I prefer having max'd charm on my protag (to make social skills more efficient. You start with them no matter what, might as well get use out of em.) Which kind of closes off being a mage. First slave is always a mage, and yes I'll make a point to pick up thief on her.
Having to train two separate stats does slow down the early game a little bit, but I am usually able to cludge up enough gear and stats to clear out dungeons by mid-week 2.
I started over for the billionth time and tried a max charisma, max sex start and I'll have to say that does work better than what I was doing before. It gives you more dates and more sex interactions that first week as well as more effective boosts to your slaves loyalty and consent during those interactions. So that means more skill training via dates and more xp via sex. I can still follow the same plan I normally do regarding a heavy combat focus early on, it just makes clearing the goblin cave on day 1 slightly harder since I have terrible physical and terrible wits so my combat skills are absolute crap.
What I did this time is start off with a Fairy MC and a Seraph 1st slave. MC has max cha and sex which means the only useful class I can pick is acolyte. 1st slave has max physical, max wits, max magic and takes apprentice and the mage staff purely so she can open locks in the goblin cave before anyone has thief.
So day 1 fish/cook meat soup for a couple of turns til I can make my slave datable, then date her and train charisma boosting her consent and giving her combatant, then it's off to the goblin cave where she mostly kills everything with mind blast and my MC is mostly just there for heals initially. Goblin cave gets me a scroll and a few random slaves to sell/sacrifice. I get unlucky on slaves and don't find any excellent stats so I sac a couple to boost MC's wits and magic to good so he can grab Apprentice when he levels up. 1st slave gets fighter so she can switch to physical attacks and start working towards Valkrie.
Day 2 I date my first slave again, fuck her, and clear out the bandit cave twice getting me a bunch more random slaves to boost my terrible stats to something useable and another few excellent. Also picked up one with good growth and one with great growth to use for boosting Daisy's growth. MC grabs thief to open locks and boost his wits faster, 1st slave gets acolyte to help out with healing. I buy a 2nd staff in the shop so I don't have to keep swapping the staff back and forth for heals.
Day 3 I pick up Daisy, boost her growth to great, give her combantant and a dagger, and go clear out the bandit den 2 more times.
Day 4 I get Druid on my MC and pick up fire arrow for everyone so now I can start clearing the bandit fort. MC picks up archer, 1st slave gets Valkrie, Daisy gets archer and apprentice. MC has to have max sex skill for the speed boost to do the fort this early unless you wait to pick up archer first because you have to be able to go before the assassins.
Day 5 I go get Cali and upgrade her growth to great with a couple of random good/great slaves from the bandit fort.
I hold out for excellent stats as much as possible but I will boost a stat from terrible to good if I need it for a class upgrade early on even though it means I'm wasting money upgrading the same stat twice.
By the end of week 1 MC, and my first slave have excellent in everything except growth and I've started working on Daisy and Cali and parked a random slave with ok physical in the mansion to work on the forge/mansion rooms upgrades.
Edit: Timeline above is slightly off, I forgot that I picked up archer on my 1st slave before Valkrie to speed up melee skill increases.
Here's where I ended up at the end of week 1 using the max cha/sex start: