Strive: Conquest

A successor to first Strive For Power game, currently at alpha stage · By Strive4Power

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Feedback for 0.6.6a

A topic by Hunter Sugar created Dec 16, 2022 Views: 1,920 Replies: 9

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Hunter Sugar2 years ago(+1)

Landed in this version after having a ton of fun with Strive 1. This is coming out better in basically every way, amazing stuff. As expected from WiP though, a few rough edges here and there though nothing deal-breaking, for sure. Shining a bit of a light into some of those edges I myself ran into. Not sure how the overall feedback loop is going so could be some of these are well known or intended.

Authority and Fear

This stat is mentioned in a few places but I’m GUESSING it’s not implemented yet? I couldn’t find it listed anywhere and am not sure what it supposedly does. I don’t recall the tutorial messages mentioning it. It’s also one of the very few things linked to the Fear status but I also couldn’t see a reason to bother with it during dates.

Stat Growth

It’s unexpectedly tricky to build up stats for servants which are not part of your battle party. I get the expectation that if I have a servant working on collection jobs all the time, that’ll build up the Physical so they can access Worker and later Foreman but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It looks like I end up having to try and build them up through dating anyway. I had the same experience trying to build up other stats. Upgrading seems to give no Wits so it’s hard to make a dedicated Engineer and I think that through a couple of playthroughs I ended up never making a Geisha because the people on Service just wouldn’t build up charm and I had other stuff desperately needing dates to work on those myself

Selected action skill hard to identify

Minor one but easy fix here. On the combat screen the currently selected skill has a faint grey overlay but it’s a bit too faint. It’s hard to tell exactly what you have selected at times

Social skills

When you click on a social skill, it then waits for you to give it a target. If that click was accidental there is no easy way to cancel the skill, just clicking it again won’t work. You need to get creative about it, which can lead to unintentional activation anyway.

An indicator on the servant list that the servant as already acquired Obedience in any given day would be quite helpful. Can get a bit harder to manage when you’re managing more servants

Popups active when they shouldn’t have focus

I had one instance where I noticed this. I guess I was lucky that the game didn’t seem to get too confused about it. When opening a chest, the new overlay pops up telling you of what you got. I then hit 2 on my keyboard and it closed the original chest decision popup. The rewards popup was still there and I think I did properly get the items.

Master pronouns

When you unlock Master Acknowledgement for a servant, you can go into customisation to change it. From what I understand you need to do it for each one. A suggestion on streamlining this (though maybe this is how it’s supposed to work?) is making use of that field on your master’s customisation tab to set a default. So the way this would work would be that each servant has their internal default value (shoutout to mewstress; that pronoun alone dictates my first servant is ALWAYS a catgirl) which they use if they don’t have Master Acknowledgement. If they do, they read from their own custom pronoun field which is blank by default. If there’s nothing there, they can read from the master’s custom pronoun field for the customised default.

There are still a lot of instances where you’re not addressed correctly, particularly regarding gender on custom events and some dialogue with NPCs always assuming you picked male. This one I’m sure is known (and expected at this stage, tbh) and will be a bit of a pain to cleanup.

Secret Classes and Races

When checking “all classes” for a character it won’t show race specific classes. I spent a while thinking Druid was a main quest unlock after not seeing it in my second playthrough. Having a way to know about these would be nice to get players interested in exotic races.

Progression and resources

This is probably going to be a tough one to sort out and I don’t expect it to happen for quite a while. Start of the game is very dependant on money but the Service job doesn’t seem to kick in until quite a while later. This more or less forces the player to focus martially for the beginning of the game, you need to be clearing dungeons to make the money through selling captives. This issue could, perhaps, be alleviated if we could have more servants but at the start of the game you don’t really have the time to go after the required resources to upgrade. It feels a bit late until you can have this freedom and start diversifying your play and by that time, maybe you still feel that for a lot of materials, your best option is to just grab them from dungeons anyway. Throughout the main questline, combat IS quite central so it IS good that the game nudges you toward getting some martial prowess but I feel that collection and service need a bit of a nudge. Crafting jobs end up getting the shortest end of this stick because it’s massively late until you can get started on them beyond quick jobs to satisfy repeatable quests.

A bit annoying to have to try and make sure you have the right tool for the job. MIGHT make the UI a bit hard to sort out but it would be handy to be able to give characters multiple tools so you don’t “oh, dang it… no, he has the axe, this needs the knife…”

Farmer gives bonuses to Farming. In this context does farming mean “collecting grain” or does it mean “jobs which use a sickle”?

Sex Skills

Sometimes you’ll get offered a free sex encounter after a Date which is pretty great but if you didn’t check what skills your companion had before initiating the date you can’t really find out what your servant would need sexual training in during the date. Just having a way to see their skills would be good.

And I guess this is already a way extended list. As mentioned, this is mostly QoL/polish stuff and, at this stage, it’s expected that there is a lot of polish to be done. Regardless, the game is already looking great. It’s taking a lot of what was good in the previous title and making it better. The big combat overhaul is a massive difference, the guild work is interesting and the storyline is way more involved. Just the prologue feels as long as basically the entirety of Strive for Power. Eager to see what comes next

Strive4Power2 years ago(+3)

Thanks for the feedback.
Authority and fear was basically removed, a bit weird that I didn't clean up all its mentions yet.
Stat growth should occur in normal tasks
You can cancel skill use by right click
The game expects you to do combat from very early so yeah.

Hunter Sugar2 years ago(+1)

All’s well that e̶n̶d̶s̶ ̶w̶e̶l̶l̶ is working as intended =P

Valtur Naa2 years ago(+1)

Stat growth does work correctly, and you can see in the jobs menu which stat is measured for job efficiency ... this is also the one that grows over time. I have noticed however that some jobs seem to grow slower than others. Dancing, for instance, seems to grow slower than gathering wood ... and that's before you consider the factors, which can slow progression to a crawl.

Social skills can be cancelled by right-clicking. Many menus can be closed the same way. However, I find that it often takes multiple clicks to cancel a skill, and menus have to be clicked in specific areas to close them (generally in areas where there are no buttons, but sometimes right over the buttons, with no rhyme or reason).

Service jobs give money relative to the related skills (they specify which one for each job if it's not sexuals) as well as the slave's overall value. Early profits are low precisely because it takes time to train your servants. They need their skills, classes, AND various training perks from the Training and Rules menu to gain the value to make a profit. This is fairly common for an RPG-like game, but it does get pretty extreme here. But if you were to spend the time and effort training one slave at a time, and give them added value as fast as it becomes available, they would start making money quite quickly. I haven't managed any no-combat runs yet but low-combat runs really can stay ahead of the debt payment.

I agree that a combat-heavy start is heavily favored here but for a different reason: slave factor upgrades. In previous versions, slaves' factors could be upgraded directly with gold or xp, but now you have to find a slave with the factor you want and sacrifice them to feed that factor into another slave (which costs gold based on the value of the recipient). Factors lead to faster growth of physics/etc, which improves profitability, and no factor is more valuable than growth, which has an exponential effect on the slave's value, as well as determining the job efficiency multiplier (and as I mentioned, value is huge in determining their profits from services). Just to put some raw numbers up here, my current game has a newly-acquired cat stripper who has only 2 growth and the dancer and harlot classes, has no advanced training, is worth 310, and earns 64 gold per day. My fully-loaded Daisy, on the other hand, has 6 growth (trained her to 5 before buying the dress, which gives +1), every class in the sex section, and every value-adding training option, is worth 6683, and can make 948 per day as a sex toy, or 896 per day as a stripper (fun fact, stripper runs off charm, which for her is at 60/100, so she isn't making max profits there yet). Of course this extreme gap means you'd be heavily penalized for not upgrading your slaves, and you need to sift through a lot of slaves to find enough sacrifices for just one to be fully upgraded. Without the huge influx of free characters from combat, such upgrades would be completely impractical. You simply can't find that many slaves in the markets, and it would be far too expensive if you could.

I disagree that crafting jobs get "the shortest end of the stick" as I've found crafted weapons and armor essential to all my combat characters, and crafted tools vital to all my workers. Workers' outfits and other costume attire I can usually find plenty of without the bother of making it myself, but armor, weapons, and tools found in shops or taken from the stores never seem to be built the way I want them. I do very much wish, however, that you didn't need a level 2 tailor to make medium armor. The early game is laced with an obnoxious period where you can make heavy armor but can't equip it to anybody, but you can't make the medium armor you can actually use.

I don't have much to say on your other points except that I agree with them. Some excellent QoL suggestions.

Hunter Sugar2 years ago(+1)

Since Strive 2 is still in heavy development rough edges are expected in many places, for sure. Always a lot to chase especially as you’re introducing new stuff. There’s also the thing where sometimes what you planned for doesn’t turn out like you imagined, which is part of my feedback as well regarding, in particular, the combat and money situation, especially for the beginning of the game. “Game forces you to develop around combat very early on and more or less gates off other revenue streams” is, really a “is this actually intended?” sort of question. To which Maverik’s answer seems to be “yes, actually” which is fine.

I was paying more attention and saw stat growth indeed being affected by jobs, but it seems to be very slow. I think this could use a buff, it feels hard, at times, to get the required stats for labour classes on many characters, Foreman and its 50 physical requirement come to mind. Growth is a bit nebulous, the way I believe it works is you get an additional stat cap of 10*min(char.level,char.Growth). And yeah, definitely see the change in value and all. Later in the game, if you have a couple of properly built servants you’re rolling in service money.

Additionally, paying a bit more attention to the UI I saw the tags for what class of task each one is on the right, so answered my own question about “what do you mean +farming, tho?”. It’s just a lot to learn and check but comes with the territory of the type of management game that this is

Also Mav explained the right click to cancel and I was able to do it more consistently. I guess a tangential QoL change in this direction would be adding a tag in the mansion servant list for those who already got Loyalty on that day. But just being able to cancel skills already helps, =)

For Crafting jobs, I guess what I mean is that, sure, in the late game they’re useful… BUT You become really powerful rather quickly and being in more advanced dungeons means you’re getting better loot. But to craft stuff you need materials which can be tricky to gather in good quantities due to other restrictions of the game. Just getting enough roster for you to have a number of collectors takes some effort in mansion upgrading etc, initially you don’t even have enough for your full combat party since you yourself take up one mansion slot. So by the time you can actually get started on crafting the good gear, it feels like you’re deep enough in the game that there’s little reason other than vanity to do it. You probably have half-decent gear for everyone from random rewards anyway. The super good stuff also happens to be really expensive and you don’t get there “naturally”.

What makes that point a bit more nebulous is that progression in “crafting and resource track” and “storyline track” have not progressed equally. I don’t really expect Maverick to implement too much more crafting progression, I would guess that side of things is mostly done, as is there isn’t going to be an entire new tier or 2 of gear (pending the game bloating a bit and new difficulty tiers needing to be included as well if that curve stagnates too much for too long). But the storyline is still quite unfinished, feels like there’s a fair amount to go there so it makes sense that they are unsynced. Crafting work tools is definitely the most important one outside of specific quest requests too, imo.

As I mentioned, with the game being in the state it is, a lot of this is mostly a “this is how this game feels to me as a player” so that Maverik can check it against what’s intended. Some QoL, as it’s easy for the small stuff to fly a bit under the radar when you’re implementing the big stuff.

dnoah2 years ago

Will there be another way to increase factors, that doesn't involve murder?

ChrisOwens682 years ago(+2)

I believe Maverik said that they are released, not murdered

Lujencjia1 year ago(+1)

I thought it's done through some cannibalistic ritual, and was slightly disturbed. Guess my mind picture of the world was too close to Age of Conan.

Arkadia1 year ago

Just came from Strive for Power and loving the sequel though it took me 2 days to get used to the sudden difficulty spike in having to chase for every possible profitable edge to pay for mortgage payments. I just have a question if there will be more unique classes for specific races? One of my first characters was a seraph and I thought I could get valkyrie until I realized it only applied to women haha so maybe more specifications on race specific classes would be great for people who have a certain build in mind.

I actually like the fact that despite initial difficulties in setting up a working economy from your manor, Once you get it up and runnig with Daisy and 2 other servants to start slowly building up your manor, and then eventually opening up to more servants for resource gathering and forging to set up a streamlined flow of crafted tools to sell you could afford to be really lazy because it pays with enough investments and the right servants with the right stats and training (shout out to the worker classes for being the best "passive" economy classes).

Hunter Sugar1 year ago(+1)

Yeah, I talked about this in the OP as well but seems that the way the economy is shaped in the early game is intentional. Maverik wants the player to head into combat somewhat ASAP. If you’re fighting a lot then it’s quite easy to make the money (at least currently since you get so many captives). Transitioning into a “service and goods” economy is an effort for later, yeah, which IMO is made a bit harder by mansion upgrades being a bit tricky to unlock early on and that passive stat growth from jobs is quite low. Things do pick up, especially if you get a servant or two with exceptionally high value from some sort of special class or whatnot

In Strive 1 the game was more or less a rush to farm and then you win, in terms of resources so I think the overall shape is an improvement.

Agree that a way to check all classes in-game would be a good one, even classes that won’t be available for a given character. I feel the game kiiiiind of nudges against you having a lot of very different slaves and peons since they need a lot of investment to be worthy so having at least those be dangled in from of you could help make the exotic trader more attractive than the random people you pick up in dungeons

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Strive: Conquest

Feedback for 0.6.6a