When resources are low, construction work slows right down, which is preferable to a host of annoying popup warnings. The furnaces of industry then build ludicrously gargantuan ships with which to crush the enemies of the Star Ruler. These structures then automatically begin churning out resources to be thrown into the furnaces of industry. These handy little chaps can be given a brief (balanced, metal production etc.) and will fill a planet with useful structures before you even realise it’s been colonised. Everything else should be someone else’s job. I’m the Star Ruler, serfs, let me rule some stars. Given a galaxy with so many systems to inhabit (the upper limit is effectively set by the heft of your computer), it wouldn’t be right to spend time overseeing the construction of a rubber tubing factory on Garbalon III. This aspect isn’t as all-enveloping as in Distant Worlds but it means menial tasks don’t have to be repeated over and over. Blind Mind’s other masterstroke is intelligent automation. Upping the scale is conceptual, it’s part of the vision of what a 4X game should be achieving. This is a game in which ships can kill the stars that men seek to rule. In Star Ruler you can make that fighter gargantuan, sticking more powerful weapons, shields and engines on to compensate for its sheer size. Normally a fighter (think TIE) would be a lot smaller than a capital ship. Once the systems and subsystems are in place you can alter their scale and the scale of the ship itself. And if the balance was overturned, it'd be because you'd constructed some kind of sentient and terrible cathedral-ship that melted entire planets just by thinking about them, at which point balance would be the last thing on your mind. It’s a great tool that allows a huge amount of options without feeling like it will totally break balance. They are dragged and dropped onto a circular grid, an abstract representation of the ship, while the blueprint calculates energy production/consumption, range and other handy stats. When choosing what type of craft you want, the first thing is to add components to a blueprint. Not only can fleets be massive in number, each ship can be massive in size. And I mean some kind of gigantic space bucket. You can churn out ships by the bucket-load. The first is the scale at which Blind Mind have allowed players to realise their galactic ambitions. There are two reasons that all these things are possible. With options like that last one, I’m not really thinking about my economy, I’ll be honest. I could be tweaking my economy or converting a planet into a moveable, all-conquering super-colony. While all that's happening, I could be designing bloody great ships o’ war and defensive space stations. The colony ships fly off and colonise the planets. The scouts fly off to discover new systems. If I want to concentrate on colonising as many planets as possible, I build scouts. I’ve learned to focus on one thing until I get distracted by something more interesting. Technology kept advancing at a steady rate though so I simply nodded and tried to look like I was in charge. Early on I realised that I could prompt and prod my researchers to learn about specific things but I didn’t actually know if they were listening to me very much. That’s not because I suddenly understood everything, it’s because I stopped caring. The complexity still astonishes me but, crucially, after a few play sessions the confusion is hardly an issue at all. The problem with the early hours is not just the sheer amount of stuff that it’s possible to do at any one time, it’s the fact that the consequences of any given action aren’t always entirely clear. On top of that, the tutorial is clear and informative. The UI has come in for a lot of criticism but I found that in its current state it usually helped me find what I needed. But the play’s the thing, so here’s wot I think.Īt first glance, Star Ruler is mind bogglingly complex. While I may not agree with everything they’ve done, the fact that they continue to listen and improve the game is exactly what we so often demand and so rarely receive. Since then, their support of the product has been exemplary. Star Ruler did turn up in that sort of unsatisfactory state, but the developers admitted that and they put out a representative demo as well. It is easy to believe the entire global computing infrastructure has been put in place so that developers could ship as soon as they got tired and wanted a holiday. We are all familiar with the terror of unfinished games and the horror of 0-day patches. What could be regarded as the actual launch is now here. However, anyone who has followed the game can tell you that what you get for your money now is a different beast to what you got at that nascent time. Before I get into the nitty-gritty, yes, we do know when long-zoom 4X indie spectacle Star Ruler was originally available to buy.
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