I guess it was just luck then, a couple others had a similar experience to mine and I guess some ran into your problem as well which is why he's tweaking it.
How many power plants do you have left? I'm now down to seven. Prosperity is looking pretty...grim...here too, low twenties.
My corruption is going the wrong way too, church chimed in with a nasty -5, plus a couple others that lowered it. I want to be able to walk my shameless naked sluts down the street in peace, is that asking too much?
Yeah it might have just been bad luck. I have never had the town be totally empty like that before in previous games. I actually started over again, partly because of that and partly because I filled up all my slave slots and couldn't hire some of the ones I really wanted without selling someone. Didn't want to have to wait til I could get the retreat.
I'm hoping that doctors kits work on MC like they do with the mercs but I haven't tested it yet. Ayden winds up being my main tank for a long time but if I get the health implants my main would eventually become the new tank.
No idea about the power plants. Not sure if I've gotten far enough for those to be an issue or not.
I think this time I'm going to try and be extra stingy until I can get the investment in the general store and weapon store up and running so I can better afford my mercs, even if it means selling all of the weapons I would normally want to donate for faction. I can always craft more of those eventually.
I'm also kind of curious how religious conversion works. Didn't get around to trying it last time. I did noticed that one of the options is an intelligence check so I'm kind of curious whether a success on that might give a chance for an Int increase. The other option was a dominant approach which I'm assuming is probably manipulate. I failed every time I've tried so far.
Most of the religions seem to give a pretty huge persuasion bonus at max devotion so if it's moderately reasonable to convert, that would conceivably be an easy way to make the girls nice and compliant even with 20 charm so I could take my time caressing my way up the charm ladder later. That would also give more time for some extra manipulation increases before I read the books.
I kind of like the Christianity start for the bonus stamina so far.
One other option I've actually never tried that might be interesting is to focus heavily on the slave trade early on. Instead of immediately selling those female slaves I capture, train them up a bit and sell them for a lot more. I imagine that would be a lot of fun but I don't know how viable since I've never done it, especially at relatively low starting charm levels.