I played this quite a bit in the last few days, and I'm not sure if I like it or not.
I like the fact that we can build on planets, but not the fact that buildings are HUGE. There are also civilian buildings that are 1 square but you don't build them directly.
Many game mechanics feel very abstract, like the planet levels. It's annoying that we can't stockpile money and every 3 min, any extra is turned into a boost for another resource.
When I first started playing Terrakin (human), I found it discouraging how much food and water was needed to get some use out of my planets, and how many planets were needed to get a higher level one. Since it's like a pyramid, the last tiers can be really hard to scrape together, with how rare lvl2 resources are.
Then I started playing Mono, and also I noticed that it was possible to "terraform" planets to turn their resource into a generic lvl1 of my choosing.
Let me tell you, the Mono race is the best by far, in my opinion. It doesn't need any water and food, so levelling up planets is WAY easier. Also you start with unobtainium on your first world, and you can turn that into any resource you own, so you can colonize a world with lvl3 resource, morph your unobtainium into that, then transfer the population back. Oh yeah that's another great feature of Mono, you can transfer population from planet to planet instantly, and that's the only thing you'll ever use FTL for. Also, since Mono population generates labor, it's really fast to build all sorts of things once you get the ball rolling. Their weakest point is that they need to build population for §150k a pop and increasing labor cost. However, if you terraform all those useless food and water planets into textile planets, you can get a lot of money. One thing I noticed was that the buildings have really big maintenance costs, so if you want money, build as little as possible.
For labor, research can make factories really productive, but I found that simply massing population is the best way to have lots of labor early on, seeing how the population cap isn't really limiting for Mono.
Now, I have to say, even though I enjoyed the game for a few days, in the end it plays and feels very similar to other games in the genre. If you're looking for a breath of fresh air, you'll find this one a bit stale, and I'm not sure there's a lot of replayability.
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Topic: Star Ruler 2 [7/24/2018 - Now Open Source!] (Read 85528 times)