I always felt this could be easily fixed returning to the ways of earlier patches with super-expensive potions that permanently raised your physique and arcane stats (they costed alot and weren't sold/you had to make them, i think half a million to get perfect Physique and Arcane on old playthroughs, which IMO would justify how in-game they aren't a common thing since "only rich/high class people can afford them") and THAT way there's an equalizer/players can be whatever they want and still be op.
So two problems with this, both stemming from the fact that the game's overall progression is completely fucked.
First, I can hit a billion credits in like, the first week of in-game time. Half a million to get perfect stats is way too cheap. But also, there's no price you can set that wouldn't be too cheap, because money rolls over at ~2b credits. The last save file I pushed was rolling over the money limit every three days. Don't ask how long load times or time skips were, it was... really, really bad. Surprisingly few slaves needed though.
Second, the stats in this game are just kind of shit with how they scale and how the stat progression works. They all have hard limits set because the progression is fucked, and without those limits you could easily do billions of damage a turn. Maxing your stats isn't actually that hard, even with enchantment capacity turned on. And there's some funny bugs with the capacity that lets you break it even with it turned on, but that's not really relevant.
Just giving me cheap potions to max stats would just make it easier to max all the stats with minimal time investment.
This would be really, really bad if the game's encounter progression wasn't equally as fuck. Instead of being a progression you just have like, three steps of difficulty entirely based on the number of enemies. One enemy, trivially easy on any character. Two enemies, also easy. Final fight with the imp lords or whatever the fuck they're called, extremely difficult for no apparent reason and no apparent step up from the previous fights.
But also extremely easy because you can literally just pop 100% heal potions every turn. And they're like, free as fuck.
I'm honestly really curious to see if the game's progression was thought of at all when adding in a new area. I'm absolutely, 100% willing to bet it wasn't.
There's no saving a badly designed system. It just needs a redesign. But everything needs a redesign, so it'll never happen. So I guess fuck combat, lets just ignore it and hope for some actual god damn content...
Well I love me some FERAL content, Can't wait :3
You're going to be waiting a long, long time.