I'm still pretty new to it, but I've had some success with BlueResort so I'll share my thoughts.
- Make sure you advertise every day if you can. Once you get a good flow of patrons, money is quite stable and you'll have some extra for purchases even without running dungeons.
- To ask someone to explore with you, they need affection level 11 or above. Getting someone to this point is one of the first things you'll want to do in the game to get your progression going. You'll see a change in your affection status/title, which won't be "Stranger" anymore. Beyond that, there's two levels of hiring - first level of hiring is 1000/day and they stay in their guest room, second level is 2000 and they move to a staff room instead. However, even first level employees will extend their stays indefinitely so you can keep adventuring together. People who you've only invited to explore will explore with you, but leave when their stay is up.
- I would recommend grinding some levels in the second dungeon. Combat can be really quick with a unit like Magisa who has a high-damage AOE for only 60MP. Once you're in the second dungeon, you'll have earrings, and you can use those to get optimal elemental resistance on your AOE party member before grinding a given encounter. If you're short on rings/earrings, it's also worthwhile to re-run the second dungeon boss (once per day) as it still gives these additional good drops on death.
- The other benefit of level grinding is that your returns from the default explore option (where you instantly/automatically go around the island) seems to scale with level. For example, with my party members at level 12, I got ~12000 rupees for exploring instead of the 1000 I got when I started the game.
- I'm still playing with party composition, but my core party is two casters (Magisa, Yuel) and a healer (Societte). I'm trying out different characters for the fourth slot, but so far it seems like martial characters and non-healer support characters aren't very good. Maybe I just haven't found the right ones. Also, elemental affinities are important in combat, but doesn't seem you need to be too picky about the elemental affinities of your party, since earrings quickly become an easy way to change elements.
- You can make shops in the airport which provide boosts to your resort. The boosts seem to be pretty small, but you can also shop there yourself.
- You can also cook dishes in the dining room from ingredients you harvest in dungeons. Finding the right combination of ingredients or serving the correct combination of dishes gives different boosts as well. For example, I found that Raw Chicken in Raw Chicken (I don't remember the preparation method) produced a special dish which boosts the HP of the guests. I also have two other meat dishes, and three meat dishes gives another bonus for the combined menu.
- Kissing is super powerful for raising affection (once you can do it). Kissing lasts across multiple turns, and gives big boosts to other actions performed while kissing. You can even serve tea to someone while kissing them to net 2000+ friendship points from a single action. The Heat state also boosts points received as I think it also does in EraTW.
Hopefully this stuff is useful and not already stated in a post I missed. Looking forward to hearing tips others might have as well.
