I already said several times and literally implied it in this very post that my character is unoptimized and gimped. Sure, if you min-max everything, go for ultimate cheese in every situation, and somehow find a way to make tons of money right out of the gate (though I'm not sure how easy this would be without a large amount of meta-knowledge) things are going to go easier for you. My point is that someone who has never played the game before and hasn't re-rolled their character 5 times isn't going to be having piss-easy encounters.
I'm not talking about bug-abusing or anything like that. Just plain, straight playing the game as it present itself. Selling all the crap and buying only what will boost you the most is a common approach here, is it not?
I don't know what's your RPG background of course but in Encased you don't have to have any meta-knowledge to build a min-maxed character. Especially if you've played similiar games before, like, you know where was something about water chip problems and such. Because you can see derivatives at the char creation screen and decide what's more important. I've listed what I condidered the most important and went for it the first time (perseption/deftness/fortune) and now I went for same stats even if I went for heavy non-stealth route this time.
There's an important nuance however: Encased don't provide perk list at the char creation which is really bad: F1/F2 didn't provide it because it was expected that player would read the manual beforehand while these guys either blindly aped it or handwaved with the wiki in mind (players who want to know without starting themselves will go there and read, idk). Anyway, any player who did play similiar games will want to examine the list before rolling ahead for real. If your point was that an RPG newb can corner himself on tactical - sure, I agree but I thought we're on rpgcodex? By the way, the game allows to change the difficulty on a fly - that's how hardcore it is.
The companions are not a pain in the ass in the least, and come with a strong focus in one thing or another. Got the melee meat shield who beats ass and the energy weapon girl with great medical skills. They've changed things significantly, but haven't totally changed the tide of battle.
Just keep in mind that solo chars can (and should, obviously) have +75% base XP. Means that by having companions you aren't necessarily gain power, it's hard to say what's better (I think solo is).
Clearly you have a big hate-boner for the game. I'm not trying to convince you to play it. Nor am I saying that the game is a ultra-challenging masterpiece throughout. I'm just saying that reports that it's "piss-easy" are hyperbole. It's got decent challenge to it, unless again, you have a ton of meta-knowledge and are min-maxing from the very beginning.
I don't. I could give that vibe of course but that's just because I was writing about things I consider more objective rather than I would describe my impressions about the setting, the writing etc etc. That's why my feadback was negative: combat aspect seems quite shitty here and the base role-play system is wonky, messy and derivative. Anywa, I'm playing it right now again and maybe will write some more impessions once I get to the parts that I haven't seen.
Why wouldn't I min-max from the very beginning if I was going to pick the highest difficulty? I didn't know what to expect so I went for a sneaky thievy rat but then quickly became clear it's a total cakewalk. You loot, then you loot, and then you loot again while this crazy-ass game gives you XP for it. You easily aquire some decent gear and then kill everything from stealth. Now with non-stealth approach it's harder in a sense that you can actually stumble at too strong enemies but that doesn't mean the game's hard. Not at all.