My Journey in Learning Star Ruler 2

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DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE: Here's what we've worked out so far ...

• The Star Ruler 2 community is basically dead

• The developers now work at different studios

• The Game Wiki has not been seriously updated since 2015

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Like many journeys, mine began on YouTube in 2015. A video appeared out of the blue from Scott Manley, entitled Star Ruler 2 Livestream - Exploding Whole Galaxies. This enthralled young Spode, so much so that he decided that he wanted to purchase this game. But immediately, problems arose. Star Ruler 2 runs on either Windows or Linux- Not a Mac, and I was basically borrowing a Mac laptop at the time for gaming. How does one get around a limitation of OS? By running an emulator! This janky setup worked so poorly that getting Star Ruler 2 to start running without immediately crashing was an achievement in of itself. Not conducive to learning the game's systems.

So now that it's the year of our Lord 2021 and I have a computer that can run games without pretending (badly) to be running Windows, how well does the game work? Er... At least it doesn't crash.

The thing is that even younger me understood that this game had some non-emulator induced jank in its design. For an example, when I booted up the game for the first time, the UI wasn't scaled correctly for my screen. This is a typical issue that many games have, which is normally corrected by either altering the games' resolution (often for newer games in my experience) or by using a dedicated UI scaling bar in the options. Star Ruler 2 is unique in that rather than either of these time tested solutions, it has a key combination that you press to scale your UI up or down. It's ctrl and the plus or minus key, although I had to learn that from a Steam discussion rather that the keybindings in game (I couldn't have read them anyhow because the settings are part of the UI).

Okay. Enough with that. Let's go to something positive about the game, for instance, the review used by the developers on Steam.

"Star Ruler 2 expertly balances complexity in gameplay with an intuitive, easy to pick up system for players"

Does it?

Here is the start screen after you hit "New Game"

[img]WIP[/img]

Here is specifically the top bar of that:

[img]WIP[/img]

I have five hours of playing this game (on my personal laptop, not counting hours played in 2015-2016), and until today when I deliberately went through to read all of the factions' traits, I couldn't tell you what even half of these icons are supposed to mean. Even looking at them after reading the descriptions, I would be hard pressed to name more than a select few. Which is a problem when that information is incredibly pertinent to your choice of civilization.

But don't think that the fact that there's civilizations to choose from means that, like in series such as the Sid meier's civilization, you are constrained in your choice. You can customize your whole civilization (with points for bad traits and point costs for good ones for balancing) with just a few clicks. This is probably awesome for playing against friends or just replay value, but dang, it is complicated.

Now it is 1/2/2022, and I would like to give learning this game a proper chance.

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Game #1 - Kill me with kindness
Playtime: 3.2h
Difficulty (of AI): Easy
Result: N/A
Lessons: Even the easy AI outpaces my turtle-like speed in all capacity. With easy AI, this means that the game becomes unbeatable- The AI could kill me, but is too darn nice to actually declare war. Maybe given a few more hours the easy AI could reach some win condition, but that's more than I'm willing to wait. I did get two achievements though!

So if I want games to end I need to up the difficulty. Additionally, it seems like having natural generation of resources or “pressures” is better (at least cost wise) than trying to supplement with buildings.

But that leaves me in an odd spot: Getting research in the early game without building laboratories is basically RNG. If I don’t get a resource that gives research pressure (I think just chemicals)…. I’m basically screwed.

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Game #2 - In which the Plant people are rude
Playtime: 1.8h
Difficulty (of AI): Normal
Result: N/A
Lessons: The AI doesn't outpace my expansion now with territory at least. But that doesn't help when they manage to field multiple 400k strength fleets (I think I counted 4 or 5) to my one 10k battleship fleet. That's just insane. There must be something I'm messing up with on development here.

I was able to get into research, but I feel like I'm falling behind the AI in terms of research even when I focus on it. Frustrating.

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At long last, I have given up. I will no longer be bashing my head against the wall. Or at least, not before consulting the Star Ruler 2 Wiki on how to more effectively bash my head into the wall. Okay, well... There's barely any information on the wiki. Ack.

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Game #3 - In which the Plant people grow a spine (and proceed to kick my tooshie)
Playtime: 1.2h
Difficulty (of AI): Easy
Result: N/A
Lessons: On easy, the game is not so one sided. Instead of being up against crafts nearly 40 times stronger than me, the crafts are just 5 times stronger than me. Also, I'm apparently threatening enough for even the peaceful AI to declare war on me (in record time). I started on trying to knock out two planets and a warp beacon, but then a fleet more powerful than all my fleets combined showed up and put a halt to me. Oh well.

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What does reddit have to say about all this? Surely someone has gone through trying to learn this game before and has gone looking for the ancient wisdom of older players?
Me too, Rrrrry123, me too.
Oh.

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I found a review of the original Star Ruler. It contains a funny quote:

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Does editing a nation mention into a dispatch ping them? Here goes a test: Mechanocracy