I got Spore on Friday during my dinner break at work so I was pretty anxious to bugger off home and give it a whirl. When I got home and had it installed, I was greeted by the warning message that said something along the lines of “You’ve got an invalid activation code” but allowed me to play offline. I checked the Spore forums and found that all these other people have been effected, many saying it was only the EU but we got it before America anyway (that’s a first). Turned out their servers got pummeled and we had to wait till they came back up before we could get creations made by others, which I wanted to wait for anyway so I continued making Flying Fenix. That didn’t bother me cause I had stuff to do, but later on during the game pissed me off more. Click more to read on.
I enjoyed the Water phase and the Creature phase, munching on things etc. When it got to the tribal stage (RTS), it just went downhill. Barely any strategy needed. Simply kill some wild animals for some food, make an instrument hut, equip people with them, offer gift to rival tribe, play music for them and press button when they show the speech bubble of the instrument. Repeat x 4. By the way this is where I saved it cause I was going out, not knowing what would happen later.
Civilization stage. I’m not sure if I got the choice but some how I ended up being a Religion based city, not knowing what exactly I could do, I was finding my feet by exploring a little, capturing the spice mines to gain a little bit of money then I get raped by the fucking orange team. They had like a zero tolerance policy for a city trying to make do with 2 cities so they send an entire arsenal of military tanks against my pussified religion hovercrafts. After hours of playing, I realised that depending on how you lay out your city, it’ll effect how much cash they generate. Also that the instant you capture a city with a choice of what to change it to, CHOOSE MILITARY AND BUILD SOME BIG ASS TANKS!!!
After I raped the orange team back for what they did to me, capturing 6 cities under a Religion ‘class’ will allow you to spend around 36,000 spore points to instantly take over the world with a big holographic religious speaker. Win. Finally I was on to the space phase where I went through the tutorials quickly and had a good time till it crashed. I ended the task and entered back in only to find Spore doesn’t actually auto save… ever. What kind of games now don’t auto save? I mean there’s games that auto save every time you fire a fucking bullet to make sure you don’t lose on anything. That’s when I yelled at my screen and cursed any stupid twat making a game to leave autosave out, I mean come on, save when you pass a phase atleast for christ sake. So when I through again, I gave up on the custom create shit and downloaded a bunch of other peoples ships and tanks. Raped by orange team again during the Civilization phase by the way.
I eventually ended up back where I started in space and I was already accustomed to the starting tutorials so I whizzed through them and ended up exploring a little on different planets only and found some life on a planet so I decided to drop down to look. I noticed a special ability in my green category saying Fanatical Frenzy, take over a planet religiously. I thought to myself, oh wow, this would be nice to make some waypoints for myself and launched it straight for the planet. The holographic religion thing happened again and the entire planet was mine, yay. When I left the solar system and into the galaxy, I noticed these big red areas around quite a few planets, they started to chase and shoot at me, pissing me off by attacking my home planet. I was wondering what the hell did I do to them already? I tried to pay them off to be good again but obviously that was a waste of all my money and they continued to bombard me.
I think it takes like 30 mins or an hour to recharge the Fanatical Frenzy but eventually I got it again, so I went to a pissed off place and launched the Frenzy. Everything was all good again, till I went back to the galaxy where almost a half of the fucking galaxy had a red circle… What the fuck Maxis?! Why the hell would you give us the ability to calm things down on a planet make everyone else hate you?
So currently I have 3 planets being attacked around the clock by asshole AI’s, just like the civilization stage but with a bigger scope of scale. I’m pissed off with Spore.
so then, in a word, is spore woot, or meh?
It’s funny you should say that, even though I’ve been slagging it off, I want to play some more. In the hopes that the galaxy will one day stop hating my guts and let me play peacefully.
Other than that, it’s fucking infuriating.
Hmm I have to dig deep into the game, I’ve only just started.
I found Space mode to be more fun after cheats……
It’s weird, I thought the same thing, about constantly being attacked, or some random eco disaster, so to get to the centre of the universe you have to use a black hole, because by the time you get there, there is something wrong with your planets. kinda defeats the object of being able to roam around :/ Well, i’m sure it’ll be modded, or a patch will come out that will fix that annoyance.
You know, the reason they hate you is most probably because races appear in empires in the space stage. As in, it’s most likely that the planet you took over with the Frenzy power belonged to an empire who unsurprisingly were pissed off at you forcefully capturing their planet. And unlucky for you, their empire spanned pretty close to yours.
Well, I dunno - I’ve been fine, managed to make one enemy at first, because they kept on asking for more money, so I said screw it - and recently found an ally right next door who helped me own them. I’ve thought that nearly everything in Spore is really intuitive.
Spore is kind of both, towards the end it gets really frustrating…
Especially with the suckage ending after like 15 hours of Space gameplay, which is really slow and boring occasionally
So far, from what I have seen, Many people struggled through tribe and civilization, I personally found them to be the shortest and easiest (Carnivore).
Pretty much, the only hard part was on the tribal phase, the las tribe knos how to fight back.
In space, you angered a culture, did the planets you religously took over have anything to do with Spode?
Pretty much because I blew up a spode planet when I had got pretty much everything unlocked, and about fifty different spode related groups declared war on me, but before that everyone had been peaceful.
Should get into a habbit of saving normally because a crash in any game can corrupt the save file.
Well your religion, so try to ally people that are also religion, if you find races that are military they are most likely going to be hostile and demand tribute, take your religion buddies and wipe them out before they wipe you out.
tho it could of just been the grox that is attacking you, they are actually part of the story of the space stage and theres nothing you can do, paying them off doesnt work you can only kill them.
really you cant have fun exploring the galaxy until you have no enemies and have alot of allies, also the randomly generated attacks from pirates can be ignored if you dont mind losing some spice.
space was easy, ally with all that you can, make trade agreements and buy there planets. destroy and take small empires. whenever you find a new empire, be nice and do 1-2 missions and you can ally with them. make plenty of turrets at your cities and they will take care of themselves for the most part. as for making money, find planets that dont have the same spice you want to sell and try to sell to the one that it is most valuable. i was finding places early on that would buy stack of 99 red spice for 14,000 each, that’s well over a million for one full stack. your city layout is very important if you want to generate a lot of spice. i usually did 3xfactories 1xentertainment and the rest houses and would get 120 spice per hour from one city and happiness at +1, that’s 360 spice per hour with a happy planet, your home planet can not generate very much, don’t bother with it. just go there for the free recharge. place spice reserves on your big money making planets and every time you go there you make over a millions sporebucks in spice
oh yeah, you are already an enemy to half the galaxy by default, the grox prevent you from getting to the center and getting the special item. once you get high enough you can just fly through them and recharge with items so you can keep going. just ignore anything else. if one of your planets gets taken they’re not hard to get back
Sounds to me like you just suck at spore. How could it take you “hours of playing” to realize that where you place buildings has an effect? I noticed it right away… yeah, space stage can get annoying, fortunately some guy on Gamefaqs reduced the random attack frequency to one every half an hour (if you’re at war with someone) and the pirate attacks to one every hour…
It is stupid that maxis doesn’t warn you of certain things. The whole point of fanatical frenzy is that you can take over a whole planet no questions asked and you don’t allow the planet a chance to fight back. In the game there is like a code of conduct and using that weapon breaks it which doesn’t mean if you use it you are a cheater. Once you’ve used it every planet within 10.0pc will be aware of it and it goes negatively with their relationship bar. The only time you should use it is if your so powerful you don’t care and anyone who apposes you will die or if you allies are not within that area and only your enemies will get affect (which of course you don’t care)
You still have a chance to change your consequence ability(BTW fanatical frenzy is a consequence ability) by befriending another alien race that has a different philosophy to you. If a military race, that after becoming friends with for a long time, offer you a chance to change. I think it costs money to change and quite a lot but your ability will change. So for military you will be able to call hostile pirates to a planet to plunder it.
Spore isn’t such a bad game once you’ve gotten into it. A bit childish but really fun
I too was bitten by the “No Autosave” bug. Lost only till the tribe stage though. And I didn’t play for a few days after that.