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Strive: Conquest

Slave management RPG with extensive combat and roleplaying dialogues · By Strive4Power

0.16a Humble review

A topic by WhiteOrm created 20 days ago Views: 219 Replies: 1
Viewing posts 1 to 2
(-1)

I had too much free time on my hands recently, which led to the creation of this review.

First of all, I must say that my opinion on the game is mostly positive; I would not bother writing anything about it if it were not good, in my humble opinion. Still, there are several problems that plague my current gaming experience:

1) There is too much gold, and it is worth too little. The devs tried to limit gold income by introducing a maximum weekly service income, but at the same time, they introduced the accountant position. The accountant sells excess materials every turn, generating an income of roughly 900–1000 gold per turn. When you compare this to the meager 200 gold per turn from services, it is clear that the limit on service income doesn't change anything. Furthermore, we cannot buy anything worthwhile from the market until Act 4. Fox masks, mythic leather (only useful for crafting), and dragon bone stuff just go straight to the salvage bench by Act 4. Only a very small amount of gold is spent on enchanting. This lack of sinks leads to prodigious sums in our account with nowhere to go. Consequently, I have very little motivation to do slaver contracts—even if they pay well—when I already have 300k gold that I cannot spend anywhere.

2) RNG in crafting and slave training. This is just a poor mechanic that forces players to waste time re-rolling for the right numbers, without really changing the ultimate outcome. The fact that there is an option to turn off slave training and get a crafting bonus just highlights how poor that mechanic truly is.

3) A-grade slaver market commissions are too hard to fulfill. Maybe it is meant to be this way, but keep in mind that most players will be forever locked out of S-grade. There are only a few manageable commissions; most of them are just impossible.

(+1)

The issue with gold is that it's essentially unfixable as long as you can always just hit end turn button and farm resources infinitely. No matter what gold sinks or tax mechanics there is, you will always can get infinite gold by infinitely skipping days. There's a few ways to prevent it but ultimately neither will be considered enjoyable by majority of players: hard time limit so you can't skip days and play infinitely; regular evergrowing threats to keep players on their toes (basically softer time limit), removing 'set and forget' tasks which are used to farm infinite resources. While I do consider setting universal time limit for each act at full story completion, I'm pretty sure many players will request a sandbox mode where it isn't a thing at all. 

Also you can upgrade your item quality so you don't have to simply roll for it.