History VideoGame / StarRuler

''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.

* ProudScholarRaceGuy: The Researcher AI focuses more on research, [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin naturally]]. They prefer to stay at peace because it's beneficial to researching, but they view war as [[BlueAndOrangeMorality another way to test out new technology]]. Their ships are fragile but pack powerful lasers and shields.

* ArbitraryMaximumRange: Weapons all have ''relatively'' small maximum ranges -- but the ranges are measured in thousandths of AU (Astronomical Units, basically the average distance from Earth to the Sun, roughly 500 lightseconds).

Research has a massive focus in ''Star Ruler'' - you unlock subsystems by researching its specific upgrade (i.e. researching Energy Weapons will help unlock lasers). However, when a subsystem is first researched, it's usually weak - you need to continue to research in that field to make it more powerful. Eventually, you research how to build {{Ringworld Planet}}s, [[StarKilling blow up stars]] in an instant, [[SerialEscalation build ships larger than the galaxy]], and make ships that can [[ClownCar carry itself inside its own cargo bay]].

The game's starships have (somewhat) realistic physics, in that there is no friction - or a top speed, for that matter. Ship's ''effective'' speed is measured by their acceleration power. Ships moving between star systems accelerate halfway to their destination, then flip around and fire their engines backwards to slow down. The more engines a ship has, the faster it goes - but the faster it burns through its fuel supply. You can make the ship larger to [[NecessaryDrawback fit in more engines, but then you have to push around even more weight]].

Ship-to-ship combat is [[RocketTagGameplay fast and brutal, with ships annihilating each other often in just a few salvos]] - sped up by the fact that weapons [[SubsystemDamage damage ship subsystems]], and many subsystems are also [[MadeOfExplodium explosive, such as ammunition or anti-matter]]. Entire fleets can wipe each other out in mere minutes, so positioning your ships to prevent mass losses is necessary when fighting equal forces.

The game's economy is simple at first glance, but very nuanced. Ships require Metal [[note]]processed from ore[[/note]], Advanced Parts [[note]]processed from electronics and metal[[/note]], Electronics [[note]]made from metal[[/note]], and Labor [[note]]what is used to actually build stuff, generated by the population[[/note]] to be built, but planets, and your race as a whole may have modifiers on each stat. Food is necessary to keep your population from starving, and they want goods and luxury goods otherwise they'll produce less - unless you just enslave them. Unlike other games, ships, stations, and planetary facilities have no "build time" - if you have enough resources stored at the build point, you can build anything virtually instantly. If you don't have enough resources, the planet (or mobile shipyard) has to pull the resources from your Galactic Bank, the empire-wide resource depository.

* ArbitraryMaximumRange: Weapons all have ''relatively'' small maximum ranges - but the ranges are measured in thousandths of AU (Astronomical Units, basically the average distance from Earth to the Sun, roughly 500 lightseconds).

* ArtisticLicenseSpace: The orbits of planets do not affect each other, nor will ships. It's possible to have a station the size of Betelgeuse orbiting a planet not much bigger than Earth. Likely for the best, though - otherwise, planets would be shot out of the galaxy by players warping their ships everywhere.

* EasyLogistics: Played with. Ships will, by default, restore their own ammo and fuel from planets (or other "tender" and "tanker" ships), provided there's enough to take. However, the resupply settings on ships often need to be tweaked to prevent them from [[ArtificialStupidity flying between two stations to resupply their fuel and ammo indefinitely]]. In ''Galactic Armory'', fuel and ammo are actual Galactic Bank resources that must be assembled by planets or ships/stations with the proper subsystem - good luck invading that enemy planet when you don't have the fuel to gas up your ships or the ammo to load the cannons!

* FasterThanLightTravel: 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/second fairly early on.

* GhostShip: 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. Additionally, ships with analyzers can make a copy of the ghost ship's blueprint.

* MatryoshkaObject: 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 [[ClownCarBase from a size 1.0 fighter to a size 256 battleship.]]

* MobileFactory: 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.

* RockBeatsLaser: Hyper-averted. A technologically advanced empire will absolutely ''crush'' a lower level empire. To emphasize this - A fighter with level 40 armor, engines, and weapons will curb stomp a level 1 mega-battleship.

* SubsystemDamage: Damaging enemy ships will cause their subsystems to fail (destroying their generator, ruining their ammo cache, killing the entire crew, etc) once you get past their armor - which is also a subsystem.
* SuperweaponSurprise: 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.

* BarbarianTribe: The Aggressor AI focuses entirely on war - research be damned.

* BlueAndOrangeMorality: The Lunatic AI has no rhyme or reason in its logic - they might go to war because they consider it a hoot. Their ships suffer from CripplingOverspecialization since they are all geared to do ''one'' specific task. The Research AI also considers war to be an effective way to test out new technology.

* ShoutOut: The Inhibitor AI is a major shoutout to Creator/AlastairReynolds' ''Literature/RevelationSpace'' series - they have the same name, both want to extinguish any life they find, and both rely on physics-bending weaponry. The backstory even says they took on this "mission" from contact with a race called the "wolves" - another name for the Inhibitors in ''Revelation Space''.

* {{Artistic License Astronomy}}: The orbits of planets do not affect each other, nor will ships. It's possible to have a station the size of Betelgeuse orbiting a planet not much bigger than Earth. Likely for the best, though - otherwise, planets would be shot out of the galaxy by players warping their ships everywhere.

* AstronomicZoom

* FrickinLaserBeams: A weapon choice. Averts the usual depiction by being continuous-beam and hitscan, though it gets ridiculous when you research them to where their range is measurable in AU (~8 light-minutes/~500 light-seconds) and [[FasterThanLightTravel STILL hit instantly!]]

* LethalJokeItem: The Salvage gear largely seems rather useless at first glance, since most enemy ships tend to explode faster than any reasonable salvage operation can go. Because it returns resources as a multiplier of armor values, and because more efficient simple armor can cost less than one resource to build, entire Dyson Swarms of space stations around creating and destroying unmanned and underpowered hulks can have net positive metal income. Because stations, unlike planets, aren't limited in construction time by manpower, such arrays are the fastest way to creating truly impressive BigDumbObjects faster than the tech tree normally supports them.

* BarbarianTribe: The Aggressor AI focuses entirely on war - research be damned.

* {{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.

* {{Artistic License Astronomy}}: The orbits of planets do not affect each other, nor will ships. It's possible to have a station the size of Betelgeuse orbiting a planet not much bigger than Earth. Likely for the best, though - otherwise, planets would be shot out of the galaxy by players warping their ships everywhere. FridgeBrilliance: By the time you're building those megaships, you probably have some levels in Gravitics control.

The game's starships have ([[MisaimedRealism somewhat]]) realistic physics, in that there is no friction - or a top speed, for that matter. Ship's ''effective'' speed is measured by their acceleration power. Ships moving between star systems accelerate halfway to their destination, then flip around and fire their engines backwards to slow down. The more engines a ship has, the faster it goes - but the faster it burns through its fuel supply. You can make the ship larger to [[NecessaryDrawback fit in more engines, but then you have to push around even more weight]].

* MisaimedRealism: The game enforces newtonian motion (no SpaceFriction), and ships move around realistically, but there is no relativity, so they can easily exceed the speed of light by simply accelerating long enough.