Star Ruler 2

I LOVE this game. It's been a long, long time since I've seen something both different and GOOD in a 4x space game. So many are rehashes or lame indie jobs that don't quite work. This game is different, and I actually found myself looking up and realizing it was 10pm and I'd forgotten about dinner--and everything else. Played out two games so far. There are many elements I don't have a full grasp of yet, but I'm getting there. Played mix of Hard/normal AI, will try all difficulty maxed next time. What makes it good: -Innovation is what shines the most. You haven't done all this before. -Card-play-type diplomacy interaction. This can be ignored, or played seriously as a sub-game. It's worth doing and fun. -Responsive AI. If you try to use a card to annex a system, they declare war on you, they won't just sit there. -Lots of planets and fleets are involved but with just the right level of automation to make it a non-headache to manage. The game beats virtually all 4x in this department, but the learning curve is real here. Play the tutorial. -tactical battles with you in control (Sins of Solar Empire fashion). These are real time, but not so fast you can't react. -Ship design. It's fun, and seems to be effective, but is a little hard to measure what it's doing. Problems: -Sometimes an AI would sit in it's home system and do nothing. -I've experienced 1 crash so far, while loading. Suggestions for players: -Don't build a lot of random buildings. They will suck up your budget. You don't need very many. -Go fleets instead of too many outposts and colonize often. You'll expand faster that way. -Build up a level 4 or 5 planet as soon as you can, but don't grab too many level 2-3 worlds you can't use yet. -Name systems and fleets with the diplo cards for big bonuses. -Spend energy etc. for easy research grabs. -Go into the key bindings and make the space bar the pause key so you can pause when a fight starts in a large empire.

I have played a lot of 4x games in my life. Probably the best was a Win 3.1 game called Stars! Things have come a long way since then, mainly due to real time vs turn based game play. However, there is just absolutely too much going on that I have no idea how to keep up with the AI, let alone a human player. For large swaths of the game, you're paused because letting the game play out while you're busy planning is a bad idea. The last game I played had about 110 minutes of game play spread out over 6 hours. So, you have to pause to find a planet that can supply resources to another planet. Pause for diplomacy. Pause to build planetary structures. Pause to catch alerts. Pause to find a fleet to investigate an anomaly. But most importantly, you're paused to design ships. It is new (to me at least) to design a ship on a hex by hex basis. It sounds really cool at first, but then you realize that with little documentation to go by, you have no idea what you're doing. For instance, support ships (which can't move on their own without a flag ship) need acceleration for some reason. Every single combat I've been involved with just had both sides standing in space, unmoving, and firing off their ordinance. I've never seen support ships on either side of the battle break off from the fleet and engage. The economy is probably one of the most confusing aspects of the game. The designers were probably afraid to be too derivative, so they took things to a whole new level of complexity. Every three minutes, your remaining cash budget rolls over to buy one other reasource of your choosing. Then, you start with a new cash budget that you need to spend over the next three minutes. So, yah, they've redefined 4x - eXasperate, eXacerbate, eXplain, eXcuse

Star Ruler 2 is a massive scale space 4x game, which innovates in almost every aspect of the genre and succeeds in doing so. In Star Ruler 2, your empire is very much alive, and you're very much it's ruler, you're not it's architect, it's city planner or his fleet commander. You don't need for example to build a colony ship to colonize a planet, you just right click on it, and select the appropiate option, your empire will send as many colony ships as it needs, with you only having to care to have enough funds, and to cover each planet's needs. Because in order to level up your planets, you will need to get more elaborate types of resources, so every empire in Star Ruler becomes an impressive commercial grid of planets interacting with each other. You can build things in your planets, but you won't be building everything, for each planet will build it's own buildings depending the type of resources it's importing. So if you have a highly developed planet that imports tons of iron, titanium and other minerals, you'll have a industrial powerhouse in no time. Diplomacy is a weird beast, but it's remarkably innovative. Each diplomatic action (besides declaring war, trade agreements and alliances), is given to you in form of cards you can purchase. Once each action is played, you and the opposing faction will have to play different influence cards to pass that action. You can annex planets, systems that way. Ship design deserves it's own post on it's own, you build ships placing blocks, armor, weapons, generators. Then on battle those blocks will get hit in real-time, so you have to plan carefully your design, trying to avoid exposing power generators and bridges, and not exaggerating with armor either, since it will slow down your ships considerably. Each race plays differently and there are ancient artifacts you can reactivate. There are a lot of other subsystems on Star Ruler 2 for you to discover sadly I'm hitting the character limit of this review.

It is not a bad game per se but if you liked star ruler 1 you will probably not like this game. I wrote some Pro and cons however from my point of view the cons significantly outweight the pros. Cons: -Very very limited ship Design: compared to Star ruler 1 (advanced armor is only available for flagships and this armor can NOT be placed in front of weapons) . Besides Flagships are usually not the significant fighting force. -"one budget cycle" economy makes it impossible to save money for later uses for example when the enemy breaks your complicated supply chain (see new economy system). -Combat: no more boarding possible, not possible to resupply ships aside from the automatic resupply. (You can not send additional supply ships when your fleet is low on supplies). -overall graphical style with very bright colors Pro: -Diplomacy system -aside from the budget economy the ressource system allows to make some decisions whether to focus on research or money ressources -some random debris to research while being in the expansion phase. -Easier system of settling planets -stonger differences in races

This is more of an economic challenge than a military one. The key is balancing resources and placing it in the right place. Variables such as stargates, floating continents, random chance and a dynamic evolving galaxy(s) make it quite a challenge! WHEW!