Brolo

I think karma is a good idea, it just needs some tweaking and balancing. I think it's realistic because if you go around killing everyone, the colonial powers aren't going to look kindly on this. So sending out more patrols, building more forts etc is pretty much what happened historically.. Along with using encounters as pretexts to wipe out more tribes & generally engage in a bit of genocide. That was the reality, and the steady flow of settlers backed by military and militias is why lands were ultimately lost.

Out of interest.. how are you playing? So assuming you're a lone brave doing all the wetwork and not relying on you tribesmen? Or do you free enough people from prison camps to fill your camps? For me, keeping karma high means having people to populate my territory, and looting gives me stuff to equip them, or trade with the traders.

Killing guards is kinda easy, at least compared to not killing them and intimidating them instead. There's a fairly hefty penalty in terms of karma & potential SP loss for killing, along with the enemy reacting to killing sprees. Which I think is kinda neat. The main thing I'd like to 'cheat' is day length, so maybe allowing an hour real-time per in-game day, or making that adjustable. 7 Days to Die is an example where we can tweak the day/night length to adjust difficulty. Currently I think time pressure is too forced, especially with a kinda 'iron-man' mode by default meaning if you rush into trying to clear a camp, it's easy to die, lose stuff then be on the back foot trying to slow the enemy expansion. Latest patch added a ton of weapon parts & blueprints to make choice of weapons (and better quality) more available, but first find your blueprint.. I guess for me, I'd like more of an 'easy' mode, mainly because I'm more of a casual gamer and tend to get overrun before getting to any mid-late game stuff. So pacing is challenging given the need to get SP and loot to gear up your warriors so they can survive bear hunts to get mats to upgrade camps etc. Balance looks like it's being reviewed & tweaked though.