Space Ruler is an enjoyable no-frills 4X game in a 3D galaxy. Star systems are highly detailed with planets orbiting their stars, stations orbiting their planets, binary stars orbiting each other, and comets and asteroids floating around. Ships have to accelerate and decelerate. The game is played in real real time but can be enormously slowed down, sped up, and paused at will. Random planets have typically 11-29 slots for buildings, with some special exceptions, and 1 or 2 conditions which determine whether a planet will be particularly good or bad for specific purposes. Governor types can be automatically or manually assigned to planets and will construct buildings to a pattern determined by their type: Balanced, Advanced Parts manufacture, Electronics manufacture, Mining, Farming, Research, Luxuries, etc. The AI does a fairly good job of planet development except that it tends to overproduce Advanced Parts and underproduce Electronics. Also it will not assign Luxuries production to a planet automatically. As well as boosting your production, Luxuries can be important to appease the AI players. Designing ships and stations is interesting and quite simple. The game takes a unique approach that ship and station designs can be scaled up and down to arbitrary sizes. A scout design can be sized down to scale .005 so that you can make hundreds cheaply. The default size 50 Dry Dock construction station provided by the game can be sized up to make constructing bigger ships easier. Likewise the size 20 Muon Gun ship you designed early in the game can be scaled to 50 or 100 or 200 later in the game and will still work, although in the case of warships you are likely to want to make some changes to use technology you didn't have available at the time of the original design like heavy hulls, antimatter generators, shields, ion thrusters, and jump engines. Blueprints for your designs can be exported for use in subsequent games. Construction requires Advanced Parts, Electronics, Metal, and labor in appropriate quantities. Planets can store some materials and import and export from your "galactic bank" at a rate determined by the number of space ports they have and their technology. Food, Goods, and Luxuries are consumed by populations and are also stored. Except in the early game where you need to be careful not to expand too fast you shouldn't need to watch these numbers too closely, just make sure they remain stable or go up. Technology in the game is a web of disciplines like General Sciences, Economy, Projectile weapons, Armor, Engineering, Metallurgy, etc. Each discipline improves specific buildings or ship components, for example General Sciences improves Research laboratories, or may unlock specific ship components like Artillery at Projectile weapons tech 2. Not all disciplines are unlocked at the start of the game. They will very slowly get unlocked automatically as adjacent disciplines get researched or the player can research Guess and Hunch options on the adjacent disciplines until it unlocks. Strangely enough Biology, which improves Farms, is usually not unlocked at the start of a game and at some point you will need to unlock it or you will begin losing planets to starvation. Except in the early game where I explicitly assign a few levels of research in General Sciences, Metallurgy, and Economy, and 1 level in Projectile weapons for the aforementioned Artillery unlock, and intervening for an occasional discipline unlock like Biology or Computers, I usually let the AI run the research program. It uses the simple approach of always researching the discipline that has the lowest tech level. Diplomacy is rudimentary and involves mainly trading items for a period of time measured in game seconds. Refusing a deal will decrease the AI's opinion of you. Some deals will come with a condition that failure will result in a declaration of war. Being #1 militarily seems to be the best way to avoid being attacked. Since defensive stations appear to be counted toward the military rating and the AI (in my opinion) over-builds defensively, that can be hard to maintain. (You will need to build some defensive stations in your systems to prevent pirate raids, however, so don't entirely neglect that.) The AI players can be assigned difficulty levels at the game creation screen. I'm not an especially good gamer so I was pleased to have several easy settings. I've played games at the Trivial, Easiest, and Easier settings so far and enjoyed all of them, after each victory moving up to a harder difficulty as I learn. Other than exterminating the AI players there are no other paths to victory (as for example in Master of Orion you can win diplomatically, economically, technologically, etc) and not much else to do, so like many games of this type once you achieve domination the game can get boring as you crush the last remnants of your enemies. Speaking of remnants, scattered throughout the galaxy are systems controlled by the remnants of an ancient empire. Most of these systems are easily taken with a few size 20 ships, but the Ancient Imperial Seat (four 50 slot worlds) and Ancient Gate Array systems are much more strongly defended. Still, with a few hundred size 100 or 200 ships they fall easily enough. Once all your enemies have fallen there's nothing to do except build Ringworlds (100 slot worlds) everywhere or blow up stars for laughs. Being an older game, Star Ruler can be had cheaply and is well worth the money. Like all games of this type, it has potentially infinite replay value since every galaxy will be different, you can change the distances between stars and shape of the galaxy, assign different difficulty levels to the AI, allow the AI to cheat, ramp up the pirates or remnants strength, etc. The age of the game may be a benefit for performance in larger games. The grapics are adequate. I have minor issues with zoom and edge panning, but clicking the middle mouse on an object when those get flakey clears it up. Selecting ships and fleets can be a little annoying especially since the game doesn't use standard Windows conventions for multiple object selection but you get used to it. Turning off the option that causes left drag to select only military ships helped me a lot with this, as I often want to include Tankers with my fleets especially in the early game when my low tech ships don't have much range. With thatt option turned off you can select everything in a system with left button drag then ctrl-click to remove ship and station types that you don't want, then hit the F key to create a fleet.
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