However, to be honest, I’m still not satisfied. In the midgame you become too strong. If anyone has suggestions on how to improve the early game without breaking the mid and late game, I’m open to ideas.
I’m also planning to change the requirements for traits and items (mostly lowering them) and to make random chests more consistent. Right now, you can get anything from literal trash to an endgame weapon.
If anyone is interested, I’ve uploaded the modification I mentioned. I’d really appreciate any feedback.
I'm not really sure if I can give a proper suggestion since my personal philosophy on what constitutes a great RPG heavily clashes with what Roleplay-S is trying to accomplish, which means it would take more than just modifying stats number to make what I suggest come true. I wish I could give a more detailed explanation on my suggestion but I don't have enough time atm. A simple TLDR would be, just follow base LonaRPG progression style. Measure the time it takes for Lona in the base game to gain a certain level/trait/item after doing a set amount of quests in a non-repetitive session, then modify the mod to match it. There's also many other amount of EXP farming options to look at too involving rescuing prisoners, rape loop, prostitution, etc...
Now, here comes the tough part and the reason why I think it may not be possible to properly balance Roleplay-S difficulty curve unless you put in some titanesque work. Even if you do make it so all skills/traits are claimable in about the same time frame as it would in the base game, Roleplay-S has a lot of added features, such as free stats farming and OP items/skills that will rapidly trivialize the game. Lona is given many new options to face her ennemies. But what about the ennemies themselves? Were they given anything to counter Lona's newly found power? Not really. And this is where the issue regarding difficulty becoming suddenly too easy surfaces. The base game already has such problem, however it's far more prominent in Roleplay-S. Lazi Ness placed a heavy emphasis on vertical progression aka grind because it is the easiest solution to prevent the game from becoming too easy too fast. It's a sloppy solution, but that's all the modder can realistically do from the looks of it.
At the strict minimum, the NPC should also be modified to match the newly added feature. In an ideal world, the better approach would be to do a complete overhaul of LonaRPG's map/NPCs. In this, the map is divided into different sections, each section having their own set of difficulty and NPCs. Certain parts of the map cannot be accessed without fulfilling certain requirements. To prevent Lona from becoming too strong too soon, there should be a leveling limit. It's only after Lona fulfill certain conditions that she can level up further. Don't make it so you have to hit something 100 times before you can get to the next level. Have the leveling method involve player's brain, not their willingness to repeat the exact same action over and over for hours.
That's the basis of my suggestion on how to improve Roleplay-S. I don't think there's an easy way to better balance the difficulty, but at least you could try to balance the leveling system to be less grindy.