

Yeah, I suppose this is true. In NWN2 you basically had to defeat what amounted to several armies, and prove yourself to the nobility, to get your money-pit. Of course, at this point you could have probably just taken over Neverwinter itself. In BG2, you get one early - but if you consider that you had already gone through BG1, it kind of took a while. With this, it's like handing the main character a castle after ridding the Nashkel mines of kobolds in BG1, and thus is a little underwhelming.

Well - I was a little bummed about thought Stronghold as it was implemented: 1. Minor gripe. Resting is tedious - too many load screens to get there, and bonuses were very poor compared to what you could get at the inns. 2. Minor gripe. It's at least 24 hours travel time to everywhere else in the game. This means as soon as you go somewhere else, you're probably going to have to rest again. Your special rest home you pay so much for is pretty much only useful if you are doing the local dungeon - and this only barely. Sometimes even just traveling from this place you miss adventures or even invasions because their window is much shorter than it is to travel where you want to go. Of course, this is kind of a general gripe for the entire game itself. It's like 12 or 16 hours of travel time from the starting village to Raedric hold - how can you hear the bells from their towers notifying of a Raedric death? 3. Minor gripe. Everything except the Warden, and maybe a couple of the other buildings are just a waste of time and money. Even the hirelings you buy get instantly steamrolled by whatever invades you, and at 50 defense you're expending more on them than you get in taxes. 4. Major gripe. As another person here has said, it *feels* shallow, and kind of dead. The only real people who talk to you at any length are a posessed chair (pretty weird btw), and the warden. There's no activity of you being an actual "lord", No passing judgments on crimes. There's no indication of who in the world you are taxing, or what's being taxed. Visitors are rare and have nothing to say. Invasions are tedious and generic. 5. Major gripe. Doesn't tie in at all with the rest of the story. I don't think there's any instance of the character ever referencing himself/herself as the Lord/Lady of Caed Nua. One would think the rulers of Defiance Bay might be interested to know they have a new noble in their midsts (and may strongly object or approve such a fact).