Star Ruler 2: Wake of the Heralds releases tomorrow, Friday April 22nd! You can read our final feature higlight about the second new race, "The First", below.
The First
Although their once great empire is gone, reduced to nothing but remnants by the ravages of time, the minds of those who chose to live forever still carry on. The planet Atrozal, hollowed out and brimming in circuitry; where a trillion souls discarded their bodies to be part of the final dream of the ancients.
The First care little for the physical world, yet the arrival of the Heralds spells a threat even their paradise does not escape. Send out massive orbital replicators to find raw materials and convert entire planets into automated refinery worlds and computation hubs. The entire weight of this galaxy must be unified if we hope to stand a chance of surviving.
Silicon Continent
Because the First are a fully virtual race, they do not have any population or civilian infrastructure or any of that messy stuff. Instead, their planets are covered from top to bottom in industry and circuitry, each part performing the valuable task it was programmed to do.
The First have an entirely different set of buildings to place, and placing buildings is the only way they can make use of resource pressures.
Having little use for food, luxuries or infrastructure, all planets are immediately at the level their resource requires, no lower and no higher.
Replicators
Rather than colony ships, the First take control of planets by using their Orbital Replicators. These giant orbitals filled with specialized manufacturing hardware and fitted with specialized thrusters can rapidly replicate and assemble entire factories for placement on the planet they are orbiting.
In order to control a planet, an Orbital Replicator must be moved to it. Only planets that have a replicator orbiting it can build any buildings.
Base Materials
One of the functions of the Orbital Replicator is placing enormous Transmuters on various planets. When the First deem a resource useless, such as food, they instead decide to convert the resource and the matter on the planet itself into Base Materials for further use in replication.
When a resource has been converted to base materials it can then be exported to a different planet. Various buildings require the continuous consumption of imported base materials to operate, so you will need to convert many different planets to fuel your industry.
Omake: AI Settings
The AI has received a number of improvements to how it plays the game, and you can now control parts of its behavior during game setup. You can also determine exactly in what way and how much an AI cheats, if you feel like teaming up for a comp stomp or just want a bigger challenge.
Note that the AI improvements and settings will be available to all players through an update to the base game, and will not require the expansion to be purchased.
Multiplayer
In order to allow people to play multiplayer with as many others as possible, the expansion content automatically gets unlocked in multiplayer depending only on if the host player has the expansion installed.
So even if you don't own the expansion, hop into a multiplayer game hosted by someone who does and you will be free to try out any of the new stuff!