Yeah I think the merc progression I'm settling into now is to hire 1 top tier in the first week or two for the assault rifle/coil gun battles around town plus the tier 3-4 bounties and the arena. The first time I see that tier 5 bounty with 2 opponents in duraplate I hire a 2nd top tier merc. The easier tier 5 bounties are fine with only 1.
First time I see a tier 6 bounty with more than 1 guy in duraplate I hire all 4 top tier mercs (first day this happened for me in my current game was day 42). That doesn't really leave enough time to get Bud trained up to be all that good but I grab him anyway along with Dexter and Doyle. I didn't bother getting duraplate for Dexter or Doyle since I'm going to replace them with top tiers in about a month but I did give them combat armor. Bud has already been replaced with Space Marine in my current game before he gained even 1 ranged skill. Picked up Ayden first.
I do generally prefer to break my girls will initially but compliment and encourage is so effective at raising happiness and affection early on that I don't mind taking a bit of a detour to max out kindness and get their happiness/affection high enough to make seduction easier. It takes awhile to get their respect to 20 if I'm doing 1 girl at a time anyway. In my current game I got Juno, Rebecca, and Mai-Lynn to 20 respect each as well as more than 50 kindness and amiable or loving in the first 3 weeks which is a lot easier than if I was just trying to grind out happiness via sweet talk/caress/kiss.
I actually stopped prioritizing Aria as heavily as I used to since in my experience she's just not very effective in the arena without either extensive training or save scumming. She can sometimes beat opponents worth around $1000 without training but she sometimes loses to opponents worth less than $500 which means unless I'm save scumming she's only going to be fighting the easiest opponents she's guaranteed to beat. Rebecca sometimes loses to the $100 opponents so I don't bother putting her in the arena at all anymore. If a loss just meant losing money or influence that wouldn't bother me that much but it seems like there's a 100% chance to lose stats when she loses and at best maybe a 10-20% chance to gain stats when she wins.
I'm planning on spending some time to really pump the shit out of her physical stats in this game before trying her in the arena again and see if that makes a difference.
I seem to get my best start if I grab Rebecca almost immediately to train stamina to 60 with, then pick up Mai-Lynn and train stamina with her as well to get me to 80. That seems to be about the minimum to not need massages very often anymore so you're more efficient with your actions each day. At that point all of my money goes towards duraplate, the aim implant, and house upgrades until the house is done. Then I work on investments. Those persuasion boosts from the house are huge if you start with low charm.
I lucked out in this game and Mai-Lynn was both a workaholic and a perfectionist so she makes a great gardener/head maid. By the end of week 3 she was already at 80 gardening and headed off to the academy to max it out with Juno as my back up gardener while she's in training.
I did make the mistake of sending Rebecca off to work at Roos and he must have had his way with her because next thing I know she despises me despite me never abusing her. Oops... Didn't take long to fix once I bumped her respect up but will have to make sure to only send girls with high corruption to Roos I guess.
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