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

As you can see, the Diplomacy cards offers very powerful upgrades that you can use for your empire. Have fun discovering others powerful cards that you can play.

We built our 1st Carrier Group.

Game Mechanics: Fleet Strength When you first build a fleet, the supports ships that are attached will need to join the fleet before the fleet reaches full strength. It’s good to wait a few moments for the supports to join up before sending you fleet on combat missions. Similarly, if you find yourself severely depleted after a battle, it’s good to visit a planet or support orbital or outpost to replenish your Fleet Strength. Fleet strength is basically a reflection of how many support ships are still available for combat.

Once we have some level 2 planets, can can still build ships at our main planet and still grow it’s population.

We have completed our Megacity Research so let’s build a Megacity in Cico’s Capital and boost’s it’s Capacity. We’ll be leveraging it later as we enter into the next phase of expansion.

Looks like we are spending a lot of of Budget and we are currently borrowing against our next Cycle’s budget. Not to worry. We’ll push on. Time is of the essence.

Game Mechanics: Defence Resource The defence resource is used by your planets to generate “free” support ships. It’s an empire wide resource and can be utilized by any of your planets. The distribution is automatic and your planets will occassionally add Support Ships that surround them and guard them against attacks.

Don’t go around using defences around all your planets if you dont have a good healthy Defence Resource income. You’ll come across planets that gives a boost to your defence. Colonize them and they will generate pressure that will enable the planets to build structures automatically to get the defence production going. The resource is then contributed to the global pool where any other planet can then use.

Megacity built. As you can see, it adds a sizable bonus.

At 31 minutes, we expanded rapidly and our Cico’s Capital is now at level 4.

Game Mechanics: Secret Projects Secret Projects are special projects that pops up (you cannot see them on the research tree initially), and they offer some very powerful techs. Here the Spire can be unlocked if we build 5 megacities.

Our Empire is expanding. At 36min, we have an almost fully populated Capital. It’s time to take stock of the situation.

Our fleets are busy clearing up the Remnants and we are spread across a wide region of the galaxy. It takes us a lot of time to travel from system to system.

Let’s see how the Mono’s problem of managing and defending a far flung empire.

Race Mechanics: FTL Travel Every race handles FTL differently. Some have FTL space drives that allow their ships to travel faster compared to normal travel. The Terrakin’s FTL drives allows their ships to travel in FTL speed. It’s not instantaneous but they are faster compared to normal travel. The Mono does not have an FTL drive. Their ships travel relatively slowly. But they can build a Star Gate in their systems that allow them to instantaneously teleport fleets into systems with Gates. When you have a very large Empire area, these gates are a must to enable your fleets to travel quickly between systems.

Let’s build a couple of gates with our Cico’s Capital.

Thanks @tylertoo!

With our planet at level 5, we’ll build it up with the population required. And now, we’ll have a big decision to make.

Should we build some more powerful fleet with and go smack an opponent around? Or should we quietly terraform our planets to boost our planets even more?

To terraform, we require 1 building planet and 1 target planet (that is already colonized).
LEFT CLICK on a planet you will use to terraform another planet. Preferable with high labour.
RIGHT CLICK on a target planet, preferable a useless one. Like a water planet which is useless for the Mono.
Then select Terraform. You can choose any of the resources available. You can only Terraform planets into Tier 1 resource planets.

And we go… BUT we hit a problem…

Oops! The DLC had introduced changes to the game. Terraform option is now DISABLED at default at game creation. You will have to ENABLE it so that the game allows for Terraforming option.

This is sad because I was going to show you how Mono can now leverage the Terraform to create an extremely powerful empire. Basically, by just converting planets into Tier 1 planets, they can all become level 2 with time and add a HUGE amount of resources and power to your economy.

This is actually a nerf to the Mono. No worries, we’ve been pretty efficient in our expansion and is playing against Easy AI opponents. So nothing to do but to soldier on! For those of you following in non-DLC original, you can try colonizing a planet and terraforming it.

Note to self: It is important to find out what has changed between DLC’s in case we get caught like this!

Let loose the dogs of War!

Commanding fleets the easy way.

Interface Tip: Group Selection SHIFT CLICKING allows us to select fleets into a group. This allows us to issue mass command to our fleets. We’ll issue an attack on the Oko’s highest level planet.

We issue an attack command to our fleets. The UI tooltip helpfully tells us an estimate of how long we’ll need to capture it.

We don’t expect the enemy to sit still. So we’re expecting some opposition.

At about 48mins into the game. We are about wage a war. Keep on expanding our borders in the Galactic Center and pick the good planets to colonize to deny the enemy a foothold on them. Grow them and select one to become your next level 5 planet.

The Battle is about to begin!

In my experience, RTS Games are brutal. Anyone having a slight leg up in terms of production and military strength can and will crush their opponents at will.

Here, our fleet decimated their defences and captured the main planet that belonged to Oko.

We not that their starting planet is a special one that contains both water and food as a starting resource. It’s not very good for us. But we’ve basically dealt the Oko a very serious blow.

We have 2 choices, to destroy them totally or to subjugate them.

Let’s try subjugating them. We do it through the diplomacy screen.

The Mono’s teleport capability allows us to strip a conquered planet’s population for colonization really fast. Our only limitation is our FTL. Which we have a very fast generation rate thanks to our FTL Crystals on Cico’s Capital which is a level 5 planet.

We’ll proceed to lay waste to them since they are unwilling to surrender.

Game Mechanics: Surrender As a player, you can actually surrender to a superior empire and still continue playing the game. The game will end when your masters rule the whole galaxy or you gets destroyed totally. This allows you to keep playing even if you have “lost” the larger war and take part in a sort of limited “victory” when you help your master conquer the galaxy!

We’ll be activating the reduced build costs Artefact and use it to build the next generation of increased sized Ships!

Artifacts are generated around the Galactic Center and offer extremely powerful bonuses.

Be sure to get as many of them as possible.

Capturing planets is a slow business. Maybe we should offer them a chance at surrender.

Now the empire is too large to parse meaningfully. So we’ll now use the Planets screen to link our exports!

The continual attacks on their planets forced them to surrender at last!

With the Oko subjugated, we set our sights on the remaining opponent. The Terrakin.

New to DLC, Attitudes.

I was so focused on on the guide that I forgot about attitudes.

The DLC introduced a new feature called Attitude.

The bonuses are powerful and will need time to gain levels. So it’s good to start getting them as soon as you can.

Preparing for a tougher opponent