Anybody have tips for increasing reputation? I've got a concubine, club, various policies, and I'm barely making any headway. I remember it being way easier to increase, so, am I missing something?
It takes time to build reputation. Basically it's easy to build reputation up to your "enduring reputation", but gets harder the more you exceed it. Enduring rep increases every turn you hold your actual rep over that value. You should see a sentence like "Your base rate of reputation decay is high" in the end week text...as long as you don't let it drop to "low", rep will get easier and easier to gain because your enduring rep will rise automatically. When it changes to "Your legend is perfected, reducing reputation decay to its lowest possible level", that means your enduring rep has reached cap.
Be aware that there are other factors that directly affect enduring rep, and these will *kill* your ability to sustain high levels of reputation, regardless of how much raw reputation you get every week. Personally engaging in smuggling or prostitution, being too young in an arcology that doesn't have a youth preference (or too old in one that does), allowing slaves to penetrate you without the Sexual Openness policy, and certain other factors will damage your ability to retain enduring reputation.
Game difficulty also affects rate of reputation decay.
On the rep *gain* side, your concubine and club are two of the three biggest factors. I'll assume you have those handled. The third is FS compliance. Everywhere you see green "Society approves of...", you're gaining rep, and if you see red "Society disapproves of..." that's a place where you're losing rep. Adhering uniformly to certain FS' slave standards is a great way to gain lots of rep. You can do this with any FS as long as you're willing to invest in it, but a particularly easy choice for an early rep-positive FS would be Chattel Religionism, Paternalism, Physical Idealism, or Hedonistic Decadence. Just remember that you have to actually make your slaves adhere to those FS' ideals to get the benefits, and there are penalties for not doing so. Conversely, adopting either Eugenics or Repopulationism will very likely drive your FS rep gain *negative* at least in the short term...choosing either one as your first FS is a kind of self-imposed "hard mode". Slave Professionalism and Transformation Fetishism are very hard to get rep-positive in the early game, but can be a great source of rep later in the game, so if you want to take one of them, consider delaying and choosing it with a later pick.