Star Ruler 2 - A Beginner's Attempt to Conquer the Galaxy!

Damn. Now I want to play this. And the next Steam sale is many weeks away.

I am in the same boat. I was a bit tentative to try this before, but put it right on my Steam wish list after seeing this excellent effort by @cicobuff. Hope I get a chance to try it myself soon.

Re-installed. Now to see if it sticks this time. I may even grab the expansion.

Number me among the impressed and grateful. I bought it on a whim a short time ago on a Steam Sale but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I was cooling off of my latest, greatest game ever (Subnautica) and looking for something else to try and saw the thread here. So, yay!

I appreciate that you started with the race which does not require food and water but can you quickly summarize how it works more or less. A starter planet has both food and water and is at insta level 1. One nearby planet might have a food, another nearby planet might have a water. First I deduced that I should have one of these planets send its comestible resource to the other but soon I had two planets at level 1 and both were in need of a second, different food source. So I scrubbed that and sent the food from the nearby planet to the starter planet. Correct? That is, a better choice to start or not?

Perhaps I need to re-read above but I was a little confused about mining on things which are not colonizable but which have a resource. For instance, ore is measured by amount and as I mine it, the amount is degraded until eventually it will be depleted. The ore ends up on the starter planet (from whence I launched the miner craft) and can be used to build… buildings? How do the other things work which seem to have a resource which grants a boon to something else? Are these going to be depleted too?

At any rate, am having great fun except the graphic settings seem a bit wonky. I have what I am sure is much more graphical power than the game requires and so I turned the settings up such as they were. My monitor is a 4K with native resolution of 3840 x 2160 and the default graphic size setting for the game is to match the computer’s set display rate. It ran at that scale (unlike some games which sort of stick to 1920 x 1080) but the text was tiny. So I tinkered with the game settings. Tried 1920 x 1080; tried some middle of the road setting (25xx? x 16xx?) but the game either wouldn’t display (sound, black screen) or would flicker and or the mouse would not line up correctly. So I changed the display settings at the PC (Windows 10) level and restarted with varying game settings including the default which is to say go with what the PC is using. Similarly poor results including having the game run in a small window floating in the big screen. So I’m back to blown up 3840 x 2160 and tiny text. Any ideas?

Ore is used to construct large projects, including a specific hull type for flagships. For instance, building an artificial planetoid or a ringworld takes ore, IIRC.

In terms of other resources that you can mine off of asteroids like water, plutonium, morphic resources, etc., they do not deplete.

Similarly poor results including having the game run in a small window floating in the big screen. So I’m back to blown up 3840 x 2160 and tiny text. Any ideas?

Yep! Hit Ctrl+Plus and Ctrl+Minus. Ctrl+0 (not numpad) resets.
These shortcuts will inflate or deflate the UI independently of your game’s resolution so that it’s easier to play the game on very large, high density, displays. Hope you’re enjoying the game so far!

(Worth noting that the UI scale you choose should be saved to your user profile so you should only need to set it once and it should remember that scale from thereon)

I’m being selfish, but I really want you to get to the ship building and design, because that’s the part that is confusing as hell to me.

As a neophyte to both ship design and the combat system, I found this video to be helpful in explaining the basics of what makes a good ship design, and why. I also picked up good info about the design sandbox (e.g., that it exists), and the design UI.

I just came back from a business trip and will be able to update more regularly.

@SlyFrog order taken. I was actually planning to touch on the Ship Design soon because we’re almost at the stage where we will be building ships.


A Quick overview and execution of plans

Game Time: ~16mins

Our outpost links up our trade network and we can no import and ship crucial resources around.

You will note that whenever possible, we’ll like to expand to the Galatic Center. The reason for this are the abundant special resources we can make us of there. They give special bonouses and there are very good planets like “Vast Plains” that can become very productive.

Our immediate plan is this, use this time to ship our level 2 resource to Dupo I so that it can utilize the spare capacity to build the buildings to exploit the resources for the pressure they exert.

Additionally, we’ll colonize another Tier 2 planet and level it up to level 2 with 6/8 population.

Then with the 3 8/8 Level 2 planets, we’ll level up Dupo I to level 3 and ship Populations to it very quickly because we’ll have 3x relatively good labour planets producing Populations.

Let’s put this into effect.

When we take a look at Dupo I, we see it’s excess spare capacity being used up.

We export the tier 2 resource from Witirioa to Dupo I. This allows Dupo to build structures and utilize the space capacity.

But we notice that the Pressure is not used immediately.

Game Mechanics: Pressure takes time to become active If you recall, when we first imported Chemicals, it took some time for the University to build up. When Pressure is first exported to a Planet, it will automatically build buildings to take advantage of the Pressure. Before that happens, the Pressure is imported but not active.

Therefore, it is good to immediately export to a Planet that you have intended to be a recipient of resources, because it takes time for the structures to build.

This is our current Planet summary at Dupo I, you can see that our Influence is still at 0. That is because, Dupo I, although it is importing 2 Influence from Wititioa, does not have the building to generate Influence yet.

Game Mechanics: Pressure and Planet Space and Retooling of Economy We now know that Pressure takes time to become active. And Pressure utilization requires space on the Planet. This means that we cannot willy-nilly build our own structures and expect a planet to become a “super” productive planet. We must have space for the Pressure buildings to be built.

Furthermore, whenever we decide to change pressure on Planets, we will be negatively affected in our Economic output because planets that used to have different Pressures must now demolish old unnecessary buildings and build new buildings to take advantage of the new Pressures! The demolishing and building takes place automatically and does not require management on our part. All we need to remember is that change Pressure will affect economy negatively while the Planet affected builds buildings to handle the new Pressure.

Meanwhile, I colonized a Tier 2 Jewelry planet on the right of the empire and route the newly colonized Tier 1 resource to it. And we’ll build up the population to promote it to a Tier 2 planet.

It may seem odd that I do not use a nearby Tier 1 resource to promote the colony on the right.

The reason for this is that I’m rapidly expanding towards the Galatic Center. As long as I’m able to I’ll use planets that are towards the core for the expansion plan.

A quick survey of our opponents

We take a quick look at the opposition. You see that it has 7 planets across a few stars, but they are not as productive as us as they have some Tier 0 food and water planets in their midst. So we are ahead of them in our development. Let’s see if we can pull even further ahead.

Game Mechanics: Vision and Fog of War In SR2, vision is only granted when you have a presence in a Star system. There are other special conditions like Sharing Vision with an alien Empire, or getting specials that allows for vision. An example we will utilize is a special bonus of the FTL Crystals we have on Dupo I, At level 4, it will grant us vision of ALL FTL travel.

So it’s not safe to assume that your last view of a star system had not changed in the meantime. It’s dangerous! Fog of War is real in SR2.

The wait as we boost our Economies

Once Aylayza II becomes level 8/8, we’ll colonize another level 1 planet and make Dupo I into a level 3 planet. (We are already receiving 1 Tier 2 resource to meet 1/2 the requirement for level up at Dupo I).

We have achieved another level 2 planet. It’s currently at 6/8 Population. We’ll let it build it’s own Population to fill it up. Now we will now make out Dupo I level 3 by expanding towards the Galatic Center for a Tier 1 resource again.

We pick Kipax I for it’s Native Gold resource. We are fortunate in the positions of the planets and Remnants as this mean that we will not be blockaded.

Meanwhile our queued research is automatically acquired. As we can see, Megacities is being researched. This is a great tech as it allows us to increase our pressure capacity which will allow us to create planets which can be even more productive.

Dupo I now becomes a level 3 planet. We’ll fill it up with Population to take advantage of the increased production capabilities. As you can see, Dupo I is becoming more powerful. As a thumb of rule, 1xLvl3 planet > 2xLvl 2 planet > 4xLvl 1 planet

Game Mechanics: Geometric Growth In SR2, economics of a planet grows by GP, meaning effectives are multiplicative. Because you can build unique structures as well as import special resources to boost a planet with multiplicative effects. The power of a high level planet normally exceeds the sum of the productive abilities of individual planets contributing to it’s levels. This is why it is necessary to have high level planets in your empire if you want to dominate your opponents.


Summary

  1. So far we have used 16min of game time and is growing very well.
  2. We have a level 3 planet with 2 level 2 planets which can reasonably produce Populations.
  3. In a few minutes, our Dupo I would have reached 17/17 in Population. (16/16 is the standard but we had researched a Tech that gives a bonus 1 Population to Level 3 planets earlier and we now have it’s benefits.)
  4. What we’ll do next is to build some combat ability to clear up the Remnants and obtain the stuff they are guarding.

So as per request, I’ll talk about the Ship Designer next.

It’s difficult for me to get the feel of the planet building what it should on its own; should I take it on faith, at the beginning at least, that the planet knows best? When would I typically want to do something drastic like purchase a Factory to increase production or a Warehouse to increase storage?

Does it go without saying that you should strive for some balance between the Influence, Energy, FTL and Research? I have gone about my business for many ‘turns’ (3 mins) without a drop in Research, for example. I didn’t have Influence for a long time. Is it about taking advantage of some of those ‘Lvl 0’ planets and asteroids which give boosts in these areas (increase ‘pressure’)?

And I’m torn sometimes when an asteroid invites me to build a mining operation. This is something different than colonization and different than using a mining ship. They seem to take a long time to build. Is this later game stuff?

All told, I am LOVING learning this game.

Hmmm, It seems that Discourse lost all the images that I have uploaded.
I can’t see any images of the posts I have made. Anyone else experiencing this?

Edit: Ok, it’s fixed. Probably something temporary.

#Ship Design: Theory and Practice

Disclaimer: I’m not an expert by any means and is writing this based on my understanding of the systems involved. Also, our research techs currently does not allow us to play around too much with the various systems like propulsion and weapons. BUT having said that I hope this section will be able to get a beginner to understand what is involved when we design and build ships and get effective at it.

Let’s start because I’m excited to write this portion which will one of the more difficult to write sections of the guide.

Theory: Flag Ship and Support

There are different types of ships in SR2. We will be focusing on the combat designs so we’ll learn about Flagships and Supports.

We zoom into a fleet that we have and start from there

A fleet is composed of 1 flag ship with the attached support ships. Flag ships can be issued orders and represent the command of the fleet. Think of it using modern analogy like a US Aircraft Carrier Group. The Carrier is the Flagship and it may have attendant destroyers, aircrafts, helicopters, AWACS, specialised corvettes, even an Aegis cruiser for missile and air defences, or submarines attached to magnify the power of the whole Carrier Group.

SR2’s fleet is like that. A Flag Ship will typically be the most powerful ship in a fleet, but it’s the entire’s fleet composition with the supports that determines the overall capability of the fleet. So a fleet’s overall firepower is dependent on both the Flagship and the Support Ships attached.

Theory: Support Capacity and Supplies

A Fleet is limited by the Flagship’s Support Capacity which determines how many Support Ships can be attached to it. It is also limited by Supply which determines the combat endurance of the Fleet. Every time, weapons are used, the Supply is depleted. It must be replenished to allow Fleets to keep fighting battles as a zero Supply will mean that your support ships cannot attack the enemy.

Theory: Costs

A Ship carries a budget build cost and a maintenance. It also takes labour to build a ship.

It is important to remember that maintenance costs eats into your Budget. This means that you have a limit on how many fleets you can operate at any time.

Flagships and Support Ships should be built together as we do not want to micromanage later by adding Support Ships individually. And as you can see, building up a fleet can cost quite a lot. Which is why we need a powerful economy to support our combat fleets.

Quick Summary

  1. Flagship and Support Ships are different and generally, both of them are required in your starting career as a SR2 Ship designer.
  2. Flagships have Support Capacity and Supplies which determine the overall combat capability of your fleets.
  3. Supporting a Fleet is costly and you need a good economy to build as well as maintain good combat fleets.

Now, we have the basic terminologies regarding ships and how our economy interact with ship building. Let’s move into the Ship Designer in SR2.

The Practical: Knowing your Ship Designer UI

Clicking on the Designs tab brings up a screen with lots of information at our finger tips.

The UI Tooltip makes this screen easy to understand and use. You can easily see information pertaining to your designs, you can edit your designs or obsolete designs that you do not want anymore.

Most people’s difficulties does not lie with this screen. It is with how ships are actually designed as that screen seems to be the most complex in SR2.

I’ll now present 2 ways to handle ship designs.

  1. For beginners who do not want to engage in this portion of the game yet AND still would like to keep up with the game.
  2. For other players who would like to explore this amazing aspect of SR2 and experience the richness the game has to offer in terms of combat tactics by taking advantage of special ships you may want to design.

For Beginners: Ship Design, the Absolute Dummy’s Guide

For absolute beginners who are more interested in the macro aspects of the game. SR2 allows us to VERY easily stay competitive in the Ship Combat and Design subsystem

Imagine the scenario, you have researched some tech and have colonized many planets and everything is smooth as butter. You have a huge amount of budget. And start to wonder if you should upgrade your designs. But when you click into the Designs tab and click on “Create Design”, you see this.

You have no idea where to start. So you skip this “complex” screen and decided to skip this game system. You think “As longs as I build more ships, I should be able to kill the enemy.”

Then disaster strikes… A single enemy ship seems to contain ridiculous attack power and wipes out 10 of your fleets against it.

How in the world do you proceed in SR2 without becoming an “expert” in the Designer UI??? How many hours of learning do you need!

You think “Gosh! FORGET IT!!! SR2 SUX!!! I’m giving up. SR2 is great but it’s Ship Designer is a huge letdown! NEVA BUY THE GAME”

If that’s you, you have come to the right place.

Let us now see how we can handle the Ship Designs and keep up with our opponents and build designs that can match our Economic prowess.

###Game Mechanics: Size is power

The KEY determinant to the combat power of SR2’s Ships is actually encapsulated in 1 variable. SIZE

Let’s see how, as dummies, we make use of this fact and keep up with our enemy combat capability growth.

We select a design we would like to upgrade. Pick any one, because the concept is the same.

And we are greeted with a complex screen with way too many variables for our beginner’s mind to comprehend!

I draw your attention to the “Size” and the Information panel displaying the overall combat power of the design.

We will now make this design more powerful. Let’s double the combat power!

We change the Size of our design. And with just a simple change, our design is transformed!

As you can now see, the combat values of the Ship is now slightly doubled. The design “look” exactly the same, but now everything is UPSIZED!

We note that the cost to build and the maintenance costs have also increased similarly.

Game Mechanics: Ship sizes SR2 scales everything in the universe with Size. When you increase the size of a ship design, the hexes where you place the weapons and systems remain the same. But they are increased in SIZE. So subsystems hosted them gain the equivalent increase in amounts of power/damage/supplies they provide!

By using this simple way to upgrade our design, I can safely say that ALL beginners will be able to keep track with the enemy. You fleets will now grow in power as your Economy grows and you are able to fuel more expensive ships that will be able to stand toe to toe with enemy fleets and even decimate them!

You old ships can be refitted at planets with the new design. Which was why we chose to upgrade instead of designing from scratch.

Also Remember to upgrade the size of your Support Ships as well!


Summary:

  1. We learned that as absolute beginners, we are now able to keep up with ship designs. Just by controlling the Size of our designs!

Now isn’t that easy?

We’ll now more into the more advanced features of the Ship Designer! Stay tuned!

Practical Ship Design for the Brave

The way ships are designed affect how they perform. The starter designs that SR2 provides are quite workable. But for designers, fledging designers, we prefer to see if we can do 1 better.

At this stage of technology development, our fleet will just normally attack the enemy fleet head on. They will turn toward each other, close to attack range and fire away on each other. It is a battle of attrition.

Although it is a battle of attrition, factors like engines, weapons, armour placement all matter because a hit by the enemy on a crucial hex may disable critical systems on your ship!

You will be able to find out much more information from experts who have spent hundreds of hours on this in the forums. What I’ll do is to provide some key understand on the UI and features as well as terminology so that you’ll be able to glean the information from discussions.

Let’s create our own design. We’ll build a fairly large Carrier Type that contains the main weapon systems that will also support a fleet of Support Ships and supply them decently.

Our ship should be relatively good at turning and moving. As a Flagship it should be be able to survive the combat.

This seems like a long list of requirements. Let’s see if we can meet them.

Ship design in pictures!

As you can see, you can have some fun generating ships of all kinds randomly.

They can be fun, but you will probably realise that they wont be effective because things like weapons, supply, ammo are all randomly sized and placed. If your lasers are not having correct shooting arcs, you are asking for trouble!

To assist yourself, you can see if any of the shaped appeal to you. Then you can work from there by replacing systems in the ship. That is one option.

What we’ll do instead build everything from scratch.

We clear the design.

First, let’s build a bridge. The bridge provide control points for the Ship. Control points are used whenever we add weapons, propulsion and other equipment to the ship. When we add systems, control points are used up. So for a ship that bristle with lots of weaponry, we’ll need more control points.

The bridge is also the “heart” or core of your ship. If the enemy have a powerful weapon that can penetrate to your bridge and destroy the hexes there. You ship stop working.

Game Mechanics: Ship Hitpoints In SR2, each hex of the ship has a health value. In D&D game terms, we call it Hitpoints. When an enemy weapon hits a Hex, the damaged caused is done against the health of the Hex, if the Hex is destroyed, the leftover damage is then applied against the next Hex in the direction of the incoming damage.

Writing this guide is fun but I need to attend a meeting now. Stay tuned! To be continued…

##Designing our Ship

Adding Control

Let’s build some control by adding some bridge hexes.

Adding Supplies

Supplies determine how long we can fight in combat. As supplies are depleted, our weapons and our Support Ship’s weapons stop working. So it’s important to carry supplies with us for endurance in combat.

Adding Support Command

Support Command determines how many Support Ships we can attach to our Flagship. The higher this number is, the more ships we can attach. Let’s add some.

Adding Weapons

Weapons are crucial in combat. Whether you are making a missile carrier or a beam ship, you will be making some big decisions when it comes to weapon choices. Here we’ll make an all rounder ship. When placing the weapon systems, the first click determines the weapon’s firing position. When you add additional hexes connected to the weapon, those hexes determine the power of the weapon you had added.

I’ve added Railguns and Missiles and Carpet bombs to the mix.

Adding Propulsion

Engines are important to our ship as it determines how fast it can move and turn. They use a lot of power and their effectiveness is determined by how massive our ship design is. Later, when we add armour which add a lot of mass, we’ll find that our acceleration and turn rates get affected.

Engines hex placement works the same way as weapons, the first click adds the main thruster. The rest of the connected hexes adds to the power of the thrusters.

Adding Armour

We have a naked ship at the moment. Any weapon shots hitting us will immediately hit one of the crucial components and reduce our combat abilities.

There are 3 kinds of armour that is accessible to us now.

  1. Ablative Armour protects against Railgun
  2. Plate Armour protects against damage in general and have high hitpoints but is heavy
  3. Reactive Armour protects against Missile Damage

Laser is ineffective against armour but can destroy subsystems.

Now, personally I feel that it’s most effective to mix the armour. Say a missile hits our ship, it may burn through the Ablative Armour but will be stopped by a Reactive Armour. if you had layered it properly.

So for our ship, we’ll like to build some armour in front to absorb incoming hits that are sure to come.

Ship design is an art and will require a lot of tries to get the design rightly balanced.

Ok, we’ve build our very first beginner ship. The design shield the ship from the front and offers some protection from the sides. It is heavily armoured from the front and sacrifices firepower to do so.

Now is there anyway to test this? How do I know that my design works properly?

Let’s export our design.

And test it. First we save our game.

Then we hit ESC to access the menu and test our design in the sandbox!

You are greeted in a arena. And the design screen contains our design!

Let’s head back and see how a hypothetical battle play out.

Oops, it would appear that our design failed spectacularly. I guess it’ll take some more attempts before we can beat even the standard Battleship design supplied by the game!

That was quite fun and it would seem that we have an inferior design.

But I hoped that you have learned the basics of the UI and ship design and can now explore the huge possibilities available to you.

Be sure to check out some of the discussion that is happening in the forum.

Downloading designs from other people

SR2 offers you the ability to download designs from the Internet SR2 community.

In the game, you can access the community screen to access and download the designs uploaded by the community.

One of the difficult is sorting through the huge list of the designs available. Not to worry, I believe that as we experiment more and more, we’ll be able to become expert ship designers one day.

Sorry to disappoint guys, I guess my beginner stripes are showing here with regards to ship design. But I hope that I have dispelled the mystery surrounding the UI on Ship design and allowed you to get to grips and start experimenting with ships design. Or not. =)

It’s not beginner stripes. It’s awesome! Thank your for doing this.

Okay, this looks crazy deep. I’m bookmarking this thread in case I ever look into Star Ruler 2. Thanks for the hardwork @cicobuff

Thanks for the encouragement guys!

I’ve covered most of the UI and the basic of laying out an economy. The next portion will be the fun part leveraging the economic base and engage in a methodical expansion as well as teching up. This portion will be fun to play because there will be a lot of decisions and activity.

What I’ll do will be to update at a high level picture and move forward in time in 3 mins budget cycles. Expect a lot less words with more pictures.

@geggis, I thought I was supposed to encourage you to play! Haha. No worries. SR2 is a very deep game but makes things easy to do and discover because of the well executed UI and well thought out elements. Once you get past the intimidating look of the game. It’s quite a joy and easy to learn the deeper mechanics.

#Seeing the Forest instead of the Trees

Let’s get back to the big picture. This part of the game plays really fast because we have production capacity to do things.

The UI says that we are at ~19min.

With a healthy Influence generation, we can start purchasing and playing Diplomacy Cards. We see a very powerful card “Name Planet”, this allows us to boost a Planet’s production capability by spending influence points.

We have 9 points at the moment which allows us to purchase the 6 point cost card. And we’ll wait to have 7 points to spend it.

This card adds 4 more Population and 1 Labour to a planet. Perfect for our starting capital planet!

We will spend some time and effort to grow Dupo I into a powerful planet. We’ll like to reduce the amount of clicks we do to build population. Let’s see if SR2 UI helps us out here.

The UI provides a toggle to repeat the production queue. Once toggles, the game automatically queue production for you as long as you have budget for it. It’s a really convenient feature so that we do not have to revisit planets to queue up their production. We’ll do that for all out planets producing Population.