Others - Strive: Conquest [v0.10.3] [Maverik]

Game version: 0.10.3b

I played all the way up to the end of Act 3, which is the end of the main story at this stage of development I believe.

The main difference in this game compared to the prequel Strive game is that this game leans way more in enterprise management and combat.

Main differences from the prequel:

Travel: In the prior game, most encounters occurred as you are travelling from place to place. There are no travel encounters in this game. Instead, all encounters now happen in dungeons, so this game is more like a dungeon crawler.

Slave acquisition: Since travel encounters are removed, you acquire slaves through the slave market, dungeons, or story events.

Item collection: You now assign your slaves to various parts of the world or your mansion to collect raw materials.

Crafting: Compared to the previous game where gear is mostly brought from vendors or looted in battles, you now assign your slaves to craft the gear for you using the raw materials collected from your other slaves.

Slave training/growth: Obedience has been replaced by loyalty. You can increase loyalty by training the slave. Higher loyalty unlocks more slave options and increases the productivity of your slave. A new slave factor system that shows how strong your slave is, and can be upgraded by sacrificing other slaves.

Class system: Slaves can now exchange their EXP points to get classes, which will give a stat boost and skills to the slave. There are classes specialized for combat, magic, social, crafting, and sex.

I’m pretty sure that there are other differences, but these are the main ones I encountered when I was playing the game.

Improvements from the sequel:

• The class system allows more options for slave specialization and experimentation
• The combat system is more fleshed out.
• The story is better as characters you recruit during the story play a role in the main story.
• The character sub quests are better and more meaningful.

Not as good as the sequel

• Less slave customization options: There is no laboratory that allows for body modifications like the last game.
• It is harder to manage traits: The only way to get rid of negative traits is through a random dungeon event and offering the right item. In the prior game, you can get rid of negative traits by brewing potions or through the lab.
• Slave Training: Slaves take too long to train and is pretty tedious due to time gates and weekly caps for no reason.
• Erotic flavor text: It is lacking compared to the prior game, which is important considering this a text-based porn game. Needs more erotic descriptions and writing.
• Slave interactions: You can only interact with story characters and there are barely any interactions with non-story slaves.
• Too vanilla: You can’t really be evil or an abusive overlord. You can’t treat your slaves as livestock or sex slaves like the prior game. Slaves act the same whether you have sex with them with or without their consent.
• The UI can be improved. Understanding and knowing how to navigate the UI is like half the challenge of this game.
• Combat gets repetitive after the early game.

Things I would like to see:

• Bring back body modification options from the previous game. The slave customization in this game is currently lacking.
• Reduce the time it takes to train slaves by decreasing the cooldown and removing weekly caps. Or give players the option to speed it by acquiring specific classes or mansion upgrades.
• Give players a reliable way to get rid of negative traits. Trying to create the perfect slave is one the reasons some people play this game.
• Allow players to abuse slaves or corrupt them with magic or pleasure. Sometimes people just like to roleplay as the bad guy.
• More erotic content: I felt like I was playing a management and dungeon crawling sim with just a side of porn than an actual porn game. Where are the brothels? Where is the sex industry? There are some erotic writing gems in this game but it is few and far in between.

Conclusion:

I feel like the non-porn content of this game is pretty fleshed out. It just needs to be balanced and polished better. However, the erotic content of this game is lacking, especially if you compare it to prequel. Hopefully, more erotic content will be added in the future during development.

[Version: 0.10.2c]
Very complex compared to developer's previous Strive game, so many things to do that it's overwhelming at first

To a new player, things that intuitively make sense, such as putting the slave on a service job, barely make any money. The other options are guild posts, dungeons, and farming materials by traveling. (Disclaimer: I am probably dumber/slower than most)

Guild postings are great if you get lucky (slave delivery, delivery of materials that are in the market, etc). The other two options are in travel, which I avoided in my first playthrough because I wanted to keep the game simple. In hindsight, avoiding travel was a big mistake.

The in-game guide(tutorial) is not enough, you will need to spend time learning about most things yourself, through the game. This makes the game more enjoyable, and it's satisfying to see your efforts pay off. Despite the complexity, I loved how many different paths I can take in each playthrough. Speaking of fun, my fifth playthrough was way more fun than my second

Here are some changes I wish for:
- The tutorial should be updated to match the version of the game (and encouraging travel)
- I would like to be able to "hide" slaves from the mansion screen. I have unimportant slaves that just farm material, and being able to take them off the screen when I click "show all" would be great. There is so much on my screen that it overwhelms me and puts me in the freeze response
- Being able to skip animations in choices. (After displaying dialogue, your choices currently load one by one)
- Finishing factor upgrade(and a lot of other things) makes the UI un-interactable for a few seconds, which is annoying
- Oblivion potion removes classes, but also all of the experience, which really confused me. It should retain exp points, or the in-game item description should be changed to include this

I tried to like this game... I really tried.

Despite what the game says, you're not a slave trader nor trainer, you're a business owner with slaves, unlike the previous game you can't make a living as a slave trader, you can't leave town and capture girls you meet or face, instead they are just given to you in dungeons, i swear there's more slaves than goblins wandering around a goblin cave.

And the slave "training" in here is... well, there's barely any training in here except earning loyalty points and unlocking stuff in a skill tree, which the slaves earn by themselves in a slow but sure way, so there's barely any point in you interacting with them.

Classes system is a mess, to grow your characters you need to earn XP, which you use to buy multiple classes, yeah... multiple classes, not just the concept sounds stupid to me but combat is easy as hell, specially on the unbalanced latest updates where you can start by adquiring all the skills in a specific skill tree for some reason.

And the UI, oh my god the UI... more specifically the traveling UI, even tho I've traveled multiple times to multiple areas, I just prefer to build all the facilities I need in my house instead of sendind slaves to gather resources from various places because the UI to have them travel there is just THAT BAD AND INSUFFERABLE

And then the management... sigh.
I promised myself that I would finish the game since all acts are finished by now according to the dev, but the farthest that I gone is to recruit the princess... and then quit and restard, because my estate was a mess of slaves and I often felt weirded out by how disorganized things were.

Its gotten to such a mess that I can't feel attached to any of my slaves, even my daughters... oh yeah, and you can't enslave your daughters this time around either, unless you go to a very specific random event in a dungeon.

Whith that said, the characters... They are sexy, they are good looking, and I want to do unspeakable things to them, but their story is just... I dunno... the very first girl you meed is Daisy, and you barely get to interact with her on events except by calling her a bitch and some short sex scenes, she feels really unfinished so I guess the dev is planning on rewriting her but I don't know for sure.

Its miles away comparing to Emily and Tisha's quest from the prequel, where you could be nice to them and get both to love you, kidnapp one and lose the other since you were mean, or trick them by branding both and keeping both of theem to be your playthings.

But with Daisy its just... no matter what you do the result is the same, even if in the last mission you could let her decide which owner she stays with, she will decided based on how you treated her... you could just beat the crap of the Baron and take Daisy since combat is extremely easy

Despite what I said, I still think this game is leagues above the average slave game in this site, its just that this game could be so much better.

This is vastly different compared to the first Strive game, and honestly I like the first one more. Game is still buggy but after years of active improvements I think people are being too hard on this. Not a perfect game but still super enjoyable, and probably would keep getting better.

As a player and fan of Strive For Power, feasting my eyes on a sequel in the works got me hyped.

I believe the game does in face live up to the expectations I had.

Gameplay: You are a slave master as well as manager as you must go about giving your slaves tasks to build up your resources. The game consists of a ui for assigning roles for your slaves(food gathering, entertainment, contracts), leveling them up and giving them classes, or going on raiding parties in dungeons. This game used what made the previous game great and built more on it, such as the class and stat system being less stringent and more flexible for diverse classes.

CGS: The game has cgs for only story important characters or preset event characters. Your slaves that you get through purchase or randomly in a dungeon, will not have any cgs but you can still romance and pleasure them. Unlike the first game, this game has a character generator for slaves so that there is something to see at least instead of relying solely on the imagination. Though like the first game, you can replace the standing or preview image with one of your choice if you get attached to certain characters and you want to have a more personable image for them.


tldr: this game gives you a lot of freedom of choice with how you want to go about building up your slave business and you can easily sink hours into playing this game.

This is for sure one of the most convoluted games on the site.
There are a myriad of systems in the game; slavery, slave-training, food procurement and consumption, gathering resources, prostitution, quests, markets, exploration, turn based combat, dungeon crawling, unique NPC to gather, a modular sex system, etc etc.

BUT... At the moment none of it is done well. And since I last checked it a few years back most of it has gotten worse. I suspect it is because every system in the game seems to have been reworked multiple times at it just became a huge mess and oversight has become lost.
All the aforementioned systems have issues, but a few of my biggest gripes:

• Slaves can only be bought at the market (with terrible stats) or you randomly get them in dungeons from time to time for no reason. With a few rare exceptions. No capturing anything yourself.
• Slave training system is completely broken at the moment. It is unfun, shows unrelated images and flavour text and is flat-out shit. You can praise a slave for work done and give her a day off, and can get some critical fail and mind break her. What the actual fuck?
• A weird consent system where you have to be extremely nice to your literal sex slaves for in game weeks on end so they begrudgingly will let you romp them.
• The only way to increase your attributes is killing and sacrificing your slaves at the town centers marketplace.
• You can just buy (not hire) servants, you never have to pay or train them and they function exactly the same as slaves.
• The only actual scenes in the game are for unique NPC's, in my playthrough 4 NPC questlines got bugged out which made nearly half of the sexual content in the game inaccessible.
• Mios dios this travel system, why? Who hurt you?

I can keep going but this is all known and discussed extensively in the threads.
I'll still give it a 3/5 because it is amazingly ambitious and I frankly just want it to succeed! But I fear it is better to finish up this edition and start fresh on part 3. Hopefully with a focus on slavery again!
I still somewhat recommend playing this, just be prepared for a bumpy ride and for the love of all that is holy enable easy training when you start a new game, you will miss absolutely nothing until it is completely reworked.

A true management, combat, role play game, you can never experience this special game style other than this game.
However, this game is still in development, game mechanic always change, and you need to keep restarting game.

I will be the one to say it:

Simplicity is the ultimate Sophistication...and this game has none of it.
so much promise yet this game is borderline unplayable with how overcomplicated it it, and how lackluster its tutorials are.

I'm glad for everyone else that got to enjoy it despite that. sadly, I'm not one who can even enjoy a game that's borderline unplayable and blueballs me so hard.

If you like the complex management games that SsethTzeentach usually reviews, this might scratch your itch... obsessively, for a bit, and then you'll put it down and maybe pick it up again and maybe not. Allow me to explain.

Unlike a lot of other adult games, this one does not start off slow. The game begins with the player trying to gather up money to pay off loan sharks (this does not qualify as a spoiler, it's explained in the first dialogue interaction), and this does a really great job of creating urgency and forcing the player to figure out the game systems and hustle to get that bread. Very engaging, took me a couple of tries to feel confident.

But after that gets resolved, for me at least, the honeymoon period was over. The bones of something really good are in here, but the current state of the game (0.10.2 at time of review) is really, and I mean really clunky.

This game is fundamentally a management sim, with the player character taking the role of a disgusting nouveau riche swine who runs basically a woman sex trafficking farm. Just to be clear, I'm not objecting to that second part at all; I personally dislike the story trope of upwardly-mobile characters being portrayed as simultaneously naïve to the evil ways of the high society they barged into uninvited while also being shown as virtuous and clever. It's a symptom of a culture that fundamentally misunderstands the value of hard work and also I just personally hate the middle class in general.

Be that as it may, the player is quickly going to find that being the owner of a woman farm slave harem consists of a lot less of wild fucking and a lot more of tedious micromanagement. Like the rest of the game, this actually works pretty well at first. I can stand figuring out how to optimize wood collection logistics if I am collecting the wood to build a bigger bedroom so I can have bigger orgies, there is a very straightforward effort/reward curve there. But when I'm having to waste precious time clicking through menu screens to re-assign the FUCKING HAMMER to the FUCKING SLAVES so they can HARVEST SUGAR CANE or whatever faster because I re-assigned them from something else for the FIVE THOUSANDTH TIME because this game DOESN'T HAVE A WAY TO AUTOMATE ANY OF THAT SHIT... it gets old.

Industrial Light and Magic, back in the days when Star Wars was still this weird cool thing made by an autistic flannel-wearing guy, had this term, "greebling" for a technique they used on scale models of starships to make them look bigger. Basically it consists of adding lots of little details to models (by sort of fractal-tiling the surface with bits of lots of model kits) to make them look larger.

That's a pretty good metaphor for the current state of the game. There's a bunch of tiny detail mechanics that you can have fun juggling... until your brain runs out of dopamine. There are a lot of mechanics here, and some of them have interesting interactions that will get you to spend time toying with different builds and optimizations and concepts, if you're into that sort of sandbox type shit. But after a while you'll realize that a lot of it is greebling. A lot of this game is complexity with no real purpose or deep interaction.

This game reminds me of a 4X game from the mid 2000s; very fun at first, but as the game drags on the lack of adequate automation mechanics means that each turn takes longer and longer as you need to micromanage more and more variables in your growing sex slave empire. While I think everyone needs to know that actually running a sex slave empire in real life does involve a lot of paperwork and personnel management and other tedium, I, personally, am looking for a game that presents an idealized, fun fantasy version of running a sex slave empire. The moment that the pressure lets off from having to repay the loan sharks, the player is free to explore their own concept of what it means to operate a sex farm... and that freedom rapidly starts to feel like a second job.

Just like a second job, this game aggressively consumes your time. I don't mean that in the fun, "it's addictive, just one more turn!" kind of way. It's sort of like that at first, but as I played for a while I started noticing, and then being irritated by several parts of the game that cannot be sped up. There is no way to speed up the animation of swords crossing and going "ting!" before each battle. It was cool the first time. Maybe even the fifth time. It is not cool enough for me to tolerate for an entire playthrough, not just because I tire of hearing the "ting!" noise but also because watching the animation each battle wastes my fucking time and makes the comparatively uninspired battle system seem that much more like a chore.

Combat is a chore, by the way. There are dozens of fairly obvious, and probably several more fairly un-obvious ways to snap the combat system over your knee like kindling and it will rapidly begin to feel like something that merely exists to get in between you and the management and sex parts of the game. Yeah, you read that right; the combat in this game is so bad that I thought the parts where you're navigating a goddamn spreadsheet determining which of your sex slaves is the most efficient at harvesting winged gnoll ear wax or whatever to be more engaging than the combat after a while. I even found the dungeon crawls where you bust into a dungeon, kill a bunch of fools and take the survivors as slaves to be tiresome after a while because of the combat part. Attacking people who are minding their own goddamn business and randomly killing a bunch and then taking the survivors to be your sex slaves should be some of the most asshole-tighteningly cool stuff you can simulate in a game, but somehow this game has such tiresome combat that it makes pillaging and raping un-fun after a while.

My next complaint is all the jank. If you want to enjoy this game, I sure hope you played a bunch of ambitious, but unpolished Flash games as a child. That formative experience and the rose tint of your nostalgia goggles will help you enjoy the experience of this game more, because it's going to be very reminiscent. The interface is fucking obtuse. Why is the screen which shows the character's next level up class not also a screen which shows the classes the character's pre-existing classes? Why is the screen which shows the character's pre-existing classes the screen which is used to determine whether they will prioritize eating fish or vegetables and also how I should sexually torture them that day to break their spirit? Why does clicking vs. double clicking cause such inconsistent effects when interacting with buttons on the screen? Why do some buttons with an "x" icon to close a sub-menu require you to click on the outline of the actual letter "x" inside of the square rather than being able to click anywhere in the square the way it usually works? Why does the interface randomly hang for a split second after certain events? Why are the stats on items and characters not always listed in a consistent order?

I'm not enumerating all of these issues to own the developer or anything; UI design is actually pretty hard, and even a lot of professionally-produced games had horrible UIs in, say, the 2000s. It is a difficult enough art that they hadn't figured it out back then. But even though it is hard to code a great game UI, I would be lying if I said anything other than this game has an objectively bad UI.

I'll try to end this review on a good note, because I did enjoy playing this game, at least at first, and I think there are some good aspects. The text-based sex minigame is... actually pretty cool. The game uses descriptions of what each of the up to five participants are doing and to whom to develop a contextual text description of the sex scene. This is a modest number of personnel for an orgy, but I salute the effort that went into a turn-based orgy simulator nonetheless. The game does not really have a robust system for determining whether what you are describing is actually physically possible or not; whether that is a turn-on for you personally I don't know. Occasionally it fucks up the grammar of the text output for no obvious reason, and fucks up the context buttons for equally mysterious reasons, but that can and probably will get fixed at some point. The Marquis de Sade would lose his fucking mind if he had a toy like this. Well, I mean, more than he did anyway, the guy was pretty nuts.

There are also more traditional game CGs for sex scenes with the main characters, and the art is pretty good.

The writing is serviceable, and I even chuckled once or twice. The main plot quest guidance provided in the journal is extremely robust and I never found myself milling around trying to figure out what it was I was supposed to be doing. The only times I got lost were when I forgot what I was doing because the plot seemed kinda basic TBH and I thought it would be more fun to run a eugenics program at my sex farm instead. But that's mostly on me, really.

Anyway, I hope the developer keeps at it. The bones of something good are in here, and like I said, at first I found that the game really reached out and grabbed me by providing unexpected resistance in the form of an opening act that has actual mechanical challenge and urgency. But after that it was sort of like trying to masturbate with extremely fine grit sandpaper; no matter how much oil is used the irritation just kept building and I gave up.

Very good at the time of the review, solid story, good looking art, nice mechanics, UI could use a bit of work though, the wiki could use some updating, and some bugs need to be ironed out. Looking forward for the finished product

The game is currently in development and there's a lot of work to be done still, but for what it is it's pretty good.

The game does feature H-scenes and nudity, though I wouldn't play it if that's what you're after as the game's primary focus is on roleplay and management.

The roleplay aspect is amazing - you can really be anyone you want and the game is generally responsive to it. Want to treat everyone with kindness and respect? Sure, this will cause most of your slaves and unique characters to become genuinely affectionate towards you. Want to be a ruthless sex fiend who mind breaks their slaves? Why not. Want to become a necromancer and turn every slave that you have into an undead zombie that doesn't need any food? There's an option for that too.

Management is currently a bit weaker though - there is a bit of a grind early on to get enough money and materials to upgrade your mansion, but after you have everything set up the game pretty much plays for itself. There is potential for min-maxing by hunting perfect characters for each task in the manor, but it's far from necessary given the relatively easy difficulty of the game.

Characters themselves are great - each of them is distinct, they often have their own storylines which you can trigger by getting closer to them. All in all, it's good time.

The game isn't without criticisms though:

- Not sure if this is just an unfinished game issue, but the combat feels way too easy. Early on it's a struggle to get started, but once you get the skills and level ups rolling in then even with half a party you can take on all the challenges the game provides. There's also a regression of dificulty in later chapters, with you having to fight enemies which are often weaker than enemies you had to face in the first chapter, and I hope that's just placeholder design and not intentional.

- There are some moments in the game where you might be forced to do certain things without an option to opt out, often resulting in out-of-character moments. One notable example is after the elven storyline, if you happen to save a character from being executed for their crimes and take them in, the first thing you do is bring them home and rape them even if you've only been kind up to that point. Another is how most mission conclusions with unique characters will lead you into taking their virginity, which you can't opt out from in case you want to retain your own virginity or keep the value of the slaves/subordinates high. I hope these things will get looked at again after the story is finished being developed.

- Last but not least, the lesbian options in the game so far are pretty lacking. If you're playing as a woman, you can have lesbian sex with your female subordinates but you're not allowed to marry them or have options to use magic to impregnate them - stuff like that. Granted, most of the story events assume you're a white male, so maybe this will get looked into as lesbian story events start getting developed.

All in all, pretty decent game so far, finished all the content in 15 hours. Would recommend to wait for more content or for the game to be finished before playing though.

The game is trying to do quite a lot and does it all sort of ok ish. Building on the first game, it shares a lot of similarities both good and bad.

TLDR: Some sloppy execution and an average game with a good combat and job system that leaves you wanting more but fails to deliver. Maybe check back after more updates.

• Extremely cluttered/dense UI that feels like it is shouting at you.
• Decent character creator and art that could be fleshed out more with additional faces. The character editor/creation window is far too small and everything is so squished its sometimes hard to tell what is what.
• Sex interactions are all text based which is fine if you're into that. If you're looking for any kind of lewd scene you wont really find any outside of the "main" characters.
• Combat is actually well balanced and intuitive. The job systems is well implemented and thought out. Probably one of the things I like most.
• Training system is pretty decent and enjoyable.
• There is a barebones modification system that doesn't really affect much other than feeling like it was shoe horned in from the previous game.

I wish the general lewd scenes any kind of animation or additional body views. It all feels very flat and doesn't draw you in. The characters you create sometimes don't fit well into the boxes due to size, creating a centaur or other creature leaves you only able to view part of their body rather than all of it.

Amazing game.
Couple of problems and observations:

Craft->Enchant->Improve gear is super buggy. Let's say you combine two average items to get a good one
- First, it will actually consume three items (even if you selected two) most of the time (the exception being if these are the last two items). If you have 6 items, it will show 6/2 (which is an odd way to put it, instead of 2/6 as in "two out of six"). You click on Apply and next time you'll have 3 items left.
- Second, new item generated will be created sometimes stashed, and sometimes it will not be stashed (it will show in the item inventory as, let's say "Sword 1 Sword 1", and you can change this if you equip this to a character and then unequip, and it will stash them as "Sword 2".
- Then, also, if you have less than 3 items, sometimes it will let you combine the last two... but sometimes it will not, so you'll need a third item for the combination to work.
- It would be useful to be able to combine 4 good into 2 epic, 6 good into 3 epic, etc. If you have crafted 20 poor items, let me combine them into 10 average in just one go.

Annoying things/Bugs:
- Factors are not considered into the slave price. I can have a slave with all Excellent and it's not more expensive than a regular slave.
- In the slave shop when selling there's an "Enslave" button, that only appears on people that already are slaves of you, and mainly does nothing that I could see, but certainly doesn't enslave.
- Battle is too slow. I've grinded enough to have a powerful team, but I avoid conflicts because each fight takes too long. 10 seconds applying the buffs to characters, then every spell has to show an animation, etc. Please add a QUICK FIGHT button/option.
- Factor upgrade is slow too. The animation where it says what upgraded and shows the stars can't be skipped.
- Same for recruiting (when leaving a slave on a place to do recruiting), which also requires combining mouse and keyboard. You have to wait for the options to draw with quite some delay.
- Official support for a bigger house would be nice. You can have 7 fishers, 8 hunters, etc. but only 30 persons in the house.
- Kids always have low tame/authority unless they're things like bunnies.
- Factor upgrade price seems to only go up with growth factor, so this is the last thing to max to save money.
- Quest says Lilith home town, but doesn't say where that is and I can't find it.
- Can't see the sex of newborns. Instead of just "baby" you could say "baby boy/baby girl/baby futa". Sometimes I can click 1 while the name message appears and some names will suggest the sex, sometimes I can't guess. And I need that to know if I want to train them.
- When there's one unknown sex trait, the others remain hidden sometimes.
- As soon as one enters the "Classes" screen, there's no way to check if an upgrade can be made immediately, and you first have to click on any class to see on the right if you can unlock it.
- Scrolling different characters on the classes screen, removes the class filter.
- The improvements to the Exotic Slave Trader are super expensive and don't seem to do much.
- Only being able to get subordinates from the guild, and not being able to coerce/push/trick subordinates into slavery, and them having subordinates kids only.
- My character was upgraded on a previous patch. It seems that values have changed, so now if I go to "Upgrade body" I get "Upgrade points 0/-15" and the "Confirm" button doesn't let me close it, had to restart the game. Add a "Cancel" (or close) button please.
- Cloth from work shows as "cotton"
- I can buy a slave that wouldn't collect grain for me, but I can order it to be fucked by other slaves and this has no effect on their "Spirit". Probably if their tolerance is depleted there should be an impact to their spirit, and they probably shouldn't like much sex actions until it's unlocked.
- Good sex should have an impact on training as dating has.
- No way to raise spirit while training (and why positive does lower spirit?)
- My character is a male, but it says "Being a Breeding Sow, MyChar will be certainly able to get pregnant from it..." (it should say the girl's name)
- Some actions allow you to go over housing cap temporarily (you can't finish the turn), like having kids. Some others don't (like purchasing). This is annoying when you try to do an early factor upgrade and have to have 1 free space just for that.
- No recall button on some places like Elven Capital due to interface differences.
- Enchantments not counting to item price when sold
- Sometimes some windows (for example, when looking at a slave when recruiting) will ignore the esc key

Nice to haves:
- Hints on where to get things (where do I get ancient bone at start, etc.) would be useful.
- Auto equip tools could be nice.
- Remove equipment from slave when selling/sacrificing/dismissing.
- An option to have a secondary job or show Tailor(rest) when there's no crafting enqueued/no materials for crafting.
- When training it says something like "Wits +15". It would be good to know if it capped.
- Some ordering criteria when doing factor upgrade or some filter.
- Being able to buy more houses in other zones would be nice. And nicer to get to rule and own most of it like a true King.
- When crafting, seeing the number of current items (useful in things that have only one recipe, say, belled collar).
- In the enchant and improve gear, it would be nice if the gear had a different color depending on its quality.
- Order items to craft by power and not by name and split tools, weapons and armor (current category gear is too broad).

An excellent game with many interesting mechanics and good story. There are a lot of things to do, and your possibilities sometimes can be limited only by your imagination. Various classes have different output, so you can get something or someone in more than one way. Rare thing for sure!

Interesting game, and I recommend playing it, but there is one BIG problem!

If you look at Strive from the perspective of a normal game:
- Few mechanics that really affect gameplay, you can get by with only a small portion of these mechanics and get through the game to the current patch without any problems.
- VERY easy game, I when I first started Strive, I thought it would be difficult, the game would give me the challenge of having to load saves dozens of times. But no, literally two hours of play and I have already earned more than 20k+ gold, and carried all the dungeons, playing only through magic, it is too unbalanced.

If you look at Strive from a porn game perspective:
- Just over 5 pictures 18+
- And all sex scenes are described by text, no pictures, little variety and no fetishes as such.

Maybe in the future something will be added, but I doubt it, although the story is present and it's the only thing that kept me in the game. If they add mechanics, complicate gameplay, so that many had resistance to different magic (it is, but not all), in general, complicate the entire gameplay, plus add something new for porn game.

P.S. I played more with mods, and oh my god, the game became even easier, I downloaded the two most popular mods, they too much simplify and already simple game.

There is already quite a lot of story that makes you keep playing. Love the random characters in combination with a few story characters to spice it up. I'm a big fan of procedural/random generation and the (paperdoll) slaves and dungeons scratch that itch.

As of version 9, it's an above average 'jack-of-all-trades' sim. Everything about it is alright, but not outstanding. The sim aspect has a lot of options, but you basically can't ever fail and the generic sex scenes are incredibly dull. The combat has many classes and abilities, but once you get an assortment of elemental skills and decent gear nothing is a challenge anymore. The built-in paper dolls are passable and you can use your own art.

It's moddable, though I found it breaks the game very easily so I wouldn't use more than some QoL mods. If the storyline ever gets finished it'll be a highly regarded game, but it's been in development for many years at this point and it's still on chapter 2.

I think my problem with this game is just that I don't like games where you create new characters yourself. They're always incredible repetitive, and it's made a bit worse in this game because it's text based, so you just see the same dialogue over and over.

You can add pictures, which helps, but it's also a hassle.

Great game, but not at the prequel level, and far from finished [at least the save break from 0.8x to 0.9x, and may break again after v1.0, so the game right now is kind of a trial/demo than a finished game yet

Feels low resolution, the character creation is extremely limited, and has a ton of individual hair options that most of them don't even fit with each other.

Since you spend all your time in the UI. I can't recommend it since the UI is simply unacceptable and a huge downgrade from the first game.

Recently, I retried the game. It's not as bad as I remembered it to be.

Version 10.1

My current thoughts on the game are the following:

1. Fairly involved management and progression systems.
2. A lot of races and a variety of characters.
3. Radiant quests and dungeons are fun (even though you have to manually delete them every time).
4. The sex system is extremely basic, and characters react in the same way to the same things. The little difference that traits make is barely noticeable, with barely any training or variation in sexual development.
5. Some of the class skills are immersion-breaking levels of unbalanced, making one wonder if any thought was put into the design process.
6. The main character and main servant begin the game extremely powerful for some reason, no matter the difficulty.
7. Most bosses in dungeons are weaker than the mini-bosses in the same dungeon.
8. The clothes are gendered, which might be hit or miss depending on personal preference. I personally don't like it.
9. The UI and the poor explanation of game mechanics can make the game hard to approach for a lot of people, and it could definitely use some improvement.

All things considered so far, despite the lack of polish, limited erotic content, and mind-numbing balancing, I can't rate the game lower than a 4 because there is a lot of good stuff in there worth exploring.