Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
[Star Ruler] Indie 4x game of greatness? Signs point to yes.
Posts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGoi1MSGu64
The System Plane change (open in a new window; it's a large image): http://data.glacicle.org/starruler/planes-5.png
Full patch notes follow:
Click here to visit our thread on Penny-Arcade
Also, which techs are critical early, and which can wait until later?
Space ports, they export excess resources to the galactic bank and import them on worlds that need them. When you have a planet selected you can see how much of each resource it has and a % next to them, when a planet is at 50% for a resource it exports it, whether or not it can stay at 50% or go up depends on how many space ports you have. I recommend building extra space ports on your homeworld to begin with, and once you have a drydock in orbit you can remove the shipyards, the drydock will take resources from the planet and the planet will import them from the bank.
How many space ports strike a good balance on a world?
The Count Of Midget Fisto, for Harvester of Sorrows
arcath, for Black Sun
Namrok, for The Boundless Excess of Amoral Civilization
Shapeshifter, for She's one of our's sir!
datac0re, for The Jackwagon
Docshifty, for Star Throne
You'll all receive a copy of Star Ruler very shortly, and that is my promise. I just put in the order right now, but am having a bit of difficulty in figuring out how to get each of you the software individually (I've got a message in to Firgof). Once I have this figured that out, you'll be getting appropriate PMs! My apologies for the delay, but my thanks to all for participating.
Update: OK! Despite my bumbling, the guys over at Blind Mind have been very helpful. The first of the keys are out to those people who obviously use Steam. Before I distribute the rest of the keys, though, I need to know if The Count, arcath, or Namrok are unable to use Steam. If you're okay with Steam, I'll send a key your way. One person will get a non-Steam version.
A gentleman you are, sir!
A lot of people seem to have problems understanding how to get up and running early game in Star Ruler. One thing that must be taken into consideration is that this isn't your "usual RTS.
Expansions in normal RTS'es typically take low amounts of resources up front, and provide resources for your main base to continue constructing. However, SR expansions require a significant amount of resources (Until mid/late game) and will drain your economy until mostly constructed.
Here are a few points you need to understand.
1. The Galactic Bank
The galactic bank is a global resource bank accessible by all planets with space ports (and planet capitols). These resources are advanced parts, electronics, metals (Top row) and food, goods, luxuries (Bottom row).
Each space port supplies a set amount of resource transfer, this is shared between Parts/Elec/Metal/Food, but not Goods/Luxuries. Goods/Luxuries are passed between planets as needed without screwing with each planet's economy.
2. Planetary Governors
By default the game will assign governors to your planets automatically and attempt to manage them. This is a very bad idea early game. It is highly recommended you pull up the empire screen and set the governor choice to "Renovate Only".
3. Planet Production
There are several factors that will determine your planet's production.
A: Access to goods/luxuries - Without civil acts factored in, you will get a 50% bonus applied to your production factors.
B: Civil Acts - For the purposes of this guide we are staying away from these for now, but they are fairly self explanatory and can let you micromanage your economy.
C: Population - The overall available population of your planet determines a production modifier. Low (Near minimum for functionality of buildings) populations will result in a minimal modifier, or one even below 1x. This production modifier only modifies Metal/Elec/Adv Parts/Food production.
D: Tech Levels - Tech levels of buildings will naturally determine each's BASE production.
So a building that lists a base production of 100 for instance will be modified by the Production modifier in your planet's economy menu.
4. Resources
Metal is the baseline resource mined by Metal Mining Complexes
Electronics are manufactured at Electronics Factories and requires Metal to produce Electronics. The metal needed can be imported via Space Ports if needed.
Advanced Parts are manufactured at Advanced Parts factories and require both Electronics and Metal. As above, the needed resources can be imported via space ports.
Food is produced at Farms and can be imported/exported via Space Ports.
Goods/Luxuries are produced at their respective factories, and are globally exported/imported with no needs/demands on your space ports.
The first 10-15 minutes of your typical game should be micromanaged heavily.
Your starting planet will be a 22/25 homeworld. You should queue up 1 ship yard, 2 space ports, then 1 colony ship.
This next part requires a bit of judgment, but if your colony ship will not get to the first planet and your homeworld is going to start overflowing you should build another colony ship. Overflowing is defined by a planet sitting at 100% for all of it's main resource types (This indicates that the planet cannot export it's resources fast enough). Once a planet hits => 50% resources it will begin exporting as fast as it can to the bank.
When your first planet is colonized you need to take note of any special conditions on the planet and the main one you want to avoid early game is "Scattered Ore Deposits" (Unless it's also paired with Rich Ore deposits, which neutralizes it and makes everyone say "What's the point?")
If your first colonized planet gets this condition, let it sit and simply wait for the second planet to be colonized.
Upon colonization you should receive One capitol, one city, and one space port. (Assuming you are using default colonizer).
Unless you get Noxious Atmo/Frozen Tundra modifiers, you should queue your first planet as such
1x space port
1x metal
1x city
3x metal
1x city
2x metal
1x electronics
1x planet cannon (This is for anti pirates, and can be changed if you prefer a different strategy for handling pirates)
1x city
1x metal/elec/adv parts
(This covers an 18 slot world, which is around the "average" mark found in game)
Your main production bottleneck early game will always be metal since you need so much more of it for most buildings, and elec/adv parts require metal as well. Your first couple of planets should feed your GB with metal and some elec/adv parts. Food will not be a problem until you've colonized a few more planets.
Your 3rd/4th planet should be colonized similarly as well, you should go metal heavy with some elec/adv parts. Ideally, early game you should keep your economy generating planets at 4x metal, 2x elec, 1x adv parts ratio until you are more comfortable microing your economy. Around your 5th or 6th planet you will want to have a few General Goods factories, and if you get a particularly bad or small planet, dump some luxuries factories down also as they don't need space ports to function.
You should also have your main homeworld produce an amount of scouts equal to the amount of stars you generated when the game was created (Default: 150). This will dump a scout in every system (Minus interceptions from rems), and allow you to make judgments on what systems to colonize.
Once you have 4 planets up exporting into your economy you can more rapidly expand, however do NOT expand too quickly. You need to try and keep your GB in the green while expanding, or at least nearly neutral so you don't have a "resource brownout". You will also need to build farms on the occasional world to make sure you don't have population starvation.
You should be able to get around 10 planets fully colonized around the 18-20m mark using this method, and you'll want to start mixing in research worlds/general goods/luxuries worlds. KEEP YOUR FOOD IN THE GREEN
Good luck.
Hear, hear! Truly a classy individual! The game registered easily on Steam, and it's downloading now!
Steam Profile: miserium
Similarly, something with +10% build costs and something else with -10% build costs results in 99% build costs, not 100%.
Just a note to those who haven't received a key yet: I'm turning in for the evening, but tomorrow I'll be sure to distribute things as soon as I hear back from folks regarding a Yea/Nay on Steam.
:mrgreen:
TetraNitroCubane should get a Golden monocle award
Endless <3, thank you!
Raptr profile
Oh and loving this game, probably going to be in my top 5 games of the year.
It worked wonderfully! Thank you!
Same here, plus I haven't figured out when or how much to scale my ships either. I thought I had a decent little fleet with a hundred or so of the default cruisers and twice that many bombers and fighters, then along come some pirates with scale 20 ships and they just fucked me in the ass.
Yeah, I'm really bad at that too.
Steam: stabbitystyle | XBL: S For Stabbity | MWO: stabbitystyle
Once I get major technologies like shields, armor (i.e. nano, reactive and ablative), and beam weapons I try to overhaul ship designs.
Remember that armor doesn't count towards your component cost (although things like powered armor can count against your power usage), so when you unlock things like nano armor you'll want to put some on your designs (probably not small fighters and bombers, though). Armor will slow your units down though.
Most of the advanced power supplies will let you save space while outputting equal or more power, which gives you room for shields or more weapons. But keep in mind that for fusion or anti-matter generators you'll want to provide emergency power (or at least a capacitor, which can help with peak performance too - 0.25 will usually work for most cases).
I usually equip most ships with beam weapons so I don't need to worry about ammo much, but to keep enemies on their toes (and ship armor costs up), I include torpedoes and the occaisonal rail gun. If you focus solely on one sort of weapon across your fleet it could be countered with just one type of armor.
The ships are really poor with the newtonian physics though, and will often overshoot completely and then go back and overshoot again so I mainly use hold position for my fleets and go sit next to one of their planets OR use the defend command on my own planets and my ships will sit there and kill anything that comes close.
I haven't read the entire thread, but I do hope that in the end, you can build Ringworlds, Dyson Spheres, Death Stars and such?
This game seems so advanced, that I hope that there will be some players who will be good at macro gameplay, creating vast and powerful armies to throw at the opponents, while some players will be good at micro gameplay, creating very effective units and knowing exactly how to deploy them.
I mean, even if you could make up that difference in more ships, in order to have more ships, you need more planets. The strategy just boils down to that singular point: have more planets.
On playing the demo, I did get a slight impression of it being a more advanced version of Galcon.
Now I'm going to have to read the entire thread before making a purchase decision...
Best option for this game, I feel, is just to use a very small galaxy size.
Also, I suppose I am exaggerating the tech advantage a bit. Each level of tech is about a 40% (multiplicative) increase in effectiveness, but each level of tech also costs twice as much. So, being level 11 vs. level 10 means you've spent twice as much research for that 40% advantage.
The game just is a bit too heavy on the snowballing side, I feel. There's good mod support and the ability to tweak some values (which potentially can totally fuck up the AI, actually...), so I'm sure somebody (looking at the current mods... it'll probably end up being the developers) will figure out something that's a bit more balanced.
Does anyone have any tips for defending against boarding parties? I have a bunch of huge ships, completely outclassing this particular enemy(512-1024 vs 10-50 size). Sometimes when he attacks he will manage to get one of my massive ships. it has boarding defenses, and a repair bay, plus many nearby ships have a repair tool. it seems like there is no counter to someone capturing something they really want. I would have though having shields up would prevent it.
Raptr profile
That reminds me, I had sent a colony ship out and pirates attacked immediately afterward. I was so focused on scrambling my ships to repel the pirates that I wasn't paying attention to my colony ship and they captured it then colonized the planet I had originally planned to. I laughed my ass off because I didn't know they could capture stuff, I thought they just blew everything up.
Flak Cannons are pretty much boarding party defense weapons, aren't they?
No, bording defenses are separate guns that go inside the ship. Their description said they're mounted in the hallways inside the ships and shoot bad dudes that get in.
Unfortunately you can't shoot down a boarding party, they are a projectile just like a rail gun round. Point defense is something this game is missing.
Raptr profile
Likely to be reading the wiki for this game all day at work today. But one thing I've missed. Is there any ability to pause this game? I've noticed a few times when it pauses automatically, like when certain screens are up. But I really don't want the game chugging along while I have the ship designer open, or I'm sitting there
top right corner, there is a slow down button, speed up button, and in the middle is a | that pauses the game
The wiki is unfortunately pretty out of date and not really useful
Raptr profile
There is also a keyboard command to pause, ~ I think.
Origin: Broncbuster
Not having played AI War, well, both X3 and Star Ruler have insane learning curves. SR's is mostly balancing management, while X3's is about learning to move around (fight) and find a way to make money that you like.
Either would consume your soul whole, leaving you a shell of your former self, hidden by your family in a corner so no one can know of the shame...
Me blogging about my (amateur) indie game programming