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[Dooly]

Then in Tribal stage, if you only kill the two tribes that start out outright hostile to you, the end result will be Aggressive.

Did you ever try sending gifts to tribes that hate you?  I sent all twelve tribescreatures equipped with instruments on a gift-giving mission to the last village that appeared (populated by Kazz's Mustalkpods), and even though I had to stop to kill three raiders they'd sent towards my village on the way, their opinion of me went from red to yellow once the gift arrived, and I quickly allied with them after that to complete the tribal phase.

Also, the city phase was just something to slog through to get to the space phase for me.

One more thing:  It's possible for a game to make too much user-generated content.  Every time you make or change something in an editor, the game puts an animated .gif of it in the AnimatedAvatars folder.

[LaserBeing]

Evolution cares not for your meaningless human ideals of right and wrong! Only survival of the fittest!

Then again, I'm the kind of lung-breathing Devonian hardass who always eats the baby ichthyostegas, just out of spite.

[Kazz]

Pacifist carnivores?  Really?  Are you TRYING to break evolution?

[Detonator]

So far I'm trying not to be too judgmental, and try to be realistic about what could be improved.

My biggest beef with the creature/tribal phases is that they are too claustrophobic.  There is no incentive to wander far from the nest because you'll run into a nest of giant angry monkeys who will use your eye socket as a love canal.  Running from the big predator is definitely a part of the game, but to have a different nest of 10 guys every 30 feet is just crowded.  The world just doesn't feel big or mysterious.  A predator should have to track prey instead of waiting outside the nest for one to wander out of aggro range.

The tribal stage has no recon - you're shown where the other tribes are to start with and enemy units are shown on the minimap.  It doesn't matter what stage you're at, first contact should be the most exciting thing about this game, and they sucked it out of the earlier stages (at least) by shoving everyone into the same little area to speed things along.

Yes, I feel kinda bad jumping on this game while it's down.

[Kazz]

Easy difficulty wasn't challenging enough to be fun.  This game should be regarded as a toy, first and foremost.  I think they stuck most of the game's depth into the Space phase, which I don't agree with.

All that said, I'm having a lot of fun and so are my roommates.  Am I the only person who didn't decide that their expectations needed to be unrealistic so that they could be disappointed?

BTW it's an EA Will Wright game.  There will be fifty expansions and I'm buying them all.

[Detonator]

I take back everything I said- the building creator is tits.

So what is everyone's name so I can add them to my friends list?  I am simply Detonator.

[Kazz]

Have you made tanks/boats/planes yet?  The Tyrannobee War Blimp is the mother fucking bomb diggity.

[McFrugal]

Pacifist carnivores?  Really?  Are you TRYING to break evolution?

Why should a carnivore kill things that are not prey?  Assuming the predator isn't big enough to consider everything to be prey, you can argue pretty well that a meat-eating race doesn't have to be warlike.  Personally I was just trying to get in the middle of the graph.

Did you ever try sending gifts to tribes that hate you?

No, that's dumb and you're dumb.  I do know it works, as I did it once to calm down an unfriendly village that got angry because I killed one of their food-thieves.  Declaring war on me right off the bat is not something I reward with gifts, however.  I wonder if giving gifts to villages that are already allies would help boost the graph up.

[McFrugal]

Be careful around volcanoes.  I managed to jump up the side of one, only to overshoot it and go over the lip.  Fortunately, it functions as a giant geyser, so I didn't fall in the lava.  Unfortunately, air friction kept me from actually moving past the crater, so I bounced up and down on top of the strangely harmless steam vent until starvation killed me.

[McFrugal]

Is anyone else actually playing this game?  I got to Space mode and some asshole decided to repeatedly demand money from me, escalating the price each time.  I eventually couldn't pay, so he declared war on me.  I have yet to figure out how to defend myself against him, as he has way too many ships and my ship's combat capability is not upgraded at all.  In fact, it seems the computer cheats a lot- it expands way faster than could ever be possible.  The friendly race I started near has like 8 worlds now, yet I had only one severely underdeveloped colony before the hostile took it from me.  He did it while I was fighting him on that planet, too.

It doesn't help that I get interrupted every 5 minutes by a pirate raid or an ecosystem disaster.

Did I just get assraped by the RNG or something?  I have big problems selling spice at a decent price, and there doesn't seem to be any other way to make money.

P.S. there seems to be a memory leak.

[Kazz]

i'm playing and stop trying to win

[jsnlxndrlv]

text

Spatch is one of my favorite people on livejournal, and his first impressions post comes to some similar conclusions.  His proposed solution to the difficulties in space:

What I eventually ended up doing was starting a Space stage and, in the course of doing the opening missions (fly to this planet! fly to this star system! learn to make colonies! etc!) I have stopped the main mission at "Seek out new alien life!" I have thus far avoided going out of my way to make contact with any aliens, and instead worked on colonizing the star systems around me, trading various colors of spice among my empire, and terraforming the planets and building up cash.

In short, I'm doing all the fun parts of the Space stage without dealing with any aliens. No idea what'll happen when I eventually give in and talk to someone, but I hope at that point to be rich enough and perhaps have enough advancements to deal with the idiots who'll consistently attack.

[Shinra]

the worst part about aliens is that their ships get upgraded with every world they snatch. So you can be crusing around, fighting enemies who are roughly on your level, then you blunder into their ally's territory and all the ships have 3000 hp and kill you in four seconds. The trick? Rush to bombs. Go to their colonies, ignore the other ships, and bomb the shit out of them. Every time a colony gets destroyed the ships on the planet stop defending and future ships have lower HP.

The whole thing honestly seems dumb; I wasn't expecting galactic civilizations, but something a little less... unfair would have been nice. The only valid strategy to space combat seems to be to bomb the other guys cities and then swarm him with allied fighters until he gives up. Considering how easy it would have been to put in a reasonable dogfighting system, it just feels to me like a lot of the rest of the game did; incredibly short, incredibly rushed. Very polished for what's on the plate, but to be honest, that's really not much.

The coolest part of the game remains the builders, but honestly I'm so retarded at these things that it's not that fun for me. I'm just not artistically inclined enough to make good use of the tools.

[McFrugal]

So, in short, it's a badly made game with the ability to make your own art assets.

[MadMAxJr]

Has any game that has been in development for numerous years survive the hype and actually be good when the final product releases?


Oh wait!
 

[Brentai]

They didn't spend the entire 10 years hyping it, though.  In fact they only started marketing the thing again once they actually knew when the game was going to be released.

Wil Wright gave a long presentation on Spore to everyone at every event.  You know how you sometimes get afraid that you've seen so much of a movie in advance that you may know how the whole thing goes by the time you actually see it?  Spore.

(See also Brawl.)

[Kazz]

The problem I have with Spore is the exact same problem I had with CoH.  They tout the ability to create your own everything and then what you're really doing is setting stats for very simple mechanics, but hey, anything can look however you want.  It can be deceptive.

There are two ways to approach the ability to create your own content: the way Spore did, or the really, really complex way.  As you add depth to the game, you have to add choices beyond the Molyneux model of nice/mean.  In this sense, Spore is not deep.

Let me put it this way: if you don't care about making neat stuff, you will hate Spore.  Your buildings will look like cubes and your people will be blobs with appendages, eyes, and mouths.  If you want an intellectual challenge, you'll get bored.  If you want a toy, you'll have a lot of fun.  The game's simplistic (damn it) approach is disheartening, but I'll absolutely get my dollar's worth from the game.  People come into my room to play it all the time.

[Kazz]

Let me just add that the Cell stage is easily the best one.  Part placement matters tremendously (sticking a spike on your ass wards off predators, while sticking it on your face makes you more offensively-minded), balancing your creature well matters, and you have a better-defined sense of the world of survival.  If that part of the game were more fleshed out into a standalone product, I'd be a happy boy.  If that concept were then taken to an MMO environment, I'd probably cream myself.

The fact that there is little consequence for dying in the game kills any sense of danger, especially later on.  In the Cell stage, though, seeing that big black bastard with fifty eyes and just as many mouths busting ass after you evokes a sense of danger better than most things outside the Epic shit that pops up now and again.

[Niku]

I really just sort of wanted Graffiti Kingdom with a better game on the end.  :(

[Zaratustra]

If that part of the game were more fleshed out into a standalone product, I'd be a happy boy. 

http://www.eamobile.com/Web/mobile-game/landing/promo/spore-ww