The site says that purchase is not available until August 21st

When is the demo coming out?

Q: Is this like empire total war? zoom for battles while campaign map stops?

Nope.  The whole game takes place in a singular space.  You can certainly zoom in on battles and so forth but the gameplay isn't divided into sections; it's whole-cloth.

Q:what I am not seeing in the screenshots is a sense of depth perception. I am seeing the stars at the rear through the objects at the front.

That is a recognized problem: we'll be trying our best to resolve that and have a few ideas how we might do that but it's likely that those solutions will either have to be put in a day-0 patch or later on due to time constraints with the rest of the interface, multiplayer functionality, and so forth on the line.

Q:This game is out in August right?

August 21st, yes.

Q:Any chance of this coming to Impulse or Steam?

Steam has still yet to reply to our e-mail and so we are likely to stop pursuing a release with Steam until post-release.

As for Impulse, I cannot say.  We would love to be on Impulse.

Q:I hope the ship desgin can also be very simple or automated, because I don't really like micromanaging that aspect of the game.

Modifying existing ship designs is fairly fast and designs will update automatically with your technological research but ships are not automatically designed a la Distant Worlds.  Though the AI can see all the subsystems in the game we have been unable to teach it how to genetically build ships from those parts yet.  That is likely to be pursued in later patches for the game as well as a rapid ship design constructor.

Q:Thanks for working on this project and I'm also very eager to support it. More video's would be welcome to see how the game looks like. THis also worked very well with Distant Worlds.

Thanks!  I'd like to make some videos for you guys but I'm not the best at producing videos so they'll probably be a little cheesy/indie if I just one-off them from gameplay with commentary.  I'm not quite sure how much time I have left to work on video content for the game but I'm trying to fight through all the interface design to get to it.  With luck, I'll have some more video footage of the game for you guys soon.

Q:Back in April didn't he say "sometime in June/July?"

Yes, but we deemed that the game was far too unfinished for the game to launch back then so we moved the release date to August 21st, which is as far back as we could possibly push release without running completely out of funds and having to stop working on the game.

Q:When is the demo coming out?

We're not sure.  With all of the above in mind, we're trying to find the time to do one but it may be as late as post-launch before we can actually produce a demo of the game.  Hopefully we'll get to it before then, if not: sorry.

That somehow reads like you didnt contacted Stardock yet!?

And thanks for those answers, looks very interesting.

I'm afraid that's confidential at this time and I can't directly answer.

Also: Not a problem, I enjoy answering all your questions.

Nice to have you here.

I'll be watching for the demo for sure, this looks interesting.

Thanks Firgof! I think I'll pick it up if you guys get it on impulse (or steam). Here's to hoping you're already working something out with Stardock since you can't answer

What does this mean exactly?  Is this game based around pause and issue orders like Total War battle or Baldur's Gate or are there restrictions on when you can pause the game and what you can do when it's paused?  Maybe you are referring to not allowing pausing in multiplayer or something?  How you handle this would be my main criteria on whether I buy the game or not (I like pause anytime and full access when paused if that wasn't clear).

You can pause any time you wish and can issue whatever orders you'd like and et cetera while the game is paused.

Only the server can pause the game or change the timescale in multiplayer.  It's currently unstable to change the time-rate in multiplayer as it impacts the number of packets that are sent per second but we might be able to make it stable enough in the future that the server op can change the time whenever they feel like.

Sync will probably be better in that sort of situation for LAN games.  I'd imagine you'd encounter less problems with things like numbers of units on the server and what timerate the game is going at as the packets can transfer down to the connected clients at such relatively low latency.  That's only a guess however; we haven't tested the game in LAN for a little while so I have yet to prove or disprove that.

Space #X/RTS sucker here.  Already pre-ordered.  Looking forward to try it out.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. Much appreciated! I believe that the some gameplay video's (even if they are somewhat indie/cheesy, which was also the case with DW) could temporarily give an idea to interested gamers what the game looks like, before the demo is eventually released. Good luck with the last ends.

Wow, that was a lot of detail.  Thanks.  I'm mainly interested in single player so the multiplayer issues aren't a huge concern.  If I did play multiplayer though than the timescale could potentially be a big deal.  It's hard to say until I actually play and see how detailed things are and how fast the default speed is.

This is something I will be keeping my eye on and is a likely buy for me.  Just please don't do what Distant Worlds did and only offer it through Matrix.  I will only buy it if it's on Impulse, Steam or in a box.

I really appreciate the time you spend here answering questions firgof and i may very well give your game a go. There are just two things that bother me : the video of your gameplay is just terrible, the screenshots on you site don't give any piece of intel about the way it actually plays.

In fact, the whole gameplay thing actually looks like a mess. Which is strange because i went to your forum and the comments of the dev team are those of people who know the 4X space game type.The features looks good, it is the presentation of the game that don't make me at ease (i mean, guys talented enough to make a video game can surely make some scrrenshots that would at least give a hint about the way it is played)

The second thing is scale. I played sword of the stars with 200 stars and 8 opponents. the end game was terrible as i had to manage my 50+ stars empire. And you are saying that i will have to manage galaxies ! In the end game, it will be more "Star bureaucracy" than "Star ruler" i am affraid !

The boys over at Blind Mind Studios were kind enough to give me an interview with them back in July.  A lot the material has already been addressed in this thread, but there are still some interesting tidbits in our article:

An Interview with Blind Mind Studios

There are also some new screenshots there (well, they were new back in July ).

That was an interesting interview. I'm looking forward to this game.

Firgof, Star Ruler looks like it will take the best parts of Sword of the Stars and Sins of a Solar Empire and combine them into one awesome game.  I'm not going to commit to a purchase just yet, although if I hear some good things about this game after release you can anticipate a purchase from me.

Just found out about this today from Penny Arcade. I made a thread over on Gamefaqs, but here's some posts from Firgof from PA in case this news isn't too old for everyone around here:

Introduction and technology discussion

What can be created

Game Length

Research

This is sounding great and I can't wait to be able to see all of this in action. Between DQ9, Starcraft 2, Elemental, and now this, I'm going to be set for quite a while.

Just found out about this game. It looks to be very deep, and the featureset is amazing. I was three bullet-points down when I starting thinking how awesome something like this would be if most of the micromanagement stuff could be delegated to AI, and then I discovered that the UI and just about everything else would be moddable. I've never modded anything before, but between this and Elemental I may just have to try it.

I'm not sold on the graphics yet, but the ships have that chunky utilitarian look I love so much, and the music... You have to listen to the music. Half of it sounds like a smoother, slightly less ambient version of the EVE soundtrack, and the other half sounds like what you would get if Explosions in the Sky got its hands on a synthesizer. I could easily see it being the soundtrack to some epic new space opera show. The title track has that "battle for the fate of universe" feel, with the middle being the music of the Great Human Empire and End of it All being the theme of our destruction. Of course, hearing the rock version of Voyage immediately afterwards reminded me that if our future star-spanning civilization ever does fall, our species will be sure to pass from this universe with central digits firmly extended.

I definitely want to hear more of this. I want another album! THE UNIVERSE DEMANDS MORE SPACE ROCK!

BRAD GET THESE PEOPLE ON IMPULSE NOW

THEN HIRE THEIR MUSIC GUY FOR GALCIV 3

I strongly agree.  Brad, go for it!  This would really suit Impulse, and it would be a fantastic goodwill gesture to get them a good deal and on board (especially since Steam has seemed to give the cold shoulder).

I say, Go for it!

Best regards,
Steven. 

I encourage everyone to go read the Penny Arcade thread. It's 9 pages full of Firgof answering questions and people saying, "You can do what with WHAT?"

You know, lately I've been wondering what the sci-fi equivalent of Dwarf Fortress would be like, and I think these guys may be about to show us.

Thanks, Jalicos.  Check your PMs; Artem wanted to say thanks.

The soundtrack is released! Please consider dropping a few dollars into Artem's "tip jar". He'd be greatly appreciative.

All the money he gets from his bandcamp goes directly to him.

http://artembank.bandcamp.com/album/star-ruler

Heh I read the thread at penny arcade and I will be picking up my jaw now.

This game looks very promising. I'm excited.

Looks interesting, but I have a few questions

1) is it possible to have multiple civilizations occupying the same planet

2) if not, would it be possible to mod that functionality in?