How to fight the Grox:

This method allow me to clear out 3-4 star systems before having to retreat and repair.

Don't bother trying to capture cities, it's way too hard, just destroy the cities. Also, leave allies at home, they're useless. Here's how I do it:

1) When you fly into their territory, any Grox system within range will send a fighter at you. Dive straight into the target planet as fast as possible, but prepared to lose about 500hp.

2) If you have shield: turn it on and clear out the planet at your leisure.

If you don't have shield: without decreasing altitude, fly toward the city. The fighters will drop in behind you. Ignore them and make sure you keep moving.

Also on the planet are capital ships. There's one for each city on the planet. Ignore those as well and keep away from them. Their missiles can take off 600+ hp.

3) Drop bombs on the city while making fly-bys. You want to drop the bombs when at least half the city is cut off at the bottom of the screen. That's when you ship is above the city. Maintain maximum altitude to avoid turret fire.

4) Once you clear out all the cities, the capital ship will ignore you and fly away. So the only things to take care of are the fighters that followed you from space. Easiest way to kill them is to fly backwards and shoot them with seeking missles. Keep distance to avoid their missiles and lasers.

5) Once the planet is clear, pick up the cash and leave. If there are any other inhabited planets, go and clear it out. Fortunately no additional fighters will come unless you leave the star system, so the only thing to dodge are capital ships and turrets.

6) Once all the planets are clear you can move on to the next star system. Be prepared for another barrage from fighters. If you have less than 1000hp I suggest you retreat and repair.

With practice, the only damage you suffer is from fighter barrage during planet entry. You don't have to fight any of the capital ships if you don't want to, but you can get free shots at them while they flee after you clear out all the cities on a planet. There's a chance they drop some cash if you can destroy them before they leave the atmosphere.

An easier way to defeat the Grox:

Zoom in and fly quickly in high altitude, as the above poster said, to avoid enemy fire.

Check the terraforming/food web map. The planet will be T0, some combination of cold or hot with heavy or light atmosphere.

Select the opposite tool from the terraforming rays.

Fly around until the planet moves into the T1 stage. If you want, add food web to keep the Grox from recolonizing later.

You'll never have to shoot down the ships, unless they harass you too much while you're filling the food web.

When placing plants and animals (or gathering), a little checkmark will appear on their cargo icon to let you know it is already on planet. THis will help you know what you can place to fill out an ecosystem or what the planet has that you have already taken.

Also, placing your cursor over a plant / animal slot in the T-score menu will make their cargo icon blink. Good if you need to replenish your stocks.

When fighting enemies, if you want to keep a planet for yourself, the easiest way of making cities surrender is the following method:

1. Destroy all entertainment centers of that city:
2. Use the pulse. It will make the city surrender fast without killing it.
3. Once you successfully take a planet from an enemy, wipe out their empire. Otherwise, they WILL take the planet back, especially if it's a T3. This is true on ALL difficulty levels.

Try not to make more than one enemy at once otherwise attacks will be too frequent to enjoy the game.

Get one type of every spice each colony with a t3 and 3 colonies and you should amass about 5 million in a matter of minutes if you fill up all the spice locations don't forget the spice storage and a lone colony far from your main colonies and is t0 and you'll be rolling in dough in no time. This works best with a trader. When used with any other it extremely useful to get everything to go and kill the grox

Once your cargo hold is fully updated, keep a healthy supply of an entire T3 ecosystem on board. This will ensure that no matter what condition a planet is in, you will always have the variety of plants and animals you need to fill the food web.
You'll need 3 types of each size plant, 6 different herbivores, and 3 carnivores.

If you start on T0, just overdo it a bit on the terraforming. Don't try to make it stop at T1. Look for the change arrows to go to 3 in the direction of center all the way until you're in T1.
You can take a T0 planet to T3 this way in just a couple minutes.

Prices (more or less) you should look for for each spice before selling. I know these aren't exact as the flucuations or wild but if you wait to get more you could be waiting a long time.

Red - 10-12K
Yellow - 15-17K
Blue - 18-22K
Green - 23-30K
Pink - 33-40K
Purple - 50-60K

I've never been offered more than 60K for purple, and man is that a sweet little cash injection when you sell 99 of them.

Some other trading tips:

Turn the auto-turret OFF when you're exploring - if you encounter an unfriendly civ, you won't blow up their spaceships and provoke a war you probably don't want. Unless that's your thing. In which case, it is a good day to die.

Alliances are important because not only do you need some suckers on which to unload your spices and other wares, but also to purchase items and upgrades MUCH more cheaply than buying from your own civilization (which is kind of odd). The type of civilization you're trading with also determines what sort of wares they have, and also how cheaply they'll sell to you. Militaristic civs will have Planet Busters for 50% off in Normal mode, a whopping 2.5 MILLION spore buck savings! Ecologists have half-off colonial packs and terraform tools. Orderly civs had the wormhole key and cheapintersteller drive upgrades, etc. It all adds up.

Make a core spice empire by snatching up the prime real-estate around your homeworld as soon as you can. You're looking for systems with three or more colonizable planets here; don't bother with stars with only one planet in orbit unless it has a rare spice. Don't panic if a rival or an ally snags it first - when you're up to the challenge, you can either invade or establish a trade route to that system and eventually buy it. The idea is to colonize EVERY planet you can in those systems because it's super easy to fill up your cargohold in a few short hops, and time is money. If you wish, you can make another 'cluster' of spice systems elsewhere in the galaxy to sell to a whole new set of civilizations, and repeat ad nausum.

Many systems will have multiples of the same color spice so have those system fully terraformed and max colonized, spice binned etc, and also uber-turreted and biostablized as well, so there's as little whining from them as possible. Be sure to visit that system once an hour and you'll probably have 99 of that system's spice alone per visit! Having a 'core' empire gives you peace of mind, since as long as your 'breadbasket' is safe, you'll have a stable source of income and you can pretty much ignore invasions/pirates/eco collapses as it'll be more likely one of your loser ally's problem. Be sure to check in to your 'core' colonies now and then, to make sure they're at full health and defenses, since ignoring threats will wear and tear on them after a while.

Although incredibly slow, your homeworld is NOT useless and its cities should be at full health. Max out its defenses and production as much as you can, and treat it as the most precious resource you have. Why? A homeworld with all of its original cities and a spice bin can hold up to a whopping 100 spice, making it like a savings account! Homeworlds of other aliens are even MORE valuable - they have production rates comparative to one of your colonies. Capture a homeworld carefully, don't destroy a city, otherwise you'll lose five units of storage capacity. (I assume that you can buy a homeworld, I need to actually try it first)

I didn't know that terraforming a planet above t0 killed off the grox ("wtf?! How can they have TWO CITIES ON A T-ZERO?!" so when it comes to engaging the Grox in savage combat, invest in bunch of anti-matter missiles. one or two well placed shots will take out an entire cluster grouping of Grox, which is useful especially in fending off a Grox attack. The "city-buster" is only slightly more powerful than two or three fully powered mega-bombs, so don't waste money unless you like the crater it leaves. (I do!)

When mounting the campaign to reach the Galactic Core, black holes are your best friend if you invested in the wormhole key. If you need a breather, dive into the nearest black hole you can... and build a cluster of 'spice systems' (see above) around the exit! Sell to the alien civs you might find around there to basically 'rearm' yourself and get back into the fray!

remember that you dont have to waste terriforming life forms when you drop them on a planet. All that needs to be done is that you drop the life form on the planet once, and it survives.

After that, you are free to use the tractor beam to beam the life form you just dropped, back into your cargo hold


1 creature or plant can last a life time

karatta wrote:1 creature or plant can last a life time

I'd recommend carrying more than 1 of each, though. Stuff can easily happen to cause you to "fumble" with the tractor beam and drop your beasties...

1. The cheapest possible route to ruling the galaxy (and arguably the easiest) is being a warrior... Cheepest because all you need is the weapons, and you do not requires bribes, you will also make friends by doing missions if you want, and more so people will be more 'obliged' to be your friends.

Ups: Cheap

Downs: Numerous wars, although you should probably be able to end these quickly.

2. If you're doing something important, and you're planet is being plundered by pirates, just ignore it, you'll lose spice, that's all. Of course if you're doing nothing, you should probably go there any way.

3. DO NOT make friends with peaceful empires, just meet them (I mean like the kinds that follow the scrolls of faith, ect.) they will send you bribes of low amounts (10k spore bucks) and eventually ask for an alliance. Saves you trouble.

4. Getting to the center of the galaxy is HARD, get at least a rank 4 interstellar drive, as even with it you can only travel 3 parsecs in the center.

5. The mega bomb is your friend, get it before the mega pulse.

6. The mega laser should be used sparingly, although powerful, it drains your energy at crazy speeds.

7. If you're going to use the happiness beam, make sure you can recharge at there planet, as it takes... Well like all your energy.

8. On the trip to the center, worm holes are your FRIEND, when you are low on hp and energy (this will happen very often, as you start traveling slow when the grox attack you, and they are very strong.) enter a worm hole, find a planet and recharge, REMEMBER WHAT WORM HOLE YOU CAME OUT OF.

9. Do not ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever cheat. Never ever ever.

10. Save before destroying earth, get the achievement, then quit without saving, load.

11. Allying the grox will make you enemys with... Everyone.

12. If you ever find a race called the Traffles, place a monolith on the planet, and everything to protect it (uber turret, bio protected, bio stabilizer, stuff like that.) and you'll earn... Err, JUST DO IT. I COMMAND YOU.

13. Traveling with no energy takes away 200 hp per click.

Having trouble taking a capital planet? Rather than sweat it out and try to take out every SPORE city.

Mess with their atmosphere. I've used this method when i don't really need/want the planet that the capital is on, just drop an atmosphere reducer/any other thing you want to throw their ecosystem outta wack. Come back a few min. later and there are just 1-3 cities. Kinda playin dirty, but hey, they hit you first (after you hit them....)

jackacid wrote:Homeworlds of other aliens are even MORE valuable - they have production rates comparative to one of your colonies. Capture a homeworld carefully, don't destroy a city, otherwise you'll lose five units of storage capacity. (I assume that you can buy a homeworld, I need to actually try it first)

Yes, you can, and I recommend it. They'll always ask for the top bidding price ($10 mil I think), but assuming that their homeworld still has all 10 cities on it, it's well worth it; you'll make back your money fast.

link99912 wrote:
3. DO NOT make friends with peaceful empires, just meet them (I mean like the kinds that follow the scrolls of faith, ect.) they will send you bribes of low amounts (10k spore bucks) and eventually ask for an alliance. Saves you trouble.

What a good idea!!