I'm curious what other people's early priorities are in this game. For me, with an Int build, my goal for the first month is to buy both Aria and Mai-Lynn, complete both Professor Wolf's Planetary Studies (for the +6 int) and Daria's Science and Mathematics (for Daria's Gift), and upgrade my house as much as I can while still saving enough time and money to meet the other goals (I max out my bedroom and the garden but everything else is optional as money permits).
That gets you a huge passive food production boost from Mai-Lynn, a nice daily income boost from Aria via arena fights, a big persuasion boost via Daria's Gift, and enough intelligence to get max rewards from all books and classes. In the second month I start rotating my slaves into my combat party to boost their respect to 20 and start working on seducing them as well as finishing up my house. I also grab the aim implant when I get to $15k but it's not very high priority.
This also allows me to have all of the persuasion books read with max rewards by early in month 2. So my manipulation goes from being nearly useless to being extremely reliable in a matter of just a few days.
My main uses a dagger exclusively for the first month (with the melee master perk) so I rely mostly on the Blackguard and then Ayden for my damage output with Doyle and Bud filling out the rest of my merc squad initially. I don't pick up the space marine until I've gotten all of my slaves to 20 respect. I find that with the Blackguard and Ayden, the fact that my main is essentially useless in combat for the first month doesn't matter. Once I get the aim implant he's instantly upgraded to where he pretty much always hits with guns.
I tried getting the aim implant earlier but with a rifle, the damage increase just wasn't enough to avoid having to still hire at least 2 of the top tier mercs. It also made it very difficult to save enough to buy both Aria and Mai-Lynn by day 25 unless I save scummed 3 rounds of poker every night. I'm not save scumming in this play through so that's not an option.
So after day 25 I'm earning consistent enough money that the salaries from the higher tier mercs are not as hard to counteract, and the fact that I'm up over 75 intelligence means I can cruise through all the books and pump the shit out of my stats rather quickly. My focus starts shifting more from combat to working on my slaves with most of my money coming from my 1 daily bounty and my 3 daily arena fights (2 for me and 1 for Aria). If I see a group of raiders repopulate then I'll take a day to go clear those out as well.
I'm still trying to get a feel for what the best options for training up Aria for the arena is. When you first get her she can't reliably beat anyone that yields more than about $1000 from what I can tell but she's noticeably stronger than Rebecca. I ran around with her in my combat party long enough to boost her respect to 20 when I first got her before I dropped her into the arena to replace Rebecca.
Edit: One other thing I just noticed is that either the description for some of the books and/or classes are incorrect, or some of them require more than 85 intelligence to get the max reward. Most of them are fine at more like 70 though.
