Star ruler as an disappointment is fair, but have you tried the totally different and now open sourced StarRuler2?
It’s a much better game, much tighter with a definite progress path for colonies shipping things to each other (later used by slipstream which is more pure management and might not fit your list)
It’s free, it’s worth a try I promise it’s very different to SR
This is a bit unfair, for all its gigantic problems the creation engine is much better at supporting modding than unity or unreal.
Perhaps a more deterministic scripting engine would be better but it’d be easy to lose the one thing that makes their games good. I still can’t believe they thought starfield would work with the missing tools MIA four months out
Even if you you don’t want to plough 1000 hours into it I still think you’d get a lot of enjoyment out of exploring the game for a normal 20 hours or so, it’d definitely hold attention longer than that even for the most impatient player. It just has so much character and pull to move up the tech tree and make cool layouts.
Yes and it flows through to the skill system too. 8 points for carrying more crap across yourself and the ship, and 4 more for increasing companion inv. Even more if you include pockets upgrades on suits.
Are these good skills? Not for the player to choose but to be available in the game. What’s the balance here? What’s the decision, carry more crap at the expense of doing more damage? Is that good choice to give the player? How do you balance encounter difficulty around that? You can’t the player has to choose encounters based on their gimped pack rat skills.
Every part of the game needs a single big mod overhaul to pick a coherent direction.