It's Time for Another Spore Thread. Again.

[Stark]

Ultimate force for evil?

[Ohma]

Yeah, but even if they stacked, there would still be the 'best creature' for a given amount of resources, and importing 50 copies of it from the world was always going to make the game increasingly lame and make it much harder to tool around with 'wierd' creatures that aren't as good as the 'perfect' ones. There needed to be a vetting stage involved, or filters on downloads, or some process put in place.

Yeah, or something like maybe each part after the first costs less but also gives you less of a bonus per part? (probably a bigger decrease for benifits from more advanced parts with a simulataniously smaller discount for each additional advanced part? that might at least even the playing feild)
Maybe also prevent creatures with stats (in any area) that are some amount higher or lower than your creature from spawning? So then I wouldn't get stuck with a bunch of ass-y carnivores with like 5 sprint and bite while I've only got like 3 in dance and 2 in strike?

[DPDarkPrimus]

Learned a few neat tricks making Enki, but I'm not entirely happy with him. I'm probably going to practice a little and make a better version to share.

[Pu-239]

Hm, gadget bomb seems to permanently damage a city so you can't lay buildings down when captured- is there a way to fix this?- is there a way to fix it?

[DPDarkPrimus]

If you do too much damage to a city you destroy it. You have to watch the surrender bar so you don't go too far over - if you have powerful weapons switch to the laser at the end for more precision damage control.

[Covenant]

Well, Stark, if you ever do get Spore, there is a way to remove evil from your planets. When you hit escape you get a menu, and on it are the Spyglass and Ban functions. Spyglass lets you examine a creature by pausing the game and letting you click on it to see the stats it has and such before even coming in contact with it--it's like examining the creature's card. The Ban function works the same way, so if you see something in the distance that looks like nothing but a pile of minmax wank bullshit, like four legs of different feet, two types of different hands, buzzsaws and acid spitters, just ban that shit and move on.

And for the spaceships, go to an ally and phone them, then ask for an alliance vessel to join your fleet. It just occured to me, I never asked my own nation to send me an allied vessel... it would be nice if you could. I'd like to have a fleet of ISDs flying with me instead of the nonsense my allies have.


-edit
Just checked, it won't seem to let me get another one of my own nation's fleet to come with me. That's bullshit! Argh. And seriously, I'm so sick of pirates and rogue empires attacking me nonstop. I shouldn't have to completely destroy their species before they'll sue for peace.

[Ford Prefect]

My biggest annoyance so far is how ridiculously hard it is to get to the galactic core. I'm not so concerned about the Grox, but just how it eventually becomes impossible to move any closer. Come on.

[PeZook]

My biggest annoyance so far is how ridiculously hard it is to get to the galactic core. I'm not so concerned about the Grox, but just how it eventually becomes impossible to move any closer. Come on.

They did that for the same reason they had to spam outrageous prices on the most fun tools for the UFO: without the lame artificial limit, it would become a cakewalk to reach the core for the sucky rewards it gives. And now it's hard! Yeah! Game balance FTW!

I mean, it's not like you can't get ridiculous amounts of cash anyway, right? I can easily make dozens of millions of sporebucks without any problem at all, but it requires me to fly all around the place and waste time instead of just dicking around in the creature editor building weird ecosystems.

Same goes for pirate "attacks". I can waste all three ships in like 10 seconds, but I have to break away from my dickish experiments to do that, or I lose spice. Nowadays, I just ignore pirates and only react to the guys who try to destroy my cities.

However, it seems that defences you leave behind do work. Your guys complain you didn't come to help them, though. Sissies.

[Broomstick]

OK, two things I'm having issues with:

1) I can't seem to avoid war. I'm trying to colonize planets and set up trade routes and if it's not the Ranboon trying to kick my ass it's the Liloo razing my cities. This pisses me off. Especially as the Liloo ate two of my colonies.

2) I have issues with the "radar" - I have a terrible time trying to locate shit with it. Since 2/3 of the quests involve looking for this, that, or the other with it that's sort of a problem.

Anyone got help for the above?

[phongn]

For radar, I've found the easiest thing to do is tilt the view so it's directly overhead, and then the "pulse beams" it sends out will point you in the right direction. There's also the Doppler shift as you get close.

[Broomstick]

OOooo! I'll try the overhead view, that's the sort of thing I was looking for!

I did pick up on the doppler shift, but trying to localize on just that was giving me trouble.

[Ohma]

Just got to the civ stage and I thought I'd show off my cute little armored car.

[Covenant]

The Space stage is an exercise in frustration. And I have to say that the save-states are probably the worst "good idea" ever. The idea of a planet as a save... cool! Fun! But what if you want to revert to an earlier save? Yer fucked! One save per planet! No experimentation here, bucko. If you decide to expand early or do something wierd and get a huge, well-armed aggressor nation all around you, you're fucked and that's it. There needs to be a chapter snapshot save function so I can revert to the phase of my evolution at the beginning of the chapter. Does anyone know if this is at all possible? I really want to roll back some events I did, as they led to me being in a really bad position.

[Zablorg]

So the verdict is that while it delivers what it really guarantees, which is the creature creator, it falls abysmally short of the deep civilization shit that everyone was wanking about?

[Stark]

From what people are saying, I'm reminded by the reaction to the Sims games. Many people at the time were disappointed with the games and gave up on their repetitive play, but 'regular people' liked just fucking around with people and sandboxing. While hardcore gamers sold on hype might tire of Spore quickly, it may well get long legs from the same audience of 'toy' players that are happy just messing about with the stuff that's there.

[Ohma]

Okay, here's something odd, parts of the same type do stack in the civ stage with vehicles (in fact they seem to do exactly what I said would probably work best for the creature stage).

I'll agree with everyone else about civ seeming a bit lacking, it seems to me like there needs to be like, one more gameplay element to keep track of (probably your population like Broom said) and some of the currently extant gameplay elements need some tweaking (the diplomacy seems a bit basic, though I may just be missing out on most of my options what with nearly everyone except my ally and I getting conquered in the span of time it took me to realize I can talk to everyone on the planet).

I'd also say tribe could use like, one or two more options for each building type.

[Covenant]

I shrunk this because I'm sick of having my long bits of input take all the room. I wish we had a 'hide until you press this button' way for me to box it up somewhere instead.

First off, we need two types of evolution--physical and mental--in all phases. The physical we know--but cells can evolve instincts, animals can evolve behaviors, and civilizations can evolve culture. This allows us to make things like the size of your pack/tribe, what tools you can use, the level of aggression displayed by your creatures, etc, all controlled via the evolution at varying levels of progression. Better control, and it allows us to have smoother transitions since the jump is no longer an arbitrary 'end of level' goal, it's achieving some measure of mental and physical evolution to allow progression.

The progression is bullshit atm, that's the issue. Civ doesn't need more variables to track, it just needs to fucking go away. What's it's purpose? It's a waste of time before space, and space sucks balls and is hard and unintuitive.

Merge the tribal phase with the creature phase, such as letting me control nesting location, needing to attract mates (not just summon them) the way I impress team-members. Give creatures a need to stockpile food, creating food stocks is intelligent and it's a useful way to track how big of a group you can form, and it also allows an easy explination for why your group needs to out-compete everyone else around them. Let this transition directly into creating small nesting clusters, and with the increase in brainpower, villages. Just like how my creature can throw sticks or rocks, let me evolve tools and clothing the same way I evolve claws and feathers. Once you move from out-competing with superior jaws to out-competing with superior weapons, or hunting practices, or culture, you achieve tribal unity with other groups of your species and form your first actual culture through idea exchange.

Now you move into civ phase, with your tribe creating a low-tech city and tasking you with doing the Space Phase's colonization bullshit. You go look for proper locations (near water and food) and go land down villages, and basically learn the ropes of what will be space. You encounter your first other culture, and learn about how different cultures have different priorities, how to handle diplomacy, war, trade, etc. This is where your philosophy is formed, since I liked the original version Spore concept of religion as something that is created based on your background at that point, not a seperate 'method' of conquest, but I'd rather make it an ethos or cultural philosophy, and let religion be one of those possibilities. This defines your special thing in the next phase as normal, but it's a little less hidden this way, and it lets you try to steer your civ in the direction of the cultural philosophy you want rather than doing the silly current thing and trying to BUY it from someone else. What the fuck.

Okay, since space phase is now civ phase, civ phase basically runs as you advance until you hit modern, your trained war beasts become tanks, your soldiers become infantry, and you get the option to start building rockets. Rockets can, like the other things, be used for a 'physical' use (weaponry) or a 'mental' use (intellectual progression), and one leads to an ICBM Launch Button and the other to the Space Phase. You can advance to Space before unification because, let's be serious, you can fly a spaceship to the moon before China wants to help. However, I'd like for the 'Science!' version of unification to be flying your spaceship to your planet's neighboring planetoid and discovering life. You bring this back home and it acts as mind-expanding revelation for your planet and everyone unifies for the mission of your first extrasolar flight to test drake's equation.

Your conduct to this point defines your philosophy, choosing if or if not to use the ICBM strike is not a matter of ethos, since all it does is bomb the entire world and reduce the planet to a T1 temporarily, and you back to the stone age. I actually saw the AI do this to itself in a game I'm currently playing, it was fairly hilarious. Big war between several civs. I come back a bit later and the icon went from civ to tribal. Ouch.

Theoretically there might be an option for making a Vault, ala strangelove... but honestly I just wanted to have a few divergent paths like that. The real 'military' way to use your rockets is launch a spaceship, and then nuke people from the ultimate high ground--and the real way to win economically would be to, like, mine some asteroids or who the fuck knows. Anyway, point is, Spore has all the stuff you need for a really good game, but it's just arranged all stupid.

[Stark]

I've played the game; I pretty much agree with everything Covenant has said. The massive movement to micro in the later stages and the crushing repetitiveness of the space stage are really terrible.

What interests me is that Sims was a reasonably 'hands off' game; you tweaked things, you changed the environment, and things played out. Spore is way in the other direction; one you get to tribe mode it's a series of simplistic, micro-heavy games that involve simply clicking really fast.

[Ohma]

Hey, a new patch, also Maxis/annoyed users have convinced EA to let people have multiple Spore.com accounts for each install of the game (though that isn't part of the patch).

(I've bolded the interesting bit)

Features

* New Cheat: "evoadvantage". Enter this cheat when are starting a new Creature game to choose any creature from the Sporepedia. Start a new game with one of your more evolved creatures!
* Display part statistics when you are in Build mode. Rollover any part and hold down the 'i' key.
* New Cheat: "blocksmode". Turns creatures into their blocky representations.
* More style filters. Open the cheat window and type: "stylefilter -microscope" or "stylefilter -norainbows" or "stylefilter -nextgen" to see the new styles
* Added 70 new planet scripts with a low terraform score, especially of the "hot and high atmosphere" type

Graphics/Aesthetics

* Animation improvements
* Improved the planets fogging, blooming and lighting
* Fixed animation issues with tool handling, hand walking and some of the more oddly shaped creatures

Tuning

* Creature phase: Improved the pacing towards the end of the game, and increased the challenge in Normal and Hard modes.
* Tribe phase: Increased the challenge in Normal and Hard difficulty modes.
* Civilization phase: Increased the challenge in Normal and Hard difficulty modes.
* Space phase: Made Empires in Easy and Normal modes demand reasonable amounts of money in exchange for peace and adjust the level of punishment if the player doesn't pay
* Space phase: Made disasters less likely to occur in Easy and Normal modes and increased the time between each attack from the enemy empire when the player is at war.

Miscellaneous

* Creature phase: Improved the way posse members behave during threatening situations and fights.
* Space phase: Made finding your home world and colonies easier in the Galactic view.
* Tribe phase: Made it so that tribe members can travel on steep hills if they need to do so now, but their speed will be reduced a lot.
* Fixed an issue with attacks not working on some bigger animals and larger animals not dying correctly
* Fixed collect mission not completing correctly when all parts have been collected
* Fixed problems with the "Rolling Thunder" and "Déjà Vu" achievements not being awarded as they should
* Fixed floating parts not being deducted from the budget when loaded into creator
* Fixed an issue with the rotation rings not resizing correctly when a part was resized and improved their look
* Fixed an issue where the terraforming score of planet could differ when revisiting a solar system
* Fixed the keyboard controls for zoom & pitch in the Colony Planner not working properly
* Fixed a crash that could occur when watching an epic creature attack a city
* Fixed some issues where the game would freeze when using the Creature Tweaker tool or when capturing a planet in solar view
* Fixed an issue where not all tribe members would obey the raid order when a large group was ordered to raid
* Fixed an issue where banning a creation from one of your other saved games would black out the main menu

Don't know what any of that tuning actually means from a gameplay perspective, but I'll probably find out soon.

[Covenant]

Sounds like a lot of good stuff, especially the 'start with a fully evolved creature in creature phase' one--which would have made it so much simpler for me to start a new game and still achieve an end-game Consequence Ability. Otherwise you need to actually play the whole game, and creature phase is raw tedium. It's a bad combat game tacked onto an incomplete creature creator. Lame!

Anyway, I like the changes, they are very well needed. It's just sad that the Space phase is so lackluster, even still. I remade a game and this time did it all right. Cheated to start from space with a species that had a Science philosophy, and ran around looking for aggressors. Found two aggressive religious civs and bombed them with my Graviton Wave device--eliminating them COMPLETELY. Game over, fuckers! Once that was done all I had were happy trading civs to deal with, built up my money and badges and now I'm safe from harm.

And that's great, but it's still fuckin' boring. And it's so sad. I've noticed a lot of cool things, like the newtonian physics. I was able to put a tree into a stable orbit over a world, and just sat there reading a book and watching it circle the planet as a satellite. That kind of physics engine has so much possibility if it was expanded on--and when ships fly around in-system they'll use the Sun or other planets as a gravity slingshot, but only minorly due to the speed they move at. Again, if this was expanded on...

Ah well. If the game can do well despite all this shit and despite the flareups about DRM, maybe Spore2 will have some of these ideas fleshed out.

[Stark]

It's a shame none of those entries say 'made tribe and civ phase slightly less raw tedium and simplistic micromanagement'. For all it's flaws, Space is easily the most 'actual game' part of the game (so much so it's got me playing GalCiv2 again, because holy shit it's stupid you can't get more ships from your own fucking planet), but tribe and civ phases are simply 'do one of two labourious and repetitive things eight thousand times until the phase goes away'. The totally worthless AI in both phases doesn't help either (civ is particularly pathetic), but this impacts on space too with the hopelessly repetitive annihilation of utterly worthless raiding fleets, which due to the combat interface requires millions of clicks at the low tech end.

[PeZook]

I recently came to the conclusion that Spore is a technology demo which will require a developed with actual ideas to work.

I completed Space and did a second playthrough, and holy shit it seemed 10 000 times more tedious than before.

[Covenant]

I burned out early because, while riding the Sporeuphoria on my first run through, I hit space and got attacked by like 5 civs nonstop, and I decided to make a new species. It was absolutely tedious now that I knew what I was doing, and had an idea of what I wanted, but I had to collect all the parts. Worst of it all was I didn't realize I couldn't adapt my mouths later, so I got stuck with my wrong mouth-part, which means I had to do another do-over. And again, and again, and then on like my fourth civ to hit space, I just decided to custom-build my ideal species in the creature creator and then import it to space, and do it right.

I really wish Space was a bit more of an exploration and sandbox game--and it also feels far too cluttered with alien civilizations. That or the final mission in Space was less tedious and more transcendant, and comes up in a fifth the normal time, so I can get a glorious "life is great and the universe is huge and awesome" ending without all the bullshit. Spice trading it dumb as all fuck, we should be trading tech and math and chemical codes and DNA sequences. Hell, THAT should be the currency--DNA bits. So by creating diverse biospheres, you'd increase your currency, and be able to beam over codes that they could then use to create life on worlds with chemistry similar to the one you sent.

[PeZook]

Yeah, the economic system is dumb as fuck, but what could one expect after Civ phase?

The fact that you have to pay outrageous amounts of money for each use of the creature creator tool (not to mention having to make contact with a gazillion civs just to get it) is just horrible.

I mean, it's not difficult to get tonnes of monies, it's just that you have to fly to each and every spice-making world of yours to collect the change and then manually look for someone who will buy it at a decent price. Why isn't it automated or elliminated altogether?

[Covenant]

What I find less excusable than travelling around for spice is travelling around for abducting trees. I understand that abducting something is lolz ufo funny, but come on. Why do I need to physically re-seed trees onto worlds to stabilize them? Why can't I just abduct things, scan their genes, tinker with them in the FREE ONBOARD GENE-LAB it should have, and then beam that code into nanites or stuff to create life on worlds?

As it stands I just get frustrated. I need to collect spice, but I need to have a fuckton of vegetables and beavers and raptors in my cargo so I can plant down planets--but it doesn't matter HOW MANY, just one or two of each like fucking noah. The only thing it does is occasionally force me to fly home to drop off artifacts or throw trees into orbit to make room. Nothing fun stems from it, it's just raw tedium.

And then you have the Grox. Worst idea ever. EVER. I've basically abandoned any interest in the game at this point because I know the eventual payoff for all my loving work tweaking my critter is a goddamn exercise in futility as I'm forced to fly my piece of shit spaceship into the galaxy's center, while constantly being blown away.

I thought that putting down a midway colony would make my life easier, like a staging base, but instead all that happens is that my planets are suffering slow death via eco-disaster and I'm a billion parsecs away so I can't get back in time to save them. When I die, as is nearly unavoidable, I respawn back at Midway instead of home. I can eventually work my way back through the galactic spiral, but it requires so much click-and-point bullfuckery that I want to go kill Will Wright just for that. What the hell. You could at least show me which black holes lead to where once I've travelled through them. And honestly, an auto-plotter would be so cash, and we just don't have it. I want a 'return to base' button, goddammit, and not one that's a result of a racial special ability.

I'm playing on hard. Who here has actually gotten to the galactic core. How'd you do it?