Thanks for the feedback, yeah, i've never been happy with the balance overall and it's something i want to address when i have the chance to get back into the game :-)

Well, I've been mulling over a few ideas in regards to those ones, mainly since you already have to put in the effort of training the Hungry Bandit's and they are pretty much the quantity over quality type, maybe just make their dialogue a straight up "Will you feed me?" "Yes" and they join. The Dust Bandit's can still be the more picky ones, but maybe toss the meat option and rice option and go for the tougher stuff like Meat Wrap's and Gohan's. I was also thinking that maybe items could be your later requirement like needing the Holy Nation's bible in your inventory just to talk to them, Shek's (now that I understand them better) actually make sense with needing higher stats, Ninja warriors could need someone who "lives in the shadows" (Stealth stat higher than 50) to understand them, and so on.

Also, is it possible to make them consume the item they ask for, since I notice the Hungry and Dust bandits don't consume them, they just require them in the inventory? It might be good to make the tougher ones require some sort of offering, like Inquisitors might require something like limbs off a Shek or other race which get consumed upon recruitment so you can't just chain recruit a bunch of high level characters (figured them out and now my army is all but unstoppable). At the very least, it would make us work for our army whether we want to train easily recruitable low levels or go hunting for specific items for the high level stuff.

That's pretty much ideally what i'd like to go for. When I began i just used chance gates, then moved to criptic loops (broken skeleton) then items, then stats (shek), and last branching choice dialogues (samurai). Having an item or an evolving dialogue that you can't just memorise would be ideal, and might be possible, but I also have to work within the limitations of the editor. On a side note, actually dust bandits are supposed to be cash requirement, however there is an old long standing bug that makes them keep using the lower tier food rec and i cant' as yet figure it out (oh well)