You will need to colonize a planet with food, and export it. Let’s say your starting planet needs a food resource, and a “Tier I” resource to level up. Here’s why I don’t like the resource system I would go as far as to say the resource system is tedious to use, and makes the game a little frustrating. More than half your time is spent just scanning over planets searching for resources, and that feels stale quite quickly. It does get confusing, and I have to say after pumping some time into it now I’m really not a fan of the resource system to level up planets. You can only do that if you have planets colonized that have the needed resources free. That was until I realised you could colonize a planet, and tell it to auto-level up to the required level. I kept getting confused on what planet needed what resource to level up. The planet levelling system is one of the unique aspects of Star Ruler 2, and it can be more than a little confusing. You see lots of particles fuzz around then and eventually a POP/BANG sound with a flash of light and off they speed, awesome stuff.ĭifferent races actually have different methods of faster travel, so expect to see more like this in the game. Sending out ships to the far reaches of space also looks awesome, as you can tell them to plot a faster than light jump, which the animation for is awesome to see every time. It looks like absolute chaos and I do love that part of it. Space battles can become insane with lots of lasers and rockets flinging around, especially as we are talking multiple hundreds of ships once you get going into the game some more. It's a nice way to boost up an area you're not producing well in, but I would still rather have money build up to utilise fully on building a massive fleet. I would have much preferred a standard pot that just builds up, as currently any money not used after the 3 minute cycle gets deposited into another resource if you have enough left over, and I’m not a fan of that. It doesn’t really allow you to plan very far ahead, and actually makes the game a bit slower to manage. It’s an odd way to do it, and makes building fleets take quite a while sometimes. I’m not sure if I like the fact that money doesn’t build up, but gets reset every 3 minutes based on your income and expenses. Each flagship has a ton of support ships attached to them too, but you don’t control them directly. You even directly control your flagships in a traditional RTS type of way. From money coming in every 3 minutes, to research points generating over time. It even has an insane zoom level to allow you to zoom right on top of your ships, and your ships have a surprising level of detail considering a lot of your time is spent zoomed out.Įverything is played out in real time, rather than ending any turns. I really do quite like the graphical style of the game planets actually move around their sun and you can see little asteroids floating about. It wasn’t quite as comprehensive as I would have hoped though. Luckily most things seem to be laid out rather nicely, and it’s one of the few tutorials that doesn’t overwhelm – something that would have been easy to do in a game such as this. The tutorial is an absolute must, as the game has plenty of unique features that need your attention. It’s true that this isn’t just “yet another 4X space game”, but it’s also not the best either. I find Star Ruler 2 to be a very different experience over traditional 4X space games, and I’m not entirely sure it’s for the better. I was going into this expecting a turn-based 4X game like the recently released StarDrive 2, but what I found was quite different, and surprisingly interesting to play. The fate of your empire depends on your ability to master the economy, field a military, influence galactic politics, and learn what you can about the universe. Explore dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of systems in a galaxy of your choosing, expand across its planets, exploit the resources you find, and ultimately exterminate any who stand in your way. Star Ruler 2 is a massive scale 4X/RTS set in space. Star Ruler 2 released out of Early Access last month, so it’s a perfect time to take a look now that it’s considered stable for everyone to play. It also helps that StarDrive 2 is currently broken, so I have extra time to give Star Ruler 2 for this article. My interest in these types of strategy games has never faltered, and with the release of StarDrive 2 it has spurred me to go over games like it that I missed out on covering. It was released for Linux back in July of last year in Early Access, and it’s about time we gave it some thoughts. View cookie preferences.Īccept Cookies & Show Direct LinkStar Ruler 2 is a space strategy game I’ve been meaning to cover for some time, and I’ve given it a good go to tell you what I think. YouTube videos require cookies, you must accept their cookies to view.