Spore again…

I know, you want to see pictures :/ But when I’m home, I’m playing Spore! I’ll put some up tonight. If you have Spore, you can see all my stuff by putting “tipadaknife” on your buddy list. I put Bildo and Darren on, and now I have some of their stuff trundling along in my world. It’s always fun to see a friendly face, though most of the stuff on the worlds I encounter are the things I made in Sunday’s game.
I started last night from the Tribal phase, on Normal mode, rather than Easy which I’d played the first time around. I doubt I will ever play the cell game again, and the creature phase, aside from seeing all the different creatures, was pretty boring as well. The Tribe phase, with its simple RTS, at least has some replay value.
My race was an evolved form of carnivorous cat. Where Sunday’s race was a kind of herbivorous rat/bird mix with violent tendencies, my prey-hunting Tribal Tabbies were as much interested in playing their didgeridoos as fighting. I allied myself with two tribes and was forced to destroy three others — one of which attacked me as I was trying to make peace. I marched into the last tribe’s village as a parade — my villagers playing wooden horns, maracas and didgeridoos as they filed in. I laid a gift basket of food down on their food store, serenaded them with my songs, and entered the Civilization phase in Economy mode.
You can’t build weapons in Economy mode. Your only option is to form trade routes with other cities and keep donating money to them until you can just outright buy the city. Only one opponent was economy (and I took that city quickly). The others were split between military and religious. While I had to keep paying ever-increasing bribes to keep out of war, they were having a merry old time lobbing bombs at each other and occasionally picking off one of my canine Poochinator cargo mechs. And of course all I could do was protest. Well, I did eventually ally with a military empire and paid them to go destroy a particularly annoying empire that kept sending planes to bomb my cities.
I wanted my ally’s cities in the worst way. I managed to get one through economic means, but the other just wouldn’t fall, so now that I had military power from the first of its cities, I used it to attack the other city, which gave me a port. I used my new ships that could actually fight back to clear the seas of all other shipping and take the offshore spice mines for my own.
By this time, the religious Red empire had pretty much taken over the second continent, save only for one cyan city, which hadn’t responded well to five hundred foot high holographic cats yelling sermons at them all day and all night.
Red and I had had some minor skirmishes, but had managed to avoid going to war. I opened up trade routes with two of its coastal cities, and then used my special ability to instantly purchase cities with whom you have trade routes to take them both. This gave me enough cities to use my game-ending power to purchase every city in the world, and so I entered Space phase as a Trader, which has similar powers. I can buy any planet with whom I have a trade route, but they want millions of Sporleons, more than I have at the moment, but once I do, I imagine the conquest of the galaxy will be just as quick as the conquest of the world was, once I got the city-buying power.
I’ve already encountered the empire of my species from the first game 🙂
Even at Normal level, the tribal and civilization phases were easy. Aggressors were more aggressive, but special moves like being able to outright purchase cities (or in military mode, nuke them from orbit) make it difficult to really get in trouble you can’t get out of. Being an economy civilization meant I was rich and could afford the sort of bribes to keep my city safe while I conquered my enemies by economic means.
I may restart the game once more to go the entirely social route and see how the religious empires work. They don’t get guns, either, so if they try to convert a military city, that city can just bring out some guns and shoot the sermonizers. I guess they might be able to make some headway against economy or other religious empires, though.

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