More Awesome Than You!

Annoyed at Apartment Life? Annoyed at all the people who are bitching or drooling over Apartment Life? Totally disenchanted by the Sims at the moment?

Have no fear, Spore is here (almost).

Release is set for September 7th. Yup, that's only six days. Discuss.

In six days, Pes will have fixed what most people are bitching about. In six days, Spore will be released and the bitching will resume.

In all seriousness, I was excited when I heard about this game how ever many years ago that was, but now the enthusiasm train has stopped. If I see some interesting screenshots, then maybe I can be swayed; I'll stick with TS2 for now.

SecuROM and the crappy activation system completely killed my enthusiasm for this a while ago. I will not be buying it.

It got release in Australia a full week early in some places. Why? Because the store owners FAILED and put it out as soon as they got it.

On the one hand, it still sounds like my kind of game.

On the other, SecuROM. And since I'm on school intarwebs, ARR'ing it is out of the question. Guess I'll be passing this one over.

Insanity, you keep mentioning your school monitoring you. Have you considered getting a proxy or encrypting your torrent?

Spore is at the bottom of my "To Buy" list and not much higher on my "To Arrr" list. When the bugs get fixed, all the crap removed I will consider it.

My husband has been all over this game since it was announced. He pre-ordered it last Thursday, and is practically counting down the days. I'm not planning on getting it, but I'll check it out when he installs it. After all, I wasn't crazy about the idea of the Sims either until he got it.

I'm kinda interested in Spore. Once the SecuROM thing and the inevitable bugs get straightened out, it may be the first thing I torrent now that I have non-dial-up internet.

I suspect that SecuROM will not be an issue on release day, just like with Apartment Life.

I don't know if they monitor or not. sorry, didn't realize I was getting annoying (I guess I was looking for advice.)

Don't know how to do either.

I'm getting it for DS I think. Not for me, for my son. I 'Do Not Want' now. Shame and I was really looking forward to it too! My son still plays on the creature creator but I have completely lost interest.

I pre-ordered it last week like an idiot.  I'm working on a show right now where my first line is SIX pages long (roughly 15 minutes of me just talking to a guy under a sheet).  Then I have to memorize the REST of the play.  So I'll be owning Spore fairly soon, but I won't get to play it for at least a month!  Hopefully all the kinks will be worked out while it's sitting, unopened, on my desk.

Unfortunately a family member pre-ordered it for me, otherwise i would have bought it by now as it's already been released a few days ago here in Australia. 

Now I just need to wait till they have the time to go collect it from the store, but it's all good.  I am glad I am getting it any day now.


Edited;  Got it now, just need to decide which pc to load it on considering the securom issues.

I really want to get it, but SecuROM and evil spyware crap has put me off totally.

Shame, really. Will Arr when all crap is removed though.

I don't intend to set up an internet connection on my XP just to activate Spore. So I'm either not getting it I'll wait for a pirate version or a crack that will allow playing without spying.

Well, you'll notice I said nothing about buying the game.

I'm eager for the gameplay, of course, but I'm more eager to see how many glaring bugs are there. My theory is that there will be much fewer than with the Sims titles, since Sims fell apart after Will Wright left.

Will Wright is a very intelligent man. Under his watchful gaze, I'm sure the only bugs we'll be seeing will be relatively obscure and minor, much like TS1 (or even base game TS2).

I think Spore is very interesting.  Groundbreaking maybe.  A lot of cool game stuff is being innovated and will probably carry on in future games.  However, I don't think it looks fun to play.  Kinda like back in the day when I was this huge RPG nerd, Cyberpunk was much more fun to create characters for than to actually play.  So, while it looks pretty cool, I played around with the free version of the creature creator for about a half an hour, then removed it from my computer.  I'm done with Spore now.

I watched some australian guy play spore for 6 hours last night.

It's still at the bottom of my to-buy list. Shame my list is only full of 1 item. And that item is Spore.

Yes, I will buy it. Looks great, even after seeing some guy play through cell, creature, and tribal. I had to sleep when he got into the civilization stage

I'm probably going to arr myself a copy when the suckrom issue gets worked out.  And I'll probably play for an hour and lose interest.  Or maybe I'll love it.  I'll have to see.

Right now, life and stuff gets in the way of a lot of game time, so I don't even get to play Sims like I would like to.

I feel that I played out my enthusiasm for 'critter games' with the various incarnations of Creatures and Pokemon so Spore really doesn't interest me. I won't be buying and will stick with TS2, I might even install AL at the weekend.

There's an 'arr'ed copy out there somewhere, apparantly. However there's not a scene release of it (and a scene release will be superior to a homemade release of it).

I will 'arr' it, but I will own a legit copy. The Galactic Edition, however. Boo on 3 activations... I bet they'll remove the activations eventually.

i can haz spore torrent?

http://www.mininova.org/tor/1763526

Spore is not for me, it is so uninteresting . . .

I'll just stick with sims and simcity.

I've never seen the attraction that this game has. I don't like critters that much, and I certainly wouldn't spend my time making them. It's hard enough making Simmies, and creatures that have no remote resemblance to things living or dead do not spark my mind with ideas.
Hell, I don't even like the ones that I've seen so far in various places-ridiculous to me.
To each his own, but I wouldn't want to put up with the 3 install limit that the game will have, SecuRom, or the DM they will force one to have when you want to upgrade the game.
No, thank you. Not my cup of tea.

I can has luv for IAmTheRad?

Played it today for about 2hrs on another family members PC and had heaps of fun with it, it's very unique to anything else I have ever played.   Looking forward to playing some more and figuring out the gameplay further.

I have a question to ask before I torrent, rather than waste time and bandwidth for something I may not be able to use.

The computer with the graphics card doesn't have a net connection yet, what form does the torrent arrive in? For example, is it multiple .rars, that I can fit on my 512MB MP3 player - in multiple trips - or am I screwed? (ie, is it just one file?)

Also, does the torrented Spore, once installed, need a net connection? (I hope not!)

Faizah, save your time.  The torrent is down at this moment.

Really? I finished this morning, just shy of three hours ago.

So far so good, though I didn't have much time to play before I had to get to work. I'm at early creature stage. I got the Pacifist label after the cellular stage as I didn't attack anything. This is mostly because I didn't know how to. My doo-hickey had a solid "Run Awaaaay!" mentality.  Movies are absolute cuteness.




EDIT: Things make more sense when you use your words.

That's... terribly cute.

My torrent -should- finish sometime this evening. I checked before I left for work and it was still going on strong, around 100KB transfer rate. I... well, I ordered it, but I'm terribly impatient, so I'm going to get in some offline play before it gets here next Tuesday. (Who releases a game on Sunday? That's one more day that people who ordered it online can't have it. Jerks.)

I don't know if I was doing it right, but if you aimed your cell thingy at another cell thingy and wiggle the mouse around, they tended to 'hurt' each other depending on who hit who first/harder. I'm finding the mouse controls a little award.

I forgot to add, but the saddest thing was when my girl (I assume she's a girl as she laid eggs) walked by the corpse of one of my other creations.  :'(

Creatures! I used to love those games...

Hmm.  When I click the torrent link, (and I've tried  both private and public trackers), it says "The system cannot find the file specified" and nothing happens.

edited to fix stupid errors.  Edited again:  NM.  It finally worked on about the 10th try.  But private trackers rule!  I'm getting speeds topping out at 400 kB/s

My download speed isn't as fast as some of yours. I cap at 160KB/s downloads. So I didn't use torrents (of course).

I downloaded the game off usenet. It's the best way, in my opinion. Then I don't need to worry about the speed of the torrent dropping below a specific speed. I kept the same speed, and started the download before I went to bed. And put the rar files on my laptop when I woke up (and extracted and installed during class at school)

I know i won't get nearly the same quality of graphics on my laptop as I'll get at home. But I did give it a quick try, and it was fun. I enjoyed my small time in the cell stage, even when I had a few minutes to try out the game. It's actually *gasp* going to be a purchase for me! I'll suffer securom and it's DRM solely for the content that I'll get off the sporepedia, and I know I'll have limited activations, but maybe the crack will let me avoid the activations and still have the game. A unique key? Yes, please!

Spore, even when I only tried the cell stage a little bit, was still fun. I'll be able to try it some more during my lunch break, and able to play it when I arrive at home on my desktop (and have much better graphics there).

So, free trial of the full game even with the limitations of no user content. At least I can play it for a couple of days before I officially own the game.

BTW: I believe the torrent is in .rar files that can be transferred on a usb flash drive.

IAmtheRad, you should still be able to access the sporepedia without buying the game, at least for creatures. All you have to do is wrong-click and save the .png files to your creatures subfolder. I'm not sure about ploppables, but I suspect they'll do the same. Why put your computer at risk, knowingly?


BTW: Si, it is in a split .rar file.

UPDATE: Confirmed, you can get user buildings, etc, as well from the website without being logged in.

There are free file splitters out there, so *anything* can be transferred on a flash drive or memory stick.

Heck.. unrar and rerar it, that is what RaR was made for.

I was delighted to do random searching and find Spore was ARRable, I am further delighted that Sporepedia is easily downloadable. I hope if a bunch of MATY like this we can perhaps have a Spore corner.

Good lord, mines only at 8.0kB/s... Anyone know how to speed it up a bit?

Yes. Quit watching it.

HAH!
Good advice, actually. That usually works, after ports are forwarded and settings are tweaked.

As for Spore... I got sort of bored after about a half hour of playing with the creature creator, and I think I might get bored with the full game after a couple times through it. I hope it will grow on me a bit more, but so far I am not having the orgasms I thought I was going to...
The installation was awful. Creature Creator would not uninstall so I had to delete it all manually, from the registry and everything. Then, I was being denied access to install data from "\sporebin\" so I had to extract everything from the ISO into a folder on my desktop. Then I got ANOTHER error at the end of the install. I can't remember what it was. Luckily, there was an "ignore" feature to this error...

Well, if you are board, perhaps you should go get hammered.


In other news...
I hath made FIRE!

*rubs eyes* I just played for hours. Can't be that boring, I guess.
I made a creature with no eyes. Right now it's a carnivorous fly.
(not sure why I said board instead of bored. I know the difference, so it's odd I would do that. twice in one post. faaaack.)

Ahhh I keep getting surrounded by various huge creatures and all I end up doing is having to run away, unless they get me first >:(

This game is rather short, and rather violent. I'm already on the galactic stage after a single 8-hour sitting and the entire game so far has been characterized by violence. Lots of violence. I'm not sure if it even POSSIBLE to be peaceful, seeing as the entire world is invariably full of things trying to kill me. The pool stage is characterized by angry critters trying to kill me, so I would stab them with my spork and eat them. The creature stage is characterized by angry monsters trying to kill me, so I kill them and eat them. The tribal stage is characterized by a bunch of tribes of lesser creatures who attack me unprovoked, so I retaliate and kill them and burn their villages. The civilization stage is again characterized by other civilizations, who proceed to attack me without provocation, so I kill them.

Is anyone else finding the game characterized by constant violence?

Shouldn't you like the MOAR FIGHT! aspect?

You must love this game.  Killing and eating, your two favorite things to do. :)

Mostly.

Cellular stage isn't hard. Run, run, run, and eat. I actually found it harder as a carnivore because so many of those hippy herbivores had big spikes. The creature stage can be done nonviolently. I chose not to, as I got too close to a hostile nest trying to get a fossil and the bastards killed one of my tag-a-longs. I hunted them down, and their little babies too.

I have no idea how you could possibly do tribal stage nonviolently, as rival tribes are out to get you from moment one, and I haven't seen any way to turn a prehostile tribe to a neutral stance. I fail at this level. I really, really fail, and kept getting my entire tribe wiped out. Tips would be appreciated.

Civilization stage seems okay. I didn't get to see too much of it. I wasn't doing well, but no one tried to kill me. Well, some wild tribe damaged a ship of mine, but that wasn't too bad.

I saw some epic creatures, and witnessed a few abductions. They almost sucked up one of my tagalongs.

Oh, that's easy. You give them gifts. In social mode, right-click on their food... area... blanket thing... and a group of your guys with flowers and such will bring a wrapped gift basket.

Do this as fast as you can. Really. If they attack your tribe beforehand and get truly pissed off, they might well attack anyway. Then you can do the music thing. This is randomly harder for some creatures, mainly carnivores. I had a group of carnivores attack to the point where I (and some of my allies who happened to be wandering by while gathering) had to wipe them out, wait for their chief to respawn, and THEN bring them a gift. But that does actually work.

You can also domesticate animals, who will lay eggs that you can harvest. ...I domesticated a Darwin. Lulz ensued.

Always leave at least one person at home, though. Bastard wild animals keep trying to steal food. Also, someone has to be there to accept any gifts that allies might bring.

While we're at the tips, bring as many musicians as you can, divided up evenly between every instrument you have access to. Larger tribes seem harder to impress, and having more people playing music helps.

Oh doi. Totally forgot about that.

My evolved creatures, the Dodoki, are masters of instruments. They quickly befriended one tribe of creatures that I had made with the creature creator, a sort of ape/frog hybrid, after being told that they would enjoy maracas. The triffids, however, wanted to kill me dead, closely followed by some random EAxis creature.

I had issues with this. When I went tribal, I had three group members of different species (easter egg to unlock by doing that). They appear in my pen. I tried domesticating a group of other creatures, and they adore the Dodoki, but I had the message that I had too many domesticated creatures. I guess I need to let go of the ones I inadvertently have.

Blasted other tribes, too.

Will have to retry. I'm hellbent on getting all the possible parts in both the cellular and creature stages. I came close on both before. Plus, I want to figure out being an omnivore, eating fruits and already dead animals.

Well, I know the HOW, but the problem is that they ATTACK me. When I am subsequently forced to kill them and burn their village to the ground to make the constant unprovoked attacks stop, it is self-defense!

Why would you kill them and THEN give them a gift? That doesn't make a lot of sense. If they attack you, they are your enemies. You don't give gifts to enemies. Plus, if you killed them already, what'd be the point?

Yeah, I got the entire animal domestication thing. Took a bit to figure out that you did not have to feed them or slaughter them for meat to get food.

I love it when they do that. Saves me the bother of having to hunt an animal down if it will just come to me! OM NOM NOM NOM!

You mean my one instrument, right? The game gave me one instrument.

When you befriend a tribe, you may get additional instrument creation stations as a benefit. I got the ability to make digger-whattas (that aboriginal instrument) from befriending the apefrogs. They also brought me some food, right before the dang triffid war started.

You mean Didgeridoos?
(No, I have nothing of value to say beyond that.)

Easter Egg? You mean, er, the actual eggs, or...? I domesticated quite a few and I don't recall seeing anything.


I was going for a peaceful, hippy, religious society, just to see how it goes. They're vegetarians and everything.

And... Well, the chief comes back after a while, then the tribe repopulates, assuming you didn't smush their buildings. You can often get them to stop attacking with a gift, but they hit me first, so I was forced to butcher the hell out of them. And then we gave them gifts. They decided that they preferred the happy music and trading to being butchered.

My next creature is going to be a terribly cute death machine that destroys everyone who opposes.

Yes. However, that word is hard for me to say. It is going to remain digger-whattas.

Midnight Voyager, a lot of my creations I have are like that. I haven't actually played them, though. I have a few that closely resemble frogs, and one that has these huge tentacles from its head that make it look like some sort of bush/octopus hybrid. It's so pretty when it hops around and the tentacles spin. Under the tentacles, however, is hidden a tiny creature with two of the highest bite-rated mouths and loads of spikes.

We should start a creature swap!

Didge-er-ie-doo!  It's a fun word you shouldn't miss out on.   ;D
Got any screenshots to share?

I finally gave in and am torrenting this. I've told myself it's just to test the game out, but I know what'll really happen: I'll get hooked on it and forget all about my poor Sims. Sadface.

It seems like a lot of fun already. :D

Okay, I have another question. When you play, does it start out as a cellular thingummy, or something? Can you evolve into one you've already created in the editor without re-making the whole creature all over again in the game?

I think it's the transition between the first two syllables that gets me. I couldn't say "recognize" until I was 17, either, and finally had to master it for a skit I was doing in a British accent for Speech Club. It took a really long time for me to be able to move between the first and second syllables.

I have some screenshots. Unfortunately, I'd tried to printscreen the videos, which are the cutest thing ever, just to find that they come out as masses of blackness. I may have to get one of those external screenshot programs all the cool kids are talking about.

EDIT: Here we go. Clicky on the picture below for a link to the album.
(http://i533.photobucket.com/albums/ee334/zazazuspore/Untitled-1.png) (http://s533.photobucket.com/albums/ee334/zazazuspore/?action=view&current=Spore_2008-09-03_20-32-08.png)
The Dodoki (far left) with his three buddies.

It wants a password. Sadcakes. :'(

Fixed. Photofuckit was being confusing.

If nothing else, I find it easier to be violent than to make friends. You just go in and destroy everything just like that, whereas making friends, you need to fuck around around a lot with instruments and showing off and such.

Well, now after having made it to the tribal stage, I'm getting sick of it.  It is like JM says, just too much violence.  There is no way to avoid it and it gets tedious after a while.  The creature creator was fun for the first few plays, but I'm sick of that now too.  Back to Sims!

Im having a bit of trouble figuring out how to make them leave the tribal area.. or do they only go out when meat is low?

Click and select around your tribe. This will set them as a group for commands. You can then click on the ground to move them about or on action-objects like fruit bushes.

I find myself enjoying this game entirely too much. Starting from cell and only letting them have what they come across has made some interesting messes of creatures.

My sadness is no underwater/flight from creature phase. I see a expac with all that in there.
Try the poison on the cell phase, you don't have to fight at all.

The question about how you start..First load of game requires you do the previous level to access the next. This means you must have done cell/tidal pool to get to critter, critter to get to tribal so on. From that point on you can create something "at that level" and play it one level beyond what you got to. The downside of this is they do not get their evolutionary powers, which can change the way things are going quickly. The first species I got any distance came into Tribal phase with this rain that heals, and a firework that raises those that watch it's relationship to the tribe.

I am finding depth in odd places and empty holes that imply content might be forthcomming. My thought for the underwater is if you do for some reason swim out into water as a critter you will get chomped.


Last but not least, omnivores rule. If it lives , we can eat it.

I've played the cell stage twice and neither time could I find the omnivore jaw!  I got all the parts except that one.

How did you get an omnivore from cell stage? It always tagged me as one or the other and then all the mouths I could find were of that type. My last run as a creature called the Macard (a pretty normal-looking bird), I got all parts but the omnivore and carnivore mouths.

I noticed some other creatures in a group catching fish. Every once in a while you see them hopping in the water.  You can sort of fly with the right wings. I couldn't get the Macard to do much more than a very short glide, but his body was slightly awkward. I saw quite a few EAxis creatures flying full-out (and one altercation where they were dive-bombing another nest).

I have made a few omnivore critters, and couldn't unlock the right piece so initially I gave it both mouths.   I then ate plant and meat matter, after doing this and evolving all my creatures but one have been omnivore.  Not sure about the other one or what I did different.

I have evolved a few to Space stage and they have been mostly passive civilisations that dominate via religious or economic means, it's been awesome.

I want more stuffs in spore. I'll buy it, and suffer the consequences of suck-u-rom to have the game automatically grab content for me.

See that green pear-like thing that can charge forward really quick and pierce other cells while draining their fluids? That's the cell stage omnivore mouth.  You can also suck plants with it.

The easiest way to get to omnivore anyways is with the carnivore mouth and herbivore mouth in cell phase. It makes finding food a whole lot easier in creature phase (not that it was hard to begin with) and it makes finding food trivial in tribal phase. Sure, you can use the omnivore mouth after you get it, but usually the time you unlock it you're already in either the carnivore or the herbivore paths and can't get out of it.

There is a 1000 creature Torrent for download. In addition sharing these things is incredibly easy. Email a .png file of your critter.

/documents/mysporecreations/whatever kind of whatever you want to share

This was a big thing for me to find out so I will share. To load the critters you either find,save,email or download if you are not using the sporepedia is very easy and not intuitive.
You put the game in windowed mode, go to the directory said .png is in. You drag said .png file into spore. There you go all loaded.
After the hassle I have dealt with in all the Sim games in sharing content this is very simple and rather unexpected.

To get to windowed mode is a "uncheck" in the graphics menu or Alt+Enter.
I opened my "in game" sporepedia and dropped things from there. I have to say that this is rather slick. So if we wanted to share our content without the perils of the Online sporepedia, we only need the .png file to do so.


For your clicking pleasure..........
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4337557/Spore_1000_Creatures_Pack

I'm still a day out from Spore, but I can upload Creature Creator critters. 28 and counting, here (http://s131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/Spore/). Username attributed should be Faizah.

A 'couple' of favourites:
(http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/Spore/Aslorn.png) (http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/Spore/Bazoo.png) (http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/Spore/Blibble.png)
(Aslorn, Bazoo, Blibble)
(http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/Spore/Bortog.png) (http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/Spore/Skonawary.png) (http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/Spore/Talmon.png)
(Bortog, Skonawary, Talmon)
(http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/Spore/Talopda.png) (http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/Spore/Taonak.png) (http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/Spore/Terec.png)
(Talopda, Taonak, Terec)

Though be warned, Terec was designed to be a killer - which is why I wondered if you could bring a created one into the game to play - and even friendly herbivore Taonak has a hidden spitter weapon.

Exactly.  For those who are still confused: 
I figured out that to be an omnivore and have access to the omnivore mouths in critter phase you have to split what  you eat in cell phase.  You don't have to eat one plant and then one meat, but once you have access to both a carnivore and herbivore mouth, you can have a two-mouthed creature until you get the omnivore proboscis (Said proboscis kicks some serious ass!).  With the two-mouthed creature, you can try to eat the equivalent amount of whatever you didn't have access to before and then go on from there switching between the two. 

Step one:  Pick your original mouth.  In this case I'm saying carnivore. 
Step two:  Eat meat until I get enough points to evolve and buy another mouth.  Keep vague track of how much meat I've eaten. 
Step three:  Get the herbivore mouth and stick it as close to the front of my creature as possible without removing the carnivore mouth. 
Step four:  Eat plants until I am even with the amount of meat I've eaten.  While doing this, attack critters that have the gold token symbol until I am tricked out with shinies.  Once meat=plants, eat a balanced diet. 
Step five:  Evolve legs, and rejoice in my awesome omnivore qualities. 

Psst. WE ALL DON'T MEET THE SAME CREATURES.

*facepalm.*

That's still the mouth to steal. Oddly, I had the same cells on my last two planets. The others before were different.

-stares at the space stage in awe-

I have nothing else to say .. my god its full of stars.

My torrent is only at 11%. *WHIIINE*

I want to play this game more and more every time I read this thread. :D

The character I just played was supposed to be an omnivore (I already have one, technically, but I don't like it). Instead, it ended up being a predatory carnivore who will kill anything it crosses. It's so cute....but it will tear you limb from limb.

So Cute
(http://i533.photobucket.com/albums/ee334/zazazuspore/Spore_2008-09-06_16-10-26.png)

Will kill you dead
(http://i533.photobucket.com/albums/ee334/zazazuspore/Spore_2008-09-06_15-18-13.png)

Possible paradox
(http://i533.photobucket.com/albums/ee334/zazazuspore/Spore_2008-09-06_15-16-07.png)

I officially call that shiny buttocks creature.


There is a need to remember as you wander into Civ stage and Space that doing things may be more round about than one might expect. For instance, it is important to note that the Economic Civilization has no military. That means they do not attack anyone.

This does not slow them down, and may make them impossible to deal with when one is playing against them. I am not sure. It was the first Civ level I attained.

Money is power!

Oh, it's easy to get around that. Take over a military city by buying their asses out. Then you can blow shit up to your heart's desire. Same for religious cities.

I wish my screenshot of a civilization I uplifted would have worked. Didn't know that it didn't until too late. I observed a giant, holographic Black Beast of Arrrrgh! preaching to convert a city. Surreality, I haz it.

I've gotten to the space stage too, but I keep losing track of certain planets when I get too many missions at once. I would also love to know the minimum design specs for the space craft, or does it not matter what is on it in terms of engines for air, water and space?

Edited to add: Spore English manual download here: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=vzaft66s

Spaceship appearances are purely cosmetic. There are no stats, and no parts you can buy in design phase do anything. My ship is featureless cube.

Go the borg  ;D

I managed to get an omnivore by just being lucky enough to unlock one of the omnivore mouths in cell stage. It's long and kind of looks like a trumpety sucker.

Like this? (http://img135.imageshack.us/my.php?image=capture05092008204734aj1.png) I was wondering what it was  :D

I finished cell stage with an omnivore mouth. My creature? An herbivore.

So yeah, that doesn't matter too much if you eat too many plants.

There's a limit, though. Kind of obvious, but while you have some wiggle room, if more than 2/3 of what you ingest is animal you'll be locked into carnivore. The same for herbivore. That was the mistake I made with my green guy...he'd eaten about 75% meat.

There is a cheat console, ala Sims. CTRL-SHIFT-c again. Most of the cheats just affect graphics, but there's one to heal if you suck like me. (I only used it once, though. I don't suck that much).

What's interesting is the way you are shoved into a certain path in civilization. I finally got one creature through the long way (I've been focusing on cell and creature stages) and it was immediately told to choose a religious vehicle. Now, I did want it to go religious, but I wonder what the criteria are for each. Is it based on your score from Tribal? I had a near-perfect on Friendly (I killed one tribe early on because they were pissing me off).

Sometimes what the tribe members talk about is kind of funny given the situation. The one I was playing tonight looks like a yellow stork. One of the little guys kept talking about storks delivering babies to the chief while I had the whole tribe gathered together.

I like the game better now that I kind of get what I'm doing. I pretty much stink at strategy games.

I just reached Civ. Stage, and decided that the developers read too much Frank/Brian Herbert. The spice MUST flow!!!

I was wondering if anyone else had made the spice - Dune connection. However I am disappointed that I can neither command nor ride gigantic sand worms.

Yea, mine's only around 13%, and I've been downloading it on and off for two days now.  Probably at least 20 solid hours of downloads (I have to pause it if I want to do anything else on the net...).  At this rate I should have it by next weekend...

How bad is SuckRom anyway?  I find myself really wanting to play this today, but so far I've managed to avoid infecting my machine.  I made a point of getting the crack for Free Time even though I bought a legit copy, just so I wouldn't install SuckRom.  I bought the 360 version of BioShock instead of the PC version, again for the same reason.  But right now I'm pretty bored and this looks interesting.

 - Gus

This has the nasty version of Suckyouwrong in it.

As there is already a patch out for SPORE, and it seems to only come through the EApleasehurtmedownloader. I wonder if this is their new tactic. No patch 4u if you do not install their crud.

My cell finished as being a carnivore, but in creature stage it's marked and acts as omnivore as long as it has the omnivore mouth on it. If I take off the mouth, it reverts back to being carnivore.

Probably. And that's a fine tactic...no patchy-poo unless you are registered, etc. However, not a fine tactic if they are still including SecuROM.

Twilight Torrents FTW!  Seriously, I got the d/l in about 5 hours total.

Yea, well, as of now Twilight Torrents is down -- I get a 'you don't have permission to access /' error when I go to it.

I completely failed my patience resistance roll and purchased a copy at Best Buy.  It's installing (very slowly) as I type this, and no doubt SuckRom is busily raping my hard disk already.

The first four letters of my CD key were BUGY.  I consider this an omen.

 - Gus

SPORE "documentary" (about future Ice Age and Spore beasts like "spinx" mole-quails, giant bat monsters, "grassland rattleback" armored armadillo-snake-rodents, "carakilla" egg laying carnivore birds, "snow stalker" polar bear-otter-hyenas, "shagrats" sheep-rat-cow-buffalos, and "bobbakurry" primates)  / "making of" program on Animal Planet cable channel *right now.*

If this is pertinent to your interests, be on the lookout for repeat showings (none listed on MSN's TV Schedule guide, though).

ETA:
The Future Is Wild (& The Making of SPORE)
SUN 9/07 3:00pm EST, ANIMAL 55, 120 mins
Description: Time-traveling millions of years into the future to discover bizarre creatures.

I finally got on Twilight Torrents, but they no longer appear to have a Spore torrent.  So it's the long wait, or do as Gus did and just buy the damn thing.

@Gus:  Assuming it's like TS2 and doesn't actually install SecuROM until you run it the first time, you can get a no-cd.exe that keeps SecuROM off your machine.  Of course, you can't go online with the cracked .exe, but that's not an issue giving the informal sharing of creatures here and elsewhere.

I can throw you an invite to funfile if you want.

Edit: spore patch is for creature creator only, not for the actual gameplay. http://www.spore.com/patch

OH I finally figured out how to get all 6 cell parts. IF you look at the name of the critter your attacking in the plasma it will have a shiny gold part in it , if you need that part. IF you dont have cillia attack an animal that has it.etc..

Well, I bought it but it doesn't actually run.  It'll fire up SporeApp.exe as a process, but it just stops, with SporeApp using no CPU time.  I've gone through a large number of supposed remedies, such as re-installing or running as an administrator, none of which has had any effect whatsoever.

At this point I'm looking for a cracked version of the .EXE, but not having any luck.  I'm just not in the practice ARRRing things, so my weak google-fu only turns on a handful of Creature Creator cracks.  GameCopyWorld certainly doesn't have a fix.

So it looks like I shelled out $50 for a coaster.

 - Gus

GameCopyWorld doesn't host the cracked .exe, but they link to it at another site.

It was on last night on Discovery Channel (?). I mentioned it in #grah and got minimal response. I was underwhelmed by it.

I've been going online with the cracked exe and everything seems to be working fine to me (and SecuROM free!).  It's awesome when other player's creatures are invading your game btw.  8)


ETA:  You do have to own a purchased game to get a valid registration code to be able to go online though.

Question:  Using a no cd crack...  It let you make a user name and password?  Are you able to use all of the online features and stay securom free?

Yep! You can register for a Spore account as long as you have a valid registration code.  When you install the game, do not start it up until after you install the crack.  Then just start it up normally and you can go online and utilize the full features of the game, minus the SecuROM checks.  My computer still has no SecuROM on it.  ;D

I do have a "store bought copy."  I got it as an unexpected gift.  I already have the game installed and a no cd in the proper location.  I just haven't done anything else yet til I find out what will get me securom infested and what won't. 

Registering it though will use up one of the 3 limited installs correct?

Right.  Each time you use the registration code counts as an install.  If ever you go past the three installs, you have to contact EA and provide your reasons for needing to install again.  I don't know yet if they give you a new one, or just allow your old code through or not.  Time will tell as people reach their limits and tell us what their experience is.

Is there any benefit from playing "registered"?   Are you missing out on things if you simply play offline with a no cd crack?

Sorry for all the questions.  I am off the philosophy that it is easier to look dumb and ask a question than to take the time to fix your errors afterward.  :D

There is a noticeable difference when you play online versus offline.  For a few days, I was playing with an Arr'd version offline while awaiting the release day.  Today, as I obtained a legal copy, I uninstalled the Arr'd version and installed the legal copy, put the crack in, and went online quite smoothly.  Then, as I was playing, I was in awe at the invasion of the other player's creatures.  Plus, you can send your creations to your Spore page, and your game stats are added to your online profile, and so forth as well.

I've been playing for a day now and I have a problem - The Creature Stage gives me motion-sickness. I like the game but I can't play it through because the camera moves around way too much. I need a static "birds-eye" view type camera or I start dry-heaving. It's like watching Cloverfield all over again. Anyone else having this problem? Any remedies? I can haz Camera hacks plz?

I'm using the No CD crack now, and it solves my problem with the game refusing to run.  So clearly the main thing that SuckRom does it prevent legitimate purchasers from playing the game.

You can indeed go online with a cracked copy if you have a valid registration code.  I've noticed quite a few creatures credited to players.

I'm up through the Tribal stage, and so far I'm pretty underwhelmed.  There just isn't very much to the gameplay, and what's there is very, very repetitive.  In fact, despite the fact that you control multiple creatures, not one in Tribal, and you buy clothing for bonuses instead of body parts, it feels only trivially different from Creature mode.  Hunt for food that you only need sporadically.  Find nearby nests, and either kill everyone or charm them with a Simon game.

Despite what was said earlier in this thread, I'm finding the peaceful route is much, much easier.  Unless the creatures are absolutely hostile - some are flagged that way in Creature mode - it's much easier and faster to run through the Simon game than to attack.  In Creature mode, there's a pretty good chance you're going to get mobbed and killed immediately, though you can sometimes avoid that by picking out an outlier.  In Tribal mode, either is viable, but charming them takes a lot less time.

This game needs more possible interactions and more goals.  Kill X Creatures / Charm X creatures / Domesticate an animal isn't very much.

 - Gus

If you press Ctrl + Shift + C to bring up the cheat console, you can type "help" for all the commands.  There is a cheat you can type in to use the free cam mode.  I don't know if that might solve your problem, but it can't hurt to try.

Charming them takes a lot less time, but on the other hand, the option may be less feasible if they are already ATTACKING YOU. The implacability of hostile enemies tends to increase as you move through the game. While I've been told that even hostile tribes can be buttered up with a simple present of food, civilizations and beyond tend to be largely implacable.

Me too - sigh.


Crap - I tend to that too.  First person viewpoint games are a complete no-no for me.  PLEASE post any solution you find.

Maxon, I get motion sickness from most first-person games like Oblivion. This game doesn't bother me one bit. The camera does not move independently. I almost wonder if Frally accidentally switched camera modes.

In tribal, it's easy to get them away from not attacking you once you've gotten your tribe set up. I found the key is to have everyone gather until you can spawn your extra babies. Then put two on gather and have the others get instruments. Send them with the chief to do socials. As soon as new tribes pop up, hover over them on your map. If they are ambivalent, ignore them in favor of a hostile tribe. Send a gift to the hostile tribe and socialize them to an ally. If you make a hostile ambivalent and leave them for long enough, they will start to hate you again. Get the Swiss last. Your ideal number of musicians is two per available instrument.

Civilization was definitely a challenge for me. My group was Religious. I don't see how you could play that out nonviolently. It was a bloodbath, and a lot of the blood was mine.

Space...I don't 100% get Space yet. I'm still getting used to the controls, for one. I made fast friends with one group but was careful not to ally yet. Some Deer clan hated me on site and was extorting me for money. Then I took a mission that I didn't realize was in their territory, and they killed me. A lot. Oops. Before that, I was a complete failure at my first terraforming mission. I couldn't get it from T1 to T2.

Good to know; I'm going to die of old age waiting for the thing to download, and may just buy it (~40% when I left this morning).

This is only sort of true, in my experience.  By the time you reach civilization stage in the "peaceful herbivore" track, you've got several special abilities that let you persuade recalcitrant cities that they like you.  Also, it's entirely possible to build up enough religious vehicles to convert a hostile city even if they're firing on you.  I wouldn't suggest taking on a powerful warlike neighbor first thing if you can avoid it, but once you've got more than one religious city it's fairly easy.  

Economic power acts almost the same way except that it isn't seen as a threat; send enough trading caravans to a semi-friendly city and they'll offer to sell out in a few minutes.  The econ track also has a "make friends" special ability, I think.  I'm not at home at the moment so I can't check.  The only problem there is when another neighbor takes them over with military or religious power before you can buy them out!  

Admittedly I haven't played on the hard level, which Pescado has probably leaped right into, so our experiences may differ slightly!

While the peaceful route is easier so far, it's also sort of boring.  Simon game over and over and over again.  Once I got to the space mode I was enjoying myself for a while but then found that every five seconds I was being asked to go fight pirates or attackers on any of my allied planets, which got to be a bit much!  Doesn't anyone else have a spaceship?  At that point being warlike might be a lot easier, as you get fewer pirate attacks.  Defeating them isn't hard, but I seem to be defending planets constantly and never being able to play any of the other parts of the game.  

Thank you for all the info.  :D

Thanks - that's good to know.  I didn't get as far as Oblivion, Morrowind made me barf big time.  I just got the email to say play.com posted my order. 

---Probably lots of spoiler typeness in here be warned---









I really enjoyed going the economic route at Civ phase. That requires killing at least 2 tribes in Tribal Phase.

Space... whew space. Yeah, that's a doozy. Lots of folks with advice out there. The best piece of advice I have seen so far is remember terraforming tools work in both directions.

For a rather non military space group.. removing the planet's viability from under them seems to be a ideal prospect.
The reason behind this is you get 1 colony on a barren->T2 planet. If you knock them out of T1 you get a city with nothing but a cityhall and any defenses it had. This at the least makes them loose a ton of sporebucks and is a more manageable target.

There are 9 philosophies. They are generally based on the color of the "cards" you get at the end of a "phase".
I am sure someone will find the spreadsheet promptly, but there is a nice list of what it requires to get to what in the EA-Spore forums.

The noise ratio is going up in the EA-Spore forums. I am hoping to find a less .. noisy place to discuss strategies. Anyone have links?
I am aware of the Spore forum at the Sims Community forum as well.

Yee, I'm starting up my game. :]

/me is envious, and hopes his game is somewhere near being fully on his machine when he gets home later...

These are the 2 threads I found helpful about the space age.
http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/spore-game-discussion/336161-tips-space-stage.html
http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/spore-game-discussion/336159-lost-space-handy-hints-tips-survival-black.html

The manual that I posted a link to has all the info about the different abilities you can earn at the end of each stage, and what they give you.

Hrm. I do believe the Deer race are going to get it. You have given me ideas. Try to shoot my ship down? Heh. Let's see how you like tasting vacuum.

Cell: really dull.
Creature and Tribal: not as dull as Cell, but still not good games.
Civilization: very simplistic, but worth playing.  Rather like one of those Indie RTSs, only with superior production values.
Space: This was worth the $50.  It's really excellent, and it's the only part of the game that has any depth.  It has lots of weak spots, like the excessive repetition of the Pirates and Hunt The Diseased Critters events, but it's really fun.

While I can understand the temptation to ignore the ship customization tool since it does nothing in game terms, you're constantly staring at the ship.  It's worth spending at least a minute or two to make it look decent.  Plus, I kind of enjoy tinkering with the vehicle tools more than the creature tool.

However, I had a crash after 8 hours of gameplay and lost everything from mid-Tribal to mid-Space.  So it's a very good idea to save often.

 - Gus

$50? You PAID for it? Pft... :D

This is my first Arr... Thank God for #Grah.
My game crashed as well, but it was only loading from cell to creature. I was still mad though.

Would someone pretty please link me to a copy of the full version of Creature Creator? :D

Somewhat offtopic, but MATY and Pescado got mentioned (http://www.metafilter.com/74710/Spore-in-the-wild#2249393) in the Mefi thread on Spore --  by someone younger than me and with a lower user-number. Harumph.

I thought the full version of the Creature Creator was part of the game, and what was released a month or so ago was just a limited preview of it?

RE: My motion sickness - thanks for the tips. Haven't had a chance to try anything out yet, but I will fiddle around with it later tonight. Are there camera modes I could have switched accidentally? I didn't even know that was an option. I haven't touched the settings button, I've played the game straight, so let me know if there's some other way I could have toggled something I shouldn't have toggled.

The problem for me is more that the camera jerks around everytime you turn so it can always behind your creature, rather than just remaining static. When you're looking for creatures to attack and things to pick up, you do a whole bunch of turning around - it's too much for my weak stomach to handle. I remember having this problem with Tomb Raider back in the day and thus never finished that game either :(

Scrolling the view right back so that I'm playing from a birds eye viewpoint diminishes the effect somewhat. However, the birds-eye viewpoint doesn't scroll back far enough for me to have a good view of my surroundings. Also? The movies at the end of stages are done with a "rotating camera" effect, so there is no rest from the constant movement. I actually feel sick just thinking about it now. *chunders* Hopefully any camera cheats I find will fix it up. I'll keep you posted.

Ah. I always play at the furthest-out view. The videos don't bother me much, but they are short.

So, Spore overheated my computer. :D Fun times! From now on I'm just going to play with my fan pointing right at the tower.

...This game autosaves, right? I was about 10 minutes into the creature stage.

Space stage made me want to play Alpha Centauri, which I am downloading now.

If anyone has any suggestions for me.  I just started the Tribal stage.  I have a laptop and having a terrible time translating the mouse maneuvers to touch pad, and I have a terrible camera angle.  It's like I am at ground level and having to look up at them.  Is that how it's suppose to be?  It's so uncomfortable and difficult to navigate that way.


The videos are driving me batty.  I wish they'd have a way you can by pass them.  I keep clicking buttons trying to find a way to escape. 

The cut scenes? I can skip them with the escape button.

It most definitely does not autosave my games.  ::grumbles::

Orly? I hadn't noticed. :)

Yeah, no autosave. CTRL-S works for a quick save. I don't have any crashing, but I still save frequently because I'm still learning.

I got to the tribal stage last night but stupidly didn't realise that meant I had to stop evolving. Tribal stage is pretty boring compared to Creature stage, at least so far. I've been attacked by another tribe and have failed to charm two more tribes. It's very boring compared to creature mode. It's like Age of Empires  (I) only with fewer options and worse animation. And no cheat to add the gray guy with the laser gun to your camp! *g*

My son's in Space mode already and loving it, but I'm not sure I'll ever get past Creature mode at this point because Tribal is way boring and I like reinventing my creature all the time. Dressing it up is just... stupid.

The arrr'ed version that we got came with a creature pack so we have not yet felt the need to go online/register.

There is a small exploit in space level for basic terraforming tools (atmo generator , 3 plant types and the basic eco level of animals).

Don't finish the terraforming tutorial.. use it elsewhere than where your people desire, like over on that other barren waste that has pink spice on it. Throw a colony , do the normal terraforming and you have a functional money producing location as you can have a factory there. (no spice from a colony untill there is one).

Also tips-

If you are being hounded ..earn a colony somehow and head for the rim. One can rebuild the empire out there. You don't have to keep your homeworld to stay "alive".

There is no autosave! The best thing to do is to save at the beginning of each era, and that way you can go back if you're not happy with how things are working out.

Save as soon as you enter the space stage, particularly if its your first time playing it.

I'm in the process of writing a guide/faq. It's being updated twice a day at this stage as I add more and more to it. Has cheats, cell and creature stage now, and I'll be adding tribal shortly. I'm also waiting for it to clear the queue at GameFAQ's.
http://arr.sublimesims.net/files/spore_guide_skadi.txt 

Edit: It's been accepted at GameFAQ's.

Thank you. They're kind of cute the first time, but since I've got three worlds in play at the moment (one each of omnivore, herbivore and carnivore) they were getting old. I don't need to see the 'find a mate' animation that many times. Seriously. (And to think I was wondering how to turn the cinematics back on in the Sims... No more.)

Other minor irritants:
Some of my pre-created creatures don't show up as playable, but I have encountered them on other planets during the space stage. Though it may just be that they're 'unevolved', and I was trying to start one at space level. But there's not much point in starting later anyway, as playing through earlier stages grants special abilities.
Those little easter-egg achievementy things? ("Yay, you didn't attack anyone as a cell!", and so on) Apparently to view your achievements you need to log in. (Badges earned in space mode are properly in-game, at least.)

I'm considering buying this one, just because the achievements thing bugs me. Those are my only issues, so far.

Edit: Well, I found my missing creatures. About a quarter of them went to the 'Downloads' menu, which was where I looked first, and the rest went to 'Everything'. Which is also filled with the 1.6k Maxis creations. I don't know why, and I wish they'd gone to 'My Creations' in the first place, but at least I found them.

According to the manual, the achievements are stored on the servers - so if you don't log in, I don't think it remembers.

I'm kind of stuck in the Space section right now.  I had worked my way up to about 2.5 planets (the 0.5 being a T2), and the Deer People declared unprovoked war.  Since then they're constantly huge war fleets against my worlds, and I really don't have time to do much else other than defend and occasionally rebuild some of what they've destroyed.  I did try making a raid of my own, but I ran out of energy before I could take out even one enemy city.

 - Gus

Okay, would someone please explain to me what I'm doing wrong?

I made it to the tribal stage. My creatures are peaceful herbivores and I tried to make friends with other tribes. I tried to communicate with them, but the game said I should play an instrument to them. Okay, so I look for one. I've got one instrument. I make a few of my creatures take the instruments and go with their leader to the other tribe's area. I click other tribe members with the leader and my creatures start playing. A meter comes up but it doesn't change. The game says I can press some buttons to make the performance better. Finally I find the buttons and when I press them, the game says I can only use that abillity during a performance. Result? Nothing happens. I forget about the whole thing and go gather food. Soon the other tribe becomes my enemy. They start attacking me. So I figure I'll attack them, whipe them out and proceed that way. I have my creatures take torches and go to the other tribe's area, again. I have no option to attack them, only to give gifts. But not to worry, they attack me. After a long fight and a lot of respawning, the enemy tribe's population is zero. What happens next? Nothing. I still have an option to give them gifts. I figure I'll attack other tribes as well, maybe I'll "win" when they're all defeated. But the tribe I just killed starts respawning. During all this my tribe hasn't evolved even one bit. Advice, anyone?

Ok. First off, make sure you have your warring/social group(s) selected as a group. They went over this in the game tips. Click and drag a box around the creatures you want to be part of the group. Then direct actions.

1. Warring

• Weapons help. If you don't have any yet, I'd hold off on attacking. Give them a gift to calm them down (you've found the option) for now. Wait to kill/befriend them until you are able.
• Torches are only good for attacking the buildings. You don't want to do this until you've killed the tribe members.
• Yay, you have weapons. To attack, choose combat stance by clicking on that red button in the middle section of your controls bar. Then wrong-click on opposing tribe members, not the buildings, to attack.
• Kill members (including any babies). Then kill the tribal hut.

2. Socials

• Everyone is equipped with an instrument. That's great. Make sure you have your group selected as a group, which I suspect you don't.
• With social stance clicked, wrong-click on an opposing tribe member. Everyone will take their place.
• If you have your group properly selected, you'll hear the beat start and a second of silence.
• The opposing tribe will hold up placards showing what they want. Give it to them by pressing the corresponding button (look at social stance control area; it will turn green when available).
• If you don't have the right instrument, play what you have. You can screw up once or twice, usually, and still be successful.
• Do not leave this group while you are doing a performance. The performance will stall and you will have to move the group and restart!

*Wrong-click means clicking with the right mouse button. My lefts and rights get confused, so...yeah.

I found having more than one member playing the same instrument helps.  I had 2 wooden horns, 2 digraridoos, 2 marachas and I found it a lot easier to impress them when on previous attempts kept failing.

Two on an instrument is definitely ideal. From my experience with Tribal (I've ran it through four times now), you're better off having two players for each of two instruments than only one player for all three.

The clothes in tribal add to your score. If you are going out to impress dress accordingly. There is a Social mask (I usually use it as shoulder cover).. wile you are there pick up the gathering backpack and put it on your guys somewhere. It helps with the whole food collection.

If you are a carnivore hunting a bunch of critters as a tribe works well. If you can pull it off .. the epic monsters have plenty of meat on them. Either way stock up on the foods before deciding what to do about your neighbors. If they get angry, click the green social button to get the social options and wander over and right click their food mat. There you go , insta neutral.

For your first social when you have one instrument, and possibly a low social score with clothes, I recommend going with three tribal members with your one instrument. Easiest way to select is to click them one by one on the side menu, you hold down shift or cntrl and they will stay in a "group" for you. This allows you to choose them based on task, leaving say one or two gathering food.

I cannot stress domesticating enough. It should be the first thing you do. When you get to the last two tribes to befriend/remove you may not even need food gathering if you have collected the eggs from your domesticated animals.
You can have three different animals domesticated, if for some reason they die capture a new one. You must have 15 food , but it only costs 10 to lure them into slavery. (this might be a factor of easy/normal I have played both ways but I cannot remember if normal is 15food or not)

My tribal phase starts as such. I send shaman guy to go befriend first domestic animal. I set the other two gathering/killing/fishing depending on what kind of creature they are and where I want to take them. Shaman returns with his first slave, I promptly send him out gathering food as well.  Now I play the waiting game to get enough to pop out an egg , and the Shaman to return. This "should" leave me with just enough to get another animal. The second slave returns around the same time as the new egg grows up, the other two return with food baskets and I should be able to get the third animal. One more brief round , and the first other tribe has shown up, I have three animals now producing eggs. I take one gatherer and stick them on get eggs duty and grab three guys and my shaman heading to the "new" people. I equip them with a weapon/instrument depending on what I am doing and get them dressed for the occasion.

After this it is a matter of keeping that egg basket empty, and handling the tribes as they show up in turn. I often have the shaman gift aggressive tribes on the way home from the first win as they are triggered then.

....
In a related way here is something I am sure you will all be curious about when you hit space.
If you play as three or four of the same color trait, you will end up with one of these:
Green: Shaman
Blue: Trader
Red: Warrior

If you play as half and half, you will end up this way:
Green and Blue: Diplomat
Green and Red: Zealot
Blue and Red: Scientist

If you play as all colors at least once, depending on which one you played twice:
Green: Ecologist
Blue: Bard
Red: Knight

Bard:             Soothing Song - Calming effect on other races
Ecologist:    Safari Vacuum - Abduct multiple animals from planet
Zealot:    Fanatical Frenzy - Take over a Planet Religiously
Diplomat:    Static Cling - Stun all ships and turrets on a planet
Scientist:    Graviton Wave - Destroy all structures on a planet
Trader:    Cash Infusion - Buy any planet you're trading with
Shaman:    Return Ticket - Instantly return to your home system
Warrior:    Raider Rally - Flood an enemy planet with pirates
Knight:    Summon Mini-U - Warp in a friendly spaceship to help
Wanderer:    None - Default trait if you start in the Space game

I got to the space stage, but I couldn't leave the planet or save.  I was stuck.  I was forced to quit the game without saving and now I am back at civ stage. I've been reading on some other sites that this is a bug or glitch with the game.  Anyone else have this problem or know what the solution is?

Well you may not need to domesticate if you enter the tribal stage with pack members.. they become your pets. :D

Did anyone notice a space ship in the second stage? I mean, I was playing the second stage and I was busy fighting an enemy and only had 2 more to go, when suddenly the shadow of an (alien)-space ship was visible on the ground. It shot (or abduct...) 1 enemy (and it got killed). The ship a few more minutes and then left. Next thing I did was kill the last 1 of the enemy, but the game still seems to think there is 1 more enemy (the message top left said somthing simular to: 'destroy 1 more of the xxxxx  to get ??dna points'), but the map shows them as extinguished :-\.

To problem is that I forgot to take pictures, but I found a (bad) youtube video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVRwzGVdmpY (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVRwzGVdmpY&feature=related)

I saw spaceships multiple times in the Creature stage.  When I saw it I thought it was some sort of easter egg, since Maxis has a thing for alien abductions (Sim City, Sims 2).  It wasn't until I hit Space that I realized they were just showing off normal gameplay... from the victim's point of view.

 - Gus

Did you play through the "testing" part? I couldn't quit or save the game until I had gone through the testing of ship movement and abducting animals.

After getting to the space stage, I loved the meta in the game, as throughout the creature and tribal stages I had come across space ships abducting other creatures and was wondering what they were doing  :D

I love the early stage UFO visitors, the normal game play, but from the other side. Before I got to the space stage, I witnessed a couple of abductions and thought, gee, that looks cool. Never really thinking that I'd get to do that. I've got two races at the space stage, and I think I've got the hang of this terraforming business. (I transfomed a lava-world by my home system's sun into a T3, woo.)

The biggest time-saver I found when it comes to terraforming: You're given 10 each of three plants and three animals during the quest your home city gives you. (If you don't have them after going through the quest dialog, check your cargo bay has at least 6 spaces and try again.) You really only need to put one of each on the planet, it'll fill in the rest. That leaves 9 more of each, for 9 other planets. (Also, you can take as many plants/animals from worlds as you like, they'll repopulate.) Also, plants can be 'dropped', they'll be fine. Zip them out there. (So long as you're over land.) Animals can't, you need to be more careful when beaming them down. (When I beam something up - spice crates, etc - from within city limits, I inevitably beam up a few citizens. I just chuck them out. Heh.)

There seems to be a bug during the tutorial on space flight. Make sure when you first leave the world to plant your first colony that when you return you answer the comm before zooming into the planet.

You can't save during the space tutorial either. I have gotten in the habit of saving at the end of Civ stage for two reasons. Sometimes my neighbors are a PITA and I need to rethink what I was doing. The other is to have a recent save location due to the no saving for a small bit at the start of space.

Tips from elsewhere-
Many are stating don't waste that colony on the rock they try and make you use it on. Once you have done the tutorials a few times you have the gist of how to handle it, terraforming your moon is one of the easiest things to do. It also provides you with a quick one two of spice collection. Usually your moon has a different spice, thus buys your homeworld spice at a reasonably high price and can be reversed for the same effect.

Carry a colony in your ship at all times when possible. You never know when you will find Pink or Purple spice.. you can always come back later to make the colony viable.

It wasn't showing me any tutorials or missions at all.  There was just nothing, I was stuck, and couldn't save.  I've been having this problem where I have to remember to save the game before I click to go to the next stage, then quit the game and restart it because otherwise upon entry to the next stage my game and the game camera is all buggy and glitched and nothings working the way it's suppose to.  It's starting to piss me off.

I did have a question. Can you play windowed mode? Is it the same as TS2?

Yeah you just need the -w on the shortcut.

That's what I figured.

Keep a tally of what spices are being sold, too. If you find spice for a reasonable price (you can take a bit of a risk and spend up to maybe $3k), buy one. Then see what other races are paying for it. I wish I'd paid attention to that earlier. I found the closest neighbor empire to the Dodoki, which loved me on sight, was charging $2k for blue spice. My empire pays $21k for it. Short stints for big profit. I've been doing spice runs and the odd mission or two to keep the two military empires off my ass until I can afford to buy out two star systems that are ripe and ready.

Almost every creature stage I've played through has featured a UFO as well as a meteorite storm. Some tribals have had UFOs as well. Actually, last night, the Dodoki were asked by another race to abduct a Bobony (shiny buttocks creature) from a tribe...on the world I play them on!

Terraforming...meh. I'm finding money to be a concern mostly because of the two races that are constantly extorting me (sometimes I forget who I'm talking to and accidentally answer the message). I don't have money for the tools. I do throw the paints around a lot, making seas purple just because I can.

I did not realize how very big the space stage was until last night. I scrolled way, way out and saw how little space I'd been covering compared to how much was out there.

If you press Alt-Enter you can switch quickly between windowed mode and full screen.

Ok, so, WTF?

I started out as a predator, flirted with omnivore in cell stage but didn't like it much. Ended up a carnivore in creatures, ate a bunch of creatures. Ended up as an aggressive tribe, slaughtered my enemies. Ended up as a military civilization. I destroyed all cities except for one - I did convert one city. Furthermore, I allied with one nation; near the end they spooked at how big I was, so I paid them off to be my friends and said I'd ally with them, winning the planet. This is after militarily killing all but their three cities and the one I converted. The arrow firmly points to Military, near the Religous end.

So why did it brand me Economic up at the top?!

It still made me a warrior but now my bar of red is interrupted by blue... surely 16k bribes isn't enough to swing me that hard, is it? Without moving the arrow in the timeline?

Yaaaaa! Come home to find my download finally done!  Now I can find out what the hell this game is all about. :)

Well.. there is no benefit from being 3red or 4 red- they both equal warrior.
It "should" have moved your arrow on things that were shifting you in your history. You can press T at anytime to see the history, even if you are at completed. (useful in say creature phase where you may be a few kills or dances from where you want to be)

I have never had a shift of philosophy in Civ stage, but then I haven't really tried.  I find it much easier to swing major arcs in creature or tribal. (say going from green to red then back again before civ)

If it changed you over with no hint of what was doing so in the history that is rather odd behavior.

....

Shiny Buttocks Creature! I should so nab that and put it in my game.
Anyone want a few of my silly guys? I seem to have a thing for monsters.


Trick with Terraforming... find a science philosophy group, befriend, trade often for the tools. Science and Spode folk are all about terraforming.

WARNING -SPODE (religious) hate it when you find artifacts. Go fig.. To avoid war with them , well leave artifacts where they are, tools (which you will find) don't bug em. It stinks as those sets can be a nice chunk of change but hey trading some pink spice will make you feel better over loosing them.

(http://i533.photobucket.com/albums/ee334/zazazuspore/Creatures/Bobony.png)
Bobony

(http://i533.photobucket.com/albums/ee334/zazazuspore/Creatures/Dodie.png)
Dodie (I call the race Dodoki)

(http://i533.photobucket.com/albums/ee334/zazazuspore/Creatures/Macard.png)
Macard

(http://i533.photobucket.com/albums/ee334/zazazuspore/Creatures/Lillo.png)
Lillo


Spode schmode. The two empires who alternately love and hate me are Spode followers. Unfortunately, both have a lot of star systems.

Sure! Always up for more, filling the game out and such.

I've been uploading more things to my photobucket every couple of days myself, I've got two folders: One pre-Spore (http://s131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/Spore/) (all creature creator) and one post-Spore (http://s131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/Spore/More/) that also has things like buildings and vehicles.

A favourite from the latter is this fellow here: (He's just got a randomly generated name, Kwarisses, which I later changed to Kwarissus for no real reason.)

(http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/Spore/More/Kwarisses.png)
('Just crawled out of the ooze' version.)

(http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/Spore/More/Kwarissus.png)
('Final' version, pre-tribal.)

Well, seeing as we're sharing, here are my creations so far:

DOOM:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v209/Solowren/DOOM.png)

Divinia, a dragony-guy with six appendages. KILLING MACHINE:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v209/Solowren/Divinia.png)

Fuzzastripeman, my first run through the creator:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v209/Solowren/Fuzzastripeman.png)

And my favorite, Griffikin:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v209/Solowren/Griffikin.png)

ETA: Zazazu, you'd said before that it's possible to get creatures off of the Sporepedia without logging in. Which .png do I grab? I can't get the creatures to show up in game.

Never mind. :D

Motion Sickness update - Windowed mode helps a lot, for some reason. I've made it to tribal stage...now I've realised that the game is actually kind of boring. So, all that effort to get it working for me and I don't think I can be bothered completing Civilisation stage *shrugs*. I guess I'd like to ask those who've played it through, does it get any more exciting?

Yes. Space stage is what it's all about.

I've hit civilization stage on both the planets I'm playing, and I must admit the fire inside me for Spore is dying. I'm making myself stick it out so I can get to space stage, though. :D That's all #grah talks about anymore.

Civ stage sucks donkey balls. Thankfully you only have to play it half way through. Next time, I'm cheating it. Blech.

Space can get repetitive if you are following a set path...only going for alliances, for terraforming, etc. But there are a lot of options as to how you can approach the goals your empire gives you.

I find taking on missions from other empires can be fun too, at least it gives some more variety that way. I have barely scratched the surface though, and haven't had time to play in a while, so I look forward to playing it again when I can. :P

Seriously. I find tribal and civilisation to be a bit of a drag, civilisation is a snap if you're economically based (finish tribal in blue), just keep trading and buying everyone else out, but it's hardly exciting. But, space? Totally worth it.

I found creature and tribal quite dull, but civ was fun; and cell and space are definitely a blast.

Creature is my favorite. :] You get to control the little dude! And make him fly and kill things!

Also, I just downloaded a shitload of pokemon creatures from the Sporepedia. This one guy make a bunch. The game tells me Charmander is wandering around somewhere on my herbivore's planet.

Just wanted to let everyone know.  According to this online article (don't know how reliable this information is) if you are using a no-cd crack you can install Spore as many times as you want.  This suggests that a crack bypasses the 3 install limitation.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/09/10/spore-seeds-rootkit

Umm, simple reading here will indicate that using the no-cd.exe means just that, and also means you don't get SecuROM on your system. This is not news.  :P

I was just passing this information on, as people were asking about this earlier in the week.  Of course I knew that you don't get SecuROM on your system with a crack, but there has still been some uncertainty whether or not using a crack would specifically bypass the 3 install limit and allow you to reinstall as many times as you want. 

With the no-cd, you don't have to activate your game. It's the activation that locks up after three installs, far as I've heard.

I also like it because I never know what I'm going to end up with when I start creature. I randomize the body shape, then add parts as I get them. The first foot type I get determines what row of feet are available to him, in my mind. Same with hands, eyes, etc.

Here's my stuff from the creature creator.

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ellatrue/Spore/

Highlights:

Landshark:
(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ellatrue/Spore/Landshark.png)

Dopefish:
(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ellatrue/Spore/Green%20Dopefish.png)

Lawliphant:
(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ellatrue/Spore/Lawliphant.png)

(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ellatrue/Spore/Purple%20Dopefish.png)

(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ellatrue/Spore/Darwish.png)

(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ellatrue/Spore/Sporkle.png)



I enjoy making fish with legs. There's also a peen monster, but if you are male, I recommend you do not download. It is rather disturbing in the game. The lawliphant is a flying elephant, covered in flowers, with butterfly wings for ears. It runs backwards on three legs and farts glowing balls of doom for a spit attack.

The Lawliphant reminds me of the sushi creations (http://www.spore.com/sporepedia#qry=ftr-creature%3Asast-500005660663%3Apg-100%3Aview-featured) I downloaded from Bernoully. I have a couple of backwards creatures. One is a very thin snail, the other is this three-legged tufted thing. Both were accidentally backwards.

I don't know if I got a bad copy, but I've had nothing but problems -- graphic glitches, random crashes, even had my tribal leader constantly lock up and not be able to even feed himself.  Once I couldn't find him, and when I clicked on his avatar he was floating in space above the planet. :P

That said, I'm not so much impressed with Sprore.  I was never a fan of SimCities, and while I used to play Age of Empires, I'm over that phase :).  I may give Spore just enough of a try to see if the space stage really does salvage it, but so far, I'm more likely to just delete it from my disk...

My favourite stage is the Creature stage. My creatures are herbivores (sometimes omnivores) who mainly socialise, and the social actions are just too adorable.

Next is Space, followed by Cell. Space is fun because it lasts long, the missions are complex and space travelling is great. I absolutely loathe the raids though. My homeworld overlord is so whiny. Cell is great because NOM NOM NOMing other creatures and plants is fun, but it's too short-lived.

Next is Tribal, which is a little tedious if you've just started learning how to play it, then it gets a little too easy (especially if you're a friendly herbivore).

The WORST has to be Civilisation stage. What the HELL were they thinking. Zzzzzzzzzzzz.

There's actually an ingame option under settings for windowed mode, too.


Another easy method (once you have airplanes and at least one military city) is to forget about land vehicles and boats and instead make a huge swarm of airplanes. You can knock out even a heavily armed city pretty quickly with minimal losses and every city you take via military means can be turned into a military city and help grow your swarm. I'll have to try the economic method though, I haven't bothered with any peaceful attempts at the civ stage.

Well if you are really desperate to quickly take over cities , which at first I thought was hilarious, you can use the ICBM bomb but it levels the houses etc  and you cant rebuild on them. 

The religious take-over is nothing short of awesome, though.

(http://i533.photobucket.com/albums/ee334/zazazuspore/Spore_2008-09-07_14-56-04.png)

I present to you, my finest Splotch creation.
(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/spore/fwoggie.jpg)
This is Fwoggie. He is cute and harmless. He is not at ALL a vicious eatbeast. Notice his total lack of any apparent weaponry.

The real question is "Can you use the no-cd AND activate online without having securom installed?"

I'm thinking about buying it so I can share creations with my sister and her kids, but I don't want all that extra "security feature" shit on my system.  Especially since I just finally cleaned the last remnants from before I became an enlightened gamer.

Get the expansion as well. SMAC is one of the bestest games evar.

Yes, because you'll be activating a legitimate serial number if you buy it.

Okay, where's it hidden?

I know it's still warrior, but I was quite proud of my row of all red. Sometimes I think I'm slightly OCD the way I like things to match up perfectly like that.

It did move the arrow in response to my actions, but the arrow was still firmly in the red zone when I ended - but then, it didn't move for my bribe at all. Maybe it secretly counted that as economic and didn't show it? I never purchased a city, which is what I figure would swing me.

Songie
(http://i533.photobucket.com/albums/ee334/zazazuspore/Creatures/Songie.png)

The creature is kind of iridescent in-game. His fin-things are actually attached to legs, so they wiggle when he dances. He prefers to use the central grasper. Went through creature stage with a band of rogue creatures, which made socializing a snap. In tribal, he decorated his tail with miniature masks. I got the race through civ as economic, which I definitely prefer to religious.

One of the epic creatures inadvertently helped me out in tribal stage. A huge damonet (the creature I used in the first post of this thread) attacked a new tribe and killed four members before he was done in. He made it a really easy conquest.

Yeah, that's the first thing I thought.  :D

I had tons of graphical glitches too, but I updated my graphics drivers and all the problems went away, so I guess that was what caused it. *Shrug* Never had the tribal leader issues though.

You put everything inside the mouth, didn't you?

If the mouth is big enough to contain a number of weapons, then technically, it is a giant maw.

Y'all know me too well, I see. This is Fwoggie's stat card.
(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/spore/fwoggie-stat.jpg)

No, the weapons are not hiding in the back.
(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/spore/fwoggie-back.jpg)
Now you can haz Fwoggie! (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/spore/Fwoggie.png)

It has to be the mouth. Look at the size of that thing!

Actually, I've been hiding things myself. Case in point, Ockie:
(http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/Spore/Ockie.png)
All of his attack stats are 4 or 5. (I suspect they were all 5s in the pre-Spore creature creator) Also, it's not just things hidden under his hat, his hat is also a weapon. (A spitter, turned around)

Here's his deadlier cousin, Octagor:
(http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/Spore/Screenshots/Octagor.jpg)
Appearance-wise, he's just had a change of paint job. However, he now has 5s for the socials that don't require hands or feet, and has 5s for all styles of combat.
Right-click, save as (http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/Spore/More/Octagor.png) to get an Octagor of your very own.

I finished my first Space game on Normal, went to the Core after "winning," found Earth, etc.

I started a new game on Hard.  Cell stage wasn't a big deal.  Creature stage is smashing me flat.  I'm about midway through, and everything has more HP than me, and can kill me in a one-one-one fight unless I kite.  And it's never one-on-one, everyone brings at least one pal.  I can have 2 sidekicks... but the Charm game is complete failure every time I try.  I'm determined to be a Carnivore, but this sure would have been a lot easier with the Omnivore's "summon posse" ability.  "Scare stuff away" isn't that useful, because it scares my target away too.

I also ran into my first penis creature.  I'm quite grateful for the Ban command.

 - Gus

On Normal I always get stuck next to the people who attack me because I don't believe in Sporn or whatever.  I tried to escape into a galaxy long ago and far away, but then the fuckers followed me.  Dunno how, I was hundreds of pcs away from them.  Their name?  The Troggs.  :P

I love the music.  It are win.

Did they play "Wild Thing"?

Yes. Oddly appropriate, innit?

Heh, that's what nukes are for. Banning, pssh. I've never played on anything *BUT* Hard. If it's anything like the Sims difficulties from Castaways, "Hard" is the "real game" with the settings played as-is instead of a hidden fudge factor that makes everything 16x easier.

If you want HARD, instead of evolving, devolve. Play as a limbless, eyeless, mustachioed slug, and make it to the Civ stage (where it ceases to matter that you are a blind, limbless slug). On HARD, of course.

Yea, I just saw that ATI has new drivers up, so I'm downloading them now.  My bunch was in early Civ stage when it crashed Friday night, but when I went back in to play them last night, they were back in the middle of Tribal.  And I *know* I saved when they completed tribal before going to Civ, and then saved again right after their first city formed, but the game completely ignored those saves.  So I just said the hell with it, and deleted their planet (that'll show 'em :)).  Did get a pic of the tribal leader floating in space first, though.

(http://www.speakeasy.net/~jsalemi/TL_in_space.jpg)

FYI, there's an article in today's Washington Post about the controversy and user reactions over EAxis' DRM. He mentioned that someone has already made a creature called "Ea's DRM Policy" that has its head stuck firmly up its ass.  You can find it quite easily over on the Spore site, and in case it disappears, here's the .png for your viewing and game-adding-to pleasure:

(http://www.speakeasy.net/~jsalemi/DRM Policy.png)

I see your first creature looks similar in nature to mine. My new thing is trying to make them cute as opposed to monstrous, but no less deadly! See: Fwoggie.

LOL. That looks like a turkey without it's feathers. Sort of fitting don't you think?

Yea, The Horatio (innocuous name for a deadly killer :)) kinda ended up looking like alligators on two legs -- not sure if I did that intentionally, but there you go.

I'm redownloading now, in case I got a corrupted copy the first time -- the torrents are running much faster, so it shouldn't take me a week to get it this time.

Bah I tend to delete the things I am not happy with. Should stop doing that.

(http://img60.imageshack.us/img60/3972/chailesus7.png)

(http://img60.imageshack.us/img60/3775/marlebw4.png) (http://imageshack.us)


............................
Edit

HAY GRUMPY GUS...
Mod instructions.
http://www.gamingsteve.com/blab/index.php?PHPSESSID=1d8971f37824705e07b1f2a11a510878&topic=14425.0

That being the case, have you played as a carnivore?  If so, how did you manage it?  Seriously, I'd love to see some tips.

I did finish Creature as a predator.  No choice really, because no matter what parts I equipped, I never managed more than 25% on the charm bar.  Or is that 50%, since half way is success?  In any case, even with perfect mimcry and +5 socials they weren't impressed.

I did not, however, feel like I did it well.  Past a certain point, I lured each target back to the nest where I was invulnerable, and incidentally had a bunch of back up.  That worked because you get a minimum of +10 DNA for each kill, even if you don't get credit for the final kill for the quest.  That only ended when I reached the end brain stage, where you're eligible to advance to Tribal.  At that point I suddenly had twice the hit points of anything around, so I went around slaughtering things so I could get the DNA and parts I wanted to get my creature to where I wanted it for aesthetic reasons.

Tribal and Civ weren't difficult.  Tribal was dead easy, though I discovered that if you're deep in the red zone, getting alliances with 4 out of 5 villages will still make you Industrious instead of Friendly.  Turns out that killing enemy raiders counts against you being friendly, hah.  Civ was mildly challenging, since I had to pay off my neighbors repeatdly before I could buy a military city.  I really wanted to buy a religious city to try that out, but they all got wiped out before I could buy one.

Anyway, I'd like to see some definite ideas on how to really be a predator in Tribal / Hard.  I do wonder if part of the problem is that so many creatures were built in the editor, rather than with the much more limited DNA budget of an evolved creature.

 - Gus

Spode. Damn, I wish it was Sporn. That would be hilarious.

I have three races in space right now, and each run is easier than the next not necessarily because of my learnings, but because of my neighbors. First run had to be abandoned because I was surrounded by militaristic Spode followers who wanted my blood before I'd gotten a single upgrade. Second run is still ongoing and decent...two Spode empires are now firmly ambivalent to me. I have a decent number of allies and am flitting about for giggles. Third run, even the Spode worshippers like me pretty easily. I even took a risk and started allying early. So far, so good...I have 20 allied empires and no issues.

I'm a little disappointed that you can't use terraforming tools on planets with saved games.

Had a couple planets not render on approach, but be fine once I was on the surface. Then I had my first crash. Boo.

Woo, I just reached the center of the galaxy last night. That was hard. Ended up having to quickly jump from hostile system to hostile system to make it. Died twice. (Thankfully respawned at a nearby colony instead of my home colony, that would have been painful making that long trip again.)

If anyone has any tips on how to reach the next place (if you've hit the center you'll know what I mean), PM me. (I do have some idea regarding the general area, but it is a much larger area to search than 'the center of the galaxy', and with no helpful arrow...)

I went through a wormhole and now I'm nearly at the center, and probably too soon (I'm only at The Legendary). I decided my colonies can go fuck themselves, the whiny bastards. Go make another ship and fight off your own pirates.

If there's a way to get to the center without ignoring your whiny colonies, I certainly haven't found it. (Ungrateful bastards. Do I have to do everything around here? Let the damned ecology collapse, I can repopulate it later. Spice raid? Let 'em have it, I won't be back before the storage space runs out, so I won't miss it.)

It's even worse when it's other colonies. Enemies calling to extort you, allies calling for help, or just to give you a random $10k (like you can even buy anything with that) etc.

I like cell stage. Two options: eat, and attack. Simple. Space is awesome, but occasionally annoying.

The ecology collapses seem to be prevented entirely if you install the bioprotectors on them. Pirate raids are basically irrelevant because pirates don't destroy anything and besides, if you have the uberturrets on maxed out colonies, the only thing you'd see if you went there is bits of destroyed pirate raining from the sky as you arrive anyway.

Word on the street is that the center of the galaxy reward is really, really lame. You have been warned. If you thought discovering the Precursors had turned into cows was lame, this is both DESPERATELY LAME and EXTREMELY UNFUNNY.

Yeah. So.


Don't go to the center just because you think it's super-neat that a wormhole deposited you right outside of Grox territory. They killed me. Then they followed my ass home and killed me more, and wouldn't leave my homeworlds be for a moment. It was bloody, and horribly sad. I did hit 5 mil, though, just by buying up spice whenever I saw it priced under 3k and selling whenever I saw it above 10k.

I've been to the center of the galaxy.  That's what I did with my Normal game after I'd "won" by getting the top title.  I'm glad I did it, because I now have the 42 achievement and I've seen the video, but no way would I do that again.  It's a huge hassle, particularly since there are dead ends that aren't really apparent.  Running from Grox over and over again in order to build resupply colonies just isn't fun.

The reward video is meant to be funny, but it's not.  It's not quite as bad as the end of Starflight 2, but it's just really weak writing.  The end reward is sort-of powerful, but by the time you get it, you don't care.  It doesn't do anything you can't do normally, it just does it with a little less effort.

I managed to figure out what I was doing wrong in Hard / Creature.

- Before you advance, it's actually pretty easy to kill stuff.
- You need flunkies in order to deal with combat once you advance.
- You can recruit flunkies from your own race.   I didnt' know that.
- When recruiting, any nearby creatures of the same species contribute to the opposing progress bar, just like your flunkies do.  So it's really important to recruit critters, either of your race or another, well away from the crowd.
- Since they rarely oblige, you can shove them until they're isolated.
- If you have 2-3 flunkies, you can tackle stuff that's hard, even small groups.  You'd think I'd know that from Normal, but it was pretty easy to breeze through on Normal.

On Normal, you can be completely half-assed about recruiting and succeed.  On Hard, you actually have to put some effort into it, which is while I failed so miserably the first time I tried Hard / Creature.  The other thing I did this time was say "screw trying push through the second nest."  The stuff around the first nest is a lot easier, and being able to evolve isn't that big an advantage.  I had a couple of nests of 60 HP always-hostiles between me and the second nest, and I was OK dying against them as long as I took one of them down.  It meant I was making progress.  By the time I managed to get to the second nest, I'd actually completed the stage entirely, and I had something like 700 unspent DNA.

One odd thing is that if you eat a lot of meat as a cell, and you pick up the Omnivore proboscis, you can be an omnivore as long as you don't throw away the proboscis.  The upgrade mouths are all carnivores, but surprisingly it was OK relying on stuff like Charge and Strike instead of the usual Bite.  I'm not sure what would have happened if I'd equipped two different mouths.

IMHO in the Civ stage, Economic attack > Military > Religious, now that I've done all of them.  Religion gives you the city with no damage, but the vehicles are really weak.  I do like the holographic preachers, though.

 - Gus

Yes. I pretty much always finish creature as a Predator. First, the perk is better. "Prime Specimen" is USEFUL as it makes your entire military force in the space stage (namely, YOU and YOU ALONE) about 25% more powerful. So are the bombs in the Tribal and Civ stages. It is much better than, say, the Green perks. as it is trivially easy to improve neighbor relations in Tribal and the "reduces likelyhood of colony revolt" in the space stage...well, let's just say I have NEVER, EVER, even HEARD of a colony revolt. Reducing a 0% chance event does not mean anything!

As for tips, it's simple. Kill it and eat it! FOR THE HORDE! It's easy to charm the first few creatures when you start since you can just sing at them and they don't try to be buttwipes and do things you can't, but pretty soon they start being really annoying about it.

Numbers improve things. Having more creatures in your pack and less in theirs helps. Babies are more easily impressed than adult and Alphas. They are also very tasty. Mmm. Babies.

If you want to switch to friendly while deep in the red zone, giving gifts (Regardless of final outcome) makes you friendlier. Allying a tribe does the same. To jump up your friendly meter, attack a tribe that you just gave a gift to. Then when they get mad at you again, give them another one. Rinse, repeat.

As an economic civ, it is crucial that your first vehicle emphasize SPEED ABOVE ALL ELSE. Forget entirely about armor (you don't have weapons anyway, so who cares?), and go for SPEED, so you can raid those remaining tribal villages and claim the spice before they can. This will choke their expansion and allow you to buy out a military or religious civ, and thus have some means of defending yourself.

Predator is easy! Just look at Fwoggie. I exterminated literally every other creature I could find on the map and solo'ed an epic with Fwoggie (all the packmembers died instantly without doing any real damage, due to their poor tactics). Points to keep in mind: The parts you tend to get when you loot Alphas and Bones are dependent on what parts you have installed: The game tends to favor unlocking better versions of your existing parts as an apparent nod to the evolution thing.

Anyway, Hard is the ONLY way to play. Accept no Kewian-based substitutes! Your problem is that you were spoiled by playing anything other than Hard. When *I* first started playing, I picked Hard out of the gate, so I'm used to this.

I appreciate the detailed reply, even if I did figure out a good bit on my own.

I totally agree about "Prime Specimen."  I feel the same way about Power Monger, which the game current says increases weapon damage, rather than energy capacity.  The Green and Blue perks are discounts, but I can always get money.

I'm curious about soloing an epic, even with level 5 attacks in all four categories.  The advice I've read is to kite it, since they tend to kill just about everything with one hit.  That might not be true if you're post-end phase, and have 100+ HP, but I have my doubts about spending any time toe-to-toe with one.

I agree about Hard.  Now that I've run through 4 of the 5 stages on Hard a couple of times, I can't see doing it again on Normal, ever.

 - Gus

Recruiting a rogue creature can be fantastic, too. I almost got Fwoggie on my side last run through last night (straight blue), but instead ended up with one of my own race and two carnivore rogues. The rogues generally have high stats and fantastic HP, so you can pretty much sic them on a nest by themselves. They help exponentially with socials.

Ditto that. I love econ just for the fact that as long as you are on top of it and prioritize vehicles first, you can dominate your continent by taking all geysers before other cities appear. Then, buying out the ones that do appear cost me only $4k as they had no resources. After that, I was rolling in it and taking over the other cities was simple. I just bombarded them with four or five planes at once trading, hitting with an advertising blitz when available.

I'm still playing on Easy, but we know I suck. I want to hit the end goal, then play through Normal and then through Hard. I definitely feel like I can handle cell-civ on Hard, but not space.

Ok, I installed Spore.  I haven't run the game yet because I haven't put the no-cd patch in yet.  I actually still have SecuROM from BV, which I haven't had time to remove yet either.  But, just to clarify...

Can you play the game online without activating it?  OR... does going online, in effect, "activate" the game (or rather... does it require you to "activate" the game in order to go online)?

I'm a bit confused about this activation limitation thing.  I haven't been keeping up with the happenings and all, but from what I vaguely recall, I think Hellyes said they were able to go online fine with a no-cd.  But, I'm confused as to whether the no-cd crack bypasses activation altogether... meaning you can run the game and go online, all without having to activate?

Or, it just lets you run the game locally/offline without activation.  And... the only way to get online, is to activate, regardless of whether you use the no-cd crack or not?


Ste


PS.  I also saw some rumblings about Sporn and servers and crap being disabled and what not.  Previously, I had the Spore Creature Creator installed.  When I first played around with it, I'm pretty sure I was able to see the 30 EAxis made creatures, and I think I was able to see random peeps creatures too.  But recently, just before I installed the full game, I went into the Creature Creator and I could only see my single creation and the 30 Maxis ones.  I tried to look through the settings/options, and I didn't see anything related to privacy or what not, that would prevent me from seeing other people's stuff.  I thought the whole point of the game was that you should be able to see other people's creations and download them. 

Was this recently changed?  Or is this just something isolated to the creature creator?  Or possibly isolated to my PC/install?  And is there some setting that I would have to change in order to see other player's custom created content?

Ste I'm also having trouble seeing other people's creatures that I've downloaded.  I opened up the sporepedia in game, dragged the .png to the window.  It shuffled the thumbnails like it was adding them, but I can't find them back in game now.  Where did they go?  when I try to sort them by creator, I get nada.  sorting by name gets only those few maxis ones.  It shows on the left side that there are some thousands of creatures, but I can only see a handful.

I don't even mean ones that have been downloaded.  I didn't download anything yet.  I thought you were supposed to be able to access other people's content in game.  In the Creature Creator, when you created stuff, you could start off by building from scratch, or choosing something that's already been built.  I could have sworn I used to be able to see other people's stuff under the "Community" part (or whatevs it's called).  But last week, all I could see was just the 30 pre-made EAxis content.

Are we supposed to go through a website then?  I either imagined that I could see other people's stuff, or something changed on the server side.  As I am pretty sure that I haven't adjusted any of the options since I last created that single creature I made, which was like during the first week the creature creator came out.  ???

Anyhew.  I've also herd/read complaints about people downloading stuff and it still doesn't show up.  I also remember peeps mentioning something about an adult server that's supposably separate and hosts the Sporn stuff.  I thought that the reason why I couldn't see anything else was related to that.  But it can't all be considered Sporn?  Lol.  :D  I thought maybe they added like privacy options for people to check whether they wanted to see other users' custom content, and/or the adult server (if there is one), and that maybe they set defaults to not have any access.  But I couldn't figure it out.  :P  I hope that, when I finally do get Spore running, I'll be able to see other peeps stuff.  Unless that was never supposed to be an option to do it in game, and the only way to add content is by downloading things outside of the game, from a website?  And then importing them I guess? :-\


Ste

I'm still confused as to how you download other people's creatures?

There is two ways.  At the Spore website in the Sporepedia you right click on what you want and save it to the creatures folder.  The other way is in the game if you are able to go online.  Go to the Sporepedia, and under creatures click Search Online.  There is a link under each creation for downloading.

Having now played the game, I can actually form an opinion on it.

I quite like the cell and space stages, but the other three are a bit linear and dull. The cell stage is just fun and focused (plus seeing the scale of creatures evolving and growing and shrinking is amazing), and the space stage is that magical sandbox we all know and love. The other stages have potential, so I hope they flesh them out a lot more in the future.

I did admittedly cheat, but only because the game froze FOUR times in the Space Stage, and I got sick of losing my Sporebuckaroos over and over again. I did get a shiny new Joker badge though, so all is well.

It's odd that you only get Joker'ed in Space. It's like the creators decided that cheating on the earlier levels doesn't matter, since we all know the game's about space.

Huzzah! I have obtained Space stage. This thing is HUGE.

I'm a bit confused about the whole going online thing, as well. The instructions for the reloaded crack seemed to indicate that doing so is not possible.

If you use the no-cd.exe and a keygened key, then you can't go online.  If you use it with a legitimate key, you can go online, but you're subject to the 3-installation restriction (I believe).  But you won't have suckrot on your machine.

But I don't think there's any real advantage to going online -- you can search the Sporepedia on the website, and save the creatures/vehicles/whatever that interest you.  Just plop them in the proper sub-directory under 'My Spore Creations' and they'll show up in your game.  They don't always show up in your game's off-line Sporepedia, but I've seen them actually show up in the game itself. But at least that way you have complete control over your game, and aren't stuck with random crap it decides to download on its own.

I decided to start a new planet today (still downloading a new copy in case my original was damaged), and while my carnivores were in creature stage, the pack chased some prey into the ocean.  Didn't get to far when suddenly something BIG came up out of the water and ate them all!  Surprised the hell out of me...

From what I can see, to get online you need an online account, which would be tied to your serial number. Because the cracked game comes with a pregenned serial number, using it to try and set up an online account is a bad idea because the odds are a lot of people have the same serial number (I don't recall if there's one or three or what). Thus, you can only play online if you have a copy of the real game with a legit serial number.

However, the three-install thing seems (from what I hear) to be negated by the crack even if you have a legit number, because the cracked exe won't phone home to reduce your install count on their server.

No, the cracked exe doesn't come with a pre-genned number; you still have to gen one (or get one) and enter it in during install.  Others in this tread have reported going online successfully with a legitimate game with the no-cd.exe to keep it from installing SecuROM.

Maybe someone tossed one into the torrent I used or posted it in the comments or something.

I finally broke down and went to look for promo stuff on youtube for Spore, but I'm not real impressed.  I was kind of hoping it'd be possible to custom design tools and dwellings and whatnot based on your creatures' physiology, but it looks like they all get basically the same stock tools and instruments and buildings and social whatsits.  And there doesn't seem to be an option to make it a hunter-gatherer society rather than an agricultural/city-building one.  Don't they know that there are real honest-to-god hunter-gatherer societies in the 21st century?  And that from all appearances the switch over to an agricultural lifestyle was a bad one?

It looks mostly like the earlier stages are about sticking bits and pieces of things together to make funny-looking creatures and the later stages are sort of a clone of civilization.  Am I wrong?

Epic creatures. The Morekin were plagued by them last night. I was chased down by at least six different ones. I seriously was regretting making the Lillo. He'd fly in from nowhere:
(http://i533.photobucket.com/albums/ee334/zazazuspore/Spore_2008-09-14_20-18-45.png)


Oh, and for Pescado:
(http://i533.photobucket.com/albums/ee334/zazazuspore/Spore_2008-09-14_20-39-22.png)

Creature link in my sig with most of my keepers. Cry for the Songie, who pissed off the Grox much too early.

Fwoggie installed fine in my game, but the Pumpkin creatures did not. Are you doing it rong?

So since I have an arr'ed game I probably shouldn't do the second one?

And just to demonstrate how bad the switch to agriculture was, look at all those high-tech hunter-gatherer societies.  I know I'd rather be living in a mud hunt and worrying about whether I was going to starve in winter than sitting around in a 2.5 story house playing computer games.

 - Gus

Question: how many creatures and other content should I download or make to have a pleasingly diverse enough game?  So far I've collected around 360 (many of those came from the 1000 creatures torrent; I discarded the rest), and I have 29 things that seem to be buildings and vehicles.   How many do you guys recommend I collect before I get around to installing the game?

I don't know how I could do it wrong. They are .pngs. You just shove them in a folder and there you go. I swapped one or two before from my test account, and they show up in my main.

Not saying it was bad in the long run, just that there wasn't anything to recommend it at the time that anyone can tell.  In other words, not a logical evolutionary step.

Also, hunter-gatherers wouldn't have mud huts - too hard to pack up and take with you.  Hunter-gatherer cultures also tend to involve smaller numbers of people, who are thus less likely to starve to death, and work together more efficiently and thus have more free time than in agriculture-based communities.  Raising crops is more work than killing animals that happen to be in the area, and requires more manhours.  In the meantime, you have to somehow keep the larger, sedentary population clothed and fed and avoid being overrun by human waste.

Regardless, I think it would have been interesting to see settled cities having to deal with more advanced nomadic cultures.

They worked in my game. I've even run across a couple.

The most interesting thing I discovered last night, when I went through and 'dressed up' a bunch of my creatures for tribal, civ, and space, was that I suddenly had three new space races surrounding my planet, in the very next space-level game I loaded. I'm glad I only chose to do three of each, now...

I think it's self-evident that it did have an advantage, or it wouldn't have happened over and over again in different parts of the world, and the agricultural societies wouldn't have overrun their hunter-gatherer neighbors.  I've read authors who've held forth on how great it was to be a hunter-gatherer, but I think it's a lot of starry-eye hoo-haw that ignores history.  Even if the resulting diet was inferior to a hunting culture, as people like Stephen Baxter have argued, it's fairly clear that it yielded more food overall, and the sedentary lifestyle you're deriding allowed the accumulation of wealth that wasn't possible in hunter-gatherer societies.

The people who praise the virtues of living in a hunter-gatherer society remind me of socialists from the 1920's talking about how great the Soviet revolution was, and how we should all go live in that worker's paradise.  Except that the evidence as to what works and what doesn't is even more dramatic today, since the handful of cultures that have stayed in that mode are even poorer than a citizen of Soviet Russia.

In the meantime, Spore is a game.  Instead of thinking about how it doesn't explore anthropology in ways you'd like, you'd be better off thinking about it on its own terms.  IMHO the only really interesting stage is Space, which isn't much like Civilization at all.  It's more like Space Rangers or Starflight.  It's primarily about you and your ship, and the colonies you found are more for your support than an end in themselves.

 - Gus

Human beings were hunter-gatherers for two million years, and it was originally employed by all humans, which cannot be said at all for agriculture.  The neolithic revolution (the first transition to agriculture) was only 10-12 thousand years ago.  Just because it happened later doesn't mean it was better.  Have you forgotten how evolution works?  The reason agriculture overran the hunter-gatherer societies is that agriculture takes up (and uses up) a stupendous amount of land compared to hunting and gathering.


There are also a lot more people to feed.  At a certain point the production starts to overtake the demand, but you have to get a pretty sizable population for that to work.  The main mystery is what made it seem like a good idea up to that point.


I'm not deriding anything.  I enjoy my sedentary lifestyle.  It's just that hunting and gathering was a lot easier then, and probably would be easier now if not for the huge population we now have.  If you don't have a large population with multiple levels of social hierarchy and division of labor, there isn't much need for "wealth".


I think some of it probably has to do with encroachment by agricultural societies, and probably also differing ideas about what poor/rich is.  I don't doubt that today it's much better to live in a settled city, though.  But from the point of view of a culture evolving in a vacuum (as in the case in Spore), hunting and gathering is a more logical approach.


Indeed.  And I think a small, self-contained hunter-gatherer culture would be more interesting to play than a space-age culture that goes flying around the galaxy blowing up planets.  I guess it's just me.


Ah, thanks.  Doesn't really sound like what I was hoping for, then.

Dude, define "easier". Have you hunted? Have you hunted with primitive weaponry? Have you farmed? Seems to me that this is an armchair theory with nothing to support it.

Eh, there have been studies that prove that hunter-gatherers spent less time working compared to farmers.  I don't think I read any of them online, though, so I guess you'll just have to take my word for it.  Obviously if you're used to doing one, the other is going to sound harder.

ETA: If you have any faith in a wikipedia article of disputed neutrality, there is some info about it here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_revolution#Consequences_of_the_Neolithic_Revolution).  I'm not claiming it's necessarily accurate, but it's more or less what I would have said if I had more time and gave more of a shit.

"Less time working" does not necessarily mean it was easier work.

Well, this is interesting. Every time I start a game on a new planet, yet another planet is added next time I fire up the game. I'm up to eight saved games and the last three times I've started one, I've had exactly six more possible planets to start on.


Hunter-gatherer societies just aren't feasible in the age we live in now. There isn't enough viable land to support current population. Now, if we were like the Goompahs in Jack McDevitt's Omega, this wouldn't be an issue. But I can't close my fallopian tubes at a whim. Can you?

"Disputed neutrality:" so you are asking us to rely on something less reliable than regular wikipedia? And you don't give a shit? Dude, this is Retardo Land. If you don't want to back up your arguments with solid evidence, don't start with us.

Damn, I forgot that you said the thing should be mustachioed.  Then again, I don't know exactly where a mustache would go on this thing.

This victim of ID is named Verma.  I had to put some spit and strike weaponry on him for to survive the creature stage though, I was not going to spend 2 hours using Siren Song to impress everyone.  As for the not having eyes issue, it only affects the first two stages, gives you less sight range, and makes everything dark.  Essentially, there is no real disadvantage to being eyeless.

Creature Stage
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v497/mrexpert25/SporeCreations/VermaCreature.png)
Tribal Stage
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v497/mrexpert25/SporeCreations/VermaTribal.png)
Civilization/Space Stage
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v497/mrexpert25/SporeCreations/VermaColonist.png)
All of the paths taken with this creature were green which gave the Shaman card as the final one.  Also, the right mouth doesn't seem to work during communications.  I wonder if this is because the developers didn't expect someone to finish the game using a split filter mouth.

In other news, it's pretty neat that you can find the planets in your other save games and communicate with them.  However, the fact that it saves them along with the empires near them really makes you think that the universe is probably already populated with all of the creatures you will visit ala Sim Townies.

Dude, that is an incredibly stupid argument.  You might as well say that the transition to larger brains was a bad, thing because for hundreds of millions of years our remote ancestors had brains the size of a walnut, and that can't be said at all for brains of our current size.

For someone without your weird love affair for hunting gatherer societies, this is actually an argument for agriculture, because it took only a few thousand years for a different method to completely replace something that had been in place for millions of years.

No, but you apparently have.  You think that evolution is about what you think is "easier," when in fact it's about having more babies.  Agricultural societies could support more people, and that's why they pushed out the hunter / gatherers.

And you know why that is?  Despite your assertion, made up out of thin air to support your predetermined conclusion, it takes far, far less land to feed a person with agriculture.  The "stupendous amounts of land" you complain about was only needed because there were a stupendous amount of people.  Well, not really stupendous by our standards, but compared to the hunter-gatherers with whom they were competing.

More food and more babies.  That's a basic drive in every animal on the planet.

That's the statement that made it clear to me that I was dealing with yet another weird fanatic with a fetish for hunter-gatherers.  This sort of argument belongs in Retardo Land.  Is that your response to every game that involves the advance of civilization?

"When I play Age of Empires, I refuse to advance beyond the Stone Age."
"Civilization would be a lot more interesting if you could just play one as one of the tribal villages."
"Master of Orion doesn't interest me because it isn't about  a small, self-contained hunter-gatherer culture."

--------

Well done!  When I read J.M.'s quote, I dismissed it as impossible, but I forgot to think in Email Challenge terms.  Limbless, eyeless, and mustachioed does not preclude weapons.
 
 - Gus

By "Musctachioed", I meant that it would have the basic herbivore mustache mouth, thus being incapable of defending itself during the cell stage.

But doing that defeats the point of the challenge! The point is that you weren't supposed to evolve, and, in fact, devolve. But you can still bite people with your mustache.

You can visit your other games? What happens, do you encounter the other Paperbladderian Empire you made? Does it break anything if you invade yourself?

OK, lay out the rules.  Basic herbivore mouth only, no creature stage parts.  What Cell stage parts are permitted?  Only the herbivore mouth, perhaps?

 - Gus

Only the herbivore mouth. You even lose the starting eye and tail, thus devolving. Expect to die a lot, as you are a defenseless mustachio-mouthed slug. When reaching the creature stage, remain as a blob! You may be any color or shape of blob, but you are a blob. Limbs are permitted to give your blob some flair if you wish, but no actual HANDS or FEET or any other part. If you install an arm or leg, you must remove the foot or hand and not replace it, to keep it as a nonfunctional part.

Of course, once you reach Tribal, if you reach Tribal, you are permitted to give your blob a hat. :P

Right; if you're arr'ed, you can't register and go online.

Shift-Ctrl-C brings up a console (deja vu all over again)
will let you start a new game at any level you want.

Well, my current copy is seriously borked, so I'm sure I got a corrupted download.  Got a new creature on a new planet to tribal, and had the same problem with the tribal leader locking up.  Fortunately I got a new copy arr'ing, so I should get back to the game soon...

With the Morekin, who are two-headed wingless birds, only the right mouth (as I'm facing them) speaks in Space mode.

I don't know of any hunter-gatherer societies that have moved beyond the tribal stage.

Agriculture, as I understand it, is what allowed society to become more highly organized with a greater division of labor among different trades. Producing food more efficiently meant that everyone didn't have to be involved in food production, thus paving the way for art/science/government/what-have-you. In other words, "a civilization." Something larger, more organized, and more complex than tribal society. When everyone is busy hunting/gathering, they don't have time to build a civilization--only for living from day to day. This is why there's a theory that agricultural societies are what drove the hunter-gatherers to extinction.  Note the distinction between "civilization" as a general term that encompasses things like culture and values, and "A civilization," which has a much more specific meaning in this discussion, especially in terms of Spore.

I think the real question here should be more along the lines of "why can't I stay in the tribal stage forever," instead of "why can't I have a hunter-gatherer civilization?" There IS something to be said for hunter-gatherer societies. It's a completely different way of life. However, Spore makes more sense the way it is now.

It would be cool if you could play as a tribal society and try to survive as the rest of the world moves past you to the civ stage, explores space, etc. Now that would be a real (if somewhat depressing) challenge! Basically, you'd have to find a place that's extremely abundant with life, very biodiverse, and difficult for the "civilized world" to reach. Either that, or a place so far on the fringes that no one wants it, with a climate so unsuitable to agriculture that specialized knowledge of hunting/gathering would give you a relative advantage.

Sim-Eskimo?

Just to clarify, when you go online, and go to the Sporepedia, can you browse random people?  Or do you have to specifically search for usernames?  Or, do you mean that this Search Online option does allow you to just browse random people's custom made content?

I vaguely recall having access to random stuff, when I very briefly played around the the creature creator.  But when I last went in (about a week ago), I could only see the 30 EAxis pre-mades and my one creature.  I couldn't see anything else, and I musta been totally blind or something, as I don't remember seeing this Search Online option, and I don't remember using it the last time.  :-\







BZZZT!!!  Conflicting info.  Does not compute.   HALP!  I R confused!!!111oneoneleventy  ???

So... which is it?  I has a legitimate copy and I has arr'd so I could play without suckrot.  Can I go online with my legit SN# without reducing the install count?




Can someone again sum up any differences between online and offline play?

Are the only benefits of going online:

1) "direct" access to the Sporepedia... and thus you can download other people's custom made creatures by clicking (instead of saving .png files and "installing" them?

2) random content crap being downloaded to your game?

3) achievments/easter egg lists?


Is that it?

Also... if you want to "install" other creatures via .png files, what directory to you "install" them in?  Does it just go in:

C:\Documents and Settings\<User Name>\My Documents\My Spore Creations\Creatures

I just want to be certain.  Thanks.


Ste

Yessir.

I believe so.


Yep, you just save them into that folder.

You can browse the Sporepedia pretty much anyway you like.  I've searched it on creator name and on a particular item name (or portion -- do a search on 'DRM' on the Sporepedia for lulz. :)).

Suckrot and install count are two different issues, since the install count is stored on EA servers, and SecuROM is on your local machine.  
So no, you won't reduce the install count by using a no-cd.exe -- you just won't have SecuROM installed. (This is at least how I understand it -- do note that I arrr' playing strictly offline :) ).  However, using a no-cd.exe is not the same as being arr'ed -- you can have a purchased copy and use the no-cd.exe, but if you use a arr'ed copy, you don't have a legitimate key, and the EA servers will reject your fake key.

As for the difference between on and offline, you got it. And yes, you store the downloaded .png in the proper sub-directory of My Spore Creations.  So creatures go in \Creatures, vehicles (including spaceships, I believe, though they may go in \UFOs) go in \Vehicles, and so on.

I'm not asking you to rely on it.  Wikipedia should not be used as "proof" for anything anyway.  I am asking you to read it and assume that that is generally along the lines of what I would have said.  I don't doubt that as a scholarly reference I am probably less reliable than Wikipedia.


Actually, that's precisely the point I was trying to make; farming cultures never fully replaced hunter-gatherer cultures.  Also, consider this: human beings were all hunter-gatherers for 2 million years.  After only 12 thousand years of farming, we have pretty much decimated the ecosystem.  How's that for natural selection?


Evolution is about survival of the species.  Too many babies means that everyone dies from starvation.  Overpopulation is already becoming a problem in some places.

Agriculture would not have yielded more food than hunter-gathering until it had been in practice for some time.


Dude, I just think it's interesting to think about how cultures with a completely different way of life would live.  I already have plenty of city-building games if I decide I want to play another one of those.


Good thing that's where it is, then.


I actually don't own any.  Not because they offend my anthropological sensibilities, but because I never found the premise of building up a civilation just like ours and fighting wars very likely to be fun.  I thought Spore might be different.  I was wrong.


Sure.  And the way of life we call civilization is also interesting too.  I'm not saying we should all go back and be hunter-gatherers, just that the hunter-gatherers have a way of life that I think would be fun to play around with, and that the neolithic revolution was a bit of a fluke at the time.


Actually, hunter-gathering societies actully had more free time.  What caused civilization as we know it to come into existence was the division of labor that you addressed before and the fact that there was an upper-crust that didn't have to do much of anything.  The hunter-gatherer societies were generally very egalitarian, so the complex social structures never developed.


They have not.  Read the thread.


See, that's what I'm saying.  That would be fun.

On a different note, it looks like Spore hacks/mods are starting to appear -- saw something on xspore about a mod that removes the automatic symmetry when adding body parts.

(Edited to correct for brain fart...)

We've pretty much reduced it by one tenth, eh?

DECIMATE: I don't think it means what you think it means.

Yay for mods - maybe we can find one with a less masculine soundpack for tribal and beyond - my creatures are laying eggs and look like females....for crissakes.

OK, I'm done.  Arguing with weirdo fanatics who will Make Up Stuff to suit their beliefs is only interesting for a short time.

 - Gus

"My knowledge of Latin Roots.  Let me show you it."


Saying something that anyone can find out in first-semester anthro is fanatical?  Ok.

Whatever.

 - Gus

Sure, if you like. That particular word happens to be a pet peeve of mine when used incorrectly. I have extremely limited knowledge of Latin roots, to be honest.

At least you know what it actually means now. :P

Eh, the dictionary actually claims that that's a obsolete meaning, and I've always heard it as a synonym for "destroy" or "partially destroy" anyway.  I'm not really sure how you'd quantify destruction of the environment, anyway.

There's a difference between "free time" and division of labor. People could be craftsmen, or elite warriors, because when other people were getting the food and producing it more efficiently, it allowed specialization (or even the development of an "upper crust," which could not have existed without it). Hunter gatherer societies don't have much in the way of different people developing different skills. Also, that statement makes no sense coming from your position.

The "complex social structures" that define a civilization? Thank you for proving my point. I win!


I tried downloading the .png files from the spore site, but the pics they give you are actually a different file: xyzmonster_lg.png (the large preview pic) instead of xyzmonster.png. The large pics don't seem to contain any data--I tried putting them in the "my creatures" folder and it didn't work. Possibly you can get the right png files by logging in, but you need a valid key to register.

I think we are saying the same thing, but you are saying it better.  I never claimed that hunter-gatherer cultures had complex social structures.  I'm sorry if it sounded that way.

Ellatrue: You may have a better shot by downloading the png that you click to make the large preview window appear; I can't actually test this out, but it seems that those pics are the "xyzcreature.png" to your "xyzcreature_lg.png".

Yes, the smaller, clickable images work.

Sporepedia is worse than the exchange in terms of signal to noise. Anyone got any ideas for finding good stuff vs crap?

I just look at the features and then click on the creators for more stuff by them. The guy who made that sushi monster I like made a whole bunch of other ones as well as these neat creatures masquerading as plants.

Sort by "most popular." Click on the creators you like to visit their page.

Yes, I go by either most popular or featured. Everything else is crap.

I d/l the FOJ's creature pack and fired up the game tonight.  Shortly after migrating to my new nest in creature, I came across, and allied with, a Rogue Buttolino.  I now have a ginormous purple creature as part of my pack.   :D 

(http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a321/cwieberdink/buttolino2.jpg)

FYI, I found the cause of my graphics glitches -- I did a google search on it, and turned up a recommendation on a couple of Spore sites that you don't run it full screen on resolutions greater than 1600.  I have a wide screen monitor that runs at 1680x1050, so naturally I used that setting.  Cutting it down to a lower resolution solved pretty much all the graphic glitches I was having.

My sound is terrible, I obviously need to update my sound drivers. I keep forgetting till I'm in the damn game again and have to turn the speakers off.

This incredibly stupid question has caused me to delurk, I'm sorry!

I live in Japan, so I had planned on ordering Spore online and just dealing with the crappy download system in order to play it. However, for some reason, despite working fine before, the website now INSISTS on always redirecting me to the EA Japan site, and no matter what I do I can't get back to the US site in order to buy the damn game in English and with my American payment methods. (If I do get the US store, the 'add to cart' button does nothing. Excellent!)

So I decided to arr the game.

This is my first time arring a game. I admit I don't really know what to do. I'm a bit of a n00b. I've got the iso unpacked, but how do I install without an activation key? I'm sorry for the real stupid question, but I figured you guys would answer without giving me a preachy moral lecture. ::)

Thanks!

[edit] I'm stupid and figured it out! I didn't see the link on the torrent site originally. Sorry if I wasted anyone's time!  :(

Check out gamecopyworld, it has?/had some excellent tutorials. You'll need software to load the iso, then you will be able to see the contents of it, just like any CD/DVD. There will most likely be a crack directory on the iso. Read the nfo file (open in notepad) for directions.

And the crack directory should contain a keygen program for the game; you run it to get a random key that works.  It helps to copy the key and save it in a text file so you have it handy for future reinstalls.

ETA: The first official shot has been fired in the DRM war: http://www.gamepolitics.com/2008/09/24/ea-faces-class-action-lawsuit-over-spore-drm

Excellent! Be most interesting to see the outcome of that.

@SuperRi - do not run the game with the original exe! Make sure you are using a No CD file, which can also be found at gamecopyworld. If you patch the game you will need to update the No CD file. If you run the game as original, there will be a rootkit installed on your machine.

Mind you, if it's an ARRed copy it probably won't run without a crack anyway.