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

After some preparations, ready for War!

Victory!

Which we will accept and thus end our beginner game in victory.


Some thoughts

The game is against 2 easy opponents with zero aggression. So it is very easy to win. Their economies were nowhere close to ours even when we had a slow start as Mono.

Our game played out quite typically as an RTS game. The one with the bigger economy wins.

There is not much chance to research. In the end, my research tree was only 1/4 complete, and I did not have the time to build some of the cooler end game features like Ring Worlds.

Once, the economy is built up, the wars will keep you busy. I feel that there is much more to learn about combat. There are other cool weapons technologies we have yet to see as I had focused mainly on defeating the enemy economically. I am sure that if we play against the hard AI, we’ll need a lot more strategy and tactics to win.

Overall, it has been fun and I learned quite a bit about the DLC stuff.

I hope this has been enough to get you started on your own SR2 game. It’s quite a joy to play. And thanks for staying with me up till now. Thank you guys for the encouragement. Took quite an effort!

Until next time!

That was a great write up!. There have been times I thought about doing stuff like that but I never got the motivation up. With your clear writing and well-picked screenshots you did a much better job than I could have! So what’s the next game you’re going to tackle? <kidding!>

You’re too kind. The reason why I could write this was that it’s a great game. Kinda sad it didn’t meet with the financial success it deserves.

As for the next game. I’m not so sure myself. Most great games have less complex subsystems involved and so will probably not require any explanations. Any under appreciated great games out there?

@cicobuff - the DLC comes with a diplomatic victory condition. Have you ever tried that? Diplomatic/cultural victories are my preferred outcomes in any 4X, so if I decide to get serious I would have to get the DLC.

Worth it for the improved diplomacy?

I have not tried it but the diplomacy win requires to play 2 cards to win. So far, I have found getting diplomacy cards passed to be quite difficult mainly due to the amount of time involved. Every time I play more cards to get votes, the time will get extended, and after some time, the opponents will play some cards to vote in opposition. This makes the diplomacy game that requires voting very long. Especially when the opponents feel very strongly against the card you play.

I’ll be trying out some other races to see if they are more suited to a dplomatic win.

The DLC streamlined the Tedh web a bit I think, the general economic and even ship enhancements are placed throughout the web so that no matter which path we take, we can unlock general improvements. So growing deep in 1 direction does not mean that areas like ship health and factory labour does not get improved. I remember I had to research in multiple directions to get benefits in the pre-DLC.

The new races also play extremely differently from the others. I’ve been trying out the First. It totally changes the way planets are used. And without any FTL at all, they make for a strange race to play. This seem to indicate that their victory probably like in a diplomatic one.

If not for the long nature of the games, I’ll like to play multiplayer in the new DLC Co-op mode where everyone starts allied and the AI sends waves after waves of invaders into the galaxy to exterminate you and your friends. But with each game potentially lasting hours due to the way the numbers are scaled, it would seem nigh impossible to get something organized where friends can devote the hours necessary for 1 play session.

To qualify what I had said, I have not fully experienced the extra cards that the game provided. There are new cards that can heavily influence how diplomacy plays out. I saw some powerful card that can make opponents use more influence to play anything you propose if they oppose you.

So the diplomacy game had become deeper and it may be possible to focus on a diplomacy win by building up your empire with many enhancements before you play the 2 winning cards. Maybe I’ll play out a game and report on this the diplomacy game. With screens to highlight the amazing diplomacy subsystems of course. Stay tuned!

I fired up a game tonight, and I think it’s finally starting to click with me. At least I understand it enough now to ask some questions:

  1. Is there a summary screen that lists all the explored planets and what they produce? It’s a little tedious to have to scroll the map in order to find a particular resource or an untapped food producer.

  2. Is there a hot key that moves you through fleets with no orders? Often my scouts are sitting in some far-flung system doing nothing because I got preoccupied elsewhere.

  3. Obviously the early game is devoted to building supply chains in order to level up your homeworld. Other than that, how do you determine the best planets for development as opposed to those that are just cogs in the machine?

  1. Unfortunately, I do not know of a screen with unowned planets. Not sure if a mod exist for that.

  2. The keybinds dont seem to support it. I use the right panel to see if my scouts are idle by occassionally clicking on them to see what they are doing.

  3. There are planets that contain unexportable specials that you can leverage. Like there is one where it reduces costs per level of planet it is located on. Or obvious ones like Vast Plains where it can support huge amounts of pressures and buildings. These are normally located nearer to the center. Have fun discovering them!

marvellous AAR cicobuff. one q. from me about ship design: the research tree tends to corral you through a hard reserach tech required for ship design. as i have tended to avoid the ship design, is there an easy way to upgrade standard designs with the new tech? you know, bulkheads etc

Was going through the thread again when I realised I didnt respond to this.

Regarding the asteriods with ORE. They are used for special structures you can build. They are typically very powerful. The Asteroids with resources can support a mine, you build a mine on them and they act just like planets but without the high support costs. They also cannot be leveled up, similar to the Tier 0 planets. The ORE asteriods should be moved by tractor beam to your planet where it can harvest them more easily BUT that is only useful much later when you need ore for the special structures you want to build.

As you colonize, spread out the resources if you can. Try to go for a balance of the pressures are all of them are needed. You’ll get a hang of what to focus on when you start developing your own expansion strategies.

I hope this didn’t all dry up; am really enjoying it.

So a few more things I’ve figured out or decided as I have played. In no particular order…

It really pays to look at the planets in your empire of systems before you start randomly colonizing them for their food, water or other resources. Some are much better than others. Ones that have inherent ‘pressure’ along with their base resource are to be favored and if possible associated with a planet on which you are directing other similar resources.

Also when deciding on which planets are going to be the ones you raise up beyond level one or two to levels 3, 4 and 5 be judicious. Some times you will have a location in mind like a choke-point in the star systems but even there you will have many planets to choose from. Look at the surfaces of the planets. Some ‘obvious’ choices may be mostly volcanic and will be difficult and expensive to upgrade. Sometimes the water planet or the food planet is the better choice if they are mostly forest and desert - two biomes in particular that make buildings less expensive to build and to maintain.

Watch out for ‘unique’ resources; often they are not exportable but give significant system or empire-wide bonuses when that planet is leveled up. And of course, watch out for the ‘great plains’ planets which are invariably better biomes and much, much larger (more colonizable, buildable space) than typical planets.

{deleted - a bunch of stuff that was factually incorrect. I thought that a planet’s resource, be it water, food or other, could be used both by the planet it was being exported to (traditional) and by the planet itself. Rather, it is either/or. But worth mentioning because I had assumed it was ONLY export for a long time because of the way the description of the resource is phrased when it is under-colonized. And there are times when you want to further level up that planet with the Tier I resource, or a food or water and it seems odd that the source planet exports all of something it can use elsewhere only to import a different something from somewhere else. Sometimes the trick is that you temporarily use an outside source to help the planet get over a hump (usually level 0 to 1 or 1 to 2) when a planet has to be a level higher than it is to make its resource usable to anybody. After the hump you can remove the temporary resource and the planet will use it’s native resource in the appropriate way assuming you don’t later try to export it… it’s one or the other.}

Try and utilize asteroids and comets for ‘free’ resources and water. Not completely free, they take time to build, but once finished you can hook them up to a planet and they don’t require that level 0 one billion in population that keeps bleeding your wallet.

I am now spending lots of time designing and tweaking ships; both for war and civilian uses. On advice from forums I am making my mining vessels larger and with no armoring. I am making the tractors smaller but all tractor and engine so they can haul heavy asteroids back to my home system quickly.

For fighting flagships I didn’t do so well on my own but there is a wealth of designs you can look at and download from within the game which is very cool. They will show you whether, in your current game, you have the technologies necessary to build at this time and you can add them to your PC for use in that and future games. I have not advanced very far (I keep starting over) so I don’t know much but I’m having great success with the sort of early-game designs which stress lots of armor up front and weapons to the side and even rear. They necessitate a style of fighting which demands you get in close but that’s why they heavy armor in front. Speaking of - you have a lot of control about the way your ships fight and can designate a ship stay at furthest weapon range or get in close; you can ‘swoop’ in, fire off a salvo and keep gliding past and out of range before they can return much fire. All kinds of fun. And as for the civilian ships - turn OFF the AI which tells them how to fight… you don’t want them fighting at all.

And speaking of fighting, don’t be deterred by most of the Remnant vessels in systems. They fall pretty easy to a single 96 class cruiser (w/ full complement of support ships) or a couple of 64 class heavies. Just stay away from the “Ixion” 512 class Remnants for a while. ;-) I generally build one or two more war ships as early as I can to help clear out the stars around me as I expand rapidly. (Don’t forget to outfit your flagship with a complement of support ships!) Be sure to keep an eye on their declining combat strength and supply status bars. Get back to a home system to resupply yourself from time to time. on both the And the Remnants invariably are guarding things worth the having. Farming them is the preferred method for having good “influence” and cards to play in the diplomatic channels early game.

That’s all I have off the top of my head, I guess. I can surely see that I will be playing this game for a long, long time. As others have said, it has all the complexity and enjoyment of a Civilization (in space) title but plays very differently than Civ (and Civ-alikes). In a good way.

@Mr_PeaCH, the play through is complete, the Monos won an easy game with the 2 easy opponents.

I’m playing out the First right now on normal difficulty vs 3 normal opponents. The First plays very differently compared to the other races and I"m enjoying the run.

I guess you figured out that level 0 planets can never be upgraded to higher levels. It’s a special case in the economy mechanics of SR2.

The starting spaceship you have determines whether you can engage remnants. Terrakin starts off with a powerful heavy crucier that allows you to start attacking remnants right away. As the Mono, I held off building another ship because that eats up a few minutes of my population building time which allows for more colonies. The effects of a slow economic start snowball VERY fast. But as other races, it’s preferred that we build another fleet to clear out the remnants as fast as we can.

Not true, you can build a Megafarm and Hydrogenator on lvl 0 worlds to bring them up to level 1. With 3 pop it pays for itself and makes a small profit. More importantly they stop being a drain.

Thanks for the clarification!

I found this incredibly useful. And the game is really growing on me, best fun I’ve had in the first few hours of a 4X/RTS in quite some time. Shame about the financials.

I spent some time uploading this into Steam’s Guide section for Star Ruler 2. Hope it helps.

Thanks to your awesome AAR, I am picking this up during the winter sale. Looking forward to giving this a try.

Have fun with this gem!

https://www.bundlestars.com/en/star-deal?utm_source=Bundle%20Stars%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=ec129f245d-Star_Ruler_Star_02_21_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3437eaaeba-ec129f245d-423814473&mc_cid=ec129f245d&mc_eid=400bf6c3ae

Sale. Little under 5 bucks. Ends in 9hrs. In case anyone missed this.