Star Ruler

Star Ruler
N/A
Metacritic
84
Steam
71.129
xDR
Our rating is calculated based on the reviews and popularity of the game.
Price
$7.99
Release date
20 September 2010
Developers
Publishers
Steam reviews score
Total
84 (246 votes)

Take command of a vast interstellar empire and safeguard your species from total extinction in a procedurally generated 3D galaxy (with the option to flatten it) from 1 System to 10,000+! Prove your species' ingenuity through a deep and intricate combat system where anything (from individual components on ships to the stars themselves)...

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Star Ruler system requirements

Minimum:

  • OS: Windows XP, Vista, 7
  • Processor: 2.0 GHz w/ SSE2 Support
  • Memory: 256 MB
  • Graphics: 1024x768 minimum resolution, 256 MB memory
  • OpenGL: 2.1
  • Hard Drive: 300MB
  • Sound: Any

Recommended:

Recommended requirements are not yet specified.
Updated
App type
Steam APP ID
70900
Platforms
Windows PC
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Galactic Ruler
Galactic Ruler

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$39.99 xDr: 33.75
Popularity
Reviews
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Aaron
Aaron

Great 4X game. The sheer size of the worlds and events that occur make for a lot of depth and a long tail of enjoyment.

strathadan
strathadan

A surprisingly deep game that I keep coming back to. The graphics show its age, but the flip side is that you can play on a total potato of a computer. Customization of spacecraft can be done in moments or hours depending on how much you like to fiddle with designs and I can spend a day playing with this aspect alone. For the price of the game it is an absolute steal and though old, I appreciate the old school charm. If that sounds like your jam, scoop it up

atrocities
atrocities

Excellent game. Excelleent sound track. Loads of fun to play. Steep learning curve. Some torubles controling camera views.

FragPenguin
FragPenguin

One-up Piccolo ands destroy the sun. 'Nuff said.

Gyrospeck
Gyrospeck

+/+ Unique take on the 4x genre.
+/+ Great technology tree.
+/+ Infrastructure and starships receive updates with tech.
+/+ Excellent starship construction options.
+/+ Lots of options for how you set up the game.
+/+ Well supported by developers (over 30 patches).

+/- Star Ruler is played in real time with pausing.
+/- Micromanagement is handled by the A.I. by default.
+/- Swarm style warfare.

-/- Weak diplomacy.
-/- Mediocre user interface.
-/- Little purpose to using fleets.
-/- Graphics and sound effects are weak (not that important for genre).
-/- Lacks steam features.

Verdict: 7.8/10. Star Ruler is a very unique and deep 4x strategy game. It’s a great game, but as of writing this review, the sequel is being developed and looks to expand upon the strengths while fixing most of the weaknesses (such as the UI, fleets, and diplomacy). If you’re not a huge fan of the genre or can’t get it cheap, I’d wait for the sequel. That being said, this is a worthy game in its own right.

Honorable Discharge
Honorable Discharge

Played for 4 hours. Lost my fleet because my units ignored my orders to replenish fuel.

0/10 I am now going to slap a puppy because units ignoring orders are your bane once you start playing.

Vulcan
Vulcan

Eh.....that learning curve...and the AI is relentless...but worth learning

Naliao
Naliao

One of the best RTS's you can get imo.

corvin
corvin

It's one of the best games I've ever played 4X. Pulls for hours, but please remember that how we perceive the game depends on our tastes.
I offer compliments to the creators of the game.
English is not my mother tongue, so excuse the mistakes.

Plumbus
Plumbus

This game is what i really expect out of a 4x space game...complex but not too complex...system placement means something,easy to grab a hold of and just fun....you cant just throw a bunch of random ships at someone...it takes strategy. You have the ability to go as deep or shallow as you want into the micromanagement of this game...just fun :)

prane.fuji
prane.fuji

The blizzard swarmed the offices of Ironclad Games Corp. Snow was common enough in Vancouver, but no one in British Columbia had quite seen a storm like this. Sheepish developers were busy prototyping a fresh reboot of "Sins of a Solar Empire", while loved ones called in, urging workers to stay off the road and bunker down at the office. There were no races with defined playstyles, histories, or specific mechanics. No one had spent much time iterating anything but the most serviceable art assets, statistics, and tools for generating vast universes of orbiting planets and stars. The heroes and villains were essentially a blank page. The scope and ambition of mechanics bristled in the minds of developers, like the hail bearing down. It was this moment that "Star Ruler" would briefly blink into existence.

Let's talk about Star Ruler. This is a game made by fans of realtime space 4x games, which looked at cheesy sci-fi, and said "why not?" You start off creating Snailigons, the mad race of starfarers you dreamed up, and then a random galaxy of stars to rule. You decided that while whatever lessor races were getting up to, Snailigons were perfecting production, Communism, and Hard metallurgy- from a mish mash of racial and political perks. Snailigons soon outbreed the comfy confines of Orbos III, to colonize the neighboring Orbos II, and strip-mine everything else in the Orbos System.

Snailtopia would cover the stars in Orbos fashion, or that was the plan anyway. You "found intelligent life", or rather invaded a colony of spacefaring meatbags. Humans declared war, and sent a cute fleet of flak firing fighters. Your hardshell cruisers tore the never-ending stream of fighters apart with lasers, for about 2 years. Then they adapted with pesky "shields" and "rockets". Snailtopia would need to respond- it had to adapt. Thankfully, every ship can be micro-designed via technologies uncovered in your sprawling random tech tree; from scale, to crew size, weaponry, propulsion, tools, and defenses.

Clearly, Snailigons would create one unstoppable, planet sized destroyer, scorching the offending human systems into obliv... into your care. It works right up till the discovery of a second race, which promptly rips through the SA-43 Molluscan, like butter- salty butter. Now you, Star Ruler, are managing trade, adaptive war, politics, and survival across multiple systems, and it starts to feel a little heavy. You know there are more stars to manage, and who knows what opposing intelligences lie in wait there. You probably should have made a smaller galaxy to play in, and with 3 species instead of 30 to inhabit it. You know, Snailtopia's leader had a good run, but it's time to retire.

Star Ruler doesn't have the polish or intentional direction of an AAA 4x game, but it has the resources for the player to play the 4x game they want. I would recommend Star Ruler, but only with the addendum that it's an incredibly humbling endeavor, and to be sure to brush up on the tutorials.

I eagerly await what Blind Mind Studios does with the upcoming Star Ruler 2.

swphreak
swphreak

I apparently played this for 8 hours?

jacobakis
jacobakis

Before buying the game I ran across some reviews indicating that this is a 4X strategy game with a high level of complexity. Thats fine for me, after all that is what is intended to be for serious strategy 4X games.

But complexity needs the appropriate tools, interface and AI to work fine. Unfortunately this game lacks all of theme. Yes it is complex, but it turns out to become very chaotic in the end.

So you probably get fed up and let everything be managed by the AI. The AI governors will actually do a good job for you and the only thing left to do is designing ships (which is actually a cool part of the game), building them into thousands with out any limitations and penalties and sending them to massacres under a very aggressive AI which doesn't give you much choices than to go into meaningless chaotic wars.

Just curious, doesn't a ship have any maintenance expenses? And build by the thousands? It wouldn't be a problem managing such a large numbers of units, but you don't have the appropriate tools to do that or at least the ones provided are very poor.

Diplomacy is very poor, management of empire also poor and with out any perceptive, interface controllers and functions a bit strange and difficult to adjust even for experienced strategy gamers. The game also lacks a sense of personality, rather mediocre.

So finally in the end you have got this enormous in numbers ships and just send theme to battles, one after another, contentiously... ba ba doom booom... boring... still for some this might be enough and very entertaining.

On the other hand, graphs and layout are quite good, simple and minimal which in my aesthetic (and functionality) perspective is good. Music is also one of the best encountered in this genre of games, and the concept is fine but just stuck in the level of intentions.

RejectedPants
RejectedPants

Fun game, very scalable. Takes a bit to get used to as it's a realtime 4x, but definitely reccommend.

Dr Sinz
Dr Sinz

This is a game that needs more attention

Adamantian
Adamantian

A brilliant game. I play with the Galactic Armoury mod and absolutely love the game. There is a steep learning curve and some of the aspects of the game can be a little obscure and difficult to follow but, with potentially infinite maps (depends on how good your computer is) and almost limitless customisation of ships and stations I would rank this as one of my favourite games. Of course the fact that you can make ships that are bigger than the entire galaxy is a plus!

One of the detracting points for Star Ruler is the Diplomacy system but for Star Ruler 2 this is being completely overhauled.

On the whole I would recommend Star Ruler to anyone who is willing to take the time and put in the effort to learn an excellent game.

Zombie101
Zombie101

There are better games out there alot better.

Lord von Fleck
Lord von Fleck

Great game! BUT - it does seem like this game is getting robbed by a sequel - the game description claims that features are "currently" being expanded... but to all appearances its NOT, its just the old sales pitch, while the expanded feature development is implemented in a new game (sequel). Does "seem" a little dishonest... . If this changes, I'll change my review.

Starving Poet
Starving Poet

If you like Total Annihilation / Supreme Commander types of rolling economies - then this is the 4x for you.

Tired of the constant back and forth over a single star system on the edge of your territory? Simply destroy all the planets and the star they orbit and your problem is solved!

Don't like how looooong it takes to build those 1,000,000 kilometer long ships? Simply build a Ringworld around a super giant star! You can build fleets in the 1,000's in just seconds!

But wait! "Building that Ringworld is going to take too long!" Sure, while that might normally be true, all you need to do is build planetary thrusters on each of your planets and fly them all into a single system. Take that logistics!

gxam
gxam

This didn't hold my interest single player, and the multiplayer desynced constantly. When it did work, it was entertaining, though.

john.hogan
john.hogan

Two thumbs down on this one. The UI is nearly impenetreable and there is no tutorial at all. It just throws you in and assumes you'll be able to figure things out. The diplomacy system makes no sense and 9 times out of 10 you won't even be aware people are trying to give you "diplomatic missions" until you get the alert that your time is up. The system for setting up trade routes and supply runs to even out resources in your empire is so convoluted that even after a *long* time trying to figure it out I simply threw my hands in the air and gave up, usually with over half of my planets completely unable to make anything because they're missing some critical resource that, no matter how much I try, I can't seem to ship in from other worlds that have excess.

The battles are basically just giant zerg rushes and frequently cause massive drops in FPS because the computer just builds up huge-massive fleets and sends them all over the place, thanks to there being no unit cap. And a player that isn't aware of the size scaling issues can very easily set the scale too large only to discover later in the game that when they *thought* they were doing well it turns out that the computer made a fleet of like 1000 super ships the size of several star systems.

TLDR- The game isn't very fun, it's got a near impossible learning curve, there's no tutorials or explanations for the vast majority of in game functions and the ship designing does not pause the game, meaning every time you need to upgrade or change around ships you're wasting time that you *should* have been spending micro-managing your empire. Which, unfortunately, is required because without constant attention everything just falls apart.

2 big thumbs down. If I could send a message back in time the first thing it would say are the numbers to a winning lottery, and the second thing it would say is not to waste money on this game.

KYA\Eli
KYA\Eli

If you like huge Empires, and can stand the resulting complexity, this is the game for you!

Azkik
Azkik

Star Ruler is an RTS 4X of theoretically limitless scale and great strategic depth. A game could include over a thousand star systems if it's running on high-end hardware.

Graphics: Unsurprisingly, nothing too amazing (though the planets actually look pretty nice), but then at the scale most games of Star Ruler run, it should be considered something of a small miracle that there are as many objects rendered as there are. The UI is mainly just functional, nothing too pretty; it's not as intuitive as it could be and it can be hard to figure out what's going on even if you read the necessary literature, but it's nothing that can't be gotten used to.

Sound: Pretty standard space game fare. The soundtrack is decent enough, though a little light on tracks. Some notification sounds can be easy to miss or sound too much like other notifications.

Gameplay: This game has as deep a ship design element as one could hope for (like the creation of ships the size of star systems that shoot planet-sized asteroids, if one so wishes and has the means) as well as an interesting approach to tech trees which adds an element of chance to breakthroughs and branching. Unfortunately, the gameplay is usually too fast-paced to take full advantage of the ship design features and the pace of the game also negatively impacts the management of planets as well (an element that seemed fairly well done at first). Additionally, there seems to be an unresolved bug regarding energy weapons never cooling down, so avoiding those is recommended. Overall, however, the gameplay of Star Ruler feels a bit like Supreme Commander or Planetary Annihilation on the scale of a galactic 4X, albeit with a good deal more of untapped depth.

This reviewer gives Star Ruler: 7/10

Additional Note: The Galactic Armoury mod adds a fair amount of content to the game and is highly recommended. If I recall correctly, the developers themselves helped with the mod, so it's sort of an "official" expansion.

ClaydoeClaydoe
ClaydoeClaydoe

Played this game for about 2 hours and I can tell you that this game will bring hours, days, weeks, months, shit even YEARS of gameplay. Cant wait to actually learn how to play tho.

NoChip
NoChip

This is one of the better Strategy Space games, its just about simple enough to get you started preeeeetty fast,
but allows for enough free "building" to design your own fleets/ship/strategy.

It sure is a perl in my libary, and i reinstall and play it again and again. do not think the version II will outdo this game, it is a whole different badboy, but its not this badboy!

I give this game my best recomendation.

Batto Rem
Batto Rem

I played this game for a little while and got bored. Not much too it.

Rhavis
Rhavis

Despite the obvious fact this planet was made on a nearly non-existant budget it's pretty good for how small it is. And the size some of the maps can get to is damn impressive, just be prepared for your borders to become a grind zone for fleets that can range from where in the hundreds to the millions. Add in that literally everything can be destroyed, and you have chaos unending near the end.

Don't like chaos? Don't play this. It runs on it.

Aduh
Aduh

AI micromanaging, pause and continue. Just like the story of the game, not much to tell (if there's any at all). Anyone who love majesty, distant worlds, may also like this game.

Rove
Rove

Superb 3D space RTS. Like the civilization games if they were massize 3D space RTS with no size limits or unit caps. This game delivers a true 3D universe (with the option to flatten it to a 2D pane if that's the kind of map you want) with real time flight between stars and clusters. Sins of a Solar Empire meets Sid Meier's Civilization with extras that both games lack like 3D spaceflight along individually determined paths, real time civil management and custom unit construction.

Really a lovely game, proud to have it in my library. A recommended collectors item to buy on sale or even off if you have the spare cash and would appreciate sitting down to play something like this singleplayer sometime.

Unfortunately multiplayer is fairly dead and with Star Ruler 2 available for purchase now likely to stay that way. Still a very nice game for even just a few 100 hours of singleplayer. Star Ruler 2 going to be even better I hope and with people online.

This is the sort of thing I think of when I think of a honestly priced classic high quality PC video game.

A shame it hasn't been much more popular. Hopefully that would not ruin it as it seems to have much of the industry.

Trash Panda
Trash Panda

One of my favorite 4x games of all time

Praetor
Praetor

The spatial RTS all about the most expansive empires you can think of and the Newtonian physics.
Only limit to your game size is your hardware, and this game does not require hardcore hardware to run large games, at all

BeyondFubar
BeyondFubar

Wish I could talk about the great things that others have discussed with this game but I can't.

Why? Because despite trying all sorts of troubleshooting I can't play it longer than about 5 minutes before it locks up and windows greys it out and asks me if I want to wait or close it. If this was an Alpha I'd be understanding. If this happened in ANY other game I'd understand. But after experiancing it in this game I tried the demo and verifed cache and disabled shaders and nothing works.

Please fix It looks like a good game but if I'm the only one then eh, it was 50% off and we all know how hard it is to fight steam.

EDIT: This game conflicts with my anti-virus. While I highly doubt this is due to an actual virus disabling it fixed my issue. Seriously? I'm not sure who to blame here really, though at least I have a workaround. Game is awesome, still puzzled over why my AV fights this game so much.

Based on merit alone, this is a awesome game. Based on conflicting with an unrelated program that likely a few others have without either giving an indication of said conflict? Not so good. However to be fair I wrote a negative review on the AV website as well.

consolepcgaming
consolepcgaming

Game runs perfectly, no crashes or freezes, take some time to understand how to play but plenty of youtube videos around to help and the manual is good too. I believe this game is better than Distant Worlds Universe, much better value, better graphics and more fun. options are limitless in what you can do. Great value for money, highly recommended!

Romans 1:18-22
Romans 1:18-22

Looks like a semi-clone of Space Empires 5. I don't like the tech tree. Unfortunately for me it crashes about every 20 mins so I cannot recommend anyone buy it.

unknown.notregistered
unknown.notreg…

I have loved this gmae and its ideas, although to me its flawed with its limitless approach. In matches I often limited ship sizes and t5he such to make it playable better, but in principal its a remarkable game.

Only occasional gripes with its design mechanic - a spherical space that gets cluttered with components in an unorganized manner - but otherwise its a really good game.

One I would reccomend - but more for its sequal than this. This is good, but I feel SR2 does better.

meier47
meier47

Has one of the best Ship Design Systems.

For example it is possible to equip your ships with ramscoops and corresponding engines.

For example
Research Lasers, Fusion reactors and external mounts.
External mounts take damage first but count only as size 1 when you equipt size 5.
Therefore build the ship with a small fuel cell and a small auto repair module.
Equip Ramscoop on external mount.
Equip only Lasers or other Energy weapons not requiring ammo.

In battle the ramscoop gets destroyed quickly but the fuel cell will power the ship during combat and the auto repair module will fix the ramscoop in time so that it fixes itself automatically after the battle.

Storm_Chasee
Storm_Chasee

Game crashes on too many functions. No easy link to a manual unlike other games I have. Essentially unplayable. Too bad since it looked an interesting game.

Extra Big Swimjim with Cheese
Extra Big Swim…

Star Ruler is an amazing 4X game with lots of customisablity. Its noted for allowing the player to produce massive space stations, battle ships that span entire galaxies, and tools to destroy whole planetary populations, or even the whole planet. Its not the best looking game, has AI and micro management problems.. but its definently the most fun game of its type in my opinion. But that's coming from someone who doesn't really like this genre, but enjoys blowing up planets and making space stations thatare bigger than stars.

This is worth a few hours of play time for anyone who likes big tech trees, big economy, and massive construction projects.

K did literally nothing wrong
K did literall…

What other games let you blow up a motherfucking quasar using a ship that's bigger than the galaxy itself?

psyberjock
psyberjock

Yikes. This game looks like it could be great. However, I have some GLARING problems that I can't seem to overcome and haven't yet found answers to. These are gameplay basics that just seem to get glossed over as if they are obvious. Well they may be obvious to the developers, but to someone coming in from the dark, it doesn't make any sense at all!

Here's my 2 main complaints: 1. The tutorial is terrible. I tried to run the tutorial and it seems to jump through time and says that I've completed tasks that it never showed me how to do! What a useless POS! So I quit the tutorial and decided to try the game on my own. 2. The menus are HORRENDOUS at describing what they do. Specifically I can colonize planets left and right, but they never build anything. The supplies they start with are insufficient to even build a metal mining sctructure which would allow me to build other structures. SO I have to make haulers (transports, why not just call them transports??!!), but they don't haul anything anywhere! The options for the haulers are crazily unhelpful. I give them commands but they never do anything. So I'm stuck with planets that don't ever progress. Forget installing governers, they just go for the first structure in their list and of course it is something that cannot be completed, so they just sit there building a space port for hundreds of years.

I have tried to find answers to these problems, but there are none to be found. The ingame help only describes general game concepts, and has no mention of how to navigate menus or which options have which effects. Wikis are similarly useless.

This game looks really good despite having useless diplomacy and NPCs that seem to always follow the same formula to success.

Support this game a little better and consider tooltips ingame and you'll get a positive review from me. Don't try to make me read your mind to understand how the game should operate. TELL ME how the game operates. Use your words! Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs!

This has been a very frustrating experience... maybe I can find some playthroughs on youtube and learn by watching others. If google is any indication, though, that information doesn't exist anywhere on youtube either.

I have found a Let's Try (play) that covers my trouble with planets not building anything. I will not be changing my review yet, because it should be explained in the game or at least on the game's wikis, NOT by having to find other people playing the game on youtube and watching an entire video just to get some answers. Anyway, here's the video if you're having the same trouble I am:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqFzR8hVLqA

ChaoticCamper135
ChaoticCamper135

Eh, it's 'aight. Pick it up on a steam sale. Not worth the $15, but worth maybe $9ish.

hellatze
hellatze

this is good game. where you can set your ship with lot of subsystem and naming the ship like having battleship and interceptor.

donfredek
donfredek

WTF? Why I bought it? Confusing, bring me out after a few seconds.

1/10

sgtlion
sgtlion

As somebody clocking almost 200 hours in this game, I say this - Fuck yeah.
You need a computer good enough to run a half-decent sized universe, granted, but fuck is it satisfying to build bigger and cooler things up to ringworlds and ships bigger than solar systems. I fucking love it.

I also say - If the base game isn't enough for you, get the Galactic Armoury mod, it enhances the game in a lot of ways (though does it make it more complex).

Star Ruler is a flawed, but just beautiful amazo, game.

Quazillionaire
Quazillionaire

The interface is too poor to tolerate attempting to play the game.

XeroS
XeroS

ahhh this game was a memorable, one really left a mark in my life Highly recommended also GET THE SEQUAL

Kira Mayatu
Kira Mayatu

love this game you can costumize your ships, build mega size ship, form fleet, etc i have alot fun with this game and with the mod it's become more fun

unfortunately this game always crash when i build so many ship

Seddrik
Seddrik

Yes, if you like pure spam colonies the second u start. If, like me, you like more depth to the game. Then no.

jrasdall
jrasdall

It's a deceptively deep 4X RTS with changes in scale that have to be seen to be believed. The game is *not* best summed up by the part where you quit building ships and just start fitting your planets with guns and engines to go on the offensive. No, the game is best summed up by the part where that approach is obsolete and a single misclick can result in a planet - or a star! - being destroyed by an errant shot. It's possible to make starships larger than an entire solar system in this game.

Quantum Optimist
Quantum Optimist

Woa this one is a bit hard to review. It's an old game from an old distant galaxy in the olden times...

Fast review: If it's 10$ or less, you can buy it, over that go buy starforce 2 instead! Much better in everyway!!!

Now for the detailed review:
- Space strategy 4x game realtime with pause and adjustable speed. Colonize planets, develop them, build ships, conquer
- There ain't much graphics in this game. An old windows xp can run this game fine. Ship battle are kinda 2D boring affair.
- There is far too much bass in the background music! I had to turn it off after a few minutes, i was THAT annoyed by it.
- The gui is unpolished. It's not buggy, but it's not intuitive. It takes quite a while to find out where everything is and how it works. Because it's not a big AAA game, there ain't much information either in forums or elsewhere. It's pretty sparse. But on the other hand, if you stick with it, the learning curve is not that bad. Nothing compared to Distant Universe for example.
- The ship design is unique compared to any game i've played. Designing a dreadnought or a cruiser is the same, only the amount of armor and the hull choice seems to decide what amount of HP the ship has, but they both will have the same amount of components. A bit dull if you ask me. Clunky too. But, god it's complicated at first with something like 20 stats that you can affect with the components you include. Example: Amount of ammo your ship has, the amount he will spend by second, the amount of fuel, amount of fuel spent by second, amount of energy generated and on and on. I think it's a bit too much detail, but you can design your ship to your heart content! Also, all ships pretty much looks the same, only difference is size (which you can also set. If you want a fighter bigger looking than your dreadnought, you can do that too!).
- The research graph is interesting and kinda fun. I like it. It's also one of the few part of the game that is intuitive and easy to understand and use.
- The zoom and map movement is pretty horrible. It made me think of the first 3D game i've ever played where they had not yet mastered how to move the camera in 3D. Haven't found a good way yet to move around my empire except by planet name. And the funny part is that the game may look like 3D, but you actually move only in 2D. HAHAHA!
- The amount of ships you are going to lose because of them reaching empty fuel is pretty crazy. You need tankers everywhere and in large numbers. Yeah if a ship or fighter reach zero fuel, they die and can't be 'revived' except maybe with boarding ships.
On the other hand, there are no cash and no ship maintenance in this game. So if you want a fleet with 1 million ships, you can go ahead and do it. You seem to only be limited by the amount of ore that is on planets and asteroids.
- You can automate each ship with pretty detailed orders, but you can also shoot yourself in the foot repeatedly with a bad automated order. It does not always act like you think it does. And there are no explaination anywhere about them. So go go experiment.
- Everything in the game will improve with the appropriate tek researched. Every building on planets, every component on a ship including armor and hull. There are a lot of research fields.
- You can retrofit ships as long as you kept the same design name. For example, 'Carrier' blueprint. If you changed the name, then it is not considered the same class of ship and no retrofit for you. So you keep the starting design from start to end game. Does not matter that you completely change a ship vocation and components, as long as the design name is the same you can retrofit it.
- You will make millions of ships. Eventually, you won't even bother and you will put your planets on repeat order so they crank out the same ships forever. And you send them attacking the frontier. You can have a biiiiiiiig empire. A bit hard to manage properly thought.
- They kept the physics in the game as newtoninan as possible with even ship mass and thruster power. Depending on mass, a ship can take awhile before changing speed or even direction! It sure is pretty realistic, but i don't think it makes for very fun battles. The amount of errors you will make in your designs before you get them just right is going to be huge.
- I've looked at the starforce 2 game and it seemed much better than this one. They kept the same concept, but graphics are loads better, the gui too is a lot more friendly with nice icons that do what they look like, spying and improved diplomacy to do dirty trics and the design of ships seems much more interesting and fun. Also, unlimited galaxy that you can generate! You decide the shape of the map and how many stars there is and they generate it for you! You are only limited by the speed of your computer! So you can 'in theory' generate a billion star map! It won't play well but you can do it!
- Diplomacy is pretty bare bone and pointless. Enemy ai don't seem too challenging either after you master the game. Everything looks a bit bland. Once you played one game to completion, you don't really want to play another one.

Pulcherada
Pulcherada

Unappealing: too many details where you don't need them, too few where you would need them in order to want to invest your time playing this game. Too bad.

PostRobcore
PostRobcore

Such a fantastic, open-ended game. You can make a swarm of little ships, build space miners, build dry docks, put thrusters on your planets, etc.

Diplomacy is a bit wonky, and if you don't spam a bunch of ships as soon as you meet the other empires, they will declare war on you. But aside from that, it's pretty interesting to explore and populate new star systems.

Danger
Danger

This game seems good but I just did not got sucked into it, so I ended up not really playing it much.

WoodenDOOM
WoodenDOOM

Wish the developer would have stuck with this. Sequel sucks.

I would listen to The Tron: Legacy soundtrack while playing this. It was fuckin epic. And if your CPU can take it, you'll see some crazy stuff go down, in some HUGE galaxies. 100x better than Galactic Civ or Sins of a Solar Empire.

And if you get this, check out a mod called Galactic Armory

IHateMyselfTV
IHateMyselfTV

If you love strategy games and space than I would recommend this for you in my opinion the only bad thing is the hour long tutorial and the fact that you might need to run through it twice to understand it.

Herman de Buschauffeur
Herman de Busc…

It's old and it shows it. But it is still an amazing ride. This game relies on the principle, if your pc can handle it why not do it. unlimited amount of planets and unlimited amount of stars, traveresed by ships of unlimited size. This combined with a although clunky, adequate UI and controls.

If you ever dreamed of sci-fi battles with sizes like warhammer but were always let down by other sci-fi games that have popcaps or fleets of no more than 10 ships? Than you will like this game!

_mizZen_
_mizZen_

Good game wish it worked on linux. Looking forward to trying SR2.

Goose
Goose

Grand Marshal Kim Jon Un commands you to buy this.
Dont make me space nuke your ass

Mewn
Mewn

i played 8 hours of this in the first day and then had fever dreams and the worst night of sleep possible

10/10 would destroy myself again

be careful

Vegas Cash
Vegas Cash

Built an army of colony ships only to have them destroyed by an angry AI. 7/5 would colonize again

Arcturus
Arcturus

This is a 4x RTS that is very old at this point, and in the beginning I had a few technical errors, but once those were resolved it turned out to be an excellent game that allowed fo a lot of creativity with designing ships. It's ship design is the best feature of the game and combined with the ability to have as many star systems as your computer can handle makes it pretty fun. If you haven't tried it yet you won't be disappointed.

Ravencos27
Ravencos27

Very dull. No real storyline. Gameplay can be almost completly automated. If you don't automate, everything takes too long. Don't know where this "build ships as big as you want" malarky is coming from. Ships have a "scale" setting, but don't reallly change sixe, and still have limited module spaces. An etremely drawn out game with no reward. If you win one game, you've won them all. No variation whatsoever. Not recommended.

Tamminen
Tamminen

Nice "pocket" 4x game. Pure resource and reseach management. Perfect for "one evening session". Very good ship design and AI system (really best i seen, but i do not seen many).

Snus aus Preußen
Snus aus Preußen

My new favourite space 4x game. I've previously played Master of Orion 3, StarDrive and Space Empires 3 and 4.

I have also played Homeworld and the combat and commanding ships in this game is reminiscent of it which is a big plus for me.

Star Ruler has a lot of neat features I really like, such as:

+Research system based on levels
+Economy based on resources which can be transported
+Newtonian ship movement
+Freeform ship design
+Scalable ships

I'm very happy with this purchase

EpicPwner
EpicPwner

I thought this game was pretty average with a good amount of customisation at first. Diplomacy system is very lacking (you can send the AI a request that only hurts you and they'll refuse). It's still very fun, but not something I'd actively recommend.

Then I shot at the galactic central point and made every star near it go supernova, winning a round by nuking the entire galaxy.

I'd definitely recommend people try it, there's a lot of fun to be had in just what you can make and how much damage you can do.

Dave De Protector Of The Univers
Dave De Protec…

Benn supportng this game for the better part of 10 years, its grown to be the most complete and in depth 4X Space Strategy out there IMHO. If you can think of it you can do it, but remember, nothing is original, you are never ready, and your pride and joy flagship is only ever one slipspace jump away from being swallowed by the cosmic horror your local tier3 civilisation has built behind a black hole.

Mifely
Mifely

Short review: Largely a strategy-only 4X game, which boils down to zerging the enemy to win. Not much in the way of tactical elements, as the ship design and starship combat doesn't really make much of a difference, relative to grand strategic strength alone. You could argue that in any 4X game, but there really is very little rock-paper-scissors mechanic here at all, with regards to tech and ship combat.

The game uses somewhat entertaining newtonian physics, and the ships sling around systems while doing battle over the span of what would be simulated weeks or months, which is entertaining, although again, very difficult to do much with, tactically, since its really just a massive space-jousting competition. Again, I guess you could argue that would probably be more realistic than many 4X games present combat, but it's not very fun.

Economic and industrial management is detailed, and could be fun if the interface was better. The same goes for diplomacy -- there are some interesting concepts here, but they are tough to get into, given the zerging nature of even the easy AI.

The AI is very effective, even on its easy settings. It doesn't make mistakes, mostly -- if you slip up just a little, you begin to fall behind, and the eventual cascade of AI power will overrun you, plain and simple. You're only real hope against an AI that is even slightly ahead of you, is to convince other AIs to help you out, which is pretty hard.

I can't recommend this 4X -- there are far more entertaining 4X games out there, including this one's sequel.

Ghost Battalion
Ghost Battalion

it's prety fun difulcult to figuyerout but still kind of fun

democles_pl
democles_pl

User interface as extremely unpleasant. In a world filled with 4X style space games it was bad enough to warrant just going to any of of them.

Hawk27
Hawk27

Scale as grand as you could want (or at least as grand as your rig can handle), great detail in supply lines and economy, and an interesting twist on ship design combine to make this a great game. As others have mentioned, the diplomacy is a bit weak, but at least it has options for resource swapping. The ability to make ships the size of stars, and the ship scaling system in general, is pretty cool. Best of all though (for an engineer who's taken an orbital mechanics class and read plenty of science fiction) is that it gets the space feel right. Not so much the amount of space (I think I saw a setting to spread out the star systems, but haven't tried it yet) but the three-dimensionality, the ability to order ships to orbit things, and the way the ships will turn around and reverse thrust at the middle of a point-to-point move order to stop at the final location. I recommend the game, and be sure to pick up the Galactic Armory mod (sadly not on Steam Workshop - try modDB) for it too.

churays
churays

My paper dreadnought was killed by one shot 11/10

MAKSIMAL PROFIT DAREDEVIL
MAKSIMAL PROFI…

I'd rate this game as 9/10, without a doubt on my list of top games on steam.

10/10 customization
8/10 interface
9/10 replayabiltiy
10/10 fun
10/10 intrigue
6/10 balance
7/10 mods

Definitely worth getting if you're into 4x strategy games, the learning curve is huge but once you know what to do the game is pretty easy. There are some imbalanced things in this game such as jump drives and the spatial manipulator gun but to be honest those two things are actually what made me love this game; when used in tandem they're hilarious. You can pretty much play however you want, you can make small ships, or large ships and still win.

Celticlasm
Celticlasm

You will ride eternal, shiny and chrome!

magmaforge
magmaforge

A gold standard in the 4X genre for infinitely scaling universes and ships. UI is very minimal but it works really well. Excellent starship design, great tech tree without being overwhelming. Get the Galactic Armoury mod!

Mr Snicklebocker
Mr Snicklebocker

I was drunk when I bought this. After seeing this game sober I just want to get drunk again. Can I have a refund?

von Mistont
von Mistont

One of a kind, hidden gem. Any fan of 4x should try it, absolutely worth it's price.

M8ty
M8ty

Space Tactics Incorporated. The amount of ways you can destroy your enemy(ies) in this game is amazing, you can do almost anything; from sending swarms of microscopic drones to devour the galaxy, or to simply research enough tech to blow every system up one by one. Although the graphics are dated, and its relatively tough to get into, i recommend it as a pretty solid Gem

Zarathustra
Zarathustra

Everything is destructible, froom stars to planet to tiniest comets. The game could use more ease of control and quality of life changes but overrall the governor system does it's job.
One of the most entertaining aspects of this game is the infinite scalable tech tree, while other 4x sci-fi genres have a static tree with many individual named techs this game opts for a more general approach that allows for the best interactions and rewards time you spent in a particular node very well, contrary to the sequel that had a static tech tree.

Zeradus
Zeradus

I love big strategy games like this but honestly the UI just gives me a headache. Fun game but wouldn't recommend it based on the hassle.

MagusEli
MagusEli

Do you want to build spaceships that are larger than literal galaxies? This game will let you do that.

Aside from that silliness, it's actually plenty fun to play! It can be rather difficult if you don't cheese the game, I find. Then again, I might just be not-so-great at it.

I recommend!

Victuz
Victuz

If you're looking for a different 4x experience this is the one. It's rough around the edges, but easily allows one to fall away from the world for hours and hours.

Wüstenfuchs
Wüstenfuchs

Very unique game. Totally different experience to its successor title. Both are games you shouldn´t miss if you like ship customization. The second title introduces mechanics that shoud be now widespread in 4x games but unfortunately aren´t because of the lack of fame those games had.

Axeman
Axeman

Detailed ship design. Massive space battles. You can build a Death Star if you want. I'm dusting this one off because the senseless glee of throwing hundreds of ships against each other is stress releaving.

Itsfullofstars
Itsfullofstars

Me learning the game: Oh wow, these game mechanics are so esoteric and the UI is so awkward and messy. This must be a really deep and immersive experience.

Me after actually learning the game: Oh, this is actually an extremely bare bones 4x game.

I swear to god, there are so many "complex, high-learning curve" games out there that actually have pretty straightforward mechanics, but they're just implemented in convoluted ways, and bundled together under a crappy UI.

It doesn't really deserve a thumbs down, but neither is it particularly good.

Ainz Ooal Gown
Ainz Ooal Gown

Would annihilate the galaxy again.

CHOO CHOO
CHOO CHOO

Disregard playtime; played it a great deal off steam.

It's an amazing game, for its time. A little underdesigned and underpolished, too heavy on micromanagement and not much to look at, but it did so many things that no other game ever tried at the time, and few have attempted since, that it deserves recognition in spite of its shortcomings.

It's a thoroughgoing shame that Star Ruler 2 had so little in common with its predecessors ambitions, and that Blind Mind Studios had to close down.

The most unique thing about Star Ruler, in my opinion, is that it makes absolutely zero attempts to railroad the player into specific play-styles. It's systems are intuitively understandable, plain as day, there are no smoke and mirrors to direct and distract you. And just how much freedom it gives the player! You can take as many positive and negative traits for your species as you like (as long as the balance is maintained), and lock yourself out of entire areas of the game in exchange for various bonuses. The game setup screen lets you change various basic variables of the game and utterly break the balance if you want to. You can build tall or wide. Focus on colonizing planets or building orbital infrastructure or on mining asteroids or on waging war. Decide completely freely how heavily you invest into research or into economic development or colonization or shipbuilding.

And the shipbuilding. Yes, there are the memes: "circles lol". Its positioning system is abstract, true, but it also allows you so much freedom in picking hull sizes, component types, component sizes, component modifiers. It lets you define ship AI in good detail, and there are no fixed ship roles. There is nothing pre-defined about it, you just sit down, consider your strategic needs, and build a ship or station to fulfill them. And there are no fleet limits or other game-y factors that force you to build your ships one way or another; your limits are what your economy cannot sustain and what your enemies will too easily destroy.

Star Ruler just lets you do your thing, and if your thing sucks then you lose. It's always completely up-front about what its systems do. And then it's not "this quest was unfair" or "this race is unbalanced" or "this random event fucked me over" or "this part of the game makes no sense", but simply "I made mistakes, my plans were bad, and now I must learn and do better".

There are other things, of course.

The tech tree is one of the better ones among 4X games, IMO, because instead of just unlocking binary technologies, you can continue to invest in each technology type and thereby specialize your empire. I'm not personally a fan of the scaling of equipment powers with technology levels (especially at the madcap 1.40 default factor), because that largely devalues ship design compared to brute-forcing research, but I think the base idea of the tech tree is quite good.

The economy. Above all: Localized resources. Yes, you have a galactic bank - but putting resources in there and getting them out actually involves specialized infrastructure. Often it's better to build a transport ship and actually move resources around. And storing them is a factor as well. And to get more advanced resources, you need to process simpler ones. Overall the resource system, even though it's fairly simple at face value, is both very intuitive and tangible.

And all of it is tied together very well. Each part of the game influences each other part in very obvious and very sensible, ways. The game just plain makes sense! It's realism done well. No warp-lanes or subspaces, just a distance, a propulsion system, a fuel tank. No myriads of mystery resources, just plain metal, electronics, food. No thousands of components that are all functionally equivalent but slightly superior iterations on the same thing; each component in SR has unique advantages and disadvantages. Unlike most so-called space games that might as well take place in a fish tank, Star Ruler actually takes place in space, and having basic knowledge of space travel gives you an intuitive understanding of many of the game's mechanics.

I won't go into its many flaws in detail for now; they're probably fairly obvious.

Flaws:
Game looks bad
Diplomacy is ass
The AI can barely play the game
Game relies heavily on bare numbers, doesn't visualize them
Fleets are uncontrollable
No intelligence system except for sending scouts
Cannot design apperance of ships
No tactics in combat

spazm
spazm

I honestly have no memory of playing this game.

→_→
→_→

创意很不错,拼接属于自己的战舰很有意思,有各种非战斗船,我喜欢跃迁航母带自杀式生化武器无人机。我觉得比二代自由度要好,但是数值平衡很差。惯性不会算提前量,真正打起来很难受。不适合开大规模星区,研究40多级也没啥用,一秒挖空星球,根本没有发展。而且造一个比星系还大的船真的很违和。

Doug☠
Doug☠

Frequent crashes ruin what would be a great game

zekster
zekster

I like the idea, but the interface is awful. Controlling and managing ships is completely unbearable.

militarygradepotato871
militarygradep…

Epic scale space strategy game, its so good that some players still prefer this to the star ruler 2 which is also a good game. If you want huge scale space battles pick this one up, it has the best ones.

gartheastwood
gartheastwood

What have you done to this once good game?

The UI is now completely and utterly useless. Ships and planets will just NOT follow "automation" orders and will just shamble around aimlessly or do nothing at all.
The map scrolling sometimes works well, other times it just stops working altogether. By this I mean "map panning" sometimes it will scroll quick, then all of a sudden it's panning speed will crawl to near zero.
It is near impossible to get the camera looking at what you want, when you want.

Don't even mention mining ships and construction ships. They just will NOT do what you want whether you attempt to let them run on their own AI automation or try to micromanage them.
Most fleet/ship commands are done with the RMB. Well good luck with that, it takes on average between 10 and 100 presses of the RMB for the orders menu to actually show!

I'm sure this game was NOT like this when I last tried it about four year back! I recall rather enjoying it then! Now it is just a broken, shoddy mess.

But of course, the usual lame excuses that "I'm doing it wrong", or "I don't understand the mechanics of the game" will come pouring in. Well, "experts", show me how to do it then.

"Firgof Umbra", is this one of your games along with Star Ruler 2? Or did you just take control of this game since I last played it, and wrecked it completely? If you've anything to do with this game, no wonder it's a turd!

Density
Density

I really do not understand how so many people recommend this over Star Ruler II. It's lacking balance and adequate documentation. Unlike Star Ruler II, it appears more like an incomplete project.