Not really unless you have very low chance to defeat the obstacles. You should always look at the obstacles when you send your expedition (they are listed at the bottom right of the timer window once the expedition has started) and pay attention to what aspects you need for them. 10 guarantees a success.
Expeditions within a city, with one exception, only have a single obstacle, thus they could be finished with just 1 funds spent.
And it becomes a lot easier once you learn how to summon minions.
Protip: don't bother with expeditions until you exhausted both bookshop and auction house. Either you talk to your moth-aspect follower about the evidence (5 moth for reasonable chance to succeed), or you just wait until it expires. Unless the hunter is erratic, they can't upgrade the evidence without Notoriety.
Well, you could do it until the evidence expires, and in fact you only need to avoid generating notoriety (which is generally only created by expeditions unless you try fighting the hunters). In fact, if you have Tenative Evidence and no Notoriety at the board, and don't have a good way to deal with hunter (10-edge minion or poison), the best strategy is to wait until the evidence expires, not risking generating even more notoriety from attempts on hunter's life. Only send minions with 5+ edge if you want a reasonable chance of success. 10 is required for a guaranteed success. Of all things you can use when talking to hunter, I only know several ones that have an effect.
1. Minions. This will send a minion to ambush a hunter.
2. Poison. This will poison and kill a hunter.
3. Dread/Winter lore. Can terrify a hunter, first making it grim (immune to fascination), then turning it mad. It will generate dread too, however, and success in only guaranteed for the highest-level lore, otherwise it turns a hunter into an Idealist (immune to dread). Not advisable as it also generates notoriety and has pretty low chance to succeed.
4. Fascination/Lantern lore. Basically the same as with previous but fascinates the hunter instead of terrifying. It also backfires harder on failure, making a hunter tenatious. Ill-advisable.

From what I see, your next step in learning would be learning how to summon things. Try experimenting with rites, and read what tips the game offers with different combinations. In case you don't find a good combination, we can give you precise recipes.

I appreciate the attempts to explain things.

I don't know what any of that means, moth-aspect followers, 10 aspect followers, obstacles. Expeditions have a bunch of random icons below them, but they just seem to pile up when you put cards down, and they don't really tell you anything in the tool tips. I have some troubles converting people into followers, takes a bit of trial and error to find a ritual that works(wish the 'flash' showing what cards can be used was a little more specific based on what's already on a card). Things like the 30 second memory card don't seem to do anything, flashes on explore but you can't explore with it.

I found the solution to completing expeditions is to have about 8 followers to throw at it, that way you don't have to spend money outside of the initial 2 on it when it asks(one time I had to spend 1 extra even with all my followers). I had some rites but there's no summoning box to use. The thing is, it seems like it's all just more of the same, putting cards on things randomly, getting random cards pop up back, other ones expire. I don't see how summoning is going to make it any more interesting.

I think it would help if some things were automated, especially your job, it feels like I spend half my time putting my job card back into my job slot every minute. It would be better if a card placed there was permanent until replaced.

I hope it doesn't sound rude, but you really need to pay attention to what the game says, otherwise you'd be like a blind man in a labyrinth.
I'll try to explain some concepts.
First of all, please look at the attached picture of Victor. See those icons at the bottom right? They are called aspects. They are clickable, and it's advisable to know the aspects of your cards because in most cases, they are what matter.
See the knife icon? That's an "Edge" aspect. The number 5 nearby represents the power of this aspect. There are 9 aspects in total: Knock, Lantern, Forge, Edge, Winter, Heart, Grail, Moth, Secret Histories.
When you send a minion to attack a hunter, it's his Edge aspect that matters. If you pay attention to what the game says when you try different minions, you'll notice that the description becomes more sure of success the more edge this minion has.
When you send a minion to destroy the evidence, it's Moth aspect that matters.
In case of Expeditions, Obstacles are challenges that your party has to overcome. Each attempt costs one Funds and, if failed, might kill one of the members of your party. If you click on those little icons, you'll see text like "Forge or Heart can help us", or "They can be fought, deceived or seduced". In first case, it directly names the aspects you need to defeat the challenge, otherwise it hints on them (fight = edge, seduce = grail, deceive = moth, which could, once again, be deduced from descriptions of those aspects).
So, when your party meets a challenge that requires, say, Lantern or Forge, the total amount of either aspect defines your chance to succeed. If you have, say, 2 minions that each have 2 lantern then you have 4 lantern and is unlikely to succeed. If you have 2 minions that each have 5 lantern, you have 10 lantern total and will certainly succeed.
Now that you know this, I hope you will examine your followers more thoroughly to know what they can and cannot do. Well, now that you know what aspects are, you might notice that it's those aspects that define the ritual.
Lore and influences have aspects just like cultists do.
In fact, to convert acquaintances into followers, you need a little lore of the same aspect as your cult (the one that you used when creating a cult). To promote them further, you need a total of 7 this aspect from the lore, trappings and cultist itself. Well, while some of the game is random, most of it is not. It's just that you really need to pay attention to see what leads to what.

After a lot of frustration to begin with I'm enjoying it now. I'm taking things slowly this run and started as a Physician to make things easier.

Most of what I have learnt has been through seeing which cards will go into slots and finding out what will happen; probably dangerous but fun.

So I've learnt how to upgrade followers. I even have seers in the aspect of my cult though I would love to get enough lore/influence/ingedients to get a seer in a different aspect. I can deal with menaces and the Hunter hasn't caught me even after creating damning evidence though they did nab a couple of folowers before I worked things out.

I can go on expeditions and open some of the Doors in the Mansus. I think I need a prisoner to enter the next gate and haven't managed to find one of those yet.

I have finally managed to start doing Rites and performed my first summoning. Though I don't know what will happen when its timer runs out. For ages everything I put in the slots didn't give a start button unless it was to give a Minor Victory, even though I thought I had read everything.

It is very addictive though, I kind of think just one more timer and then I see the results and keep on playing :)

Edit - One thing is I still haven't learnt how to translate Fecuine. The hint says something about finding a Rosetta Stone or something deadish. Any non spoilery hints like which expedition I might find the right text or what I need to do to find a tutor would be appreciated

There is a person who can help you. She was known as Theresa when she was still among the mortals. Now she no longer casts a shadow but she can still visit you if you call her properly.
There is a book to help you as well but, unlike said person, you only get it randomly. If you're talking about promoting a follower to 10 - you can only do it with your cult's aspect. You can ask your grail followers to seduce a stranger. Or imprison one of your followers. Edge minions sometimes capture their targets alive, too.
Or you can just ignore this part and pass right to the next door if you have enough lore.

Thank you. Of course I did the usual posting about something on a forum and the thing you need turns up :)

So I turned up the random book to translate shortly after posting here.
I haven't come across Theresa but I haven't done many summoning rites yet

That's a pity but it would probably be overpowered to be able to get a lot of followers to aspect 10

My Hunter turned up Damning Evidence again and I decided to deal with him, using Edge, rather than deal with the evidence using moth and he became a prisoner so I have now seen beyond the Spider Door. Good tip about sending Grail to seduce though - that isn't something I have tried yet

Of course having damning evidence I was trying to get a Favour from authority in case another Hunter turned up before I could deal with it. I forgot to keep an eye on something else and died from Fascination as the cards for both are in the same area of the Mansus

Time to start again with what I now know and hope to get further this time

Once you hire a mercenary and they are shown to your headquarters, who knows what could happen to them? ;-)

I didn't but now I expect they become a prisoner :)

A disapointment.

Totally because I expected more from this kind of game especially inspired by sunless sea.

The writing is okay but not amazing. The Ui has nothing special, you stare in front f a table without any spectacular effects. There's an insane grinding for skills. The lack of automation for simple tasks such as working is a pain (you almost spend half of your time putting jobs cards and skills in action... really REALLY annoying because you must earn money to play).

But... the most disturbing for me:

It's moving the cards !!

Seriously you have to reorganise your cards all the time especially health, reason and passion.
You use one. It goes coolding down near the others and most of the time push them "few grids" away.

Some rewards windows puts havoc into your organisation just like cards but even worse.

Add to that a brutal difficulty with no archives about cards combinations during "your actual game session" and a pretty limited sound track.

I advise to go look for something else especially on the card game genre.

I was far more pleased by "SYSTEM CRASH", and excellent cyber punk card game I had the pleasure to play on Steam.

You found these in Sunless Sea, and System Crash?

Pro-tip about card-moving: 'collect' attempts to put the card down where the card was earlier dragged from. If there's a card there now, then stuff happens. If you manage things so the spot is still open, then everything should be fine.

I am 25 hours in, about 10 hours on the current attempt, and I feel like this game has really weird loop going on. At first it felt like grinding against an unknown goal, which was not fun, like at all. As many people who never went past that stage already noted, the game felt obtuse, full of busywork and unnececcarily mercyless; you get new cards and don't know what to do with them and levelling up your cult while avoiding the perils of the system felt like a real drag.

Then you figure out how you can do stuff and the game becomes amazing. You discover the Mansus, do your first rites, upgrade your followers and feel like you make progress. You learn how to avoid every possible failstate reliably, get rid of Restlessness, Dread, Hunters, you name it. You look foward to penetrating the curtain and discovering how deep the game actually can go. That part was awesome. It satisfies a certain kind of morbid, occult fascination and suddenly doing stuff has a purpose, a masterplan, so to speak.

And then... magic's gone. And you realize why the game was so obtuse with its mechanics. Right now I feel like I pretty much know how the stuff works behind the scenes: how to manage rites to get what I want, how to upgrade my cards, exploration becomes easy because of I have disciples for every possible aspects. I know what the stuff I get when I visit the Mansus is for. I have yet to penetrate the Peacock Door, yet can make an educated guess what will await me on the other side and what profit I might gain from it. Now the game feels like a grind again, sure, I have lore to level, but I already know what that is for. I have places to go, and rites to do, but I know the ends.

Now I feel like all that's left is grinding enough occult tools and books in expeditions to maximize my aspect cards and to figure out how to combine the stuff (probably Lantern, I guess, because my goal seems to be connected to that aspect) on what verb to reach my final goal. It's not as bad as the beginning, but seeing the mechanics past the flavor-text definitely hurts the experience again. I am not sure how to avert this - the devs definitely tried to push back that particual moment as far as possible by offering the least amount of tutorial/assistance - for good reason - but I feel like the core framework makes this problem inevietable.

All in all, I still had many good hours with Cultist Simulator and I will certainly push through. I still have to figure out how to summon stuff (I guess summons are pretty much glorified cult members with more aspect, except if there is a mechanic that hasn't even been hinted at, which I seriously doubt) and what to do to fulfill my desire and I really look foward to that. But what this game really needs to go beyond what it can currently achieve are some mechanics that aren't simply "how to get rid of bad cards" and "get a wide assortment of different card-types that have a high value of a certain aspect".

I am not going to spoil you anything but there are summons with special properties. They have been hinted at, though.
But there's no denial that there's not much going on in terms of mechanics. Flavor text is the main course here and I sincerely hope that game mechanics didn't divert too much of your attention from it.

I think the design is so fresh and ingenious ;D
I can't really see any problems. It was a little slow going at first but this last playthrough I am engaging in some pretty legitimate deviousness and occultery, ascending the Mansus and getting people killed, controlling and being controlled, fretting and scheming and ambulating blindly in dreamlike confusion and messing with powers I dont understand so I think generally the game is starting to work as intended so cheers to that, oh developer ;)