Selphea

Once you complete the Barracks, you can hire NPCs. You can have up to 8.... of course you do have to pay them. Also, you can recruit every "special" NPC in the game, and drop them at Caed Nua, then send them on those special adventures. The thing that's most annoying to me about the hirelings is that if you're out in the middle of nowhere and someone's invading Caed Nua, even if you have 8 hirelings INCLUDING Korgrak the Ogre, auto-resolving the invasion always costs you money - so far as I've been able to determine, you never "win" at auto-resolve. And since you can't manual resolve if you're not AT Caed Nua - which believe me is a ROYAL PITA to accomplish if you're in the bowels of the Battery for instance - I find that particular setup fairly irritating. Not those, I meant the poor farmers in Gilded Vale. They could've gone over and been my butlers or something.

My main complaint about combat is that the difficulty scaling is very spiky. I could steamroll a whole map then run across a boss that wipes the party in a single breath while everything I do to it misses outright. Then I Google it and find out I was actually two levels below the recommended level of the thing. So I go do some other sidequests to level up and run through a very long dungeon where the boss fight scripts your party to enter the room in a specific formation which puts two of my squishiest characters in front, and when the fight starts they get paralyzed, then proned while being focused. Won this by sacrificing the squishy and choking the group at a door. Went to Endless Depths and again there's a boss fight where the whole party is scripted to go in with the squishy people in front. Won this by (yep) sacrificing the squishy and choking the group at a door. I've taken to putting my main character in armor, reshuffling the party and doing some respecs but the Add/Dismiss interface seems to be random. For some reason Eder seems to be stuck in 5th place no matter what order I invite party members in. After all that I probably ended up overlevelled and it's been smooth sailing so far - if there's trouble just run to a door and choke the other group, but it does feel kind of cheesy doing that.

There's only two main things I would have liked to see with the stronghold. First one is it would be nice if it came into the story more, like if a certain group's HQ was burned down and they were being witch hunted the main character could offer safe haven to them in the stronghold. Or if a bunch of NPCs were looking for jobs the main character could hire them at the stronghold. Another is if to have more control over what the stronghold produces. There's a few pesky crafting materials that I can't ever seem to find enough of and it would be nice if there was a way to farm or negotiate trade agreements for them at the stronghold. Right now they do give crafting mats, but it's RNG-based. I'd be pretty happy with just those two changes.