>"For many the Default Route (w/o cheating!) can be very difficult, & if you're unlucky, impossible."
Eh? There are some less intuitive elements since it's an alpha work in progress, but the game is easily beatable without much effort.
Just set yourself and all your girls to fishing. You can prioritize slaves with a high wits factor, but it's not necessary. Similarly, fishing rods will help but don't stress out over them. The strategy is to maximize the # of slaves fishing as quickly as possible, and there are a lot of ways to improve your efficiency along the way but the biggest is upgrading the mansion to hold more people. I go 4/5 beds for the first week to establish a decent buffer before upgrading the mansion, and will then wait until after the day 14 loan payment to upgrade the mansion a 2nd time. When you reach the point where mansion rooms requires iron wood to upgrade, that's the hard signal to move girls out of the mansion into the forest to gather exotic materials. The big difference at this point is that (pick) axes are more important for gathering high end materials like magic/iron wood and mithril, than rods are for fishing. You will want your labor camp slaves equipped, and you will want to eventually craft them solid mithril work implements. After you've gotten the hang of the game's meta, you'll be able to swiftly align efficiency bonuses to quickly jump straight to mining and selling mithril to short circuit production. Using this method, it's possible to accrue enough wealth to pay off the full cost of the loan, completely upgrade the mansion, and fully kit out all your slaves with good gear. Prostitution is a red herring, since each girl needs to have her sex stats trained up personally, you won't be able to scale production as quickly; the harlot class tree provides methods for increasing obedience in the work camps.
When it comes to getting rep, beyond doing all the quests they put on the notice board, you should note that quest generation is kinda out of the way if you dismiss/ignore the tutorial. At the guild, you can push the upgrade button to bring up a menu for increasing # and quality of hirelings. Pressing "Quest Generation" brings up yet another popup where you can change the difficulty level of quests the guild assigns. You will want to raise the difficulty of the quests as you go to maximize reputation gains.
>-Characters & classes (esp if non-human)
To minmax your PC along the lines described above, you'll want to start with PHYS1, WIT5, CHA4, SEX1, and MAG4. Caster and Soul Eater class give +1 MAG, and Dominator gives WIT+1. You can spend money and wood at the slave market to upgrade your PHYS and SEX factors; you will want to do this prior to doing the lich hunting and myr's sister quests so you can get their events. The initial slave assigned by the guild should be built similarly. Race isn't super important, but I like having the init girl be a dark elf for the magic attack boost and access to druid. For the first few days, you'll want to use your date to study together. This will quickly raise wits for both characters, improving fishing efficiency and granting access to higher tier spells. The aoe attacks employed by casters are very OP, and the demoness boss with her high MDEF is inserted as a counter to that play style, but you can just pummel her with your staff. Though by that point you really should have at least one decently equipped fighter-type standing in the front row. Right click her to bring up the weaknesses.
>-Did you do any quests that pay -0- gold? Do any servants Quests? [have yet 2 meet anybody who got 500 pts there]
Even if the quest doesn't offer gold, items and rep rep are still valuable. I always get the 500 with all four guilds for the necklace, but the random quest generation does frequently push servants to be the last one. With lucky quest gen, I've gotten 500 with all four by day 28 (before the loan payment for that day), but more frequently hitting it around day 42-48. If you keep an open bed slot, you can buy slaves for servant guild requests. Training up the various slaves Amelia requests can be a pain, so I just do the item requests and simple factor quality requests. Unfortunately, in the first few weeks of the game, slaves for servant guild requests will provide less gold compensation than the cost of the slave requested, but that rep is valuable itself. Sex toy is great for maintaining obedience in work camps, and breeder has obvious utility.
>-Did you buy weapons or make your own? [fighting doesn't pay much but weapons R *EXPENSIVE*!] [eg, staffs can cost 1k gold or more]
You will want to do both. In the first 2 weeks, you won't have access to a blacksmith so it's your only option. You will want yourself and your 2nd caster to both have decent staves. It's less important that your fighter be equipped at that point. They exist mostly to stand between you and the goblins while you cast spells. Longer term, you will craft your own weapons for use and buy weapons to disassemble; the latter being a reliable way to obtain rare ingredients like obsidian, adamantine, and the like. Outside of the main questline, you enter dungeons to fulfill guild requests or get rare materials which are otherwise ungatherable. Most notably mythic leather and adamantine.
>Ya she's cute 2 look at, but PTP (Practicality Take Precedence)
Honestly, the game really isn't that tight. I always grab Daisy, and I pick all her classes based on aesthetic principles. Right now she has Pet, Maid, Bard, Cook and Head Girl, next will probably be alchemist, and it doesn't matter that I haven't upgraded any of her factors yet. Though in terms of absolute practicality, as I said earlier: the fighter on the front row is mostly there to stand between you and the goblins and doesn't need gear or training to fulfill that purpose. Stacking bard and the other utility classes can provide practicality in the mid game, and by the end game you should have slaves on every node making mats so abundant you can afford to fully upgrade each individual slave.
>(Milford good source: Grain/WOOD, IRON----& usually closest good source to home. [Inc Travel affects Obed etc] )
Milford is trash. You can just buy grain, wood, and iron in the city, and the travel affecting obedience is just a one time transition tax. Once the slaves arrive, they can use their obedience abilities on each other so they all stay in line. This is as easy as including 2 with the pet class, but having someone with maid or watchdog on site is also handy. If you need extra wood send your slaves to the next town over where they can get silk, which isn't sold in the quantities that you'll need for making magic cloth. Otherwise send them into the forest or the caves for higher end materials. If you have access to the smithy, then you're ready to send people mithril mining. Worker, Foreman, and Trainer classes go a long way to improving efficiency on mithril and ancient bone.