This game have a few prominent issues in comparison with the previous title and supposed genre in general.
The main one is that game in the current state encourages the player to do the least interesting things to succeed: grind basic resources to get money at first and to build better gear later. But the game is definitely not supposed to be mining/logging/farming management game, it supposed to be sexy slave management game. Currently sex slave management is not only the least impactful part of it, but also least developed.
You cannot progress the game (both story-wise and power-wise) by doing sexy things with your slaves. Quite the opposite, game actively encourages you to avoid doing sexy things because your Dates are finite resource that is best used to grind stats on the main character and slaves. Separate sex attempts somewhat helps and game even encourages the player to level up the Sexual Factor because it have the best combat buff (+10 speed) for the Excellent rating. But still, tying slave interaction and training to the same resource is a mistake that forces the player to choose between role-playing and efficiency.
Secondary problem here is that lack of things to do with your slaves beyond using them to grind resources/crafting gear, even from purely role-playing standpoint. You can either prostitute them for money (and money is the least useful resource in the game) or choose not to. In fact the only real use for Charm/Sex-oriented slaves is to prostitute them to your other slaves to keep them happy. SoP at least have more role-playing options (practical differences between Entertainer, Whore and Escort in SoP were nominal, but it is a porn game, role-playing here is secondary only to the actual smut) for a player to differentiate his dolls.
And slave individuality is another big issue. SoP slaves had Beauty score and it was doing wonders for making random-generated slaves at least feel somewhat different. Early catch of 70+ appeal bandit was an event, and natural 100 beauty slaves felt like a real catch. SoC slaves are almost interchangeable. Current trait system tied almost entirely to resource extraction or combat, so you can get 'good fighter slaves', 'good mage slaves', 'good working slaves' and yes 'good whore slaves', but the latter category is also least useful one because prostituting slaves is pointless.
Fourth thing is that there is not enough slaves to selling slaves to be relevant source of income. Slaves are both very cheap and very rare finds in the world. So they are only worth selling when you do not need additional working hands (or they have some bizarre combination of bad traits to make them useless) and they still get you less money than selling daily production of your fishery. SoP at least had a fun little mini-game of trawling through captives and selecting ones to bring back because they were worth something on the market. SoC is very stingy with 'free slaves', so there is never a choice. You always take them.
The only real improvement over SoP is a combat mini-game which is definitely much superior and have a lot more options and choice, but combat/adventure part is also held back by the resource gathering/crafting part of the game. Mainly because crafting system allows you access to the second best tier of gear from the start of the game. Mining Mithril is accessible from the start and mithril sword/staff allows you to one-shot most of the critters in the game with one AoE skill and two-shot everything else besides the bosses. Which makes combat trivial.
TLDR: Strive for Conquest is strangely schizophrenic porn game. It main focus is crafting/resource gathering while porn part is on the backburner.
