Right to the question - would you guys recommend this over frontier?? I played Hollow and am halfway through gaia.
I don't mind the plot, it's good enough, but only few sex scenes were interesting to me in GAIA while in HOLLOW i at least enjoyed vast majority (I'm bored by total vanilla, tentacles without any dicking involved, and obviously I hate NTR/sharing).
Gameplay is my bigger issue, but I come from hollow so I kind of expected this, but having only few divisions what you can actually see fighting is a pain in the ass
Well, thing is, GAIA vs Frontier and Hollow is a bit complicated. GAIA's gameplay loop primarily revolves around the dungeon and defense battles, with few Offense battles happening. So it plays very differently for that reason alone. Frontier plays more like Hollow, or rather, Hollow plays more like Frontier, in the sense that you have territory that you take over and have to protect and whatnot.
That said, in Frontier, it's pure 1 division vs 1 division battle at all times, and the only battles you see in full are the Offense battles. So you see and control every fight when you attack, but if you're not attacking, you're seeing the mini-fights, basically.
If I remember right, you could also only park a single division per location, so defense was arguably trickier in Frontier depending on the difficulty levels and whatnot.
Either way, you'd be better off asking about Frontier gameplay in that game's thread specifically, or just searching around it for info to see what's what.
I personally liked Gaia more than Frontier, though less than Hollow, and I'd have played Gaia before Hollow if that were possible (alas, localization order was a bitch)... but it wasn't that bad if only because of the difference in gameplay style. Going down from Hollow to Frontier though sounds WAY more painful... The differences and lack of certain features is gonna be way more obvious and troublesome to manage. The lack of economic benefits from divisions, as well as the Investment system makes Frontier a VERY different game from Hollow, for all that they're similar in the "conquering the world" department.