If you've been feeling lost when designing ships in Star Ruler 2, look no further.

This is a basic guide on ship design, which briefly summarizes the general rules of how weapons, armor and other components scale up with size and number of hexes on subsystems.

At the end, we provide general rules of thumb and a comparison between a non-support flagship and a support ship of same size.

Hope you'll find it useful.

SIze basically defines how large and powerful your ship is, since most component stats scale linearly with it. For instance:


Build Cost, Health and Damage Resistance on all components scale up linearly with size. A tenfold increase in size represents a tenfold increase on build cost, health and damage resistance.


Supply Usage (on support ships only) and Damage per Shot/Beam scale up linearly as your ships grow larger. A tenfold increase in ship size will generally represent a tenfold increase in Damage per Shot, for instance.

Range and Weapon Cooldown/Reload Time also scale up with size, but not linearly. A tenfold increase in ship size represents very little increase in both range and reload time.

Consider these examples:

Railgun (Support Ship, Size 2, 1 Hex)
Cost: 1k
Reload: 2s
Damage: 0.10
Range: 330u
Supply: 0.10
Health: 1.80
Damage Resistance: 0.07

Railgun (Support Ship, Size 20, 1 Hex)
Cost: 2k
Reload: 2s
Damage: 0.97
Range: 330u
Supply: 1
Health: 18
Damage Resistance: 0.71

Railgun (Support Ship, Size 2000, 1 Hex)
Cost: 125k
Reload: 2.13s
Damage: 96.7
Range: 363u
Supply: 107
Health: 1800
Damage Resistance: 71.04


Health and Damage Resistance scale up linearly with size. A tenfold increase in ship size represents a tenfold increase in armor health and damage resistance.


Build cost, power generation and power consumption scale up linearly with size. Therefore, increasing size does not change the balance between power generation and consumption, nor the cost of each unit of energy. If you need more power, you'll need to deploy additional reactor hexes.


The amount of supply, ammo and Support Control provided by the respective components scale up linearly with size, and so does their build cost.


Command bridges and Engines do not scale with size at all: a 2 sized ship will move just as fast as a 2000 sized ship, if both use the same layout. Command Bridges also provide the same nominal amount of control over internal components regardless of ship size. Control usage by components do not scale up with size.


Supply Usage by weapons on flagships scale up exponentially with size. Consider these examples:

Flagship (2000 Size, 1 Hex Railgun)
Damage: 15.6
Supply: 7.73

Flagship (20000 Size, 1 Hex Railgun)
Damage: 156
Supply: 97.9

Which is 1266% more costly for a mere tenfold increase in firepower.


Finally, maintenance costs for most flagship components also scale with size, but not linearly: a tenfold increase in ship size will usually mean just a threefold increase in ship maintenance cost for a given component. The exceptions are the Supply and Support Control components, whose maintenance costs do increase linearly with size.

The number of hexes on a subsystem also defines how powerful your component/weapon is, but different rules apply here.

Contrary to what happens with size, just a few components stats scale up linearly with the number of hexes used on them. Consider, for instance:


Health and Damage Resistance do not scale up with the number of hexes, only with size. In other words, adding more hexes to a subsystem may improve it globally, but each hex's values depend solely on ship size.


Only Supply Usage (on Support Ships and Flagships alike) and Damage per Shot scale linearly with the number of hexes. A 10-hex railgun component will have 10x as much Damage per Shot as a 1-hex railgun component.

Total Cost, Maintenance Cost and Range also scale with the number of hexes, but not linearly: even though each additional hex on a subsystem adds up linearly to the weapon turret firepower, the auxiliary hexes are cheaper to build and maintain, but also more fragile. Range increases slightly with number of hexes.

Supply usage scales linearly with number of hexes.


Since each armor hex is independent from the others (they do not form subsystems), their stats are not affected by the number of hexes.


Build Cost, Maintenance Cost, power generation and power consumption scale up linearly with number of hexes. If you need more power, you'll need to deploy additional reactor hexes. If you use more hexes on power hungry components, their power usage scales linearly with the number of hexes.


Build Cost, Maintenance Cost, and supply, ammo and Control (Flagship and Support alike) provided by the respective components scale up linearly with number of hexes.


Build Cost, Maintenance Cost, and the primary engine stats (thrust) scale up linearly with the number of hexes. Acceleration and speed, however, do not, because every component adds different amounts of mass to the ship, and this is the stat used to calculate speed and acceleration.

In this section, I'll be giving a brief analysis of how critical components (basically, weapons and armor) differ between support ships and flagships of equivalent size.

You may ask why I'm limiting my analysis to those two types of components. Well, because they are some of the few components that both types of ships share, and obviously you want to know if it really pays off to create flagships designed for direct combat, instead of fleet control.

To do this comparison, we presume you'll be using the same number of hexes on weapon subsystems for both designs, so put aside the fact that a flagship can hold more hexes than a support ship and, therefore, can compensate for any discrepancies.

Lets consider these two examples, both a flagship and a support ship with 1 hex of each kind of shared weapon modules, and 1 armor plate hex:


So what can we derive from these examples? If both the flagship and the support ship uses the same number of hexes for weapons and share the same size:

1. Railguns on Support ships have both better DPS and alpha damage, but they lack sustained firepower over time. They work more like cannons for assault range. On Flagships, railguns work more as machine guns, doing less damage but firing continuosly and from further away, at skirmish range.

2. Lasers on Support Ships are less damaging than lasers on flagships. They have the same cooldown timer, but flagships fire for longer, from further away and cause more alpha damage.

3. Missiles on support ships do more damage than on flagships. The difference in reload time is negligible on short battles, and for support ships the damage is higher, but range is smaller.

4. Armor on support ships is almost twice as damage resistant and has more than twice the health than on flagships.

5. A weapon subsystem on a support ship will cost less to build and will generally provide more alpha damage per hex.

6. Tthe flagship will generally do less damage, but from further away (range difference varies between 20%-30% in most cases).

7. Support ships will deplete supplies twice as fast than flagships for the same firepower, specially when using equivalent weapons (like lasers and missile launchers).


Answering this question is more tough than it seems. We must first remember that flagships have a base build cost and a base maintenace cost, regardless of hex composition. Build costs scale up linearly with size; maintenance costs do not.

Support ships, on the other side, also sport a base build cost, which increases linearly with size. Also, contrary to what you may believe, their impact on your budget is indeed as permanent (although not as straining, at least at first) as the flagship's, since they do cost maintenance! To keep a given support ship, you require a minimum of 5 Support Control modules on an equivalently sized flagship. Since build and maintenance costs of Support Control Modules scale linearly with both size and number of hexes, which is also true for weapon stats, the proportion between indirect maintenance costs and firepower remains the same, regardless of ship size.

This means that for each 1 unit of support ship size, you incur in 0.08k of maintenance cost, approximately, regardless of the type of component you employ on it, plus the cost corresponding to the fraction of hexes you've used on Support Control over the total hexes available on your design.

With all this in mind, we can state that the size threshold beyond which support ships are clearly more expensive than flagships, in terms of maintenance, is indeed not fixed, but will depend on three variables: the design of the support ship, the design of the battle flagship and the design of the flagship that commands that support ship.

From our experiments, in which we compared the maintenance cost between a flagship and a support ship equipped with just a 30-hex railgun, the threshold lied around 300 in size.

Given that and the game rules we've seen so far, we can state that:

Support Ships are cheaper to build, and initially, they will have less impact on your budget, with a better ratio betwen indirect maintenance costs and firepower.

They will, however, deplete your supplies much more faster than your flagships for the same amount of firepower.

Flagships, on the other side, cost more to build and initially, they also cost more to maintain. But they fire from further away, will deplete your supply storage way slower, and they gradually become cheaper to maintain as their size grows.

Also, considering that weapons maintenance costs scale up non-linearly, unlike Support Control maintenance costs, Support Ships eventually become more expensive to maintain than flagships if they share the same overall design. The threshold is not clear, depending on the design of the ships and whether or not we factor in the build and maintenance costs of the controller flagship, which would increase the costs of the support ship.

1. Between two ships of equivalent design, it can be said that, for each 100% increase in size, you roughly require as many smaller ships as the square of the ratio between the larger ship size and the smaller ones. For instance, to defeat a 64-sized ship, you require four 32-sized ships. This is due to the Lanchester's Laws [en.wikipedia.org], although those laws do not fully apply to such an engagement. Differences in weapon range, alpha damage, rate of fire, lucky shots, concentrated fire on a single critical component, attack vectors and other variables out of player control may change the outcome of a battle.

2. To increase a weapon firepower by the same amount, you may either increase a ship size or add another hex to its subsystem.

3. Range and Cooldown vary a little with each hex increase, or with size increase. On multi-hex systems in larger ships (+500 in size), the variation is more noticeable. But it still requires huge increases in number of hexes or in size to be numerically significant.

4. Control, Supply Storage / Use ratio (with exceptions), Power Generation / Consumption ratio, and Speed do not change with size. If you need more power, more speed, more supplies or more control, you have to add more hexes to the respective subsystem.

5. Support Ships are cheaper to build, and initially, they cost less to maintain (in indirect incurred costs), but they use much more supplies per shot than a flagship of equivalent size and design. Flagships, on the other side, cost more to build and initially, they also cost more to maintain. But they fire from further away, will deplete your supply storage way slower (with diminishing returns, however), and their weapon systems gradually become cheaper to maintain as their size grows, compared to support ships.

6. And finally, if you've liked this guide, please rate it! If you've hated it, please tell me what you think I should change. I truly hope this guide will be useful to you.