Blind Mind Studios, the indie developers behind the real-time space 4X strategy game Star Ruler, announced that they’re currently working on Star Ruler 2.
The small 3-man indie dev studio said to have been working on a Star Ruler’s sequel for the past two years (active development since mid 2011).
“The game is being developed with a focus on interesting gameplay with meaningful strategic choices and full scalability of the universe and unit counts.” –Blind Mind Studios
Judging from the announced major features, focus seems to have been put on ship customization, with several subsystems available to “take advantage of flaws in the designs of your enemies”. Diplomacy, a somewhat “light” feature of the original game, also seems to be an area where they plan to do a considerable overhaul. A “research grid containing hundreds of technology nodes” was also announced, and I sincerely hope they flesh out the research system and make it more intuitive this time.
Looks like scale (huge galaxies) continues to be a central aspect – “Star Ruler 2 can run immense galaxy maps with hundreds of units and simulating thousands of physical projectiles impacting ships during combat.”. High moddability was also announced and multiplayer with “support up to 28 players and AIs in the same game” was also promised.
They expect to reach beta stage, and enter in an early access scheme, in late 2013. The full release should be available somewhere in 2014 for the PC and Linux. Mac is still being considered.
Alpha screenshots
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My only major concern is that they are watering it down a bit to much in areas that where realky quite good in my opinion atleast and with the new system i feel that solar system generation may take a hit especially with the screenshots provided
Mmmh. Star Ruler wasn’t really for me, I didn’t like the arbitrary size thing where everything scaled ad infinitum. (It also had really finicky controls, but that’s partially me.) Still, I’m curious how the sequel will turn out. You can’t have too many space 4Xes.
I agree. The other concern that I had was that the time spent to create very fine-tuned ship designs was wasted the moment you researched one of the used technologies further. Unless you never opted to upgrade the existing ships…
EDIT; Ashbery76 also has a good point.
The trading system actually looks like a interesting mechanic.I hope they add personality to the galaxy as well as some focus.
I felt the first game was so carried away with the unlimited size gimmick with ship sizes bigger than a galaxy,ect which in itself makes it meaningless and misses the point of a feasible setting.It was also very,very bland in all areas.What is the point of a massive galaxy that is hollow.
You described my issue with the game perfectly Ashbery!
The main problem I had with the game was the ship design, it felt like I might as well be putting things on a list. The scale system was also pretty confusing to me. I doubt I’ll pick SR2 up.
hmm… I don’t think I like the concept: Are all planets colonizable wihtout any restrictions? As ashbery wrote, SR1 had some good ideas, but as a whole it felt rather generic: planets looked all the same, ships looked all the same and so on. I especially don’t like the idea that every single planet seems to be colonizable from the beginning, at least in other games colonizations is bound to technological advance. But even in those games I feel expansion is just too easy, too generic, in ES as soon as you have the specific technologies you are able to colonize everything, in Horizon there is only one technological level required. You always end up spamming the galaxy with colonies which look all the same. in the long run it gets simply repetitive and boring. Distant Worlds has by far the best implementation of a realistic, lively galaxy, though I don’t like its RT system.
Predestination’s planetary exploration looks very promising and I hope the final game will find the right balance for this feature otherwise it may result in a micromanagement nightmare.
btw I don’t want to sound too negative, but I don’t think I’m going to like the trade concept too, it just doesn’t feel like a galaxy. A planet produces just a single good? Of course it’s just an abstraction, but a wrong one, because it makes you feel you play a siedler game instead of a vast galaxy: you need to colonize a planet to get textiles?
My problems with the original Star Ruler were that the ship models and planets were generic (they all looked the same, both yours and the enemy) and, despite the extensive tech tree and customizable ships, the game could be “gamed” easily.
I played for quite a while, carefully researching promising techs and thoughtfully planning each ship customization, only to have the AI smother me consistently. The AI would do everything right everywhere all the time, while I struggled to build effective fleets and purposefully expand and invade. Then I stumbled upon a “let’s play” UTube video and discovered that you could beat the game every time with a combination of a scout-colonizer-cruiser spam, and that there was an optimal research strategy that would always beat the AI.
SR2 won’t interest me unless they cure the game system of such exploits.
I wonder if they will make SR2 playable on all systems this time.
Couldn’t even get it to load last time out on XP.
I think I may have found your problem right there.
While I had some fun with SR1, I still dislike Blind Mind’s decision of calling it a day and leaving SR1 in the state it is now.
Basically its just not finished. Not a complete product yet. Its not the SOTS2 kind of unfinished of course, where you can tell that the game is severely gimped simply by looking at menus. Its more like the feel you get when you play.
To me, the game plays like a glorified tech demo, or an enhanced proof of concept project of their space combat engine.
SR2 might get better, especially if it builds on SR1, but frankly.. with this development attitude, we might have to wait until SR3 before we actually get a fully fledged game and not just bits and pieces of great ideas cobbled together in to a makeshift game like structure.
Actually, if it weren’t for its moddability, I reckon SR1 would be a total failure, because out of the box, that game is unimaginative and boring once you get used to the few unique aspects it offers in terms of scale and game design.
It is the mods that added the extra variety that kept me playing.. and even then I would not call it playing.
Bottomline: Some unique ideas, mediocre execution, not much else to talk about.
csebal, well said. You told everything there is to say about this game in my opinion.
Sometimes its just not viable to support a game any longer due to financial implications. BMS have said publicly they had the choice of continuing SR1 and facing the risk as sales dropped that they would be forced out of business or moving onto their next game.
You seem to be claiming its their attitude and not just the mistakes a first time indie game developers made due to partly a lack of experience and partly situations outside of their control. Which is unfair and unreasonable to be frank.
Csebal could not have said it better. It was just unfinished and they dropped it. Now, I understand BMS doing whatever it is they need to do to stay in business. But, they should understand that their actions impact customer loyalty. I will probably not buy SR2 as the experience with SR1 was not good. It could have been but, they decided to go work on another title. I would prefer to spend my time on something like Gal Civ 3 that I know will continue to be developed and improved over time.
The >shipdesign< in SR1 was probably the best shipdesign i ! ever ! experienced in any game. (maybe sharing the 1st prize with StarDrive)
the stats, the possibility to design ships from scratch and build several realtime hours a ship as huge as a solar system.
the shipdesign is what made this game truly unique. although the vanilla game itself wasnt a good game. mediocre.
with the mod aka inofficial expansion "galactic armory" it was a really good game.
Once you had a big enough ship, ship design became a chore. Modules you did not want to connect kept connecting, those you wanted to connect did so with a different module.
You did not see half the modules on your ship, because
A) they were so tiny (.25 scale)
B) they were under a different module
Why? Because all the ship design had to be done in a rather small circle.
While the ship design had some interesting ideas, its execution was very disappointing and weak.
btw
despite my criticism above, I’ll certainly buy SR2 as I support anyone who develops a 4x game :-)
I will very likely buy it.
And csebal,your complains are NIL. I dont think you played the game long enough, the issue you are describing would only happen if you build poorly ships with douzens+++ of modules in them. Choose the correct sizes (like, 1×1 instead of 4x.25) and you are good to go.
Ragnarok:
How bout you build a scale 100000 ship? What then? What module size should I choose, when even a .25 module can destroy a star twice over? Still stick with scale 1?
Its a ridiculously over exaggerated example of course, but it shows my point. There are cases, when you do not want big modules. You might want some small PD (.25) guns on your scale 100 Battleship, to accompany that big scale 4 heavy cannon. Why? Because even .25 guns do more than enough damage to wipe small ships off the sky, so building them any larger would be a waste of space.
I’m not going to make assumptions on how much you played the game. I’m simply stating that you are dead wrong in almost everything you wrote above. That you try to educate me on how to play the game I have spent 100+ hours playing and clearly have had more interesting designs than you can even think of is ridiculous at best.
WTF BBQ, LINUX SUPPORT? Oh gawd, finally a 4X space game that will have a native client for Linux. Will be looking forward to this.~