I don't want to register on yet another forum, but I'll leave feedback here
I've been trying to find a fix for my space-opera 4X craving. I tried Aurora, I tried Star Ruler, and GalCiv II. Aurora had too much micromanagement in keeping things running, and partially suffered from some of the symptoms that also made Star Ruler hard to get into for me. I've been having a ton of fun with GalCiv II, and I think I can sort of say why at a high level. Don't take this as a criticism and "GalCiv II is better" - that's definitely not how I mean it.
Disclaimer:I did not put too many hours into the game. Had I done it, I might've gotten a lot more enjoyment as things "clicked". However, I did not have too much free time on my hands, and since I didn't "get it" in the time I had, my interest faded slowly.
Since enjoyment is highly subjective, here's a bit about me. I love open, sandbox worlds where I can try completely different approaches and seeing how they develop. I enjoy Mount&Blade, roguelikes, Dwarf Fortress, and I enjoyed my foray into Aurora's crazy undocumented world. I get immense satisfaction from finally getting something hard to work (first farm in DF!), so I'll wade through the mud for quite some time trying to get things to work. To keep me going, however, it needs to be clear why something didn't work, so that I can come up with a list of possible fixes, then try them out, succeed/fail, and rinse and repeat.
And that, I feel, might be the greatest shortcoming in Star Ruler. All the possibilities and the freedom are WONDERFUL. Theoretically, it's a superbly open world where you can try completely different things every time, from ships to strategies and everything in between. In practise, it didn't go that way. And the reason, as stated above, was that it was never clear to me what exactly went wrong with my designs and my strategies. I'll just go ahead and list specifics:
- The resource system is different than anything I've ever seen before, with "tiered" resources. Resources of lower tiers produce resources of higher tiers. Why? What does each resource do? What is it for? In GalCiv II you produce Research Points (that's pretty clear), Industry Points (to build stuff), Food (to get more people, thus more taxes), and Money, from a variety of sources. It's something that makes sense from the very first. In Star Ruler, resources ultimately feel the same: they are all used to build ships and buildings. I guess I never really saw the reason for the design decision to have more than just "materials" or "resources" - only consumer/luxury goods were clearly different. This made the task of keeping it balanced (and what exactly is balance for three resources that you don't really "get"?) too much micromanagement.
- Diplomacy is essentially non-existent for all practical purposes. This has a couple of consequences. First, it limits the scope of the game immensely. It's no longer a big space opera of different civilisations and their specific personalities and relations, it's about you building more ships faster. Which leads to the second consequence: the game is about combat, with the corollary that shortcomings in the combat system are an enormous factor in the enjoyment of the game. The way I learned to play GalCiv II was setting it on a low difficulty level, and immediately befriending neighbouring races. I started treaties to cement relationships; I figured out what techs they were betting on and invested in others; we traded them tit-for-tat, allowing us both to become stronger. This way, I didn't have to worry about certain parts of the tech tree nor about military matters for some time.
- Research is also a completely different system - which is good. It's nice to have all these different topics, but the connections between are really unintuitive. I was expecting that if I researched a connection I would automatically get the neighbour, which isn't what happens. Perhaps that's not the most intuitive way to visually represent the connections.
There are two basic properties of the research graph that make it really hard to evaluate the impact of your choices (were they good? bad?). First, it's a completely flat graph, it's not a tree - there's no hierarchy. This isn't bad per se, but now you have a lot more choices. Instead of having N distinct "paths" (weaponry, engines, morale, infrastructure, etc), you now have M different "generic" topics, where M is a lot bigger than N. Too much choice - what do I go for? Why? Which nodes contribute to what type of thing, to which strategy? Second, each topic has levels - this just adds more confusion. How much is enough? Should I level them all up equally? How little can I get away with in a specific field? I have no idea. It's very hard to understand exactly what each level does. There are no numbers. Sure, I get more subsystems, but do I need them? Perhaps I can try them out - but what are the incremental gains of getting it to level 7 instead of just 5? Here's a couple of suggestions:
- One suggestion to the flat graph would be to at least visibly cluster topics into specific, intuitively named areas (again, e.g. offensive, defensive, support, engines, morale, infrastructure, etc). This would allow people to decide a broad strategy at higher level from an intuitive understanding of the meaning of each cluster. For instance, I may want a defensive empire that lets others annihilate each other before jumping in. Then, I may decide to have, for example, very defensive and well-supported ships to take the brunt of enemy fire next to planets, around which orbit huge planetary platforms that take care of offense through sheer size (not good technology). To implement this, all I got to do is go and check out the cluster for defensive and support technology for instance, and see what's there. It's very hard to get this high-level strategic overview from a purely flat graph with generic scientific topics.
- Regarding how much to level each topic, what works for me is having concrete numbers. GalCiv II gives you those numbers, so you get a feeling for how much better it is to level Miniaturisation to level 4 (giving you more space in ships). If I have 3 levels, I get, say, 10+10+15 miniaturization respectively, and the next level says I get 20 points. That's a hard number, something I can weigh and judge - it's more than 50% increase over what I have. I saw and experienced how much extra stuff those 10+10+15 points gave me, so I know what I'm getting from those 20 points of the 4th level.
- Ship design is extremely versatile. It feels like you can do mostly anything. I LOVE that. Keep it! Allow us to do all sorts of different crazy ships! I did not try a lot of it, but it seemed like you could have carriers for other ships, perhaps support ships of all kinds, such as ammo or fuel carrying ships, support ships, etc. At least that's what it seems like you can do - if you can't, I suggest adding subsystems that provide remote bonuses. This allows for more varied, composite fleets. Mine were always lots of the same ship. The components all work relatively intuitively, and you have hard numbers here. Once again, let me try to dissect what didn't work for me.
- The numbers you get aren't directly meaningful. Sure - you use X ammo/sec, and and carry N tons of ammo. But how long exactly does that let me fire? Why not give an estimate? Same for fuel - sure, the ship consumes X fuel per second, and carries N tons. How many "jumps" can I do? What's the distance it can travel autonomously? Maybe I could have little autonomy, but have a support refuelling fleet! I don't know if it makes sense, because the numbers don't tell me how much autonomy ships are going to have (unless I kind of calculate it). As a back-reference - exactly how does a level up in research topic X affect the numbers I see here?
- Ship size. Once again, I absolutely LOVE that you get to do arbitrarily sized ships. But in real-time, with arbitrarily sized ships, it's too much choice. When do you make bigger ships? Should they change at all, or just the size? Eventually, my strategy was to keep the blueprints, but double the size. I never knew when to do this. Every now and then, my ships started getting beat, so I upped their size. That felt like a really limited use of the system. GalCiv II has a fixed number of hull sizes that you have to research, and it's really easy to identify where your opponents are at, or how quickly you can get ahead. It's also very obvious how to get ahead. Although it is too limited compared to Star Ruler, it provides a system that gives you feedback on where you are, and whether you're getting behind on the tech race or not.
- I get the idea of control, with the bridges, and they may be damaged and all that. I get it! It makes sense, that's great. But it seems superfluous. I never see the impact of having a smaller or bigger bridge/control. If it's bigger, does it mean it can take more hits before the ship grinding to a halt for lack of control? I don't know. I usually put it just barely enough - which then becomes a routine, annoying task, especially as the size rarely changes that much. I don't get feedback on whether the bridge being small or big is good or bad, and this, for me, the crucial failing:
- Star Ruler tells you you went wrong, but not where. This becomes a big problem for me. Instead of having a game where you play, identify your shortcomings, and test out potential solutions by figuring out the impacts of specific choices you get something entirely different. You get this game of arbitrarily exploring an infinite state space produced by the combinations of all the different mechanics as one single monolithic strategy. You cannot isolate parts of your strategy and figure out why they work or don't. Strategies that work, for me, become purely a matter of dogma - certain giant combinations of a particular set of research topics, with certain specific ship blueprints appear to work. Why? I have no idea. But they do, so I used them and don't diverge much. I can't isolate the combination of decisions/techs/subsystems that make this specific strategy successful. Thus, I fix my strategy and use it always. The game then becomes an exercise in mechanisation and repeating the same choices, until they don't work. When they don't, I don't know where to improve or why.
So, specifically, where do I feel this lack of feedback?
- At the scale Star Ruler provides, in ship combat. Two fleets meet, and... well, they joust. They pass one another, turn back, pass one another, turn back, etc. Every time their lances meet, ships disappear. The rate at which they disappear on either side determines the winner. All I see are icons passing each other. I don't know why my ships are being disabled or destroyed. I don't know how well/bad my support systems are working. I have no idea what's going well or not. I feel there are no tactics in combat. If I'm losing, I lose the entire fleet and so I build the same ships, but twice as big.
- In economy in general. I can never figure out exactly how much I'm producing and where. It's hard to understand when my economy is going to collapse, and one collapse is brutal. Everything stops. It's super annoying to resolve thanks to the tiered resource system. If you're lacking metals, then you need to get rid of all the upper tiers of resource production, building production, ship production, etc. It's hard to resolve, and in general it's a lot of micromanagement. Getting it right isn't particularly satisfying either, just a chore. Planetary governors also appear to use randomness, so you never really know what you're getting. GalCiv II, with it's system of fundamentally different 3 resources, with detailed info for each planet (of which there are fewer), makes it easier to keep track of everything, i.e. which planet is doing more of what and why. Less micromanagement. Furthermore, certain planets have specific bonuses that are very obvious, and so make themselves obvious choices for a particular role (research, production or expanding borders through influence, generally speaking).
Right - so fundamentally, I love the concept of Star Ruler. I love that there's this big sense of scale, and the endless possibilities in terms of military strategy. Ultimately, it didn't click for me because the entry barrier is too high. Choices seem very arbitrary for longer than I am personally capable of investing effort in a game right now. The main points I would re-emphasise are that it's really hard to 1) realise what broad, high-level choices there are for your empire (due to how the information is presented), 2) to see the impact of each individual choice that you make (because of sheer number of planets/ships) and 3) micromanage the economy due to an unintuitive resource/economic system. Finally, the lack of diplomacy only exacerbates these problems, since the game is about combat, and your strategy succeeds or fails (almost) singularly based on your military strategy.
I hope you don't think I hate the game. The wall of text should at least convince you I care about it! I think it has a huge amount of potential, but it's really hard to get into. Admittedly, I should've given it a harder try, but there you go... I hope this was helpful to you in any way!
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Topic: Star Ruler: Thats no Moon! (Read 175030 times)