Star Ruler: Difference between revisions

''Star Ruler'' also has strong support for modding, with many aspects customisable in a humble text editor. Among the most popular of them is ''[http://starruler.blind-mind.com/mods/view/3 Galactic Armory]'', which makes quite a few substantial changes to the gameplay. ''GA'' tropes go into a separate section.

 

* [[All Planets Are Earthlike]]: Averted. Some are clearly not.

* [[A Million Is a Statistic]]: Large ships have crews of over a thousand. The megaships that the player can build can have crews of ''millions''. Planetary assaults with smaller (aka not planet killing sized death machines) ships result in millions (or billions, in the case of high level cities) being slaughtered indiscriminately by orbital bombardment.

* [[Apocalypse How]]: Planetary assaults with big enough ships will cause the planet itself to break apart. You can then go blow up the ''star'' that the planet orbits.

* [[Arbitrary Maximum Range]]: Weapons all have ''relatively'' small maximum ranges - but the ranges are measured in AU (Astronomical Units, basically the average distance from Earth to the Sun)

* [[Artificial Stupidity]]: The AI thinks nothing of it when a neutral player warps his entire fleet into their home system.

** Large ships tend to spend huge amounts of fuel chasing down small, unarmed scout ships.

* [[Faster Than Light Travel]]: Of the Jump Drive variety. Ships without the drive have to go the slow way - flying to the target star on their own engine power. It should be noted, though, that "slowboating" can also result in low-end FTL - a light-second is roughly 0.002AU, yet ships can accelerate past that fairly early on.

* [[Fragile Speedster]]: Ships with "Fighter" or "Bomber" hulls, and scout ships (typically smaller than a soda can).

* [[Game Mod]]: The game is easily modded to include more subsystems.

* [[Ghost Ship]]: Crew death, loss of power, or running out of fuel will cause a ship to go derelict, and drift until it's destroyed by the game several minutes later. Derelict ships can be salvaged and reclaimed if it's only the crew that died - doing so on an enemy ship will also allow you to steal the design and build it yourself.

* [[Matryoshka Object]]: You can build ships that do this - be it smaller ships carrying progressively smaller ships, or if you're crazy, making ships carrying progressively large ships inside each other. With about a dozen transitions at high level Spatial Dynamics and Cargo Storage, you could go [[Clown Car Base|from a size 1.0 fighter to a size 256 battleship.]]

* [[Mighty Glacier]]: Ships with lots of armor and/or weapons, but small engines. The ship has no top speed, but it'll handle like the state of Wisconsin, and have trouble getting to its destination in a reasonable amount of time. However, it'll be able able to absorb tons of damage, and instagib much of what dares to attack it.

* [[Min Maxing]]: At game-start you can choose traits for your faction through the juggling of points.

* [[Mobile Factory]]: Placing a Mining Laser, storage, the 3 part refineries (Metal, Electronics, Advanced Parts), and a Construction Bay on a ship will allow it to start building ships once it has an asteroid to mine. It's possible to build what are essentially Von Neumann self-replicating ships using this - order them to build 10 of themselves, then order them to mine a large asteroid. Keep repeating this, and about an hour later there will be several hundred ships mining the asteroid.

* [[Necessary Drawback]]: A key part of the game design; new subsystems unlocked through research are not just incremental improvements on the existing ones but have their own flaws to balance the advantages they bring.

* [[Point Defenseless]]: Averted for the default ship designs, which typically feature Flak Cannons. However, many of the hostile AI ships (Pirates and Remnants) lack them.

* [[Portal Network]]: The Remnant Gates allow ships to instantly teleport to anywhere in the galaxy.

* [[Superweapon Surprise]]: Save for capturing enemy ships or finding derelict ships, it's impossible to know how advanced an enemy is - leading to things like a enemy fighter wiping out your battlefleet because you weren't researching. Additionally, it is not possible to view how many ships an enemy planet or ship has docked. You could be invading a ripe, undefended system... only for hundreds of enemy battleships to come pouring out of the planets to wipe out your battlegroup.

* [[Tractor Beam]]: A pulling (and pushing beam) are available as subsystems. Largely pointless, but they can be used to grapple onto enemy stations and pull them out of orbit, or send enemy ships catapulting out of the system

* [[Units Not to Scale]]: Units are to scale with each other, but not celestial objects (planets, asteroids, stars). A size 2500 station is several times the size of a planet, but will have a crew around ~200,000, whereas a planet will have a population of about a ~100,000,000 at low levels. This is present to ensure that your ships are actually visible at a decent zoom level.

* [[Universal Ammunition]]: All weapons draw from a source of ammo with no attempt to distinguish.

=== Galactic Armory adds or changes the following examples: ===

* [[Abusive Precursors]]: Remnants are changed into this from vanilla. It's unknown how they were like before, but nowadays the artificially intelligent remnants of their vast fleet attack anything in sight. Unlike in vanilla where they were content to bum around in their systems and chase the kids off their lawns, GA's Remnants send out roving kill-squads to purge the younger races every now and then.

** [[Crippling Overspecialization]]: Don't do jack against physical things like armour or hull.

* [[The Battlestar]]: The mod adds two hulls meant for this; the Carrier Hull, like the name suggests, leans more to normal carriers in being relatively thin-skinned and trades some space away for having strikecraft bays integrated right into the hull, while the Mothership Hull is closer to a Battlestar, trading out some space and not having the option of extra ship bays in order to accommodate more weapons and stuff.

* [[Fixed Forward Facing Weapon]]: The Spinal Mount Hull lets you make these.

* [[Macross Missile Massacre]]: Missile numbers scaling with level has been removed, but there are now Barrage and Cluster launchers.

* [[Min Maxing]]: Taken to a new level with added Traits that allow you to improve or worsen certain weapon types, further encouraging you to specialise your research than in vanilla.