Spored out of your mind?

[Aez]

They'll probably add an an editor or two per expansion : clothing, huts, plant.  They could also add part/skill  : an improved pet feature, trap laying, nest defense, symbiosis.

Imagine the cell phase if you could lay down some virus trap, build a nest/shell, allies with an other cell to defend the nest.

Having to bring back food to your nest or defend your feeding spot in creature mode would greatly improve the game.

[Baldrake]

Well, I think you're right that they'd have to change the game as well as adding editors. There's only so much replay value in the game as-is - it's not like we're all going to play it again because we can now give our guys hawaii shirts.

[Samwise]

I wish I could place more than one uber-turret per planet.  I'd plant a colony near Grox territory, put twenty uber-turrets on it, and let them tire themselves out throwing ships at it.   

Stupid Grox.  I tried to get in their good graces, but they follow me around shooting at me WHILE I'M DOING MISSIONS FOR THEM.  And then get upset if my ship's auto-turret swats them out of the sky.  Bah!

[Lantyssa]

I think I'm going to put two damn mouths on my cell and see what happens. :) I tried the probiscus thing, which seems pretty damn "Omnivore" to me, but I must have switched to late or eaten too many plants.

You can have different mouth types.  Here's a trick:

At the end of your cell stage, if you are a carnivore or herbivore, add a mouth from the other type (or a proboscis if you want) to be able to eat anything in the later stages.  You can shrink these way down compared to the later mouths, and hide them under evolved parts if you cannot fit them into your creature's look.  It makes life a lot easier in the creature stage, and lets you choose the mouth you want for apperance, without having to force your creature into a role you don't want.

If you want creatures as herbivore to populate planets in the space stage, you may want to make an edited version without the other mouth though.  The game will treat them as omnivores in that situation.

My red pandas for example, use a carnivore mouth, however their wiskers are the herbivore cell stage mouth.  That let me eat fruits throughout the creature stage, but use the best mouth for the look.

[Valmorian]

At the end of your cell stage, if you are a carnivore or herbivore, add a mouth from the other type (or a proboscis if you want) to be able to eat anything in the later stages.

I did the same thing with a couple of my creatures, it can be really handy. 

Also, for an experiment I made a creature with no eyes and no legs to see how that worked through the creature stage.. pretty well actually.. although the world looks neat when you have no eyes. ;)

[naum]

[Valmorian]

I know it's not deep, but I'm loving this game.  I LOVE being surprised constantly at the things people make, and just trying out things all over the place.. the space stage is great for that too, with the terraforming and transplanting species between worlds..

Also, I just found out  you can encounter your other saved games if you manage to make it to another home system.  I was going to try exterminating them but then I found that all my weapons and terraforming tools are disabled while I'm in the home sytem of one of my other saves.

[Valmorian]

Oh, I ran into THIS last night on a new creation's homeworld: http://www.spore.com/sporepedia#qry=srch-nixonoid%3Asast-500006485537

AWESOME.

[Samwise]

He shouldn't have given them such an obvious name.  Imagine the shock of being hailed by the Kcidykcirt Empire and suddenly having Nixon's face on the viewscreen.

[CmdrSlack]

Heh, I managed to exterminate the Religious Quack species after befriending it in creature mode.

SporeGod works in mysterious ways and whatnot. :p


Bonus points for creating a duck species tho. 

[Valmorian]

Heh, I managed to exterminate the Religious Quack species after befriending it in creature mode.

SporeGod works in mysterious ways and whatnot. :p


Bonus points for creating a duck species tho. 

Those poor, innocent ducks! 

[CmdrSlack]

Naw, they were askin' for it.

Actually, I think it was one of those "whoops not in social mode" double-clicking moments.

[Samwise]

I've begun carving a tunnel to the center of the galaxy by terraforming every Grox system that's close enough to my route to threaten me.  I've also seeded and uplifted some of the reclaimed systems so I can ally with them and use them as staging points.  Pretty awesome.

[CmdrSlack]

I'm having a heck of a time navigating in space mode.

Finding stars is a PITA, even with the filters. I think perhaps it's time to invest in a mouse for my laptop, because the touchpad thing doesn't like to play nice with it's "mouse wheel" function in Spore.

I have no idea if it'll help me out with my star-finding issues, but at least it'll make the creators more functional for me.

[Reg]

I've tried getting to the center of the galaxy a few times now but always ended up at a point where I couldn't jump far enough to get to the next star. Then I'd get frustrated and give up.  My latest race though, the Omnitards stumbled on a wormhole that seems to be taking me almost all the way there. Now I just need to grind and get the best warp drive before I make another attempt.

[Venkman]

Finding stars is a PITA, even with the filters. I think perhaps it's time to invest in a mouse for my laptop, because the touchpad thing doesn't like to play nice with it's "mouse wheel" function in Spore.

I have no idea if it'll help me out with my star-finding issues, but at least it'll make the creators more functional for me.

Ugh. I can't use Word with a trackpad and you were trying to navigate space with it?! You have more patience than I for sure

[Samwise]

I've tried getting to the center of the galaxy a few times now but always ended up at a point where I couldn't jump far enough to get to the next star. Then I'd get frustrated and give up.  My latest race though, the Omnitards stumbled on a wormhole that seems to be taking me almost all the way there. Now I just need to grind and get the best warp drive before I make another attempt.

Yeah, the level 5 interstellar drive seems to be an absolute requirement for navigating in the middle of the galaxy.  Even with everything maxed out I find that I'm having to do a lot of tacking around to make forward progress (which means coming close to more Grox systems, which is fine since it just means more dead Grox).

So you have to start from scratch unlocking tech when you start a new game?  That's kinda weak.  I'd have thought that once you unlock it it's always available, just like the different game phases.  Then again, there's probably a console cheat that makes it moot.

[Kail]

I'm getting this weird double-image glitch with my creatures on the Sporepedia (plus, it mucks up the textures and it shows a cropped pic of the Creature Creator base in there, for some reason)... anyone else having this problem, or know what it's about?

[Raging Turtle]

Holy crap some of you people spend a lot of time in the editor.  150+ creations from some of you!

Downloading most/all of it now... hopefully have time to upload my own 

[Lantyssa]

Holy crap some of you people spend a lot of time in the editor.  150+ creations from some of you!

Downloading most/all of it now... hopefully have time to upload my own 

New games can generate quite a lot since each generation is shared.  A lot of my ships are reskins due to laziness and it taking longer to design one of nine cool vehicles than the entire length of the civ stage.

[Raging Turtle]

Noticed that.  I wonder if Spore will re-download creations if I go through and whack the repeats?

And for some odd reason it only let me upload of a couple of my own.  Will try again later. 

[CmdrSlack]

So with wormholes, you definitely need the 1.5 mil wormhole key before jumping into one, right?

It's probably a stupid question with an obvious answer (it's called a wormhole key, after all), but I'm dumping most of my spice income into fortifying and terraforming my core seven colonies before I go make contact with the Grox.

I also have a pesky species that has really tough defender ships, so my usual "grab fleet, go suck the atmosphere off the planet, kill now gimped colony" method is also eating funds and taking longer since they're tough bastards. I'm hoping that soon I'll unlock more of the terraforming tools that use energy. 10k for a max energy pack is way nicer than 90-135k for the various and sundry terraforming tools.

I really don't want to read the "tasks to unlock" badges pages, since I like finding them naturally, but I may need to start grinding things if I want to move past my end of the spiral arm.

I am excited, however, that I have a monolith and am planning on uplifting my first civ-stage planet next time I play.

[Samwise]

Yeah, you need the wormhole key or it won't let you in.

I'd recommend holding off until you've got your money machine well established and the good toys unlocked, personally.  The key for me ended up being to grab a few planets with purple/pink spice, mine the fuck out of them (3 colonies plus a storage expansion = 30 spice per visit), and shop it around to find planets that'll pay 50k sporebucks per unit for it.  I'm finally at the point now where I can make 3 mil on a quick tour of my colonies.  I've bought every system within 5 parsecs of my home planet and am feeling pretty good about my little empire now.   

[Reg]

If you do a little bit of everything the important tools feel like they unlock pretty naturally without having to grind, especially on your first time in the Space section of the game. Don't spoil it for yourself by reading the badge requirements. Just explore and terraform and do a few missions and everything will open up - faster than you can afford to buy all the new toys most likely.

It sounds to me like you aren't big enough to bother with the Grox yet. You may well end up leaving your colonies unattended for several hours as you make your way towards the galactic hub so you're going to want to have them all set up with Bioprotectors and Uber-turrets so they're safe while you're gone.  And that costs a fair bit of money.

[CmdrSlack]

Ah. Yeah, I have 7 planets.

I'm slowly getting them to T3, which is nice cause it's unlocking the better terraforming tools. What sucks is that I guess I need to just start more wars to get the bigger guns. I have the first bomb you get. It works great if you Inconvenient Truth the enemy, but then you have to terraform the planet back up if you want it to be useful.


Perhaps I'll just hang back, keep my allies happy (although a couple are at war with each other, which is often comical. At least doing missions and giving them some dough here and there helps in the "you didn't save us" department), and generally see what happens when you do certain things. The uplifting a species thing is cool, and I never could figure out what you do with crop circles besides make them and watch the tribal or civ stage fuckers run around. I'm hoping the monolith is better.

[Sky]

Yeah, I conquered with bombs. Made nice with a small warlike empire that's growth limited by my other allies (I let one ally trounce them and then removed that ally...permanently), and being a warrior I get munitions at reduced price. But then I get an empty terraformed planet to play with and drop at least a token colony with lots of defense.

Right now I'm way overstretched due to this, but I also cut my allies off from massive expansion by encircling some of them pretty well, they're still relatively primitive. Except one who expanded out into a tough sumbitch empire that I hate fighting, might let them die off for a bit.

Got real lucky and found two systems with purple planets (one with two!) during my last conquest and now I'm finally out of the money hole for the most part. Going back to terraform more of my core planets and colonize.

Wish there was a way to set up internal trade routes to my home system to automate spice collection. Having to fly through 30 or so systems is a drag, especially during a war. Also, I'm still stuck to 3 or 4 trade routes. More trade routes should also result in some kind of market screen where you can sort prices so you don't have to dick around finding a system to buy spice for a good price, and also know which aliens sell which upgrades.

[Samwise]

Wish there was a way to set up internal trade routes to my home system to automate spice collection. Having to fly through 30 or so systems is a drag, especially during a war. Also, I'm still stuck to 3 or 4 trade routes. More trade routes should also result in some kind of market screen where you can sort prices so you don't have to dick around finding a system to buy spice for a good price, and also know which aliens sell which upgrades.

This.  I've got it pretty well streamlined by this point so it's not too annoying (I only bother with getting spice from my 5 biggest producing planets), but once something becomes routine I'd like to have a way to automate it.  Ditto for the Grox attacks, like I was saying earlier... just let me spend all my money on uberturrets and never have to think about an enemy attack ever again.

[Reg]

I found a purple spice planet with a tribe on it. It was only T1 so I terraformed it up to T3 and dropped a monolith on them.  Once they hit the Space Age I started a trade route with them and bought the system.

After upgrades it can hold up to 100 purple spice and it's producing it blindingly fast. I think I could probably support my whole empire just by visiting that one system every 10 or 15 minutes. 

[Stephen Zepp]

Does not work on my machine (funny, I have a Dell XPS M130--decently standard gaming laptop).

Turns out the error I've been getting has been known since May, yet EA/Maxis has never once responded to it, and it's not in their support or forums.

DasmX86Dll.dll cannot be found. Crashes every time you start a game.

Whoo-hoo! They finally found out what was causing crashes like mine: if you have the DirectX SDK running, it needs to be in "retail" mode: Game crashes when entering cell mode....

For future readers, the best reference/fix thread I've found: Spore Master Help Thread.

[naum]

Patch out for Macs now…

Haven't had much chance to play of late, looking forward to resuming Tribal stage tonight… (yes, I am glacially slow at this anymore…)…

[Samwise]

After upgrades it can hold up to 100 purple spice and it's producing it blindingly fast. I think I could probably support my whole empire just by visiting that one system every 10 or 15 minutes. 

Whoa whoa whoa... 100 storage?  Is that because it was their home planet and therefore gets more than the standard max of 3 colonies?

That is a goddamn awesome trick if so.

[Reg]

Yup it was their home so it had a whole bunch of cities. But for some reason they don't produce at the glacial pace our own home planets do. The city layouts were all bizarre and different like they are on a home world so I couldn't make them superproduce like on a regular colony world but they each produced at like 70-80 per hour which is awesome when there are 10 of them.

I'm in the process of trying it again to see if I can repeat the trick or if it was just a lucky fluke.

[Lantyssa]

No, all other homeplanets produce at a faster rate.  Buildings cost as much as any of your non-homeworld colonies, but it's worth it.

I recommend keeping the empire small though.  Grab a couple of nice systems with all the spice colors and only develop them.  It cuts down on the raids and bio-disasters, while giving you all the spice you need.  Then go explore and have fun without having to worry about an emergancy every five minutes you would with a massive empire.  It's the only failing I have with the space game -- the larger your empire, the less time you have to go out and explore to do things, because you can only manage colonies with your one ship.

[Samwise]

Well shit.  Now I'm tempted to nuke some of my own colonies and reseed them so I can shorten my spice runs.

[Sky]

I think I also read something about being far away from home lowering the amount of events at home (assuming you aren't at war).

Wish I had known about converting home systems, I've blasted four or five home planets and colonized them the old fashioned way. I'm also too cheap to use one-shot tools and don't have monoliths unlocked for free, if you even can.

I do use the one-shot missile defense against enemy fleets, though...had to for one very tough war.