I get excited about new space games most of the time but I'm REALLY excited about this one! 😯

It looks wonderful and has an truly mind-blowing sense of scale. My only worry is that it will be closed to those of us still labouring on single-core machines, lol!

Understand totally. Yeah it's great to see developers using hardware now but unfortunately some people are not at that level. Not sure if these system requirements are really the range of hardware you will need?

But you can pick up a AMD dual core CPU for under a hundred now 🙂

I wish they had a few more vids about their game mechanics and stuff on their website, I can't really get to know a game from screenshots

Howdy, I'm Firgof Umbra; I'm one of the developers working at Blind Mind Studios to produce the game. I'm in charge of directing the game's Quality Assurance, Marketing, and Graphics with my boss, ThyReaper.

I thought I'd drop by and answer some questions for you guys. So let's get started! 🙂

😆 Yes, we wish we did too! I'm working on a little something something that should be up sometime soon which should help a bunch in that department. In the meanwhile, I can answer any in-depth questions you have to the best of my ability. Be forewarned that I may not be able to answer all questions due to some systems not being finalized or yet playable in the devbuild of the game but I will try.

Warning: Long-winded, technical, explanation ahead

Technically, Star Ruler should work okay on a pretty fast Single-core processor and work better on a dual-core processor of almost any speed or kind (we recommend 2.8GHz and higher for smooth performance). Of course, the more cores you have and the faster they run the better Star Ruler will perform as it is built to work best with multiple cores. We have not forgotten about our single-core audience however so we are doing our best to try and support what we can in that category. I would say that if you can run UT3 or X3 on medium or better settings you should probably be okay for Star Ruler (in particular, if your machine can't handle better than 5x SETA in X3 in a new game Star Ruler may run a little ragged by its default settings if things get particularly crazy and there are a thousand ships duking it out).

However, in the face of all that, Star Ruler would probably be okay if a fan modded in scale restrictions. We currently support ships as small as 0.00001 and as large as 1,000,000,000,000 (roughly 5% bigger than the width of the default galaxy). If there were less than 800 ships on screen at any given time the hardware requirements are lessened considerably. Similarly, a smaller galaxy will yield better performance on all platforms. And then you could mod the galaxy itself to not have any gas, which saves even more render time, and so on and so forth. Most systems which can run HL2:EP2 on Med-High settings should be able to at the very least support a 1-4 system galaxy with up to possibly 300 ships. 🙂

It's a little bit of a grey area because we don't have a wide variety of hardware that Star Ruler has tested on just yet. We're working on expanding that base of knowledge but for now that's as much as I can get you; and we'll also need to do some re-testing as we recently added in the ability to downscale texture quality so even computers without a lot of graphics memory should be okay (it's about 46MB of graphics memory at the moment on lowest settings).

But our goal is to support as many platforms and operating systems as is feasible (for instance, currently, the game runs through WINE on Linux -- though I should clarify that we can't officially support the Linux platform). 😀

Hi Firgof and welcome to SSC

I personally like the fact that you will take advantage of my quad processor. Not many games today are multi-threaded that actually use all the cores. So I will be interested to see how performance is when you have some beta builds. So far Star Ruler reminds me a little of AI War which is a large scale space RTS/4x game where you can have tens of thousands of units.

Do you colonize planets to help get resources to build your empire?

The universe scale seems large, is the universe different every time you play? Is the universe procedurally generated?

There is a mention that with tools we can add/create ships and other items. How will balance be maintained with new items that are added?

On your website you have this bullet:

Could you describe some victory conditions to winning without doing a lot of combat?

Yes, with the aid of a subsystem which allows a ship to send down a quick colony maker. Planets come in various different sizes and richness. That in mind, the larger the subsystem which colonizes the planet is, the more people and structures are immediately built on the planet's surface from the resources you send down with them.

You have the assistance of a Planetary governor on each planet which is toggleable and will allow you to easily set how you would like your colonies to develop.

Yes, the universe is procedurally generated; guided by an editable AngelScript map creation file which tells the game how far apart to place systems, how big or small planets can be, how many moons a planet can have, and other important things. The actual size of the galaxy is decided by the user by the user selecting how many systems there are in the Galaxy. The Map script and the Scenario script take over from there and then generate the galaxy intended. We will possibly have an in-game scenario editor which allows you to create 'preset situations' for players to play through (and set up conditions such as 'players can't build ships', 'can't research new techs', or have to do trigger events to unlock certain things).

Naturally, we cannot guarantee the balance of user-generated content but server operators and clients should have ease-of-use in enabling and disabling addons, scripts, and so forth.

Exploration: You find something or a set of somethings in the galaxy that is/are a unique resource(s)/asset(s). By finding this/these things you gain control of something very strategically important to the game and by controlling that it is very likely that you will become unstoppable. Other players may stop you by destroying the resource(s)/asset(s) but that is very difficult to do; but it also takes you a while to gain control of it/them. To find this/these resource(s)/asset(s), you must explore the Galaxy and find clues to it's/their location.

Economic: Basically you can indebt the whole galaxy and if you dared to call your debt you would essentially destabilize their entire economic system. Or you could pump so much money into a corporation (or even the pirates if you feel lucky) that you favor that going up against you means going up against them -- and going up against them is not something an Empire would consider lightly. Basically, though you may not control other Empires directly with your money you can influence them -- even get them to surrender their planets to you.

Peaceful Diplomacy works essentially this way: you make your Empire so benevolent and peaceful that their citizens have a very strong likelihood of revolting when they would ever attack you -- and the more benevolent you become the more easy it is for your Empire to simply request planets from other Empires and take them from them.

Aggressive Diplomacy forces other Empires to submit to you by frightening their people with the prospect of war and as such, cripple their ability to fight you by restricting how many ships they may have built at any given time/whether they can or can't use certain weapons/and how large or small their ships may be. Eventually you could simply force all Empires to only ever have one to twelve, relatively small, ship(s) and then simply tell their people 'join us or else' as you amass a 'diplomatic fleet'. The citizens could either then revolt against the Emperor if the Emperor does not yield or offer to join you and crush the new 'loyalists' you have created.

Research can be done through a variety of ways. (Making your ships and planets practically impenetrable to enemy weapon's fire, evolving your society beyond the 'pithy' morals of other societies, building your own "asset(s)/resource(s)" from the Exploration victory emergent condition, and et cetera)

Espionage can trigger revolts in Empires, (possibly) destroy or disable planetary defenses for a short period of time, steal tech., make some systems more attractive to pirates, and so forth.

Gotta hand it to you, some of these concepts are interesting and although they may be in other games too, I haven't seen them all in one game so we're looking forward to those new vids 😛

I take it my AMD sempron 3000+ 1.80Ghz 512MB RAM dinosaur wont run this then 😥

With those comments Firgof. That puts Star Ruler in a class of its own. I absolutely love the different ways you could win a game without having the biggest military for the fight. Paying off pirates to beat up your opponent is classic, destabilizing a trade economy is another good one and interested in the exploration win condition.

With the procedurally generated galaxies and the use of scripts to build conditions you have limitless playability options available to you.

Is there any roundabout time frame on how long a two player match would take? Either facing a CPU AI or human player?

In the Star Ruler, the use of the camera in zoom seem very important for managing all your resources and assets. With the scale of the game I take it that your units will have native orders they follow unless you change them so you don't have to constantly micro manage all aspects of the game?

On newegg Gunsmif you can put together a MB, CPU and Memory combo for about $300 or less and now you have a quad system with at least 2gb memory. Pop your old stuff out your case and this stuff in.

I got myself like more than a year a go a P4 core duo 3 Ghz with 3gb ram and 512mb video (nvidia) for about $ 200 so this year I bet it's even cheaper.

That's the idea, yes; also, with the ease of modding we hope that people will continuously improve the game and add on to it, creating exciting new content for everyone to enjoy. 🙂

It is difficult to say at this time. I would expect a wide range of times, depending on the skill of the players and how they're approaching attaining victory. If there were two players both at the same skill level both going down, say, the full combat path (burn, loot, and seed across the stars) and they're both pretty good at designing ships, and they're playing just against each other in a 50 System galaxy... then perhaps 40 to 90 minutes, I'd say, depending on which races they're using, how their start location worked out, and how aggressive they were in their initial expansion. This is all based on just combat, excluding diplomacy and so forth, and we're far from release so that number may fluctuate wildly even in the upcoming month of development! 😀

Yes. You can also give them automated orders appropriate to the subsystems they have on their vessels. For instance if they have a subsystem which salvages parts from enemy hulls and stores them in a cargo bay, you would simply tell it to use that subsystem and whenever it sees a disabled ship in the system (and, if it has weapons, if there are also no enemies to fight) it will fly over to it, salvage until its cargo holds are full, and go to the planet it feels can distribute the gotten goods best. It will repeat this order endlessly until there is no more room for the salvage to be stored on any world, until there is nothing left to salvage, until it is told to do something else (and then it will return to its prior duties), until enemy fleets pass through, and etc.

Automated orders can also be cleared off a unit with just a keystroke so you may give that unit a clean slate if you wish.

Not sure. It may be able to on low settings but a lot of whether it will or won't will come down to your specific graphics hardware and etc. I can't really give a concrete yes or no on your system either because I don't have a comparable system on our list.

Thanks Firgof

I like a little bit more hands off approach when commanding large quantities of resources and with that sub system you discussed that should make the player have more fun accomplishing there task instead of micro-managing resources.

Star Ruler can have quite the few ships in play in the game can you designate which ship systems you want your ships to focus on when attacking? Kinda like a pecking order to take out shield generators, then power generators, engines, etc...

Firgof is Star Ruler's game engine home grown by the dev team at BMS? And are you going to have a video soon that will show off in-game combat, music and sound effects?

Thanks! 🙂

Not yet, but yes we'd like that. 😉

The rendering of the game is accomplished through a marriage of a heavily modified version of the Irrlicht engine and OpenGL; the rest of the game engine is homegrown from model assets to gamecode to scripting to textures (we use AngelScript for the scripting section of the game, a C++-like language).

I hope to have a video that shows off just what you asked for very shortly (well, perhaps excluding in-game SFX because all of our SFX are non-final at this time). Perhaps two weeks or less if I'm lucky. I'm currently struggling with Taksi and storyboarding to get a tight teaser of actual gameplay done and once I've wrestled both problems into submission we'll have a nice teaser to show off. 😀

Here's some new screenshots of the revised particle systems we're using in the combat portion of the game that I thought you guys might like to see. They're not finalized yet but they're a large upgrade to our previous particle systems.

[hsimg] [/hsimg]

[hsimg] [/hsimg]

[hsimg] [/hsimg]

They look great Firgof, especially that first pic a lot of things going on there. And in the 3rd all of the yellow is that a nebula or is that the brightness from multiple explosions?

Firgof can you explain what the compass/clock looking graphic is around the ships. Is that just a marker for your ship or is that a functional graphic where you can do things with it like give orders etc..

But nice to see a lot of things going on in the scene. Thanks for the pics and looking forward to the next batch 🙂

Was wondering about that compass myself 🙂 Guess you beat me to it Darkoone. I believe that's some sort of marker for the command ships .... or other important ships in the fleet ?

The pics are great btw ...... we want more 😈 lol

The yellowish tint is being produced from all the nearby overlapping explosions. The graphic around the ships is the selection indicator. Whenever an object is selected it will be 'ringed' as shown in that picture.

The Sergeant marker (the three chevrons) indicates whether a ship is a fleet commander or not.

I have some questions.

1. Will Star Ruler feature an AI delegation system ala the Space Empires games, or for more new examples, Distant Worlds or Armada 2526=

2. If so, how much will you be able to delegate? Everything (to fully automate your empire) or only certain things like colony management etc?

And finally

3. Will it be possible to new empires to form mid-game, for example say I have a huge empire under my control, but all my outer rim systems are suffering from very poor morale and lots of displeasure with my rule, so three of them closest together decide to form a new minor empire, separate from my own? If not, I think you should definitely consider it as a gameplay option as it ensures you don't get the 'mid-game slowdowns' that many 4X games do where you've got a set of "written in stone empires" and you know you'll only ever have to contend with those.

Thanks for any reply!

There will be a customizable AI which manages the ways that your colonies are built, yes. Research will also be somewhat automated should you desire it to be. Trade and Diplomacy are not automated whatsoever with the exclusion of self-automating treaties you hold with other Empires.

Anything more than that I can't guarantee at this point beyond that we are doing our best to optimize the control you have over your Empire and Strategy as much as we are able to before launch. Post-launch we'll probably be doing a lot of work in those areas to further optimize, get reactions from the communities, and et cetera. We intend to keep working on the title and adding in features that we've wanted to have in since the start of our development schedule two years ago until we have nothing left on our long laundry list of 'things we'd like to see, be able to interact with, and do in Star Ruler'.

On the new empires forming: That is a part of the game we'd like to implement but we're not sure we have enough time left on our development schedule to get it in before the release of the game. Optimistically: Yes, we will have systems that run along those lines. Realistically: Those systems may not be in or enabled until post-launch due to the large nature of the project.

Thanks for the replies, am I to assume that all fleet management is fully manual with no option of delegation of command then? I always view as much possibility(optional ofcourse) for automation as possible is a great way to ease newcomers to the genre into the game, since it allows'em to start managing the easier parts and then move onto the harders!

Regardless, I will be keeping my eye on this title in the coming months!

A fleet will constantly have a commander of it. If a commander dies or becomes unable to command the fleet by becoming disabled, another ship will take up the mantle of Fleet Leader until there are no other ships which can become a Fleet Commander (which means that your fleet was either reduced to 1 ship or all ships were destroyed/disabled/captured)

I agree on the automation front. We don't want the game to be totally automated of course. we want players to have a 'hands on' experience with the game, but we certainly want to ease the pains that come with intergalactic system management when the management is very micro in places. 🙂

There is a game play teaser video out!

http://forums.blind-mind.com/index.php?topic=184.0

Now that's what I call a bunch of ships 🙂 Nice 😉

I guess you might have to have a decent system to play this one, there was a lot of units on the screen 🙂