Spored out of your mind?

[Stephen Zepp]

Why can't you play Stephen?

The game crashes consistently as soon as I attempt to start a game. I've been through just about every "hey, I think I found a fix" tactic that exists on the internet, no dice.

It's -probably- a compatibility issue with Dell drivers for the 8600 laptop video card I have, or possibly the on board sound--no one seems to know though.

[WindupAtheist]

The game entertained you through about a week of fanbois level posting and you're actually going sit there and mouth off about how worthless the experience was?

If the game actually hadn't been reasonable you just wouldn't have played it.  The indignant self-justification act is amazing.

Two days of "I will get through this crap to get to the fun part!" followed by a day of "Wow this is fun!" then a day of "No, the interface is too awful!" and never playing again?  Yeah, that leaves me glad I stole it.

[Teleku]

Eh, I like it. Well, I sort of liked it before I jumped through a wormhole and got lost on the other side of the galaxy, suddenly turning my game of spore into the worst of the Star Trek series. 

I didn't know that happened in Enterprise 

[KallDrexx]

It's -probably- a compatibility issue with Dell drivers for the 8600 laptop video card I have, or possibly the on board sound--no one seems to know though.

Go to laptopvideo2go.com and get real nvidia drivers for that.  Dell (or any other laptop manufacturer) drivers are crap compared to real nvidia drivers.

[Aez]

Zero Punctuation take on Spore

[naum]

Zero Punctuation take on Spore

Kind of funny, thought about posting earlier, but more than half of that video is just ad spam…

Did get to play w/Spore just a little bit, got into creature stage…

Pretty game, but definitely not worth all the advance hoopla… …and while it runs like a charm on MBP (though it takes forever to launch), really irritated at the tiny font size in the Spore Guide that it doesn't appear that I can modify…

[Raging Turtle]

Bought it, love it.  Will throw you guys on my buddy list once I have a steady 'net connection (hopefully soon!).

Some things are a little bit confusing, such as what exactly all the special abilities are.  My Czech manual is a little difficult to read 

[Bunk]

I wish I could say I love it, but I don't. I've played up to the start of the Civ stage and that was a few days ago. I have not felt remotely inspired to play more to reach the supposed "fun" space stage.

[Reg]

Just grind through it Bunk. You can do it in like 30 minutes. Yours is the first city to appear so immediately claim all of the spice mines you can reach. That puts your competition at a ridiculous disadvantage. Then just make your full quota of land vehicles and take over the rest of the cities on your continent as they appear.  Once you have 4 cities you get to build airplanes and can do the same with the rest of the planet.

[Samprimary]

Boring. Sold.

[Khaldun]

I guess Yahtzee would say this makes me an eight-year old girl, but the design part is interesting enough that it's keeping me engaged even while the weakness in the game parts, especially the Tribal and Civilization stages, keeps me enraged.

[Samwise]

Civ phase doesn't last long enough to be boring.  You spend more time designing vehicles than you do pew-pewing.

I actually really like the basic idea of the city building in civ/space, with the whole city being a graph that has score values applied to certain nodes and the edges between certain types of nodes.  Optimizing the graph to give you the highest possible score in all stats has the makings of a fun game.  It just doesn't last very long with only three building types and two stats to manage.

[Kail]

I actually really like the basic idea of the city building in civ/space, with the whole city being a graph that has score values applied to certain nodes and the edges between certain types of nodes.  Optimizing the graph to give you the highest possible score in all stats has the makings of a fun game.  It just doesn't last very long with only three building types and two stats to manage.

Does the city building in the space phase actually do anything?  My capital planet  (with, like, eight cities with two or three factories each) puts out spice slower than my un-upgraded colonies.  Mousing over my income bar, it says I'm making something like 300/hour... 300 what?  300 spice can't be right, I've got to be making several times that, at least.  300 sporebucks can't be right, since each unit of spice sells for at least 225 at it's very cheapest; several planets full of factories has got to give me more money per hour than a ten second "pick it up and sell it right back to them" run through any one of my colonies...

But yeah, I'm really loving this game.  Not that I don't see valid complaints with it, but it's just awesome to see my guys go from cells to Spaceballs with entire planets full of stuff that I've made.  The individual stages are all kind of cheesy, but the whole package taken together is a ton of fun for me.

[Samwise]

On the capital planet for some reason you have greatly reduced spice production, but you can also build stuff for much cheaper.  Not sure what's up with that.

How you build your colonies does affect how fast spice builds up there, I'm pretty sure.  Before I started maxing out my colonies with factories and whatnot I had to wait much longer for them to max out their warehouses, and now I can't collect it fast enough.  I'm not sure what sort of a role happiness plays, but I'm thinking I don't really want to compound the Grox attacks and ecological disasters with colonist uprisings, so I'll keep on putting those entertainment buildings down.

[Ingmar]

It is really bothersome to me that the mechanic for religion is basically exactly the same as military. Build vehicle, pew pew them with your god beams while they try to shoot you down, take over. I think that is the laziest bit of design I have seen in a long time.

[Samwise]

Yeah, I wish it were more... subtle?  I dunno.  I think the economic victory path was the best-implemented out of those (if still very shallow and easy).

Also, how come in the civ phase the religous path is the "nonviolent" one that you get by having played as a pacifist the entire game, but in the Space phase all of the religious civilizations you meet are giant warmongers?

[Soln]

Boring. Sold.

didnt get that far

[WindupAtheist]

Space phase shoulda been the whole game.  Give it more depth and let multiple players all play as part of the same empire.

[Sky]

http://www.spore.com/patch

This is a PC only patch. Mac users should check back soon!
Features

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

Graphics/Aesthetics

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

Tuning

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

Miscellaneous

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

[Samwise]

I have noticed a distinct decrease in annoying pirate attacks since this patch.

[Ingmar]

Another bitch from me: additional items of the same type should be heavily discounted or free in the creature editor, since they don't stack their effects. I get no advantage at all from giving a creature an extra set of legs, but I get charged a bunch for that and for matching feet with my other legs. This is stupid. Same thing for little spikes down the back, etc. My desire to make my creature aesthetically interesting is at war with my desire to min/max it statistically.

[WindupAtheist]

One of my UO buddies got to the Grox and tells me that they have a ridiculous Achilles' Heel that makes it so trivial to kill them that the planet buster is just a waste of money.  Apparently they can only survive on T0 planets, and the instant you move the pointer into the T1 range they all die.  He's busy trying to exterminate their entire empire by flying from world to world and giving them each a little squirt from the appropriate terraforming tool.

I'm honestly surprised there was nothing in this patch dealing with that.  I mean, that's sort of a giant glaring weakness.

[Reg]

The thing about Grox and terraforming is intentional. If you want to spend days and weeks exterminating them you can do that.  I understand using planet busters actually makes them like you more.  Weird guys.

[Yoru]

Since you have to recharge constantly, as well as put down plants so they don't recolonize, it takes about an hour to wipe out 30 planets via terraforming - I know, I tried.

The Grox have some ridiculous number of planets. Probably well into the high hundreds.

You do the math.

[WindupAtheist]

So it's trivial to kill an entire planet of them, but the game's scale and ridiculous "you are your empire's only spaceship" interface makes it unpracticable.  Why am I not surprised?

[palmer_eldritch]

Maybe I could just bust enough of their planets so that they liked me?

You can actually do quests for them, but the positives you get from it are lower than for other races.

[Reg]

It's a shame you turned out to hate the game so much after playing it and enjoying it for a week. It's almost like you're trying to justify having stolen it.

[WindupAtheist]

I've stolen games that were more fun than Spore.  Fuck what you think.

[Reg]

Well I guess that showed me.

[Samwise]

This is sort of interesting -- if you launch Spore with the command line flag "-state:FloraEditor" you can see a completely unusable plant editor.  As in, you can see some of the parts and get an idea for how it'd work, but it's too glitchy to actually make anything.

It would be really cool if they could fix it up in a patch rather than selling it as part of an expansion.  I won't hold my breath.

[Venkman]

I'm loving it, but far and away mostly because of the editors. It's fun trying different ways of evolving a species and then completely over-intellectualizing how that'd specific species would create buildings, vehicles and then space stuff.

The game itself has been pretty easy, so much so I'm not entirely sure I'm playing one. I've heard it gets harder in the space phase which I just hit. Heck, I blew through civ phase before I realized I needed to manually select the boat and plane models I wanted to use (prior I couldn't figure out how the enemy was doing that. Probably some dialog box I clicked past or something). Once I had planes, well, I just threw all of the ground stuff at the epic wanderers, did the old school RTS build up and micromanaged the wipeout of the rest of the planet.

Next time I'll go back and continue the herbivore->diplomacy>commerce/trade route just to see.

[naum]

What difficulty setting are you all playing on?

Just about to complete creature phase (haven't had a lot of time to play and I've been pleasantly distracted just in the creator/editor panels, spending hours just building things…)…

Biggest gripe with game thus far is the tiny font size (which appears to be unadjustable) on the Spore Guide…

[Venkman]

What size is your monitor? I find the font size on the slightly small size at 1620x1080, so can imagine it gets worse at higher resolutions.

Playing on Normal. I may try the carnivore->combat->military path again at hard just to see.

One question I had: in the civ phase I kept paying a neighboring town off. No real reason, I just thought at the time if I kept giving them money they would feel less inclined to attack me. I eventually got to the point where I could roll through them. But afterward I wondered if I hadn't paid them off periodically, would they have attacked me instead of attacking others? I never saw any indication that they liked or hated more or less in their smiley-face/shield icon thingy, but I don't know how granular that scale is (like, was my graft making micro-improvements to the relationship?)

[naum]

What size is your monitor? I find the font size on the slightly small size at 1620x1080, so can imagine it gets worse at higher resolutions.

1680x1050

Set down to 1344x840, but it didn't seem to make much difference…

[Sky]

Buddy names, people. BUDDY NAMES!

I'm trying to come up with a good final form for my cat people. Still a bit off, but has a great hunch and prowl.



And mechs are way to easy, so I made a mechaspork
<------

I'm actively playing my Spork game right now, mostly. Salvaged a pretty bad situation where I was getting beaten up pretty badly by multiple empires.