I'm dissecting Strive for Power 1 from a game design perspective to go over what worked and why it worked, to facilitate a more informed discussion of the new developments appearing in the demo.
As I see it Strive for Power was a hybrid management/adventure/gacha game whereby each of these three elements facilitated the others and thus created a very compelling gameplay loop. At the beginning of each day you would (usually) have more money with which to buy slaves/items/upgrades and possibly some potentials to investigate and issues to resolve, naturally compelling but not forcing the player to engage with the management aspect of the game.
After doing a bit of managing a player's usual second priority will be visiting the slave market which brings us to the gacha aspect of the game as with each day a new slave is available to review/purchase in each of the game's four slave trading markets and every few days or I think every day after a request is completed new requests become available. This is an interesting spin on the gacha concept because you're not just receiving whatever result the game gives you but instead you're assessing slaves for their suitability for completing current and future requests and making purchasing decisions based on their potential suitability which covers a wide range of factors. Again the player isn't forced to engage with this but for those who do there's a lot of fun to be had figuring out which slave to buy to complete which request so as to achieve the maximum profit with the minimal effort/expense.
Finally there's the adventuring aspect of the game which is facilitated by the management (buying items, training skills, improving stats) and gacha (finding slaves with good stats and traits) aspects of the game so naturally after doing everything that can be done in the towns the player will want to go forth with their now more capable cohorts to defeat opponents, gain money/items/reputation and acquire captives which is itself a sort of gacha like mechanic because the player has a limited number of ropes and prison cells.
After getting back to the mansion you inspect your captives, sort your loot, maybe do some final interactions/intercourse to finish of the day then click the new day button which begins the whole cycle anew. And alongside this to keep the core gameplay loop from becoming repetitive there's the main quest and side quests to complete which themselves tie into the unlocking of various spells and facilities. Now I can't speak for everyone but what I'm personally looking forward to most in the new game is more main/side quests to complete, more characters to meet and well more power to strive for :)
In the demo I noticed a trend towards increased complexity which in some ways is very excited about (fighters guild! cooking! crafting!) and in some I'm a bit unsure of (time mechanics?) but of course it's still very early days yet.