---The good things---
Difficulty scaling:
Despite there being a lot of gamers out there who claim to want tougher enemies without just increasing the numbers, and despite this game having that (with the goods dictating how difficult encounters are via modifiers), its a shame no one seems to notice it in all these reviews I'm seeing.

In my opinion, its actually pretty lenient in terms of difficulty once you understand how it works. The enemy difficulty scales up based on the road difficulty, as well as the quantity and rarity of goods you're travelling with, and the goods you're hauling also apply modifiers to combat. If you want an easier time just haul 9/10 items to avoid the full stack debuff.

Travel:
I think I read a review that said the game was lacking in travel options. The game has multiple different ways to speed up travel.

You can re-use 3+ roads you've cleared if your cargo difficulty isn't 2 or more. This feature alone makes travelling to dead end locations more tolerable as instead of fighting there and fighting on the way back, you can just skip the return fight provided you're not overloaded with goods.

It also has quick battles. Quick battles let you skip the whole walking portion that the game has for travelling down the road and do all the battles in one calculation. The thing is, your chances of having 100% success relies on how difficult the road is considered. There is a way to boost your calculated power for quick battles. But that requires players to have found the altar in the ruins or other means of boosting their quick battle party score. The thing at that spoiler tag also increases other combat and non-combat things and can be found early on provided you're not impatient with exploring.

The mole people let you travel to certain destinations. In the beginning they will only take you roughly 3 towns away to a single location.

You can do a drinking game at two different locations (that I have found so far) to end up at random locations you've already discovered if you get blackout drunk.

Trading:
You can make a trading chain multiple towns long in order to sell an item for 30% more after you sell in 6 towns.

You can go the traditional route of buying big value items and delivering them to where they sell best.

Travelling to dead end middle of nowhere locations to sell goods isn't as much of an issue because of the travel system.

This point relates to both making money and reputation building. If you sell certain goods like industrial goods to a town demanding industrial goods, you will gain rep. However, you also gain I think 1/5th of that rep towards neighbouring locations. This means just by trading in towns that are adjacent to dead end towns in the middle of nowhere you won't have to spend as much time building up rep in them.

And this point relates less to making money but more towards gaining experience for your trader. You can sell goods that you just purchased back to the trader you bought them from for a slight profit. Like fish. So fish up some and sell them to the trader. But remember to negotiate before selling.

Eventually, you get a cat companion named Rombus who you can send off to sell things for you to earn money. Although, its pretty easy to forget he is available to sell goods because its done through the cart menu and other issues related to remembering he exists that I can't really go into without probably going over the character limit for a review.

---The things that need improving---
The game would lock up my laptop if I was playing with the game maximized and alt tabbed out a couple times as I was playing. I'm playing on Linux on my potato of a laptop and haven't been able to check if this same issue is happening to my desktop. Anyways, to get around this issue I've been playing with the game in windowed mode. Now I have to deal with sometimes clicking outside the game and then having to bring the game back into focus. But at least its no longer freezing my laptop.

Sleep is for the rich. I mean it. If you're sleeping you have to pay money for your mercenaries to stand guard and increase your chances of avoiding theft to 100%. And you can't sleep during the day to make time pass and hope that rain passes by by the time you wake up. So, sleeping is primarily done if you don't think you can take on a road that is 1-2 levels too high due to night time difficulty increases and youd rather pay about 40 gold to ensure that the delivery makes it to its destination intact. In the beginning its a substantial amount but later on its chump change.

When travelling on the roads at 3X speed some of the encounters in between battles would disappear without letting me choose an option. This doesn't seem to happen on 2X speed. Oh well, at least now I have the time to click the plants in the background after visiting Eaton and click traps on the ground.

There is no confirmation button for selling goods that are no longer in demand. If you have the demand tab open you can see whether you're at your limit. But this might be what players are running into if they are selling goods and still end up being poor. Each town only buys 2 stacks of goods that are in demand. Unless you have an ability to sell 1 more stack. Anyways, if you try to sell 3 stacks without negotiating the price on the third stack, you're selling them at a far lower price than intended. About 1/10th of the price instead of for a profit. Also, its not readily apparent that you need to click the white dialogue looking box to negotiate prices before selling your third stack of goods, or that negotiating is even an option. It would probably be better to put a button that says "negotiate" instead of expecting players to press the trader's dialogue box. I wonder how many players have never negotiated due to this UI decision and just pressed sell.

Mercenaries only need 10k exp to reach max experience. Their level is separate from the experience gained in combat and requires scrolls to level up. Or silver diamonds from your trader levelling up let you level up mercenaries without scrolls. Experience determines the stats they start a battle with. Level determines the stats they have outside of the experience start of battle buffs. While this makes it slightly easier to see that two of the same units at the same level have the same stats, or slightly easier to compare different units' stats without all the start of battle stats muddying up things, its not the traditional way to display a unit stats as an amalgamation of things that affect their stats.

Some unit abilities need more explanation on how they work. Like the rogue's nocturnal reflexes says "Greatly increases attack speed at night". Great. How much does their attack speed go up? Also, does the dps displayed on their stats page include or not include crits? Maybe the dev should include an estimated dps with crits? And an estimated dps after experience start of stats buffs are included.

The other issue I have is that rogues are green quality and they seem to do more damage in a fight than some blue or purple quality units. But I will say, their hp is horrible. So they tend to die fairly quickly if they do get hit. Making them far less useful if the enemy can take a few hits. Or ambushes the party.

---Conclusion---
All in all, a fun game to play. And it has a refreshing new approach to trading in a game. It has some flaws, but they're not gamebreaking.

I'm definitely not gonna refund, game has great art and good systems. But just of the tip of the iceberg : Game telling you "you best be in a safe location if you don't wanna lose progress" or wild boars asking money for passage are some of many things that makes it hard to get used too I guess. Also lack of tooltips on a lot of hard to grasp icons at first, lack of balance early game or at least not explaining why etc

Feels like they rushed 1.0 or lacked feedback.

Still gonna enjoy it a lot I can tell and Mostly positive feels a bit harsh

Didn't think I would get so much value from 5 dollars.