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

You have to download it from the link in Inge's message above, not from the SimPe site.

jfade's eliminates the swarm in cold weather, and pescado's eliminates the swarm completely, so I don't think you'd need jfade's anymore if you use this one.

That's definitely one of the things I'd like to see in an expansion -- the ability to build your own fleet, rather than relying solely on allies. Especially if you can create/chose different ships.  I'd love to have a fleet of big heavy cruisers with some smaller, faster protection/support ships circling around.  Or at least the ability to have different types of ships, like pure cargo and pure military.


Yea, something stupid like expanding the 'get your captains badge' into a whole stage, rather than a few quick missions. Make you go out and explore your entire solar system first before you can get the interstellar drive.

Lucky for me I'm not going for MATY achievements -- I'm having a tough enough time on 'Normal'.

There's already been a L&P from Wright that they're working on expansions, but I'm not sure what an expansion can do to fundamentally change how the game is played.

The trick is to have at least 2 or three allies with you when you go after a planet (if you're not Pescado, anyway ), and at least minibombs, a medium auto-cannon and a medium laser.  More health and energy helps, as does having shields (though I haven't gotten those yet). The allies take care of most of the air attack, keeping them occupied at least while giving you enough time to concentrate on the ground attack. Once the city/colony surrenders, the remaining air support runs away for a bit (or leaves the planet if it's the last colony on it) giving you some time to reinforce the colony before you withdraw back home to recharge/regroup.

And you do want to reinforce it, since the original owner will try to take it back until you kill more of their planets (or their whole empire).  The plus side is that the more planets you take away from them, the more time they spend trying to take them back and the less they spend attacking your homeworld.

Try to take strong allies, though -- I had one go from ally to war relatively quickly since it was their piss-poor ships that were the first to get blowed-up, and I didn't have enough AOE repair packs (or forgot to use one in the heat of battle) to keep them going.

I don't know -- explore the whole galaxy? See if you can reach the home planet of one of your other races? Wipe out the Grox and replace them as the bad-ass of the galaxy? Go on a search for the 'disney planets'?

I kinda think that once you hit space and do all the major stuff, Spore becomes somewhat like The Sims -- no particular goals, you just play it how you want and see where it goes.

Yea, I've got one race in my first space game that just decided they didn't like me (not the Grox or Spodian, either), and kept raiding my home planet.  They weren't big, either -- only 4 systems, but those 4 all bordered my space.  They only have 2 systems now, and the third will fall tonight.  Depending on how much time I have to play, they may not exist by the time I go to bed.

Probably because you did it 'years ago', and 1) there were many fewer sims in the game, and 2) maybe whatever borkedness you introduced into the hood has been bypassed because of all the new characters added by EPs and BIG since then.

More likely a hack conflict or you have an old version of a hack laying around.  Run the HCDU, and if that doesn't turn up any conflicts, remove your downloads folder.  If the problem goes away, you need to make  sure you have the latest version of all your hacks, remove the ones that haven't been updated, and maybe do a binary search to find the culprit if the first two items don't solve it.

Every other city on the map is green (the color of my ally) as far as I can see.  I'll do a swing around the globe the next time I play that planet to see if there's a city that's not obvious. 

I would think that yea, if it's just you and allies you win, but in this case it's not happening.  Maybe an infamous EAxis glitch, eh?

Unfortunately, I'm stuck in a small city with no room to grow (it's not my starting city), and all other cities are military.  I think I'm hosed...

Ah, I didn't know that!  This particular game is on normal level.  I guess I just sit back and wait while the money roles in.  You know how much it is for the normal level?

Ok, so I have a religious civilization. They've pretty much lost the planet to their ally (a military civ) after losing 2 cities getting caught in the middle of a war between the other civs.  Now they have one city and a couple of spice derricks, while the other civ owns the rest of the planet.  No matter what I do, I can't get them strong enough to even convert one of the other cities.  So it's pretty much at a stalemate -- they won't attack me because we're allies, and I can't get strong enough to attack them.

Any way out of this?  Or should I just declare the planet a loss and move on?

It looks like a cracked .exe for the patch has appeared on Pirate Bay, probably from Reloaded.  Early comments are that it's clean, so it's worth keeping an eye on.

ETA: the new no-cd.exe appears to be good -- no problem running the patched game with it.

I would suggest using the Sim Blender from TwoJeffs, found over on Simbology -- it works, and it's updated for AL.

I guess you could do the same thing on an empty apartment lot, too, since buy mode is available (or easily made available if it's not).

Right -- if you do the math, it would take 10 sim weeks for an apartment to cost the same as the initial outlay for the average house.  Since the adult stage doesn't last 70 sim days, the apartment works out cheaper in the long run.  Of course, the cheaper cost does come with the disadvantage of not being able to change or expand the amount of space you have, making houses better for multi-generation and constantly expanding families.

Finally got a creature in space -- I give you the Meganii:

Not an option in an apartment, which is what we're discussing.

Be careful logging in -- it might download and apply the patch, and there's no updated no-cd yet.

The AI does that.  Other players don't actually connect to your game (it's not like WoW) -- all that happens is you automatically (or not) get content from other players.

That's a great idea!  I never thought of hiding them inside something else.