Yeah I totally agree with your playstyle and I would add to get the carwash (30-50k per month) and to avoid recruit for a high price, right click on her, "call to office", speak to her and give her day off (even its illogical cause you didnt already recruit her). In tat way, your relationship is going better then you could more easily recruit her for minimum wage.My advice is : play it slow, very slow. Never overpay, always recruit some girl that do scenes for 100 bucks, and get only directors and maybe some security until you got 4 studios making low quality movies. Then you can start upgrade, recruting, very slowly. Get moderately decent actress, camshow, and start some easy to fill websites. At this moment only, recruit the "story girls".
Avoid for at least one if you two years the nightclub and strip club, ignore the mansion, ignore the rivals, give 0 contract, but do every possible request to get the all the money you can. Be ready to loose some reputation to keep your money, do not hesitate to get rid of staff, and always pay your actress minimum wage. Put the game on "very easy" to make all of above a little bit faster if you want.
The websites will at some point get you enough monthly incomes for you to play a bit more freely, but it is slow and you have ot be meticulous. Good luck !
But as you said, the best way to play it is not for beginners. You have to read guide or to play some times to understand how to play it. Its illogical and counter intuitive to let unique girls and dont recruit her at the beginning. Or you should at least be able to recruit her when you earn at least 100k, 500k, 1Mo,... In order to avoid havin her but cant pay her.
Contract and lvl of fame is pretty badly design right now. Cause if you pay a contract for at least 12 scenes for ex (3 months), you pay 30k for a girl who would make boy-girl for example, and a boy-girl scene would cost at least 2k per scene, so 2 x 12 = 24k when you paid 30k for her, so you only earn 6k by paying contract !! And because of fame, when you reach lvl 3, rivals would steal you almost all "good" girls. And you cant refuse to reach lvl 2, lvl 3, ... of fame.
Its just too grindy for a management game, specially at the beginning. I could easily understand that you have to be cautious in "mid" game for ex, when having girls on contract and make money. But if you have to play hours and hours to just be able to have enough money in bank to open a company, for me its just badly design !!! And as I said, its a good management game overall, it just needs some changes about wage, price of scene, impact of trends to make money, importance of work orders.
Its pretty impressive, even I didnt understand how you did it !!! Depends a lot of bonus/malus you take at the beginning.BillieJeans said:You actually can skip most of the early game grind if you start with reputation level 2 (which really is level 1.5 x_X) and 50k extra cash perks. If you go all-in on contracts week 1 (More contracts perks, 100% company score, more contracts and higher photo studio policies on level 10 PAs) you can make your way to first million or so in three months without shooting a single low quality scene. Or any scene, for that matter. You can set it all up weeks 1 an 2, and make enough to pay all the bills before the end of the month.
I did it as a challenge run one day (reach the endgame without ever hiring a prostitute) and it turned out to be really good anyway. Nerfed in v0.84, but still works just fine.