Originally Posted by Dr Koin
I personnaly didn't play NWN2 at all so I'm not sure why sadly.


I've explained it somewhere around here, but the meat of the matter is that it was integrated into the story (the story being generic to a painful degree not withstanding), it wasn't given to you simply because you were the PC. It was very consistent and coherent. Peasant -> City Guard/Thief -> Squire (to 1 of 2 knights) -> Captain of Crossroad Keep (the SH) -> Knight of the Nine. It was half the game in act 3, the other part being collecting the ritual pieces from various locations. The world reacted to the stronghold and you being its Captain. If you were with the thieves of Amn, they were using the stronghold for smuggling operations etc. The lieutenants were useful and had interesting recruitment quests (especially Light of Heavens) and one of them was actually an ex-companion (very good connection here). You had choice on what you wanted built. It had events (adventuring party for example) that made sense. It was easier to defend if you upgraded it when push came to shove with the Big Bad. etc. etc. I could go on, but suffice to say it is the best SH I can think of.

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Sounds a bit herculean.


It is, that's why they made the one in PoE pointless. I have an entire spreadsheet explaining the sides of the debate somewhere around here, but it's basically a catch-22 and you can't win if you include a stronghold :p

I remembered the one in DA:Awakening. You can imagine how trivial it was, if only now I was able to recall it. One of the pillars of the story was that you were the commander of this keep. It was very bare-bones compared to the NWN2 one though and you didn't have any choice regarding what to build. You only arbitrarily collected resources and told a dwarf to upgrade your troops and fortifications and that's it.