Pyorgara,
I think from a game design perspective, there's an extremely sharp curve RNG wise for a beginner. No matter what choices they pick, a starting character has a low chance to win fights, low chance to persuade, and certain enemies in the starting zone will crush the main army in a single blow unless they devote 4 troops to infantry immediately. Beginners will likely get knocked down to 4 rep immediately, and stay there. Their persuasion also isn't high enough to avoid difficult frenemy colonel challenges, the crystal obelisk deletes skill as often as grants it. There's just a lot of things working against a new player until they get their fight skill up to 4, where they can reliably win challenge battle to raise their rep and have enough troops to steamroll zone 1. After that, the game seems pretty easy mode and grindy.
Just my 2 cents.
Hey owiercyn!
Thanks for the notes. I still need to do a full playthrough when I'm done writing scenes and will make sure everything scales up nicely. I'm not surprised that things seem a little wonky right now as I did minimal balancing on the new additions.