For Poker, always raise, if your hand rates ~500 or higher just try to improve it every round, if it's lower then try a wild chance until you get it up there. You'll win often and make a big profit....until you discover 'Kasey' in the basement who will cost you your winnings. You can have her more than once a night with the implant and high stamina.
Numeric respect is shown when you select a girl like to talk to, provided you've set it to show a numeric value. It's on the lower right, above anger. After 20 you've something like a 5% chance to get another point after each fight, and I recall someone saying that up until at least 30 you still get bonuses.
Do you have to fill up the poker fame bar to see Kasey? Just curious. Looks like it's going to take a lot of games to do that, although early on it's certainly a great way to make money. I have gained both willpower and intelligence from carousing. Not sure if that happens each time but would be nice. If so then that would make a low intelligence build much more viable. It just means you'd have to wait longer before you could get full use out of the books and classes since it might be quite awhile to randomly boost your intelligence up to 60ish level before you start taking classes/reading books.
I see what you mean about respect. It's easy to get it to 20 and then it seems like it kind of stalls there for a long time so that seems like a good target to get all the girls to first before you focus on trying to get anyone beyond that. I tried taking more than 1 slave girl with me at a time to boost respect but pretty much any fight that isn't trivial is a pain if I do that so I think I'll stick with cycling each girl in 1 at a time til they all hit 20. Most slaves aren't really spec'd for combat initially with Rebecca being a bit of an exception.
One other thing I'm still trying to get a feel for is whether I need some kind of minimum level of melee skill and/or strength for each melee weapon to actually be effective or not. I get warnings for some of the slave girls about negative impacts for equipping certain weapons (both ranged and melee) when they have low skill and/or strength. So that might explain why I it seems like my hit rate is better with a dagger than it is with a sledgehammer for instance, even if it does a lot less damage when it does hit.
I still like picking the melee master starting perk to meet the minimum melee requirement for arena when I unlock that, and that has the nice benefit of making melee a somewhat viable option for my main character to work on skills early on. His ranged is 30 so he can't hit the broad side of a barn with a gun until I get the aim implant. So I figure I might as well gain some melee skill until then, especially since I want to work up Rebecca's stamina and melee prior to unlocking the arena anyway.
I played around a bit more with Rebecca both trained and untrained in the Arena, and she's a lot more effective in the arena if you boost her stamina, melee, respect, happiness, and affection before you park her in the arena. With that stuff boosted you can talk to her and encourage her before each fight to increase her chance of skill gains each fight and it's nice if she's already fuckable before you even unlock the arena. One thing I'm not sure of is whether it might be worth boosting melee or strength a bit after I get her stamina up around 75-80.
Her Steel Maiden perk caps out when you hit 75 stamina on her so I'm thinking that might be a good initial stopping point for stamina and then work on strength until I unlock arena since that seems harder to get random increases than melee. The only random strength increase I have ever seen so far is from using the sledgehammer to break into the tunnels in the docks area. Maybe it's more common in melee combat if I get to where my skills are high enough to reliably hit stuff with a sledgehammer, not sure.
