Mercantilism (Avg) - If you took the mercantilism trait or researched it in the socio-logistics tech tree then the supplies moved by your freighters between player controlled planets will net you income.The Trade category is split into two subcategories, Mercantilism (Avg) and Trade Treaties Each ship type has a different upkeep cost. Ship Maintenance - This is the total cost to upkeep all ships in player control.Building Maintenance - This is the total cost to upkeep all buildings on all player owned planets.The Costs category is split into two subcategories, Building Maintenance and Ship Maintenance. Bonus - Only bonus in game at this time (1.09A) is the Ecstacy Crystal.Planetary Taxes- Is directly effected by your tax rate slider.The income category is split into two subcategories, Planetary Taxes and Bonus. Each category has a total and the net gain will be displayed in the bottom right of the tax screen. Once opened, the tax rate slider will be visible along with three categories. An interface showing your economic overview is viewable by clicking the coin symbol in the top left of the screen. Do get the DLC if you can.Increasing the tax rate boosts credit income by turning a larger percentage of your production and research into credits, hence lowering production and research output. There are a lot of other subsystems for the game, but these are the most iconic things. And if you research enough you can strap giant boosters on a planet and build a lot of superweapons and use it as a battlestation You can build planet buster ships, star forges that suck up the energy from a star to build ships, ringworlds, star-destroyer ships, galaxy-destroying ships, you can use tractor beams on asteroids, ships, planets. This leads to interesting stuff happening, specially if you manage to be the galactic senate leader, which gives you access to other diplomatic options (but beware too much diplomatic hostility may trigger a war). This will trigger a a voting in which you can use support cards to turn the odds in your favor, you can even offer stuff to other factions to vote in your favor. I sent it to battle and the enemy just used their hyperdrive to move his fleet behind my ship and disable my rear engines, at that point the destroyer was just a sitting duck and it was just a matter of time until the enemy fire reached the antimatter reactor (which means the ship explodes).ĭiplomacy is basically a card game, you can do a lot of things with diplomacy, for example annex an enemy planet. For example on one of my first games I made a huge destroyer but ended having really low turn rate and no rear defenses. The ship designer is simply the best, you will build your ships piece by piece (using hex-shaped pieces ) and that's reflected in combat. Also there are several FTL methods like fling beacons, jump-drives, wormholes and regular hyperdrive. Other thing I like is that each race playes VERY differently, humans are the less weird, but you also have robots that have to build population, groot-like plant people that have to build ships with organic matter, space-born races that can only live in habitats orbiting planets. In Star Ruler is similar, if you have a planet that imports resources that give you production, then in that planet civilians will build a lot of factories in there, if you import luxury resources there will be a lot of commercial districts, same with science and others. Let's say another town imports those cars and sells them locally, that town will probably have a lot of car dealerships, also auto parts, mechanics and such. Pressure is a weird beast, it's better to explain with an analogy, let's say you have a town with a lot of factories that make cars, so it's probably that town would have a lot of business dealing with auto parts but also with factory machinery. Pressure is important because in Star Ruler 2 you shouldn't be building facilities yourself (since you can only build large-scale facilities and are really expensive to keep up) but your people will build stuff according to the resource pressure.

However it's not just as simple, each resource you import gives the receiving planet 'pressure' of that specific resource.

Basically in order to improve a planet you have to colonize other planets that have other resources and import resources from them, so you end up with a pyramid-like network of planets that need each other, this means that resource-producing planets might be just as important as ship-building planets. The planet-leveling up is perhaps my least favourite but it makes a lot of sense when you understand it. Star Ruler 2 has basically ditched most of the systems that are common to 4x games. On the other hand I really loved Star Ruler 2, but they are really different beasts.

Stardrive 2 planet management