Weapons sell for less, although it's not a 75% reduction. It'll be harder to get rich, though.
It still runs like ass for me, but I'm using a first-gen i7 and the game has always been CPU bound. I'm running into a different issue right now though, clothing models are all artifacting pretty badly regardless of what my graphics settings are.
We'll probably see a proper optimization patch along with or after the final map release.
My last game, I had just watched Seven Samurai, so I took the start that gives you five guys but no cash, scraped together funds, hired two more, and wandered the desert in search of justice. I named them all after the samurai in the movie and gave them poses and weapons to match. Because they clearly needed a village to defend, I eventually hired a bunch more peasants, put them in a peasant squad, and set up an outpost in the blue sand area east of the Great Desert. Incidentally, that area is also infested with Beak Things, who did an excellent job of regularly killing off tax collectors who tried to visit me. I didn't make much money out there, but it was self-sufficient and I got it to grow pretty big. With constant attacks from the wildlife, my original peasants were all at 40 or so toughness by the time I decided to abandon the town and move into the Great Desert. I had also ended up with so many peasants that it took multiple squads to manage them - crafters went in peasants, farmers had their own squad, and I had a bunch of "freed" slaves that I made keep their shackles on. They worked the mines and refineries and did all the hauling. I also gathered a couple of skeletons to use as monks and set up a robodojo.
I should actually revert to the last version and take some pictures of the town I had. It wasn't finished, I wanted all the peasants to have small houses and the slaves to live in metal shacks, and there was a shop and a bar. I used the dev menu to redirect a nearby road into town, so I had a fair number of slavers, bandits, caravans, and armies wandering through and buying rum at the bar or attacking me. The town didn't actually have any iron, so I set up a slave camp just outside but close enough that it was counted as part of the main settlement, posted some guards outside and made slaves mine and refine iron, then would manually use a runner to ferry the plates into town. Even got it looking nice and squalid, that's the 4th pic in the OP.
There were a few adventures, mainly revolving around theft. I had a glorious final stand on a massive bridge deep into cannibal territory, where Shek bandits with massive swords kept swarming my squad. A few people would sleep to heal while the others defended them. Occasionally some weak cannibals would sweep through or bonedogs would attack. It took two days to slowly retreat across the bridge to the lab we were there for in the first place. I had Kikuchiyo sneak in and promptly discovered why it was referred to on the map as "Suspicious Lab". We got out fast.
There was also that time Kikuchiyo ended up being followed and constantly guarded by several dozen ancient skeletons whose programming was bugged. Tried to use them as meat shields for an open attack on the Free Empire armory, but sadly it didn't work out. I retrieved a few that weren't killed and tried to use the prisoner recruitment mod so I could get more robomonks, but that didn't work either, so I had them hang around my settlement until we abandoned it. I locked them in cages to sit there forever until a new master comes along.
