mushroom_ff: I just noticed the same thing. Just finished my first game. Closer to the end game, I had two groups divided up exploring and completing quests, about 6 - 8 in each group. After having trouble, I combined both of them, and it made things so much easier.

The meat shield idea did help in my last quest, but also getting blessings from quests in social skills helped a lot also. It did seem that you got so many of them.

Either way, greatly enjoyed playing it.

mothwentbad: It's sort of unbelievable how much strength in numbers you get late-game, especially when you aren't playing on one of the more restrictive handsize caps. Normal is unlimited, and Hard is 16, which is still a ton.

Many of the early fights can be nail-biters, but late-game, if you can take a Social challenge and just throw bodies at the problem, then you can just tank everything and bury your highest damage characters at the very end under a pile of meat shields. Fighting it out physically this way would lead to some serious drawbacks, but the end-game hands you a lot of Social solutions and it also hands out a generous quantity of Social buffs as rewards for taking Social challenges. You can just ride that snowball to the end. (Maybe some other gods deny you the option or something, I don't know.)

You might need to max out Cabbage Patches to get there.

This would be a much different game with one-of-each-building and lower max handsize turned on in the difficulty options. I'm not sure if I should be playing Custom, since I tend to assume the default options will be sort of balanced, but Hard looks like it's going to have no harder of an end-game than Normal did. "Normal-and-a-half" with a 12-card limit might make for a harder endgame than Hard.