If you put two gentlemen that have the same tier of given trait, only one of those will provide bonus to research. Gentlemen gain special traits related with specific type of research, each of them having four tiers.It's generally considered good practice to post one sloop inside each dockyard or trading seaport to avoid pillaging - a blockaded port can be freed on that turn, while damaged ports require one extra turn and money. This is meant as a way to subtly encourage defense-in-depth - rather than concentrating all your forces into one big army, posting troops inside towns will not only prevent the buildings they house from being damaged, but outright deny these small bands access past the town without provoking battle. It is even more monotonous in a sea battle as it takes a long time to sail your ships to the enemy to engage. This becomes repetitive if you fail to kill them all before they escape the field, forcing you into a rather unexciting 'clean up' after every battle (which itself is difficult if you don't have enough cavalry). You could auto-resolve but this will probably lead to more loss on your side than if you play the battle yourself. They come and damage your buildings and even if you have a big enough army to easily defeat them without too much loss, you're still forced to play what is a time-consuming sometimes tedious battle just to get them off your land. Small armies, armies with left over troops and rebels.They are by no means hard to handle (especially if you play as Spain and thus have access to galleons), but are extremely annoying. Goddamn Bats: The Pirates faction can quickly become a pain in the ass at the start of Grand Campaign because they already have Galleons and Fluyts at their disposal while everyone else only has access to weaker ships.Republican government is so-so, especially for Spain, which as a monarchy gets a handful of special units, but anything is better than having Carlos as your king. The reason is simple - you start with Carlos II the Bewitched as your king.

Complacent Gaming Syndrome: It's hard to find a player that doesn't engineer a revolt from the very first turn when playing as Spain to change the government to republic.

Empire total war gentlemen