The Bulbagarden Spore Thread

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I got the game today and managed to get to the space phase with a race of intelligent purple space elephants. : ) My name is e105zeta if any one wants to buddy me. If anyone else has the game, post your screen name so we can form a community of shared stuff on the game. : )

Oh yeah, my species' spaceship is shaped like a giant elephant.

Also, it's fantastic. My only complaint is that there are so many fantastic creatures to see because of the Creator being released early, but not a lot of buildings and vehicles - just stuff from Maxis. I went to an alien planet and they were using my houses because of the limited pool. @_@
 
I got the game, but haven't yet had the time to play it. I'll probably start tomorrow.
 
T_T I really want this game now, hopefully I'll have time to go out and get it soon...
 
The game is fantastic. It is a collection of Sims, yes, but the first four Sims are patently there to give you a sense of the world you're in and the scope. There is some depth and replay value in each of them, though, because each time you can go through with a different creature and different strategies.

The Space stage is the real meat of the game though, and is positively huge. It accounts for about 70% of the gameplay. A lot of people who are giving it bad reviews sound like they just played to the beginning of the Space stage and considered it "beaten", or who are stupidly expecting each stage to be as deep as a full-fledged game on it's own - they were expecting Flow, Diablo, the Sims, and Civilization each at complete depth in one game - which is a ridiculous expectation.

This game is NOT for power gamers. That should be readily apparent. If you play games for a sense of accomplishment or "Pwning" than you had better look elsewhere. This game is squarely aimed at people who like creation and exploring. And I think a lot of people were expecting it to be all things to all people, but it's just not.

That being said, it's a great game - but it could use some junk. Shit that needs to be in the expansion:

* Flora editor
* Giant Creature Editor
* Underwater civilization, vehicles, and creatures.
* Floating/Sky/Flying civilization creatures.
* Body language selection
* Wings that work and look like fucking wings instead of cardboard.
* Option for creature to be photosynthetic.
* Ability to design sexual dimorphism and gender in creature.
* Ability to design body parts and choose how they function - like in Magic Pengel/Graffiti Kingdom. So you can have a square creature with ease.
* Also via Magic Pengel - ability to color body parts separately and draw on creatures, buildings, and vehicles.
* Space Station construction/use.
* Ability to conquer nations/worlds politically - if you treat them well enough and you have the proper tools they ASK you to conquer them.
* Ability to get out of the damn spaceship if you so choose and explore on foot or in a vehicle during the Space stage.

The annoying thing is that some of these features were IN earlier builds of the game but taken out.
 
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My friend wouldn't shut up about but now i've read this. i see why he wouldn't shut his mouth so he could breathe properly. :p

When he asked if i knew what it was i thought he was on about Spore as in the pokemon move lmao :p
 
My username is slightly predictable: Matkin22

Seems like a great game so far (despite installation issues at the beginning as Satoshi-kun knows), although I'm still enjoying Stage 2.
 
Consider Maxis's obsession with expansions. I get the distinct feeling about 30% of the game was cut out so they can charge you 30 bucks for each expansion to have the complete game they originally planned to do.

I can see it all now:

Spore: Sporequarium - Expansion that adds underwater section to the game, along with restoring the chemical and sea creature phases. Adds flora editor.

Spore: Goin' Wild - Expands the Creature section of the game into quests, better stats, dungeons, bosses, and the like.

Spore: Tribes - Expands the Tribe section of the game into more of a Sims type thing, where you can design more houses, have more furniture and stuff, design your own outfits and tools.

Spore: Conquest - Expands the civilization phase of the game into a complete game, giving better control over cities, planning, roads, warfare, trade, politics, economics.

Spore: Galaxies - Adds another galaxy to the game as well as the ability to get launch an away team to the planet to explore and complete missions along with a new campaign story. Also introduces the new space station tool.

From interviews with Will Wright and the end product, I get the distinct feeling that he was going to take enough time to add all of this stuff, but Maxis is counting their money from stuff like "Sims 2: Pets" and going "Let's just release it as is and charge them 30 bucks each for five more installments!"

You can already see evidence of this on the Sporepedia, since all of the creations now have a little icon on the lower right indicating which expansions they're compatible with. ALREADY. Essentially what I'm saying is that we're going to have to wait at least 30 more years and shell out at least 90 more bucks to see this game in an actual complete form.
 
About 30 minutes into the Space stage, the game essentially starts blatantly cheating. You're allowed one ship from your homeworld and a limited number from allies. Any enemies you make gets an unlimited number of ships to attack you with and sends them after you. An empire declared war on me because they were jerks more or less and proceeded to totally wipe me out and there wasn't a single goddamned thing I could do about it. Who at Maxis thought this was a good or balanced part of the game? In the end, my only option was to use Cheat codes to give me unlimited funds and send every single ally I had to attack the Dubels and unlock all my weapons. Eventually I wiped them out, but it was still a fucking struggle because you know - player is limited to about 1 ship and 2 helpers that are utterly useless and enemy empires get a fucking UNLIMITED SUPPLY WITH BETTER WEAPONRY. WHAT THE FUCK?! Game balance is one of the most important things in a game, and I should NOT have had to cheat to protect my fucking homeworld from being blown to smitherines by a fleet of 20 ships who invade every fifteen seconds.

In the end, I hunted down every single last fucking Dubel and slaughtered them all, save for a small number I'm saving in my hold to toture later. Sons of bitches. I haven't been this angry at a game being unbalanced in years. It's like being forced to play as a blindfolded Dan Hibiki against 20 Akuma that spawn every 10 seconds, or having to fight a Pokemon battle with nothing but a Magikarp against 40 Mewtwo.

Looking at Game Faqs, a ton of people are having similar problems with the Space Stage. Essentially, any enemies you make get an unlimited supply of ships and resources while you're limited to one ship and a small section of any allies you make. The sad thing is, there would have been a fairly easy fucking way to fix this - make it so that any colony / city on your side produces it's own space ship of your race to protect it. It was something logical that I kept on expecting to fucking happen, but never did.
 
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It's still not enough because the rate of attack is about once every two minutes, meaning once you start a war, or someone declares war on you, you don't have any time to seek out resources and sell shit. It'll be just carnage. I eventually had to break down and use the infinite money cheat code to bribe every single one of my allies to actually get off their asses and defend me.

Eventually, I was able to unlock a patrol drone for your planets, but it comes so late in the game that it might as well not even exist.

The space phase is very, very flawed. It's great in concept, but poor in execution. The beefs I have with it:
* NPCs and enemies are way too overpowered and can all do tons of things you can't, even if they have a smaller empire.
* You have to manually fly around collecting and selling Spice, which is moronic and time-wasting. Trade routes don't do this automatically like one would intuitively think, instead they just let you buy the star system you're trading with.
* No autosave, and even on a tricked-out PC this game has crashed for me at least 3 times a day, particularly when entering or leaving a planet. Which means hours of hard work can be lost in a few seconds.
* No ability to actively choose what new items to unlock, unlike in many other RTS where you could "Research Weaponry", "Research Shields" or "Research Defense". Essentially you have to just fly around randomly and hope you get the achievement that unlocks the item which you need, even after which you need to pay an exorbitant amount of money to actually get it.

So yeah, this game is NOT WORTH 50 bucks. The first four stages are simple minigames and the Space Stage is deep, but also deeply broken and lacks features that are vital to any other game in the genre.
 
I'm enjoying the second stage, except for the Epic creatures that seem to go out of their way to hunt me down and kill me. I've bsed a creature so I can complete the game and skip to the stages I like later. Username's Betagold52779. Betagold was taken.
 
This game ROCKS!

The cell stage is good, but only if you're a carnivore cell because my herbivore cells keep getting ganged up on. I'm also enjoying the second stage. It's funny to watch the little guys in action. I've gotten to the tribal stage, but I can't get too deep into it because it makes my computer freeze up, even with all the settings on low.
 
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I'm compiling of list I want in Spore Expansions. Here's what I got so far: Comment on what you think, and add your own ideas.

General Features
* Option to have larger and more detailed planets with more involved eco systems, at the expense of more hard drive space
* Add parts, obviously.
* Body language selection during creature creator - Angry, Happy, Sorrowful etc.
* Body part designer.
* Ability to draw directly on all creations and to color separate parts of a creature separately.
* Ability to design sexual dimorphism and gender in creature.
* Ability to make Creature photosynthetic.
* Flora editor.
* Autosave, GOD Autosave. Every civilization should have at LEAST two save files. One autosave, and one manual save. I cannot tell you how much progress I have lost in the space phase, when even my fairly mightly computer likes to crash when dogfighting or entering a planet's atmosphere.

Chemical Phase
I see no reason not to restore it if they really feel like it and they have some time.

Cell Phase
Not anything really that I can think of here. It would nice to see it extended and a few more parts added, though.

Creature Phase
* Restore the underwater phase, and allow a species to remain underwater. This would also add underwater features - namely, a second ecosystem underwater, spaceships would now have the ability to underwater, creatures would be designated aquatic, land, or amphibious.
* Add psychic powers, which can be added in the same place where the brain is upgraded. These could be used to do things like stun creatures, knock them back, or launch energy bolts. Naturally, they should be ''very'' expensive.
* Expand the gameplay a bit. Add some simple quests and maybe a "dungeon" area. Make it a bit more like EVO: The Search for Eden for the Super Nintendo, which required you to complete some plot and explore a series of diverse areas. Something more like the Spore DS game.
* Allow creature to become fully aerial. I mean floating up in the sky, along with a small aerial ecosystem. Something like a creature filled with gas so it floats naturally. Or antigravity glands. Or whatever.

Tribal Phase
* Ability to play as aerial or underwater tribe, obviously, continued from above.
* Restore the hut editor – more customization can’t hurt.
* Give more choices on how to outfit your creatures.
* Add arrows to the weapon selection
* If reasonably possible, it would be cool to use domesticated creatures as mounts.
* Add research options to upgrade your weapons and armor. You assign tribe members to do it, and have specialists be able to do it faster. One of the worst parts of Spore is that you don't directly control what upgrades you get. That needs to be resolved.

Civilization Phase
* Again, underwater and flying civilizations as continued from above.
* Allow the addition of infantry, who could be customized using the creature-outfitting editor from tribe, but with new parts.
* Submarines added as new vehicles for the underwater creatures, obviously.
* Give vehicle parts with bonuses other than toward damage and armor. For example they could gain speed, range, attack speed, damage absorption, and splash damage with the addition of the right parts.
* Add ‘special ability’ vehicle parts, that increase vehicle parts, but let it do something special, like drop mines, turn invisible, detect mines and invisible units, gain a speed boost for a short time, do a high damage attack with a long cooldown, etc.
* Add a Lab building so you can add research to the game. It would be based off population, and could be increased through certain buildings. Through research, you could unlock parts with special bonuses, special ability parts, infantry weapons, new buildings (like improved factories, larger houses, and better defense buildings), as well as more expensive vehicles.

Space Phase
* Allow the addition of fleets into the game. Your capital ships could be built at cities, and rallied to follow your flagship (UFO), rallied to another planet, rallied to a space station, or left to defend the planet they were built at.
* Add buildable NPC ships for your fleet. You will still have your basic Capital Ship, however, you can also invest in:
** Military Ship - Obviously attacks and defends. Can be added into your party or left to guard a planet so you don't have to rush home every 20 minutes.
** Trader Ship - Actually allow you to ship out spice in return for money. Which you would think the trade routes in the game would do automatically, but instead it only allows you to buy the system later. You first have to establish a trade route between your planet and another species. Then you assign a trade ship to it, which does the tedious task of carrying spice back and forth for cash for you.
** Capital Ship. Weapons could be added like in the vehicle editor. A ship could be given the ability to store and deploy fighters, which could be designed in the vehicle editor. This could either be you, or a separate unit.
* Add space stations, which would function as mobile cities. They could be used to build capital ships and fighters, mount powerful superweapons, and act as rallying points for a fleet. You can build a space station in any system you own. They can be moved to any other system, but have a long cooldown timer for movement.
* Allow cities and space stations to be automated to continually produce whatever you instructed them to.
* Give the user an interface to command their fleets. For example, they could drag select their units, then order them to attack, order them to follow you, order them to remain where they are, or order one to use its special ability. An additional menu bar would probably be useful.
* The power and size on an enemy AI’s fleets should be based on how many colonies and planets it commands. A few capital ships stationed around a planet should be capable of dealing with a small incursion without needing reinforcements. You should no longer have to deal with a small enemy empire of three planets sending a wave after wave of 20 ships every 2 minutes, leaving you in a impossible war.
* Ability to send out an armed away team onto a planet to explore, ala Star Trek.
* Continue to allow you to research things in your lab. You should not have to fly around at random hoping to unlock the achievement that unlocks the part you so desperately need to save your ass all while selling Spice and trying to fight off enemies every ten seconds.


Essentially, add depth to all parts of the game, give the underwater section we so dearly want, and balance the Space Stage so we can do everything our enemies can do.
 
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