Others - Strive: Conquest [v0.9.0] [Maverik]

I love everything about this game! especially the sandbox mode the nearly infinite choice of fantasy gals ! It is not for everybody, because you must read mostly and imagine the things you do I wish the creator would add more random events and special enslaved people.

The game is, frankly, awful.

On a core level, the gameplay loop has become more repetitive, less engaging, and stepped further and further away from being sexy. If you want a mediocre, boring text based dungeon diving game, I guess I've got it for you, but if you want something sexy, you're not getting it here.

I'm gonna run through the core systems real quick, and compare them to Strive 1

Getting Slaves
You will be buying almost all your slaves. I guess this change is something I should have seen coming after Strive 1 ended without adding a place to go and find a decent chunk of slave species in the wild, but now, if they're not human, they're not available for you to capture, generally, and finding slaves TO capture is difficult. You might run across one while exploring a dungeon, but that's limited to very specific kinds of dungeons, and those dungeons generally don't have as much in the way of loot compared to the alternatives.
Worse, with the new class and skill system, slaves are much more likely to be effectively worthless, meaning even when you can capture a slave, it probably won't be worth the effort you put into it. While this was always a thing, in Strive 1 it felt like walking allong a line of victims, choosing the most entertaining, and taking her away to become a slave. In Conquest, it feels more like finally being given a sip of water only to realize it's salt water.

Combat
Combat was never good in strive, but what it WAS was fast. You fought an enemy, and if they were easy, you could press one button to go through the turns. The only circumstance where you had to do something different was to stop a potential slave from escaping before you had a chance to evaluate her worth. On top of that, every combat(in the early game- late game decided to do away with this, adding more monsters and less victims to "rescue") ended with a chance to capture one or more slaves, allong with small amounra od money and loot.
Which brings us to Conquest- combat doesn't give you slaves, combat rewards are even more minimal, and you can't enslave the people you beat in a fight. Combine that with the new initiative system and expanded combat, and you've got a dull slog with few rewards that you can't even turn your brain off during. Blech.

Slave Management
Instead of managing a slave's skills, loyalty, and obedience, primarily through the application of various rules and situations you can put the slave through, you periodically tell the slave she's a good girl if she responds well to that, or a bad girl if she's timid. Then you spend the rest of your time managing a bunch of factors to keep her productive, none of which are deep enough to be interesting in their own right, nor do they particularly add to the sexual nature of the game.

Dungeons
The new dungeons system consists of a handful of trivial skill rolls, combat, and random events. The random events are also one of only two times you can capture a slave- rarely, while exploring a dungeon, you find someone locked up, and can choose to enslave them. Also, in boss battles, sometimes, if you're lucky, you'll get the leader of a group of bandits as an enslavement target.

There's no reason to play this game. Try the original, it's not perfect but atleast it's better than this. And remember- a game might have all the development time in the world left, but that won't fix problems with the fundamental design of the game. If you'd decided to make a shooter where your guns shoot you instead of the enemy, all the bug fixes in the world won't make the game stop being an elaborate form of suicide

This game has some fundamental problems.

First, the debt obstacle in story mode.
I question why it even exists. It's an arbitrary test you must pass in order to play story mode. What is the purpose of this? To make sure you know how to play the game because the tutorial tells you jack shit? The moment I got around the debt, I felt like I could finally play the game because it pigeon holes you into doing very select strategies in order to get around it. It is not a core element in the game that pushes you along, it is something that prevents you from playing however you like at the start.

The micromanagement
Alright, who asked for the increase in micromanagement? In the previous game it was tolerable and all related to slave training. This game? Holy fucking shit dude what the fuck. Some of it has nothing to do with training at all, like food variation and tool building. Haha yes, I looked at this slaves stats and found out they respond well to positive obedience interactions so I've praised them and now they're obedient. Now to make sure I have been collecting the food they like so theyll eat that and give them a custom made tool that maximizes the tool's harvesting boost and also make sure they have these 3 classes and....

.. To which I then realized something fundamentally wrong with the game....

The game isn't sexy
Nothing screams sexy like watching my servant's diet plan, creating tools/weapons/accessories, spending a ton of time in menus to optimize or travel between areas, paying off debt, and collecting wood/stone/metal/etc. To make it even worse your interactions with servants are limited to a number of times per week. Also when you do get the option to boink someone, you're encouraged to do it with someone who needs the experience rather than with your favorite servant just for fun. It makes the whole experience feel entirely mechanical. It honestly feels like the porn in the game was an afterthought and the developer just wanted to make an intensive micromanagement sim instead.

0.6.1c
I enjoyed the first game, Strive for Power, and was hoping for the second to expound on the good decisions made in the prequel and make improvements, but instead they've chosen to remove the best part of the original and, it seems so far, focus on classes and combat. Unfortunately, they haven't had much success in actually making combat interesting or even rewarding outside of story progression.

I know this has been pointed out a lot already, but the only way to make the game match and surpass it's predecessor is to reimplement the best part of the prequel which has been removed in Conquest for some reason. The ability to wander around and find random groups of people, whether bandits, innocent travelers, or a mix of both, deciding on your own whether to attack them or not, then actually being able to interact with each of them after the battle was groundbreaking.
The fact that every random bandit was a real person instead of just a standard enemy statblock was the greatest feature that set the original Strive for Power apart from other games in the genre. Now, instead of meaningful travel to each new location, you can just go wherever you want and harvest resources. The locations have no discernable differences that make one more interesting than another besides their generic resource allotment. The dungeons give incredibly lackluster loot that you have to dredge through 20 boring, grindfest combats to obtain. At the end of a rare few of these dungeons, you may be rewarded with a single slave, because you just couldn't contain your bloodlust against ALL your other opponents, I guess.
To be entirely fair, I'm sure the locations and combat system will improve over time, but until then you at least should not have to go through such a ridiculous number of battles for practically no reward just to complete a dungeon. (And battles do give next to nothing as a reward for victory, which is another fantastic reason to make. Enemies. Capturable.)
Aside from main npcs, those rare bandit leaders, and even rarer 'captive' npcs found in a few dungeons to be 'rescued,' the only way to obtain slaves is to buy them, which is an astoundingly boring method of obtaining slaves. When I capture them myself I have a sense of who they are, where they came from, what they were doing before they became my slave. At least in games like Stationmaster or Free Cities, even purchased slaves come with a bit of generated flavor text that makes them somewhat interesting. In Strive Conquest, purchased slaves appear only as exactly what they are; blocks of code with no personality.
Again, that last rant is about an issue that will hopefully be shored up in later updates rather than an obvious design flaw like the inability to capture defeated enemies. But without images and personality to dress up these slaves, they really are just a block of easily changeable text and stats, and completely boring.

Last couple things I have to say that are less design complaints and more current problems that are likely to be fixed; the micromanagy system of maintaining obedience, authority, and loyalty is awful. It takes ages just to maintain these for each individual slave, and trying to do that while training a new slave is an absolute nightmare that takes all the fun out of slave training.
Also, the current "debt" system that the game opens with is insane. I failed to repay my first debt about 3 times just because of how difficult it is to make 1,000 gold that quickly without focusing solely on resource gathering the whole time and selling it all. I never would have made it through the next payment if I hadn't turned on cheats, which did drastically improve the game. But even with cheats there's an "all or nothing" feel as they don't allow you to simply edit stats or gain a little gold, but instead require unlocking everything, maxing everything, or gaining a full 100,000 gold all at once. So cheats aren't even a way to "balance out" the game, but only allow you to throw regular gameplay out the window.
The current image system is broken as most packs still use the SfP labelling system and Conquest has no auto-assign function and no ability to sort images by any category except race; not even age, gender, or hair color.
Finally, the lack of starting hair colors is a bit disappointing. Sure, there are hair dye options available in the game, but considering that's enough of a change that I'd want a new character image, is there really any reason to stop players from choosing whatever hair color they want upon character creation?

All that said, Strive: Conquest is still in early development and it is my hope that all of these problems will be addressed and fixed in time, but until then, it is nothing more than a mediocre reference to the prequel with the potential for greatness.

Version v0.6.1b


Game with lots of potential. Great RPG system, interesting storyline, fun battle mechanics, hot cgs, etc.

But two major problems make this game almost unplayable. One, Maverik changes the game mechanics in every update. This means that you need to re-learn how to play the game every damn update.

Two, saves often don't carry over between versions due to bugs. This means that you need to start from scratch every game. And that's a terrible feature for RPG games, as the whole point of RPG games is to create a world where you can have fun. If your saves are wiped every version of the game, you need to keep on re-creating your world ever time.

My recommendation? Wait till the game gets in better shape.

Story:
It's a sandbox, but it has a story too. Has a nice amount of content as well and I generally like the worldbuilding and setting.
Sex/Renders:
Not the focus of the game, being text-based, but the portraits generally are decent and good enough for me personally.
Misc:
The gameplay is pretty good, if you're a fan of slave trainer games, this definitely has good parts. I like the combat system generally, the non-sex gameplay in general is quite good and enjoyable on its own.

Grindy fantasy slave management RPG with DnD and WoW vibes. UI and combat can be confusing at the start but the game is fun after you get the hang of it. Balance is still not quite there but it is still much better than the strive for power.

Eh. Its the 1st game. Except they screwed up: Races, Combat, Stat Progression, Game Pacing, Slave Breaking and the worst part of it all. Some of the images from the modpacks are incompatible!!! Gasp! Good things about the game... The 1st game was good so... You know. I guess they added more classes and spells? So that's pretty cool. I like the guild and mission systems, and I shit you not. I can't remember if they are in the first game or not... I remember taking specific contracts for certain types of slaves. Which was bomb as fuck. But no!!! The areas are interchangeable and meaningless now! You have a 5% chance to pull a slave with a random race as a reward for the bandit dungeons, That's it. Otherwise I hope you like humans!!!! Game about MONSTER PEOPLE!!! I've played for like...100 hours and have yet to see: An orc that isnt in a gay ass robe. A goblin. A dwarf. A Drider. A Lamia. A full anything but bunny. A Scylla. A fairy. A slime? (Were those just monsters in the other ones?) A harpy. I think there was 1 druid, with 2 averages and the rest poor's or worse for like 6 billion gold from the exotic trader... So that was cool. You kinda have to chose between stats and hp... or run like 90 healers... Make the enemies have synergy. Have a bandit mark a target or throw oil then fire or some shit. Its not exactly hard to make tactical combat nuanced. Also. The low Hp 95% humans with no access to heavy armor versus 3 assassins in 1 pull.... Super fun and well thought out. "Oh well, nerd. Excuse us but maybe get those things before going on harder quest. Get good." Yeah... ok. The stuff you need. To get that stuff. Is obtained during. And after those quests. Time management is shit. 9 hours of travel, 18 both ways for an easy dungeon. Literally a whole day of travel. For wood. Metal wood. That you need to upgrade the stable... so you don't have to spend a whole day to get more metal wood... I was going to give this game 4 stars cus of the fun I personally can have with it... But god damn. Every other decision made in this game make me go "What the actual fuck. Who thinks like this." What is the point of grinding in an erogenous slave empire game? What fulfillment is it supposed to bring us mortals?! LOL! and then you panicked and dropped the time crunch entirely once you hit the siege mission, cus once you find a rhythm. That's when to let off the gas. Smart... Scare the shit out of new players and bog the game down with grind and artificial difficulty. Offer them a solution. Then rip it away. Then more grind and artificial difficulty while destroying narrative tension in a pathetic attempt at... Game balance? Force players to play a charismatic elf wizard pervert just to be able to actual experience the game as intended.... Probably where all the negative reviews came from. Why even have character creation. Why even make this game at all? Nothing makes sense...Is any of this even real?! Am...Am I real? I don't know. But I do know this. The management side of things is cool. The quest system is... well its not great. It constantly asks you for shit you cant have once you are off easy difficulty. Which. In order to have meaningful progression you have to do. But in order to do the Medium and hard missions you need the classes from the guilds... Its a shitty, poorly designed inverse circle where you will always be needing something you don't have. But its still pretty fun. I really love those modpacks. This game needs pictures. It makes the characters so much more personable. And I get they may not be what some people look for in a slave game. But I'm not an evil person, I'm just a pervert. I always just focus on making a harem and try to make it with each race of freaky nasty ladies . #Lifegoals. Idk. I didn't talk about the unfair points system, cus you designed it with a high charisma in mind, don't understand why you can't use a second as you mouth piece or an emissary... There is uh.. another game... that actually is quite a lot like this one... but way less visually stimulating and with a lot less control. But it fucking, NAILS, the management mechanic. Maybe, uh, check it out for research purposes. Oh but this tangent is about the lack of ways to raise charisma. Dates and being a bard. You know... Dates. The thing you only get 1 of...Per day. Without any way to upgrade the time you get or amount of times you can do. And in the later game the "social skills" become less useful for the MC and you need your mana for other things. Also, using the "social skills" becomes almost obsolete as all your workers love you pretty quick if you do things right. So it gets crazy grindy and just wastes time. There are so many examples of these things done right in other games that it actually makes me think you guys are making this game bad on purpose. This is a Management game with a soft story arc. Elevate your premise with mechanics. After venting I'm going back up to 4 stars. But get your shit together DEVS! I'll come make your game for you if I have too! Jesus Christ! IT'S NOT THAT HARD! You should've built off the last game rather then reinventing the wheel. This game still kicks ass though, if you've got like... 8 hours a day to put into it, for like a few months. Otherwise... This game is awful and you should go play the first one until the devs switch back to coke classic. lol. Just get your shit together. This game can work in its current state very easily. Its just a friggen mess right now. Best of luck to you and well wishes. Just get your shit together!

v0.5.3a. Good but bad.
Sex content Ok. not good, not bad. But uniqure scenes don`t have same mechanics as repeatable ones. Not good. And non-consent barely visible. Everyone too fast to become agreable,
Story Ok too. It suffer standart "why i should care?". But don`t have big problems.
Management part is trash. Bottomless market. Endless resources. Refining and crafting barely pay for it self. Support is activated abilities instead of jobs. And you can have many ppl with it. So tons of clicks. Control abilities too powerfull. So you don`t care about workers obedience. It`s looks like error bingo.Everything that can be done not right is done not right.
Combat part is nice. There problems with unbalanced classes. Mages casting without mana. But it`s can be easily fixed and ajusted.
So, like ppl like to say, game has potential. But only if it`s planned to be dungeoncrawler with background story and a bit management and craft.
Otherwise it`s will be one more annoyng grinder.

What can I say I was big time fan and supporter of the first one. It has really great interface setup, and it feels like a improved version of the first wich I assume it was suppose to be.

Story is pretty good so far, but the main goal seems to be getting the core done first and I really like that is the goal. This isn't some simple fap bait game where you come for the images or text. Its got good text for sex its more about being an RPG managment game where you happen to fuck as much as you want.

Oh and people giving it low raitings are comparing a EA game to a finished one. This was meant to be more about managment side, and the RPG content, and its still very much in early beta or late alpha stage. They keep comparing it to the finished game before it but I played the other one when it had less content this one does, and it didn't get that harsh of raitings granted back then it was not popular, and people had zero expectations lol

Oh and the low or one stars are just fanboys of first one made its not an update for the first one. They not looking for new anything, its an alpha in a new direction, and they are just upset that its not the first game, and the dev is focusing on getting the UI and the mechanics worked out. Which is what most of them are complaining about. Its like ok read the update notes the US and the mechanics are main thing being worked on and improved on this so far lol

Pretty good management game, similar to the previous one with pretty interesting changes throughout. If you like management and slavery you're pretty much going to be at least a little entertained.

But, as it's still under development, there is a lot to be expected in terms of clunkiness and other things that need polish, such as:

1. Writing is horrendous, I'm sorry if you're the one who did the writing for this game, but you've done a very sub-par job, there are a lot of typos and a lot of sentences are structured poorly, which makes the NPCs feel quite silly.
2. Delay when skipping hours in the day, this one bothered me quite a bit, it got to the point where skipping 8 hours took more than a few seconds, which got incredibly frustrating when you are limited to certain actions once a day, or you need to fast-forward through upgrades
3. Game is just way too grindy towards the end, high-end materials are absurdly rare and require you to go through tedious dungeons to have the chance to collect a handful, I ended up simply cheating the materials in as I don't really think the grind was designed well at all.
4. Adding onto the grinding point, dungeons are a really cool concept and I quite like the combat and how it's been implemented, but dungeons simply take too long, once you do a few encounters you've done them all, I don't see why a Hard dungeon needs 20+ encounters of the same 3-4 mobs.

I'd still say this game is worth trying simply because I liked the idea of classes and mixing them up for interesting combinations, but the flaws above really bothered me during my time on this game so it gets a 3/5.

If you like strive for power then you will like this.
game is inferior to the First one for now but since its part 2 it will be a whole lot better than the first when this game is completed.
I like the story and I'm looking forward for more.
I like management kind type of games.
I like collecting slaves and powering them up.
I like how the slaves is customizable. skills, unique traits. stats and even personality. (you don't get that kind of system from other games)

TLDR: Core Changes are unnecessary and emphasizes grindy micromanagement over fun adventure.

I understand that this is the tech demo and not the story/finished product. It is a tech demo to showcase changes from Strive for Power to the new sequel. However, those changes from the original Strive for Power is a step in the wrong direction.

Coming from Strive for Power these changes seem unnecessarily convoluted and complicated. The idiom " if it ain't broke, don't fix it" comes to mind. Strive for Power's UI and map system lent itself to simplicity and fun. There was no need to change it. In fact the attempts to change these systems actually backfired.

The map system did not need to be changed. Instead of setting off with your party and moving through the world, exploring the land region by region, and encountering random events - you now just simply auto send your party to your destination, click "wait one hour" and arrive. There doesn't seem to be any positive to this change. It just strips out the adventure of setting off and exploring. You feel less like a master leading his slaves to finish a quest and more like some impersonal officer worker signing off on orders.

The UI is overly complicated and not at all satisfying to use. The simplicity of Strive for Power's day to day activities is now convoluted into hour by hour, resulting in unnecessary and unfun micromanagement. You're also limited in the actions you can take. Strive for Power made it possible to interact with your slaves, either training or dating them. This new system strips you of that and limits your interactions with your slaves to two buttons that you can only use 1 to 2 times per day. This makes it unbelievably grindy (as other reviewers have noted.)

Hopefully Maverik can right the ship and get back to what made Strive for Power so fun, and cut out this unnecessary baggage. It feels like complexity for the sake of complexity, and strips out the fun in the process.

I'll admit to being a bit flabbergasted that reviewers are giving this game two stars because the demo version doesn't have all the content contained in its completed forebear!

I think that, overall, this game has much more potential than the first game did. I think that it is more of a game and less of a spreadsheet management system. The quests aren't very balanced yet, but they are more varied than the quests in the first game.

Are is just background art so far, but there's a lot of room in the game for making a lot of variation in the looks of individuals. I like being able to add custom everything. What is missing now is extensive individualization of the slaves and trainers based on race and background - there's some of that, but one orc is much like another at the moment.

The weakest element of the game so far, though getting better, is the start. Players are given too many options and too little resources, with a huge (read: impossible) debt payment due only two weeks into the game. What the game needs is a "quickstart" mode with some characters and facilities already built, and the ability then to pursue some quests rather than spending time grinding the most basic capabilities (and often the wrong ones, because the player simply does not know how to tell the difference between what they need and what they don't).

Overall, I am much more excited about this game than I was its predecessor at the same stage of development.

Overall I feel that this sequel to Strive for Power is a lot less intuitive then the original game. It has less content (Removing loli and incest for example) and the interface is even harder to use and the last game had a bit of a learning curve but things at least were labeled and didn't require constant going back to the tutorial to figure out what does what and the conditions.

Also the quests it would be really useful if they would bring back the tooltips for when you mouse over pictures of items or requirements.

There is effort in this game and with it good potential but I feel that the original game is just the overall better game both as a actual game and as a adult experience.

TL;DR author treats this project as some test demoversion. You better spend your time playing original Strive For Power

Story: 0/5
- This game doesnt have any story. Its procedurally generated content. You just get random Quests (boring things like: train girl, do this, go there, etc.) and thats it. After some point it will get boring really fast.

Art: 0/5
- There is minimum amount of art in this game. Few NPC have images and you can upload your own picture to your slave girls (google something) and thats it.
- also uploading process is very annoying and buggy and it doesnt tell you why it wont accept some images.

Gameplay: 2/5
- When you start there is some fun in game mechanics and slave training system... but after some time it will get boring because of repetition.
- Same applies for Sex system. Bit fun at start, but you will quickly come to realize that it's endless repetion without any progress and you will start to get bored.
- Unfortunately this is some test version (author said it himself). Many game mechanics are very unbalanced, many actions are just waste of time, while important events have stupid limits to drag the time.
- There are Bugs.
- Early game is ruined by "debt" mechanism:
You have to overcome debt or you will end up with "bad end" at start of game. You have to understand game mechanics very well and push yourself hard at the start.
- Early game is ver very grindy!!

To sum it up:
I consider this waste of time.
Dont believe those 5 star reviews, they are usually fans of original game (Strive for Power) and they are just raising the hype (they say "game has potential"). Unfortunately current version of the game is huge disapointment.
But like I have said earlier, author of game was very clear and mentioned this is just tech demo. So dont have any expectations.

A procedurally generated slave trading game that always holds my attention for hours at a time - meaning, unfortunately, that whenever a new update comes out, I've played all of it the day of, and waiting for more once again...
The training mechanics are great, the battles are interesting, if somewhat repetitive, and the sex mechanics are incredible in that it allows you to pick each and every action without it becoming slow and tedious.
The dialogue is serviceable, and the procedurally generated quests weren't bad, though it felt like they were just about to start getting repetitive when the current build (v0.3.1) ended. Also, the Servant's Guild quests seemed impossible for the most part, requiring facilities you don't have built or slaves you have to train pretty damn quickly, from the very start. This may be intentional, I'm not sure.
A newcomer will likely be overwhelmed with the mechanics of the game. I had already played the first game so I was fine for the most part, though I haven't been able to find a way to improve a character's stats other than picking new Classes. There's technically a short tutorial when you start a new game, but by no means is it enough. I honestly have no idea how one would go about writing a tutorial (or even a fan guide) for this game, but I hope someone manages to do so. Other than that, the time mechanic is kind of wonky - I don't think the term "turn" had to be thrown in there at all, I think just the number slider and a "Pass Time" button underneath would work perfectly fine. Also, some attacks say they hit the whole "line" and some the whole "column", but actually, both of those kinds hit a whole column - I haven't seen any that hit a whole row. Lastly, the art is just not good. The procedurally generated characters don't have any and you can set your own images for them, so I hope Maverik either makes it so you can do that for every single entity in the game, or just hires a better artist.
Despite all these shortcomings, I do think this game could become one of the best porn games out there by v1.0, or hell, even in just a couple releases. The brilliant way Maverik has coded the dialogue for the procedurally generated characters makes each of them unique, and though the mechanics are a bit hard to grasp at first, once you get into it, you can't stop playing. When I think of what this game will be like when the art and missions are improved, and with the dialogue system expanded on a bit, I just can't wait for the next update.

This a great demo and very playable. The ability to choose what you want to do and where you want to go will make this game very replayable even while we wait for the game to progress. The artwork is a great start, and some of the initial game play is already sophisticated despite still being in a demo state. Good work so far!

Super boring. Its ostensibly a sex game, yet I can barely have sex. How many times you can do a sex scales to con, but then whoever you fuck probably can't do it much. And when you do go ahead and do a sex, its just boring. You just select x does thing to y, then it says they did it. This is a text based game, so the writing should be making up for the lack of art, and it just doesn't. Its like fapping to a flowchart.
There's combat in the dungeons but its boring, slow and tedious.
Not really much to do in town.
Not really much to do anywhere.
You train the slaves via just spamming X per day options in a menu, which give the same reactions when used on anyone, so most of the game is just skipping days out of sheer mind numbing boredom reading the same ****

The common misconception that took me some time to realize about this title is that this game is NOT a sequel to Strive for Power. This title is, as the descriptor states, a tech demo to experiment with new ideas and figure out what works and what doesn't. Treated as such, I can say that the added complexity does not make the game better and, worse, distracts from the core that made the first completed version fun to play.