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Another Spore update.
Space stage is indeed the stage where the vast majority of the game lives. I'm still doing the whole "fly around and make friends with everyone" thing. At first it was annoying because I'd ally with someone and then ally with someone else, and then they'd start attacking each other for territory. At first, I felt kind of obligated to try to help repel invasions and crap, but after a while I just decided to ignore them and let them kill each other, especially when my list of allies (currently 20+) started to grow ever larger and half of them were attacking the other half. Now, the only time I bother to respond to them, after the initial alliance has been set up, is when they're having an ecological disaster that I have to help them clear out (by killing infected animals on the planet), or they're offering to sell me a star system (which will occur after you've had a trade route with them for long enough), or they're being attacked by the Grox. The Grox are the special "big boss" race that live at the center of the galaxy and which nobody else understands and of which they're all afraid, supposedly. My current mission from my home planet is to find out more about them, but I haven't bothered to try for it yet.
I used to run missions for the other races when I needed cash, which would net amounts like 10,000 to 80,000 or so Sporebucks (as they call the money in this game). However, given that I now have around 80-something million Sporebucks, I don't really have to do that anymore either. If I need money now, all I need to do is fly around to my colonies and collect 99 of each kind of spice (there's red, yellow, blue, green, pink, and purple spice, each of differing value), then find a planet willing to buy them for 20,000 to 80,000 per unit, which gets me between 2 mil and 8 mil a pop. So... yeah, money's no longer an issue. Nor do I have to do missions to keep up the relationship level with the races, given that I can plop embassies down on their planets now, give them a gift of 100,000 Sporebucks, or fire the "Super Happy Ray" at their cities (yes, really). I still run them on occasion, as a diversion. There was a badge that leveled up and unlocked certain items in the game, which was based on amount of missions done, but I've already maxed that one out, so that's another reason I don't have to worry about missions as much anymore.
Terraforming is pretty cool, and is required if you want to have colonies that are worth a crap. At first, you have to use consumable items to terraform, but later you get items that run on your ship's energy, which makes it much easier to do. What you have to do is get the planet's climate within a given range on a circular target in the HUD. The two parameters are temperature (left and right) and amount of atmosphere (bottom and top). After that, you have to beam down plants and animals from other planets onto the world you're trying to terraform. There are three stages for terraforming overall.
And then, after a couple of days of playing, I discovered the Monoliths. When you find a planet that has a race of creatures in the Creature, Tribal or Civilization stages, you can plop down a Monolith on that planet (assuming the system isn't already owned by another Space empire), and a little while later, that race will have advanced to the Space stage, and you can do all of the stuff with them that you can do with a normal Space-going society. It's pretty cool to see a race that you've evolved start off on a single planet and then, when you come back later, notice that they've spread out to several new stars (especially if that original planet was in the midst of vast empires already set up by pre-existing races). Among the races that I've evolved so far, one of them was the exact same as the current form of my own race ("Red Guy"), and one was a version of my own race that came from an earlier point in the evolution.
Haven't ran into any Sporn creatures yet. I'm still debating on whether or not I'll actually try to play nice with these like I do with all the other races if I ever encounter one, or if I'll wipe them off the face of the galaxy (or convince some of the other empires to do it for me). Yeah, yeah, I know I can just ban the content so I don't have to worry about it, but what's the fun in that? :)
However, there is one thing that I find incredibly annoying, and that is the fact that my colonies are attacked by pirates almost literally every five to ten minutes or so. It's gotten to the point now where if the pirates are just looting spice rather than actually trying to destroy my colonies, I just let them do it, as I have more interesting things to do than to run back to a colony every two seconds. Especially given that on my more developed planets, there are three colonies, each with eight turrets assigned to them, and an "Uber Turret". The Uber Turret is a kick-ass defense satellite that automatically flies around all over the planet seeking out enemies and pretty much kills stuff even faster than I can myself, even with the maxed out weapons on theIndependence-A ([EDIT] Because EA is shit, that link no longer works[/EDIT]), and the fleet of five other ships from various other races helping me out. Sometimes that thing will have killed all but one or two of the invading aliens before I even get to the planet, and then will kill the remaining ships while I'm barely even able to begin to fly toward them, which is why it's not that big a deal to worry about it that much at this point in the game. The colonists tend to get cheesed off if I ignore them, but it doesn't seem to affect things that much.
So far, I've explored maybe something like a tenth of a single arm of the galaxy, if that much. I'm currently working from my starting point out toward the tip of that arm of the galaxy, rather than going toward the center and the Grox like I'm apparently supposed to. I can't even being to guess how many hundreds of hours it would take to even visit every planet in the galaxy, let alone do anything meaningful there like terraform or hunt for artifacts or interact with other races or whatever.
Overall, Space stage is very opened ended, and there's not a lot of structure to it, so I doubt it would be everyone's cup of tea, but so far I think it's pretty cool. It's certainly better and has more depth than the previous stages.
Is anyone else playing this game at all? I seem to be the only one that's been talking about it to any real extent that I can tell, aside from the DRM issues. >_>
Space stage is indeed the stage where the vast majority of the game lives. I'm still doing the whole "fly around and make friends with everyone" thing. At first it was annoying because I'd ally with someone and then ally with someone else, and then they'd start attacking each other for territory. At first, I felt kind of obligated to try to help repel invasions and crap, but after a while I just decided to ignore them and let them kill each other, especially when my list of allies (currently 20+) started to grow ever larger and half of them were attacking the other half. Now, the only time I bother to respond to them, after the initial alliance has been set up, is when they're having an ecological disaster that I have to help them clear out (by killing infected animals on the planet), or they're offering to sell me a star system (which will occur after you've had a trade route with them for long enough), or they're being attacked by the Grox. The Grox are the special "big boss" race that live at the center of the galaxy and which nobody else understands and of which they're all afraid, supposedly. My current mission from my home planet is to find out more about them, but I haven't bothered to try for it yet.
I used to run missions for the other races when I needed cash, which would net amounts like 10,000 to 80,000 or so Sporebucks (as they call the money in this game). However, given that I now have around 80-something million Sporebucks, I don't really have to do that anymore either. If I need money now, all I need to do is fly around to my colonies and collect 99 of each kind of spice (there's red, yellow, blue, green, pink, and purple spice, each of differing value), then find a planet willing to buy them for 20,000 to 80,000 per unit, which gets me between 2 mil and 8 mil a pop. So... yeah, money's no longer an issue. Nor do I have to do missions to keep up the relationship level with the races, given that I can plop embassies down on their planets now, give them a gift of 100,000 Sporebucks, or fire the "Super Happy Ray" at their cities (yes, really). I still run them on occasion, as a diversion. There was a badge that leveled up and unlocked certain items in the game, which was based on amount of missions done, but I've already maxed that one out, so that's another reason I don't have to worry about missions as much anymore.
Terraforming is pretty cool, and is required if you want to have colonies that are worth a crap. At first, you have to use consumable items to terraform, but later you get items that run on your ship's energy, which makes it much easier to do. What you have to do is get the planet's climate within a given range on a circular target in the HUD. The two parameters are temperature (left and right) and amount of atmosphere (bottom and top). After that, you have to beam down plants and animals from other planets onto the world you're trying to terraform. There are three stages for terraforming overall.
And then, after a couple of days of playing, I discovered the Monoliths. When you find a planet that has a race of creatures in the Creature, Tribal or Civilization stages, you can plop down a Monolith on that planet (assuming the system isn't already owned by another Space empire), and a little while later, that race will have advanced to the Space stage, and you can do all of the stuff with them that you can do with a normal Space-going society. It's pretty cool to see a race that you've evolved start off on a single planet and then, when you come back later, notice that they've spread out to several new stars (especially if that original planet was in the midst of vast empires already set up by pre-existing races). Among the races that I've evolved so far, one of them was the exact same as the current form of my own race ("Red Guy"), and one was a version of my own race that came from an earlier point in the evolution.
Haven't ran into any Sporn creatures yet. I'm still debating on whether or not I'll actually try to play nice with these like I do with all the other races if I ever encounter one, or if I'll wipe them off the face of the galaxy (or convince some of the other empires to do it for me). Yeah, yeah, I know I can just ban the content so I don't have to worry about it, but what's the fun in that? :)
However, there is one thing that I find incredibly annoying, and that is the fact that my colonies are attacked by pirates almost literally every five to ten minutes or so. It's gotten to the point now where if the pirates are just looting spice rather than actually trying to destroy my colonies, I just let them do it, as I have more interesting things to do than to run back to a colony every two seconds. Especially given that on my more developed planets, there are three colonies, each with eight turrets assigned to them, and an "Uber Turret". The Uber Turret is a kick-ass defense satellite that automatically flies around all over the planet seeking out enemies and pretty much kills stuff even faster than I can myself, even with the maxed out weapons on the
So far, I've explored maybe something like a tenth of a single arm of the galaxy, if that much. I'm currently working from my starting point out toward the tip of that arm of the galaxy, rather than going toward the center and the Grox like I'm apparently supposed to. I can't even being to guess how many hundreds of hours it would take to even visit every planet in the galaxy, let alone do anything meaningful there like terraform or hunt for artifacts or interact with other races or whatever.
Overall, Space stage is very opened ended, and there's not a lot of structure to it, so I doubt it would be everyone's cup of tea, but so far I think it's pretty cool. It's certainly better and has more depth than the previous stages.
Is anyone else playing this game at all? I seem to be the only one that's been talking about it to any real extent that I can tell, aside from the DRM issues. >_>
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-09-14 01:09 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-09-14 02:51 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-09-14 06:31 pm (UTC)From:Another poster on slashdot pointed out this is basically EA trying to kill the secondhand market since they're stealing your right to resell the game with this limited activations BS.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-14 08:33 pm (UTC)From:I seriously hate the fact that this asinine DRM is keeping so many people away from what is otherwise a pretty cool game on the whole. Rather, I hate the fact that the DRM is there at all for people to stay away from in the first place, and not the fact that people are legitimately staying away from the game due to the DRM.
And the fact that Red Alert 3 will have the same bullshit doesn't surprise me at all either, since I read somewhere that pretty much all of EA's games from now on will have it, such as RA3 and The Sims 3 and so on. Until and unless EA finally stops wearing their anuses as hats, this will apparently be their "thing". It is that for which they will remain infamous, regardless of the quality of the games themselves. And I'm guessing that RA3 and The Sims 3, which will very likely be good games otherwise based on their previous incarnations, will face the same sort of backlash that Spore did, and deservedly so. Possibly even more so, since they're part of established franchises, instead of a new thing like Spore is. It remains to be seen whether I, personally, will be able to stay away from those games, despite the inane DRM issues, but considering that I got Spore anyway, signs are pointing to no.
Resell market means jack to me, since I hardly ever sell my games. Last time I did so was when I bought my Dreamcast almost a decade ago. It is still a valid issue for many, though. Not that devs (or, more importantly to EA, publishers) see much of any revenue from these resells (any more than they see revenue when someone buys the game, plays it, and then gives rather than sells the game to someone else who might have otherwise legitimately bought the game), which is probably part of EA's reasons for trying to squash the practice in such an infernal manner.
...and here I am talking about the fucking DRM again, instead of the game itself. God damn it.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 05:52 am (UTC)From:"...and here I am talking about the fucking DRM again, instead of the game itself. God damn it."
Ahahahahahahaah. My evil plan works wonders.
"(any more than they see revenue when someone buys the game, plays it, and then gives rather than sells the game to someone else who might have otherwise legitimately bought the game), which is probably part of EA's reasons for trying to squash the practice in such an infernal manner."
I call those things "gifts". A game should end up in the hands of those who like it, regardless of if they pay for their own copy or someone who did buy a copy (And then changed their mind - and with laws being enacted to make it illegal for stores to accept refunds on opened software...) but later found out it wasn't their cup of tea. It's no different than if that first person had gone over to the friend's place and played a game or two of it instead. In either case, just 1 copy is sold.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 12:42 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 02:44 am (UTC)From:Me - Yamen
Barril - Barril
Paul - Calondar
Mike - thejackalman
Steve - RusselSprouts
Just in case you want some spore buddies.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-17 05:12 am (UTC)From: