Sokatos

Making us choose between wearing a warming cape or a trinket around the neck.

My pleasure.

A sequel where a ship, or rather a fleet, serves as your stronghold equivalent, and a much more central mechanic, with composition of ship types and acquisition of said ships varies things up. This would simultaneously provide a money sink mechanic that would allow the misers in the development team to do away with the god aweful turn mechanic of the stronghold, as a fleet of ships would need constantupkeep with which any regular monetary gains can be balanced against. Or maybe a need to go on regular enterprises/raids to flsuh money into your pocket which is then trickled away by the passing of time, giving an opportunity for randomly generated "vocational quests". Ships would also allow for travels around much of the world we only read about, connecting varied biomes to explore. Personally, I would hope of a return of the watcher aspect, because the game sometimes shows that this ability can be much more perfidious than it would seem most of the time, ****ing up peoples souls and past lives for your own perverse amusement or selfish gain. Not to mention that the way you can deal with maerwald suggests some kind of soul-absorbing aspect for power, which is always awesome, or at least the option to choose between doing the decent thing or being a powerhungry prick and many steps in between. Another idea would be to form companions not in the party into a secondary/tertiary party of, say, 4, which is tasked with all the side activities the stronghold provides, and making the composition more important based on background and character, for instance: having the task of trekking through the wild to meet with glanfathan tribes and parley would be a task for hiravias as a glanfathan, sagani as a ranger and kana for his general tact and sagacity, as opposed to pallegina who is city folk and durance who is repugnant. This would give a reason to change party composition regulary and also make every companion well equipped, not just the A-team. Coupled with the more unexplored but hinted at aspects of soul-****ery you could control these parties through soul projection or the like after they arrived at their destination, making the alright "parchment-adventures" culminate in the usual gameplay. reading about how a companion descends donw a well to face a colony of wichts is okay, taking control of said companion with own little party would be much more interesting, even if just for a single dungeon.

A game is a composite medium, not purely a visual one. A game where you can´t see into a person´s face directly, an isometric one, needs to inform you about their mien from time to time when the nuance of their expression is required for you to get information about a divergence of statment of intent and actual intent for instance. The reminiscence to actual table top games is deliberate and its own feature in these games, and contrary to your statement isometric games are very much "tell, don´t show" as you can not show very much unambiguous actions from that perspective, so a healthy dose of reading about expressions and is not avoidable, and a complaint about something so essential to this kind of game begs the question if you simply don´t like them for what they are.

See https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/85630-caed-nua-looter-enemy-with-godlike-armor/

Contrary to my previous post the affected defenses are deflection and reflex (not fortitude), and they can be increased by increments of 6 by quicksave>quickload and repeat, but only on enemies with shields, i.e. Mercenary Soldiers, Veterans, Sergeants, Warpriests and Commander Baelorin, suggesting a bug in the way the weapon-and-shield-style bonus to deflection and reflex is applied, but only to enemies.

Made an account to report on a similar problem: Slogged through crägholdt bluffs exterior on hard and encountered considerably higher deflection and fortitude (180) on warpriests, veterans, soldiers and sergeants after some time, until the fight against Baelorin with 190 deflection/fortitude made me consider the possibility that this was more than just the famed difficulty of the bluffs. After checking that dragon deflection seems to cap at around 120-140 PotD my supicions were stirred further. No savegames or screenshots from me as my first action after reading about an old bug like this was to reload an old save and re-enter the bluffs, deleting the autosaves as well as the quicksave. Might post further observations tomorrow.