Star Ruler 1 tried to use all your cores as much as it can - Star Ruler 2 succeeds. Additionally the AI thinks more, the planets think more - the whole universe really is thinking more. Ships are far more complex objects than they were in SR1 - and there are lots more of them at any given time.
#STAR RULER 2 MAX MAP SIZE FULL#
It's worth noting that Star Ruler 2 attempts to actually use the full processing power of your rig - as it needs to. If anything ties both products together and separates them from the competition, it's being among the few modern computer games to feature interesting music with some sort of personality. Though I do apologize for the bubble-gum pop slam. Instead of simply creating separate product lines for such disparate games they've managed to poison the Star Ruler brand name, and from the utter lack of media buzz (or even a wikipedia article) around Star Ruler 2, I very much doubt it managed to capture its intended fast-fingers, slow-brain online l33t-d00d customer base.Īnd so, another developer will likely join the hordes of other would-be sellouts and copycats in well-deserved bankruptcy.
It's not altogether a terrible game, but I can't help noticing yet another developer selling out its niche audience in hopes of stealing away a slice of Blizzard's mass-market tween hordes, and I doubt it'll work. For all the processing power this game's eating up, why does it feel like I'm getting so much less?
If you start a game with the maximum number of AI players, you'll notice most of their randomized names are actually duplicates of each other. It's all intended to make for quick, half-hour or hour-long multiplayer matches for hypercompetitive little snots with no attention span. You maniacs! You fizzled it!Įverything else like the lack of control over smaller ships and the much smaller map size follows suit. Kinda takes the zing out of the whole thing. In fact, I made about half a dozen stars before building the ringworld. you see that star the ringworld's orbiting? That was instantly generated, using yet another card which randomly popped into existence.
That ringworld above took hours' worth of asteroid mining to fund, after which I had to have a ship go around to all the planets where I'd stockpiled the ore and gather it up, after which followed a lengthy period of construction. #2 is intended to capture a competitive online game market, and as such everything about it feels very. Star Ruler was a single-player, dreamy, immersive science fiction adventure among the stars. That's the real crux of the matter: other players. Your empire produces influence points which you can use to buy "cards" which are randomly generated every thirty seconds, which you then play and back up with more influence points to impose your will over the other players. This next one shows my processor screaming in agony. Those bright colored dots in the background of my ringworld in the first screenshot each represent planets and stars, over five hundred of them. 4x games thrive on their expansiveness, and the usual turn-based system serves not only to define the player's interaction with the AI but to keep your RAM from melting under the weight of an entire imaginary galaxy. Bright and cheerful, streamlined and fast-paced, it's clear that the sequel is addressing a whole different audience with different priorities than its predecessor.īoth games are real-time. Planet management, instead of a balanced economy, revolves around building up each planet's one exportable resource. Small ships are automatically produced by your planets and automatically join up with your capital ships as they pass through a system. Planets still orbit and ships still make a show of gradually slowing, but distance and mass are nowhere to be seen. It attempts to remove all that troublesome information from the player's view. Unfortunately, as you can see from the interface, Star Ruler 2 is attempting to go pop. I mistakenly assumed it would build on the original's strengths, a niche item for all us Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein (and maybe Niven) fans who wanted an expansive 4x strategy game with a sense of proportion, with that hard-edged 50s or 70s chrome-plated feel. Partly, I didn't put too much effort into it because the sequel had already been announced. The sheer wealth of information made it slightly difficult to get into, and I now find I'm sorry I gave up on it too quickly, but to the extent I did I found it a nerd's delight. Objects had mass and distances were shown in astronomical units. Goods were shuttled between planets by haulers propelled by Bussard ramjets.