Star Ruler 2

Do you remember watching Star Wars as a kid? Did you ever wonder how it might feel to exterminate the competition as the Emperor after wiping away the rebel Alliance at Yavin IV? I got that feeling on a whim and destroyed just about every planet in the galaxy. I ADORE this game. Star Ruler 2 is an fantastic blend of 4x and RTS grand strategy, though the RTS strategy is a little anemic (just a little). There are few ways that the AI will put up much of a fight outside of sending ships into battle, though there are options for human players to stop their opponents from retreating (I am a fan of upgrading a battleship with an Ion cannon to stop opponents in their tracks). There are a lot of other options by unlocking technology to do things like building FTL jammers but I would like quite a bit more of. Having dangerous star systems (perhaps with high radiation levels that make colonizing and manning star systems more difficult or the odd supernova) would go far into making the game more interesting after the basics are mastered. I cannot praise the political system of this game. It makes negotiation and making hostile political action MUCH more interesting than in any game I have played before. Think of it as a simultaneously running minigame where one acquires influence points and must accumulate action cards in order to effectively use the galactic council to your advantage. This way you can spot a valuable star system and take it away from your friends or enemies without declaring all out war. It's fabulous. A tip for people using low powered PC's (like me): turn off civilian trade ships. Having the trade ships makes blockading a system much more profitable but also makes the game much more unstable. Also, keeping time under 10x seems to make the game more stable as well.

A big improvement over the usual "same old shit with a new coat of paint" which is often seen in 4X space games. Tech system is nothing special, but everything else is good. The best part is the core expand/exploit empire management, which manages to be engaging both in the early game with a dozen planets and in the late game with hundreds. Instead of micromanaging every office block, you focus on colonizing new planets and establishing interstellar trade networks to supply your planets with the resources they need to grow. There are still buildings, but all of the basic "+1 to X stat" buildings are made automatically based on the direction you have chosen for the planet. You are left to focus on the cool buildings like artificial moons, stargates, and giant orbital shipyards. Each race has a unique play style ranging from classic surface colonies to giant hive ships to living robots which are build, not bred. You can mix and match these races with different FTL techs such as the classic hyperdrive and stargate options. This provides an additional layer of replay-ability in addition to the randomly generated galaxies. The next best feature is the combat system, which is simple but engaging with giant fights to watch. You can build giant super-ships to solo entire fleets or deploy mega-carriers to ferry swarms of smaller ships into combat. Ship design is easy to learn and hard to master, with a variety of good designs available on the workshop if you prefer to skip straight to the action. Diplomacy is not the focus, but SR2 keeps it fun using a deceptively simple card system. It's a little different, but allows a wide variety of options without the risk of cheesy exploits or boring rep-farming. The modding system is incredibly flexible, and there are a number of quality mods. Almost everything is moddable, but the limited size of the community inhibits the full realization of this potential.

This game allows you to do a lot, and there's always a lot going on too. Ship building is the most complex I've ever seen in any game, almost a science in its own right, and I eventually gave up and stuck to the pre-built ship designs. Diplomacy is also something that is permanently happening, and I constantly forget to allocate research simply because there's so much other stuff going on. If you like feeling challenged by your games, you might enjoy that. However, if you want a relaxing space empire building experience where you feel like you're on top of things, then this might not be the game for you.

Interesting twist on standard empire building model, yet not a lot of fun to play. The two biggest problems with the game are the lack of detailed instructions for how to actually play the game and all the bugs. The tutorial covers just the basics, enough to give you the impression you can figure it all out – and with enough practice you can eventually figure most of it out. Provided you want to invest that kind of time on a mediocre game. Perhaps part of the fun was supposed to be in figuring out how the interface works and what to do when. I found it frustrating and I’m not sure I figured it all out. This problem is further compounded by all the bugs in the game. The crash bugs are annoying but the auto-save feature makes it tolerable. The other bugs are more annoying and harder to work around. I AM VERY DISAPPOINTED THAT GOG DOESN’T DO A BETTER JOB TESTING THEIR OFFERINGS. This game is definitely not worth $30. Sadly it is after the 30 day return period (by ten days) so I’m not sure I can return it. I bought the game because it promised epic space battles. The battles are definitely the best part of the game but there isn’t much you can do to influence the outcome. Mostly you just watch. On the more difficult levels you won’t have time to jut sit back and enjoy the battle because there are too many other things which require your attention. Instead you just periodically check on in-progress battles and then either run away if you are loosing or continue to fight on if you are winning. All in all the game needs more work to make it less buggy, more fun, less tedious due to planet and resource management, and have more interactive space battles. There are some options to automate some of the management but I got bored with the entire game and didn't believe those features would enhance the gameplay.

Star Ruler 2 is very close to being everything I want in a sci-fi empire management game. I absolutely love the combat, for one, as it has the freedom yet the compactness to be satisfying both as an action experience and a strategic one. The idea of a lead ship with tons of small followers is great, and creates massive looking battles without requiring tons of micromanagement. The abilities you gain over time, such as a skip drive, allow for some very good tactical gameplay that can help turn the tides against more powerful enemies. I've had some awesome battles with tactics that completely paid off and I love it. The huge universe is also great, with the entire game playing off in real time, its demanding on systems, but if you can handle it, you really get a great sense of scale with each game. You get everything from small freighters to ships that can destroy suns, so there really is a ton of depth in the combat. The diplomacy being a card game is odd at first, but does work well in terms of gameplay. Allowing people who focus on 'influence' to have an advantage over people who focus on war. Such as being able to annex planets, and even entire systems, as well as other disruptive capabilities. It's a great idea, but I still doubt that the card-game style system is the best way to handle it. The economy is where things start getting a bit rough. With each planet acting as a single resource that you create trade routes between. It winds up playing like a puzzle game, more than anything else. With the focus being on finding the next resource you need to increase the tier of your capital planet. Although I don't entirely mind the planet only exporting a single resource I really wish that planets had multiple resources to choose from, as it just feels a bit unrealistic and gamey to only have 1 per planet. The upside of this system is that each planet is critical, and if one is taken it can have a dominoe effect that greatly reduces your power, so it's important to have a backup plan once youre in a war. On the other hand I do like how money is managed. You don't amass sums like you do in most other games, rather you have a specific amount you get each month based on your upkeep/profit and so on. This prevents people from simply sitting back and amassing huge amounts of money, and pushing the constant need to increase the size and power of your empire. The freedom of the game seemed like an upside at first but it comes with some very bizarre balancing issues. My biggest gripe is the idea of increasing the size of ships. This completely arbitrary system allows you to increase the size of a ship to increase its overall power as well. Were there an exponential increase in upkeep for a system like this, I feel like it would be fine, prevently world-sized ships from dominating you, but there isn't. And these ships don't suffer any real downsides. They aren't slower, or less mauneverable because the thrusters also increase in size. Also, the ability to add any ship to any fleet seems arbitrary as well. Rather than having a fleet focus on a single thing, such as missle boats, or rail guns, you can mix and match as much as you want within the fleets size limit. I feel like this makes fleets far too adaptable to any situation. It would have been far cooler to see bomber squads that you have to defend with fighter fleets and so-on. The UI is very simplistic and I feel like it could have been made to be far more modern, it's not a big issues but the presentation does suffer for it. The graphics are just fine, as well as the sounds and music. All totally what you would expect, though nothing really stands out as great. I really can see how this series can become one of the best, but its currently held back by a few issues that I think would throw off most players. Giving players way too much freedom in areas that in my opinion greatly imbalance the experience, but it also provides a unique experience that you cannot get from any other title in the genre.