[WARNING: Posts from this individual tend to get longer and less coherant in direct correlation to how long it's been since said person last slept and if said person slept during the day, or the night. It's been a long night.]
Sorta'. From what I understand, if you're really trying to streamline things, you take combat-centric skills for the first bit of the game, until you can reliably get a good chunk of cash from sewer missions (or anywhere, I suppose, but sewers have pretty much the best time/reward ratio.). Then you go hunt down all the trainers and chat them up. Shortly thereafter, your skills (as in,
all of them) are at least in the teens. 'Boutique' quests become more or less trivial.
The thing with GH1 -- it's quite different in GH2 -- is that you can every-skill it without much trouble, at all. XP is for stats and talents, not skills -- skills are where you funnel the millions in cash you're raking in killing alligators and assassins in droves. You only put the absolute minimum amount of XP you can manage into any skill, with anything else you can scrounge going into the exponential cost of stat improvement.
The real MVP 'pick me up' skills (though perhaps not the tricks, just what's needed to pull 'em off.) are dodge and <preferred SF:0 weapon skill> (probably heavy weapons/small arms or armed combat -- plasma cannon, for the LINE and infinite ammo, or deathwings, for the infinite ammo and every-turn attack capability that comes from carrying six or seven of them.), not the mecha skills -- excepting Mecha Engineering, which is probably the MVP Knowledge skill. At least one KN skill is, of course, requisite for anything along these lines. Might as well take the one that's most consistently useful.
And that's not the only way to do it, either. Performance can let you bypass quite a bit of the combat aspect that would normally be needed to jumpstart cash-based skill training, if you push it hard enough. It's definitely slower and less entertaining for the player, but it's possible to get that first few hundred thousand just singing to people, go chat up th'trainers, and then it's off to th'races.
The real issue, from what I understand, with th'non-core skills (i.e. not combat or facilitating combat) is what it's been for a while now: Lack of content. This isn't to say GH1 lacks content, of course it doesn't, but extensive usage of non-core skills -- especially for equitable and repeatable reward, compared to the core skills -- has always been comparatively sparse.
Some of this just stems from what GH
is, first and foremost -- a Giant Robot themed game. Mecha media pretty much invariably has combat -- or at least th'giant robots, for which combat is bloody close to the only reason for their creation -- as its centerpoint and primary attraction. That's what makes it a mecha-related piece of work instead of space opera or more generic science fiction. Sci-fi can have giant robots, but a Giant Robot themed peice of work is going to focus on, well, giant robots -- and the themes that have traditionally accompanied them. I'll link to th'post where JH mentioned as primary influences for GH a bit after I post this, just in case you've not seen it before.
All that being said! This doesn't mean that Gearhead in general
should go down that sort of path, nor does it mean it
is. The only one who knows precisely (or at least in general) which sort of direction GH is going is JH. Mr. H has done a fair amount, already, to render luxury skills more viable in GH2 than they were in GH1, which I'd guess at least partially hints that GH2 may, eventually, end up more friendly toward 'slice of life' playing than GH1 was... I guess, anyway. Signs point to probably not...
But hey. Source is open, mods are welcome, and the only limit is th'imagination and patience of people willing to take advantage of that.
Anyway. Take everything about with grain of salt, and advisement that it's 6 AM here and I woke up around 11 AM yesterday. I'm really too tired to think straight, so I rambled... aimlessly. Looking at all that, I can't really figure out if I had a point, or was just stream-of-consciousnessing it. Probably the latter.
Last point, re: Buru Buru. Shaka cannons do everything you need to get off the ground, and nova pistols stuck in every spare hole in your machine wrecks stuff in the early-mid game. The real problem with Burus is the base MV/TR penalty... but you only need one to headshot a few mecha for th'loots. Shouldn't be a problem if you're actually wangatta -- the quality of opponent should be such that a simple 5 in piloting and <whatever> will let cheerfully collect downed machinery to sell for however much you need for your preferred machine. If you're too weak to handle what your rep's thrown at you in a Buru Buru (though, if your reps that high, you've prooobably got some (several dozen) spare mecha sitting around, somewhere.), just retreat from a few missions, etc, etc. It's pretty possible to skimp by after a disaster even with pretty minimal combat skills. I remember getting a 10 reflex, 3 or so piloting dude who'd gotten an eye shot out (and mech destroyed, o'course) back off the ground. It was fun
I'm seeing more as my mind wanders how a tightly-themed character that wasn't trying to game the system could have problems, though. Not having M.Engy (or any knowledge skill at all), not having SF:0 or SF:2 fighting skills... that would cause trouble. Definitely a more frustrating game if you're trying to do that... but as sorta' mentioned, you're going against the game's theme if your character's not some sort of death machine. All the main-character giant robot pilots are, one way or another. There's not exactly anything
wrong with that, but the expected consequence is, well, expected. Th'fixin' would be in creating content, which unfortunately for GH1 -- which is finished, more or less -- is likely going to come solely from the players. Such coding shenanigans are beyond a poor fellow like m'self.
EDITS: GH's visual influences:
http://www.gearheadrpg.com/forum/index.php/topic,790.0.html34 pages into JH's post list, I find it! The other 'here there be
dragonsinfluences post:
http://www.gearheadrpg.com/forum/index.php/topic,1047.msg11489.html#msg11489
