HTML - Fort of Chains [v1.8.4.0] [Darko]

I liked how much complexity are in a text based games that usually are just words, some pictures and music at best

But no, here we have a mini map that get updated when the fort get new buildings ; and even if there are some parts that can be improved, i am giving 5 stars because as someone who is trying to develop a text based too, i am surprised how all of this was possible in twine and sugarcube.

I can't bring myself to rate this game as average, obviously someone has put some man hours into this and it shows.

It simulates a certain game without the trash engine of Rags. Or the slowdown of another similar game built in java. It is unfortunately shallow as a puddle.


Not that enjoyment for these features and tasks isn't valid, I can play the Rags version of this for days so obviously I'm gonna jump on this.

I do have concerns over how strong your slavers are, how the fort building is handled, and a few minor things that irk me.

But overall its a good game.

Fort of Chains has, functionally, a front half and a back half. The front half is solid, the back half is a mess.

The front half is a pretty basic "Make the numbers go up" game where you take yourself and a handful of procgen slavers and take quests that have a 50% chance of earning you some cash and a 50% chance of not earning you some cash. Pretty quickly you will reach 100% great success rate because the numbers went up.

The back half, well, you have a 50% chance of making a bit more cash than usual and a 50% chance of crippling your entire operation for up to several in-game months. When the numbers go up you might hit a 51% success rate. Some events just cripple your operation for months at a time, success or failure (hello fairy event, hello master light training).

It's particularly unfortunate because the game has a lot of QOL features that could be used to support having a lot of slavers around to mitigate the risk of late-game events, but the game puts a really hard cap on the max 'active' slavers and makes you micromanage your 'retired' slavers if you want to maximize your odds at a late-game event. That's to say nothing of the mess of a gacha system that is the procgen slavers.

Takes forever to get to the management part. Just grind the same 5 quests to build the fort because every little thing requires a separate building, then build the training buildings, then build the "entertainment" buildings, then give up on all of this because just doing quests pays 100 times more, barely requires any preparation and the whole slavery thing feels like an afterthought.

Then it has these duty rooms, for pimps and doctors for example, and people on these duties require correct traits and high level stats to have any chance of success at their job. So ideally you'd have to waste a bunch of time on recruitment and then grind their levels but in the end it's all a waste of time because apparently after 4 years (every turn is a week) they become too old and retire so you have to do all of this again (I might be wrong but I'm not gonna keep playing to find out).

Meanwhile the slave training part is just picking 3 people and hoping that they have high enough stats to level up a slave. If it worked, now the girl makes 50 more gold per turn, cool. Or we could just send a team on some low level quest and make a 1000 gold with zero risk. Not like FC is balanced, but at least it's fun and you feel like a ruler instead of some pleb with 10 more people on your team just like you.

I really like the trait system, makes characters unique, even if it's unbalanced. Having unique characters and quest lines is nice. I like the fort building part but having 40 buildings for 10 people is absurd.

It could be salvaged but now the game is finished and "mods will fix it". Will they though?

Version: v1.8.3.0

The more i have played this game, the more i realise many features are pointless, the sex is basically meaningless and cookie cutter, the building and upgrades feel either useless or underpowered and the events feels bloated with words.
But even despite all that, i have enjoyed this game and its sad, but it could have been so much more if it wasnt suffering from feature creep.

Came for the slave training, stayed for... Wait, I came for the slave training. Where is it?

This is what I really don't like in a lot of adult management sims. In almost all of them, in fact. It seems like their creators don't know how to make a compelling slave training game, and instead pour efforts into every single possible aspect to compensate, except enriching the training and/or hunting experience.

In this particular game, slave training is reduced to a) picking a slave b) picking a training course c) assigning a team of 3 slavers (pick the best stats, duh) d) reading what the RNG has decided was the outcome, basically success/fail. That's it, repeat with the next course. How is this supposed to be fun or at least fap-worthy? How? For that matter, how is the "questing" experience supposed to be engaging? Same steps again, and again, and again.

Without an elaborate training process, which I consider to be the core of a slavery-themed game, I see absolutely no point to progress ingame. Yeah, I can see some numbers rising, more slavers in my employ, more levels, more gold, more... stuff I did not ask for. More 3rd party art. Yay.

Two stars for effort, since there is a lot of aforementioned stuff, but I for one did not enjoy any of it. Maybe someone else will.

Once upon a time, this started as a somewhat unbalanced, but pretty fun slaver camp management game; didn't rate it back then, but would have given 4 stars (diamond in the rough).

Since, the game has been madly and absurdly over-tuned.

Stats are now more balanced, but the price the devs were far too happy to pay was having some seriously weird and illogical traits (e.g. being attentive makes you sup-par at sex, because... you actually try to find her G spot, I guess? And I'm not sure what so-called "logic", other than bone-headed balancing, could be behind doms being inept at understanding the world).

Yet slaver generation hasn't been balanced, like ever, at all. You can roll a super-god main with a near-perfect stat line and a half-dozen of the more useful traits in the game, complemented by an elite group of starting slavers that has two magic masters and a dragonkin war god; or you can roll, much much much more likely, a full list of sucky useless meatbag potential starting slavers that doesn't even include a single one with mechanically redeeming features. Seriously, WTF is even the point of over-tuning like mad in so many places if you can't be fucking arsed to do any balancing, at all, in one of the places where it most matters? (The same holds true for slaves, needless to say.)

Effective fort-building is an absolute chore (though that's totally optional, honest, never mind the game is so over-tuned that not going for every small stat bonus is a fairly bad idea).

The sheer number of forbiddingly difficult (particularly for sucky useless meatbags) super-rare assignments that can only be found once every in-game decade or so makes No Haven look like a stroll in the park serving you everything on a silver platter (yes, this includes most of the assignments that might alter your slave(r)s' traits in way that make them slightly less sucky useless meatbags).

Well, at least using the back button and save scumming are easy. I shouldn't have to say that like it's a redeeming feature.

Even in early incarnations, the game was a marathon, not a sprint, but at least it was a fun marathon. This? Too many (arguably good at their core) ideas implemented in ways to make it a marathon chore, unfortunately. It's probably fun as the Dark Souls of slave management games, but that's a concept I can't even.

Unfortunately, as the diamond got polished, it started showing cracks. And coming back to it a couple of months later, seeing nothing has been done to mend the cracks, made me realize just how big they truly are.

Version: v1.7.0.4

All in all a pretty good text-only based management. Although it does feel a bit empty when it comes to mid and late game, but thats mainly because the game is still pretty early into its development.

Very addicting and fun, though hard to explain why.

The gameplay consists of you managing your fort at the start of each week by deciding what tasks you want your "employees" to do, then skipping to the start of the next week and seeing/reading the results. The outcome of nearly every task depends on the skills and traits of your slavers and sometimes the slaves. Their skills will determine the success/failure chance which either reward or penalize you. The traits seem to be more important though since they determine the critical success and disaster chance, the former giving greater and often unique rewards while the latter resulting in more devastating losses. It's a very interesting and fun system to me where you can play it safe by maximizing chance of regular success or gambling for a greater win but with the chance of failure. That's the main game.

There's also the base building, which I spend almost as much time planning as the tasks, but the game tells you it isn't too important and doesn't offer too much of an advantage, which is a shame because I spend so much time designing the layout and would like a greater reward for my efforts.

There's lots of reading with some images sprinkled around to help with your imagination, but that's it. The writing is very fun to read though, and despite characters not really having an actual image to attribute to them, I still get really attached to my slavers since their traits can affect the writing, interactions, and even cause some unique events. It's kinda like personalities in Dwarf Fortress, but focusing on quality over quantity since it's not always just flavor text. Your company, while committing heinous acts against the world constantly, are a family who look after each other, and the game really reinforces that feeling.

There's some issues like grammar and spelling errors, and the game gets confused about how to refer to characters fairly often. The game is missing some quality-of-life features that make it more annoying to do certain tasks, but no game-breaking bugs...

EXCEPT THE UNDO BUTTON.

It is way to easy to save-scum and roll back your turn to get a more positive outcome from missions and tasks. There should be like an Iron Man mode where it's disabled along with manual saving. Maybe I just need better self control, but it's hard when you're constantly tempted when shit like losing a 99% success chance and losing a slaver happens and the button to redo it is right-fucking-there. I don't think it should be taken out completely, but there should be a "hard-mode" where that shit gets disabled.

Other than that, great game. I love the freedom you have. I got an angel as a slave and decided to corrupt him, and when I didn't like his personality I later transferred his mind with someone else and recruited the new guy in the angel's body. It was really cool.

Graphics

There is basic graphic that is provided or you can use your own graphics in custom.

Gameplay

The game is challenging for the first time but once you got used to it and got some time spent on the personnel the game slowly start to get easier but still things can go sour for you so the excitement is still there. There are rare quests that are hidden and you need to go through the building the right building and having the right people with the right connections. You rarely got bored there is something you can look forward too and the challenge still there. Even if you're high level there is always another mission that are always far out of reach for you a reason to grow.

Mostly right personnel, character races, background, stat, traits, equipment, and perk also put in effects so you can min max the perfect team to get the perfect results but even then things does happen.

The game relied on mostly text but the text storylines are good.

Sound :

There is no sound or music.

System requirments :

The game doesn't demand too much of computer power I can still run it and you can fine tune the settings for the graphics as you can put your custom character picture inside.

Additional notes and points :

The game is modifiable you can create quests, you can put your own custom picture for your characters, To me this is the plus also the feature of new game plus that you can play again after you finish your first round if you choose to retire. Also I have to mention this that it have also the option to play as a submissive / slave leader for the group to me that is exciting.

A light weight game that you can fine tune in settings , or make your own quests, or put your own graphics to custom it. To me this is the very plus plus of this game.

Version Reviewed: v1.7.0.4

Overview: Balance dozens of stats to most efficiently run your sex slave bandit organization.

Story: It is a management game but there are a few plot threads that are expressed through a series of missions. One of the minor downsides is that since any mission can be failed you might have to restart a mission chain a few times to get the story. Otherwise most of the storylines are short snippets that are fairly dry.

Gameplay: The base gameplay loop is you take a mission, assign some of your workers (slavers) to the mission and then the game makes a roll based on the outcome to determine if you get money, slaves, injuries, items, etc... Each worker has a number of basic stats (that you can adjust what they get on level-up) as well as a good number of secondary stats that may help or hinder their effect on a mission. Your slaves also have stats, which you can add to with training. There is a base management aspect where you place buildings in your fort and manage the adjacency bonuses, as well as jobs you can assign slavers to improve the operations. There are item sets you can make to equip your slavers and slaves. Even after several hours of gameplay it is hard to keep all of the stuff in your head. The UI tries hard to help you, but there is a lot going on. I found it pretty hard to keep track of all of the itty bitty tiny icons for each character.

Ultimately, this is the primary strength of this game, but also its downfall. The gameplay is so complex that it's fairly challenging at times, but also so insanely grindy that it isn't that much fun after awhile. I finally called uncle on the grind around day 200 and cheated myself a million bucks (5,000 bucks was a good payday), only to find it gone almost instantly as I tried upgrading the base. The game is currently balanced on the assumption that you want to play 1,000 days or more before running out of content I think, so it gets spread incredibly thin. I also ended up save scumming some of the harder "end-of-storyline" missions just to see what it looked like on a success. The money grind isn't the only grind, leveling up your slavers goes pretty quick up to the late 30s, then slows down to almost a halt. The hardest part of the game is that you just never have enough slavers to do what you want, especially as missions start taking a month to complete and have a serious chance of injuring your slavers for several weeks. You will never have enough money, especially if you try to rearrange your fort to maximize the adjacency bonuses as rearranging buildings is extremely expensive. This is maybe realistic, but it's kind of annoying that they choose this time to be realistic and not the time when it costs like $2,000 to build a couple of dorm rooms for your slavers, then a bit later it costs $500,000 to build two more identical dorm rooms.

Sex content: There is pretty much everything, told in disconnected three paragraph chunks of surprisingly dry flavor text. You really can't fap to this game. It is hard to talk about the graphics because they're mostly third party and all of it is stolen art. Most of it is just character portraits. The handful of sex scenes are the art for a mission. You can assign a slave to your quarters to run a sex minigame, but since it apparently has no effect on stats and isn't all that fappable I didn't get much use from it.

Pro-tip: Buy (and staff) the Insurance office ASAP. Mission failures are a fact of life and the insurance payouts are surprisingly large. That office pays for itself after 1 or 2 failures. Some of my biggest payouts were from failed missions.

Conclusion: All in all this is a very well constructed game that ultimately is more work than pleasure. The incredibly complexity on top of the very high level of grind (especially the money grind) make it very hard to enjoy. Strangely for a game built around sex slaves and featuring huge quantities of sexy materials it's not arousing at all.

4 Stars for being a really well executed game, and for the hard work and thoughtfulness of the Devs in building it out.

But -1 Star because... it's just not very fun anymore (as of version 1.4.8)

Ironically, earlier versions were more fun. It seems like this has been a side effect of the considerable effort to make a well-balanced, tightly designed, efficient simulation. It's so well balanced and thorough that it's become fairly joyless.

But it is an amazing simulation, feature rich, and was obviously a labor of love. I hope the Devs are able to rediscover the delight again in the future.

I have a big pet peeve. Meaningless sex. And I don't mean sex without romance or whatever, I mean you have sex with your slave and then...nothing. It affects nothing, changes nothing, maybe some invisible sex stat went up by 0.01 points and that's it. You're basically a clicker, clicking through the randomly genned flavour texts for the sex scene and then that's that. That's all she wrote.

Fort of Chains has a lot of cool things going for it as a management game, but it's full of the shallowness described above. Many of the quests (the center of the game) are written in a lazy contrived way, you get the feeling you're in some AD&D dungeon rather than a world you wanna believe in.

All in all, "Free Cities Fantasy Edition" this game is not. I was super hoping for that, but nahhh. Promising at first, lots of stats and junk, then rapidly boredom sets in as you realize, as far as the game is concerned, you're just a clicker for moving scenes along, scenes which don't do anything, don't affect anything after they're over.

When I first saw this I dodged it because it used random art for characters and it looked like a low effort waste of time. Little did I know months later I'd end up playing it for an entire day. Magnificent game.

Well made html game VERY much like the rags game No Haven. More a management game than a sex game. As far as I know the sex scenes are all text based.

All in all... fun game, but if your out for a quick wank... it's not good for that.

This is the type of game development that thrives. We are given the tools to make the game how we wish and are told to do so, transforming a simple text adventure into a multitude of possibilities. It worked with large titles like Minecraft and DND and it works here.

The game has amazing playability already. Can't wait to continue playing as it's expanded.


It plays really well as a base game even before including the adult content, the dev seems to update regularly, and the format is intriguing enough that it had me wondering if there were any non-adult games that play like this.

Definitely something you can just sit down to play and lose a few hours at a time to.

Great game for a text based slaver slaves dnd simlike management system.
With just right amount of NSFW content.
Good pokemon collection ability with tons of variety possible.
And good main quests lines or events that keeps you wanting to find out more.

Ability to import your own png and pictures , debug (or cheat mode) included to change names too.

The critical system is excellent too with sometimes the failures not really a failure, but a set back to different routes.
So all in all suprised that many things went into making this game and its free too. offcourse if you don't like text based games.
Then this is not your cup of tea.

Pros:

• Good concept for 'Traits'
• Nice stories for quests (short and multi quests)
• Very nice gameplay concept for being able to put your slavers(allies)
• Nice to see you can import any picture for any character portrait

Cons:

• Almost no easily accessible penetrative H scenes variability(Just basically one button and no position specific scenes)
• Bad writing for quests and story due to not enough description on the scenes or actions
• Bad writing for any H scene related matters and character interaction
• Very limited character interaction(talking to characters that has small amount of dialogue or not enough variation)
• Default Portrait pictures don't look great or cringe
• Cannot interact with the environment or items(Like use whips on slaves for punishment or sexual kink play, or utilise the dungeon or field for same reason)

Notes
The ability to train slaves are nice but can be very annoying or time consuming(basically grindy), with almost no flavor text or reward after completion of it or has any real use out side of quests to complete. Perhaps adding more variable flavor text and uses out side of quests might be an idea(eg special trait specific scene where dominant and submissive trait people has a H scene).

This game really needs a score or a bar system for relationship points by default or something I just have no idea what I'm doing and there is no visual aid to know that if other interactions actually help me or not. Not sure but if other interactions doesn't give you points perhaps adding more would be nice(add a talk button that then moves you into another page that has differing ways to talk to them, like when you press interact )

Even though there already is items I wish you could use them on anyone during H play(that has a specific trait eg masochist).

It would be nice to see more trap like portraits (As there happens to be rooms and training for that kink).

If any player faces any bugs where the game completely blocks the left hand side menu. The game becomes unplayable and I don't know of any way to fix the problem.

Game has basically caught up to No Haven since it's release, and with the inclusion of friendly code borrowing from Lilith's Throne for sex interaction, greatly surpassed it.

Creator may lack in Creativity and Writing but shows a strong passion for coding what is given to him.

UI has exponentially improved, Content is still expanding rapidly.

It's not longer just a successor to No Haven, but is is bringing a has taken a stab at combining both the elements of Strive for Conquest/Power, and No Haven into one.

Word done by contributors shows no signs of letting up either.

7 Stars of out 5, with a bright future in the next few months.

I would say this game has past it's first 100% mark, and is working on it's second expansion, roughly 60% to it's second full release.

Anyone remotely interested in Lilith's Throne, Strive for Power, or No Haven should stop by, and if it peeks your interest keep a eye on it. If there are any artists, please feel free to add your personal creations, the images for the came could use some contribution.