I have played this game for a grand total of 8 hours (at the time of writing this) and I have found the secret to winning. It lies within 8 highly secret steps that I have uncovered. These steps are:

1: Scout everything
2: Aggressively colonize
3: Find the enemy
4: Make nice-nice with the AI
5: Aggressively colonize more
6: Make warships
7: Make defenses
8: Win the game

Making a small scout is easy. Go to the pre-built scout and make it as small as you can, then remove the thruster engines and replace them with ramjet engines. Proceed to add one railgun, two solar panels and as many Ram scoops as you can.

- The small size of the scout allows you to produce dozens at low cost in no time.
- The ramjet allows the small scout to fly fast while not wasting fuel.
- The railgun, if the AI has attack automation, can destroy other scouts or at the very least deter scouts.
- The solar panels provide extra power
- As do the ram scoops

Scout until you either A) you need to build more scouts as there are still some undiscovered systems or B) have scouted everything you need to see.

See all those empty systems around you? Go out there and colonize them. All of them. The natives aren't important anymore, you're a space-faring nation who has scouted half the galaxy! Need more resources? Wait a few minutes until your planets are producing resources and then colonize more

Since you have so many scouts this shouldn't be a problem. Find the other players and estimate their abilities. If the enemy is an AI, they will stick to one or two systems for a while. If the enemy is a player, they will most likely have read this guide and will already be enroute to being a galactic superpower.

This only applies if you have AI in your game, in which you appease them by any means necessary so that they like you. Then you can exploit use the AI in your future conquests.

Do what you were doing earlier, but aggressiver . This way you have more systems and your enemy doesn't.

Although you should be making warships all throughout the game to colonize Remnant sectors and fend off pirate invasions, this is the point where you go full Britannia and start making battleships, dreadnoughts and other super-capital type warships, with a handful of smaller and support ships to suplement your main fleets.

As defenses are typically more costly than warships, you should do this after you have your dread fleets. When you begin attacking the enemy will exploit the gaps in your likely-obsolete defenses. If you build modern, strong defenses around the planets in your Empire, the enemy will less likely be able to strongarm your planets to their cause.

Using your highly advanced fleets and impenetrable defenses you should be able to just absolutely destroy any opponents in your path, AI or player (unless if those players have read this guide, in which case you're just going to have to build bigger, better ships and bigger, better defenses.)

When you conquer everything and have the last empire standing, you win!

congrats, u r now gud at star ruler

pls gift games and steam money for saving ur star rulre lyfe.

(I actually have just always wanted to make one of those sarcasm guides. Don't actually follow the advice in this guide as there are plenty of ways to play and win the game)