mudd1

It's not like this hadn't been anticipated. This post and the quite interesting discussion that followed it raised a red flag to everyone that very little thought had gone into the design of the stronghold: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/64555-update-66-double-whammy/page-9?do=findComment&comment=1394318

makeshorriblecrunshingnoise

I think after listening to the commentary you will realize that those things are just not feasible with reasonable resources for such nice-to-haves.

This conversation left any kinds of rails long ago if you ask me

I'm trying to remember when I last heard such a call for moderation being said on the internet, a place that is famous for being anything but. Usually, the one that can shout their point the loudest in the most drastic language wins in that at least they get vastly more attention from either side of a debate. So this truly impressed me. In an ideal world it shouldn't but in this one it does.

Yeah, I first thought that over time you'd really build yourself some awesome rest bonuses that would make it worthwhile to travel there. But when I realized that you have to choose which of the +1 bonuses you get I was a bit bummed. Also, it doesn't really make sense why you can't build yourself a room as nice as that of any of the inns you go to. It's your own castle and you poured thousands of coppers into it already so what makes those inns special?

The bestiary entry of the Cean Gŵla looks really ugly because the font used is missing the circumflexed w. May I suggest that if adding the character to the font is not an option, misspelling the creature "Cean Gwla" for the title only would still look much better than what we have now. Edit: Oh, this obviously also affects the Pŵgra entry.

I take it those clusters of black pixels I highlighted in the attached screenshot are not supposed to be there, are they?

Well, I don't mind there being no tower-defense style mini game. And I perfectly understand why they didn't add a full-scale siege mechanic. Heck, even the way the terrain works in regular combat probably couldn't make good use of fighting from the top of a wall. There could be a lot more logic to the whole thing though. Because let's face it, to take such a stronghold you do need an army (if it's properly manned of course, which it isn't with the dozen or so guys you can hire). A bunch of thugs won't get into there. Unless of course they are serious about the northern defenses consisting of a hedge maze. Like, seriously.

Also, Dwarf Fortress No seriously, I was also hoping for some more impact on the game. I mean look at it, with Madhmr Bridge gone, Caed Nua controls the only bridge over the ... whatever the name of that river is and in fact the only land route to Defiance Bay for everyone west of that river. That's a huge deal! Yet the reaction of people to you rebuilding the place are nonexistent as far as I can tell. People treat you differently because you helped some dude they don't know and don't care about but you controlling that strategically important choke point, raising taxes, becoming a local lord ... all that stuff, nobody ever mentions? It might even have been an opportunity for roleplay. What if you were showered with copper from all the trade going through your lands and then suddenly Madhmr Bridge is going to be rebuilt, threatening to make you some backwater bypass for Defiance Bay again and cripple your income? Are you going to pull strings to keep that project from happening, even if it means people in the area are worse off? Maybe even kill someone over it?

Seems about right. Bandits don't take a lot of copper anymore for a fully rebuilt stronghold but I'm still not clear on how useful my hirelings really are. Well, it's not like prisoners are "useful" for anything in real life But yeah, I was hoping for something more, although I can't say what. I mean I expect not killing people will reflect on my reputation, even though I didn't verify that. Regarding prisoners and quests though, there is clearly something off: I had a bounty quest to kill a criminal who had escaped from prison. When I didn't actually kill him but put him back into prison, which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do given that this is where he came from, I wasn't awarded the bounty. The quest didn't fail either yet. I would have expected that if some effed up legal system really wanted to see this guy dead, I could still deliver him alive, put him to trial if needed and have them sentence him to death. But no, he's just sitting there and making me question whether the game had expected me to actually cut his head off when he pleaded for mercy.

As long as the share of backers vs. non-backers isn't significantly different on GOG, the numbers don't change at all. One of the bigger assumptions might be that the achievement probably needs the game to be started at least once (I didn't even notice it myself but I'm pretty sure that's how Steam achievements work). So if there's a significant proportion of backers who have never even installed and run the game, the estimate might be way too high. I mean I'm no expert but almost half a million copies (let's wait for the first Steam/GOG sale) does sound like a lot for this kind of a game to me. Sure, one would assume people who backed a game couldn't wait to get their hands on it but I'm not sure this assumption is correct. A lot of people have more money to fund games than they have time to play them. I myself have backed games that I wanted to see succeed but I don't prioritize them in my backlog. And those aren't even 100h games like PoE is.

This question at least we can get some estimate on. According to the Steam achievements, 16.8% of people who own the game are backers. This means that with 77,000 backers, about 380,000 additional copies have been sold as preorders or at full price. Now how much that is in actual cash for the devs is more difficult to say because of the number of editions and because I have no clue what share Obsidian sees but since the currency in the gaming industry seems to be "copies sold" anyway, who cares?

So what would be the point of hiring any hirelings then? Or rebuilding things that don't have a function beyond prestige/security and cosmetics?

The consensus of this thread seemed to be that money is not abundant in PoE: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/76080-coppers-plentiful-or-scarce/ Well, it's definitely not turns as I had two pay days without any turns passing in between (ok, it might be a number of turns between 0 and 1 but ... yeah). Furthermore, the question is not if the taxes can pay the hirelings but if the additional taxes one gets from the hirelings are larger than their cost. I want to believe that there is some strategy here that isn't either "never hire anyone" nor "hire as many as you can." But without the devs giving us the formula used or somebody reverse engineering it (which would be a pain since even the relation between turns and quests seems to contain a random element!) I don't see how a player is supposed to figure this out.