If you make a fighter who has weapon focus in the weapon you want he will start with it. so it will cost you 100gp at the start of the game to make a fighter companion and get the weapon you want.
While the suggestion is appreciated, it is missing a few points:
1) You may be referring to an old cost, the current cost is 500 gp for level 1 mercs. Kind of expensive for a weapon that isn't even masterwork.
2) There is no weapon focus in slings. It seems that they just don't exist.
3) Even if you create a fighter with weapon focus in darts, so that your druid MC has *a* ranged option, you need to contend with the fact that this will be his only ranged option until the end of the game. A non-masterwork weapon can carry you up to level 3, maybe 4, but without "magic weapon", "masterwork transformation", and the crafting feats, there is no way to make the weapon relevant past that.
The game is lacking a number of things. Some are an intentional workaround to bugs (such as fact that you have almost no options for wizard scrolls, which is due to the fact that, if you run out of unknown spells, you can no longer level up, since you have to pick two unknosn spells as part of your levelup), and some others are sacrifices made to get the game out at all (like the lack of a crafting system).
Even so, the game needs more options than it currently has.
At the very least it needs a better selection from merchants, as well as an inventory that gets *updated and replenished* as you level up; ideally, it would have a full crafting system, or at least an option to order custom made items.
There are mods that allow crafting, but they break the GOG update system. Even so, the fact that the modding community could do it suggests that throwing some money at experienced modders might get the problem solved for good. Doesn't even need to be a lot of money: many modders are young folks who are looking at a career in the development industry, and being able to list a published game as part of your resume makes a really good impression on recruiters.
Sure there are QA issues with outsourcing features, but let's look at the game as is: it is 25 GB in size (when it looks like it should fit in 4 with room to spare), has lengthy loading screens on things that really should be snap-your-fingers fast (such as the entire kingdom management load-unload-reload mess), it keeps one CPU core fully occupied at all times, *including when paused*, and literally goes in slow motion on busy scenes, regardless of gpu usage, presumably because of the same issue that keeps the aforementioned core fully occupied.
I think the devs have their work cut out for them for a number of years before this becomes a properly polished game., and outsourcing a few simple features would probably help
Adding manpower to a late project does indeed make it later, but there is such a thing as an embarassingly parallel problem, and some of these game's problems really are that embarassing.
I trust that optimisation will come, eventually, and I'll keep playing on the 80%-finished game until then becuse the 80% that *is* there is something I *want* to play, but to be perfectly blunt, this is an alpha that was released as 1.0 so that it would be released instead of scrapped. It's better than the alternative, which would have been not having a game, but only just.