Star Ruler 2

You can play Groot. You can play an Alternate Reality race from Stars! done right. You can load a planet with Thrusters and planetary defenses and fly your Battle Planet around, wrecking other players' fleets, and then snag a Buster Machine (Buster Beeeeeeeeeam!) and blow their planets up. You can collect the parts to the mighty Revenant Titan and return from certain defeat to dominate the galaxy, or snag pieces with a tractor beam and hide them about the map to prevent others from doing the same. You can make (overpowered!) kamikaze ships to wreck other players' fleets, but if they resize their fleets, you'll be wasting money on an overly large one shot ship. Conversely, they can outsize your bombs and regenerate the damage, which calls for bigger bombs, which calls for.... Ship design > Spore. This game is a fantastic gem that's bound to gain a cult following that will expand over time. The multiplayer's great, but almost no one plays multiplayer. Fix that. Game crashes all the time, but loads almost instantly and has very frequent auto-saves. Can reload multiplayer matches. Multiplayer can start with a few players and several AIs, and new players can join games in progress, taking over for the AIs. Conversely, any players that need to leave will be taken over by reasonably competent, if not incredible AIs. The game has 5 major resources, *not counting* planetary resources (several types) which can be combined and routed to other planets to "level them up." Levelled planets are a prerequisite for other planets to reach higher levels, and access new planetary resources. Each major resource by itself is fairly simple and straightforward. Managing all 5 (mostly 4 of them) effectively in real time is a significant whack-a-mole challenge of the most enjoyable sort. Learning curve takes several in-depth hours, but the basic gameplay is immediately accessible. Veteran players are extremely helpful and friendly. Buy this game. See you in multiplayer.

I have only played 10 hours of it so its just a first impressions. Graphically game doesn't look bad, good enough for 4x game. No performance problems on huge maps and x10 speed. Gameplay is quite interesting i would probably point out 2 mechanics that should catch your attention. 1. Leveling planets, each planet has 1 type of resource, you will be exporting it to different planet to make the population of different planet grow, basically you will have a pyramid of planets that support each other and you have a megapewpewpew planet at the top that generates loads of resources. 2. Diplomacy cards. 1 of resources you generate is influence, with it you buy "action" and "vote" cards, action cards are used to take over artifacts/planets or even solar systems. when activated the card goes to a vote where different factions use/or not their "vote" cards. And for the things that i don't find particularly well done. 1. Combat. Combat is very stale, its basically 1 commander ship and tons of support ships around it, resulting in 1 click battles. 2. Ship designing. Its either very in depth and complicated or plain lazy and uninteresting, i couldn't figure witch it was. 3. Researches. Its a pain to navigate the research "tree/circle", it doesn't give you info on technologies that you cant research yet, meaning you will have to scroll over each one of them.Technologies are very basic + to that, - to that, boost this. Overall i like the planet and diplomacy mechanics which is the point of the game and "minuses" are not that bad. Good game

I bought this game on Steam and have put about 6 hours into it. I have a hard time giving what I think is a fair rating for the game because of this: 1) If you are a person who has a large amount of spare time to devote to your gaming this game may be of interest to you because it does appear to have a lot of depth and does several things (leveling of planets, diplomacy, etc...) in unique ways. 2) However, if you are a gamer like me who only has limited amount of spare time for gaming you might think twice before buying this. First there is no manual. In place of a manual the utilizes a wiki which currently is fairly "bare bones". Lastly, to be blunt, the tutorial leaves a lot to be desired. To sum it up if you have limited time to game you may want to pass this up but if you have the time to watch "lets play" videos, read forum posts or just fool around with it for hours than it could be a great game for you.

I tried this game a year or so ago and didn't really get into it, mostly because many of the game mechanics are new, not well explained and not immediately obvious. However, I tried it again lately and completely fell in love with it. Thanks to a great strategy guide by cicobuff: https://forum.quartertothree.com/t/star-ruler-2-a-beginners-attempt-to-conquer-the-galaxy/125503 This is an indie game that did not get the exposure it merits and it is a real pity. It's a really well executed innovative take on an old genre. No showstoppers or annoying glitches. Great replayability. Just awesome.