Star Ruler review (PC)

My first game with Star Ruler was like something out of a Hollywood movie. The plucky humans had ventured into the stars, expanding their empire to new systems, and their military to deal with the pirates that occasionally attacked. I was proud of my fleet. They crushed everything that stood before them.

Then one of my scouts bumped into the scouts of an alien empire. We talked. I wanted peace; they wanted war. Still, it was a bloodless war, as neither of us was really in contact with the other. I slowly built up my fleet – refitting older ships with new technology and trying out new designs.

Then there was a flashpoint. The enemy and I found the same goldmine in a star system at the same time. Our colony ships arrived at the same time. He took three planets; I took two. It was on! This was going to be a fight. I immediately dispatched one of my fleets to the system.

I got there first, but before I could fire a shot, their response entered the system.

One ship.

One enormous ship. One ship twenty times the size of my biggest. And at least fifty times as tough. I engaged with my fleet and lost. Badly.

No worries. This is the learning curve. I started building my own ships – three times the size of his, armoured to the teeth and covered in guns. Plus floating asteroid stations, armed with a single cannon the size of a small moon – able to destroy with one shot.

We were the human race. We were ingenious. And if this war was about a few enormous ships, we would adapt.

And then the rest of the alien fleet arrived. Not only was that first ship the smallest and oldest in the fleet – with their average being twice the size. No, they also had more ships in one fleet than I had in total. The small threat had become an unwinnable situation. Humanity was doomed. I loved it.

Sadly, that was the high point of my time with Star Ruler.

Star Ruler

Don’t get me wrong, Star Ruler has many reasons to be praised – most of which can be summed up in one word: scale. This game scales up to just about any size. I mostly played in the default sized universe, because well, it’s the default. But you could scale up the number of systems (and planets) to truly daft numbers. If your computer can handle it, it can do it.

The same is true of your starships. Star Ruler’s ship designer is one of its best features – allowing you to throw together whatever designs you want – from tiny 0.5 scale fighters, through to the 500 scale asteroid bases I tried to make. And that’s not the end of the scale, that’s just where my sense of big stopped. You can, if you have the patience for it, build ships the size of stars, star systems and galaxies. I’m not certain what you’d do with them, but if building Death Stars is your thing, you can.

The scale, can frankly, be a bit of a problem – one that Star Ruler’s designers seem to be well aware of, as you can automate just about anything. There are different types of governors to deal with your planets, an AI that will handle your research (and the semi-random research trees are very clever), AI routines to drive your haulers and scouts around the galaxy. The only thing it doesn’t hand-hold for you is designing your ships.

Star Ruler

What this results in is a game where you change what you’re focusing on at any given moment. If you’re interested in optimizing your research, you do that – leaving the AI to keep your empire chugging on. If you want to make sure your empire expands, or want to build a pile of dry docks, you can focus on that. But mostly, you’ll focus on war.

Disappointingly, it’s mostly pointless war. The enemy are the red guys, or the green guys, not the dreaded Martians or Ur-Quan. They have no character, no goals (other than wiping you out). They’re just there. It’s probably one of the places where corners are usually cut by indie games. They put together innovative, clever, beautiful games – but have little time or money for the fluff at the end. But that fluff can be missed.

The last major negative is that Star Ruler has a brutal learning curve. Nothing is told to you (though most of it is in an fairly dense in-game encyclopaedia). A red star means different things to a binary star system. What does ‘high winds’ actually do to a planet? None of this is actually complicated stuff, but it’s all quite difficult to get at. That complexity is what makes this game good, but also can make it very forbidding to a new player.

All in all, if you like the 4X genre, you owe it to yourself to try Star Ruler. It’s a different approach to the conquer space genre that has many, many merits and many dials to turn to give it a lot of replayability. But it’s not going to take the throne from MOO 2. Then again, is any game ever going to manage that?