seliam wrote:Has anyone played the Civ stage on hard since the patch? It seems that the balance of power has been drasticly skewed towards the AI, since they seem to start with 5+ vehicles, make money at a much faster rate than I do, and my rate of earning is much slower than in normal. Not to mention that all 9 other cities are founded as soon as I claim my first geyser, if not sooner. I hadn't tried to play this stage on hard before the patch, so I don't know if it was overbalanced when they increased the difficulty. Has anyone who completed the civ stage on hard before the patch and played it afterwards tell me how much of a difficulty increase there actually was?

Much appreciated.

I did my hard mode run (for the achievements) the day after the patch; I went military in Civ, and got the under-an-hour achievement at the same time (and the capture-all-geysers and have-8-military-cities achievements). My enemies never attacked with more than one unit at a time, which was thwarted by my turrets every time. They never attacked my geysers.

blanketyblankman wrote:I did my hard mode run (for the achievements) the day after the patch; I went military in Civ, and got the under-an-hour achievement at the same time (and the capture-all-geysers and have-8-military-cities achievements). My enemies never attacked with more than one unit at a time, which was thwarted by my turrets every time. They never attacked my geysers.

Ok, well that is not the experience I am having. I was attempting an economic victory to get the increased spice production, and as soon as the other cities are founded, which sometimes happens before I can even claim my first geyser, the closest military city immediately sends 5-10 land vehicles over and obliterates my city. They also usually blow up my geyser if it is on the way to my city. I think I will give it a shot with a military city and see how that goes, maybe the AI will act differently towards me. It just seemed like a big jump in difficulty from the post-patch tribal stage on hard, which was still pretty easy.

xyish wrote:

karatta wrote:
I have a question for those here, today I ran into an issue where I finished the Civ stage with an economic alignment, but I was rewarded a military trait card. I belive this is related to the number and type of cities you own at completion. Can anyone confirm this senario? (I do not have a screen shot sadly, I quit and reloaded the game to a previous save point without thinking about the strangeness, to change my space trait card).

Pretty sure that is not the case. For all my games in the Civ stage I've played based on a focused single-minded strategy, that is, based on the type of nation I have, and for all my timelines, they have straight lines throughout despite having cities not belonging to my main type (mostly from super weapon captures).

I also noted that getting into bad relationships, starting wars, killing off enemy unit, using multiple vehicle types (religious/miltary/economic), attacking/converting/starting trade routes with cities do not affect my time line at all. I suspect only captures (based on type of capture) do affect, so if you accidentally attacked a city using a group of military vehicles while being an economic nation will not cause your timeline to slide towards the military trait unless you have captured the city via military means. I cannot confirm because the "free vehicles" (gained by capturing tribes) are unlikely to reach a group large enough to start capturing cities, and I'm lazy to build up say, a military army as a religious nation, but it seems logical.

Edit: Confirmed.
I started a new economic game and quickly bought out a small religious city, which after I maxed out the space building (I should have built all houses, but it was just so habitual to maximize income), giving me allowance to have 4 religious vehicles. In the next few seconds, I had a religious capture! I then proceeded to check the timeline and noticed my timeline had leapt on to the edge of economic and almost into religious. In fact, the arrow was practically pointed on the border between the two traits. The only way I could tell was the lighted economic trait. So unless someone else has any new findings, it is safe to assume that only captures count towards affecting your trait, not city type or even anything else.

I understand the alignment in your case was operating normally, but you will have to complete the game in the manner that I depicted to be certian of the test.

It was pretty strange when I got the game to do that at the end of the phase. I finished the game when I became friends with the last remaining nation, and they asked to join forces to end the civ phase.

That was when I saw my timeline, and at the end of the timeline it displayed in blue under economic heading, but I was rewarded a military trait card at the top of the screen.

I owned 2 economic cities, and 4 military cities at the time.

I spent over 30K on military air vehicles in the last 10 mintues of the game to put down a hostile faction, who I could not raise friendlieness with, and the rest of the game I spent about 14K on economic ships & vehicles. All economic vehicles were deleted near the last 10 minutes of the game, because I could not trade with anyone at the time. After the final city of the hostile faction fell, I begain trade with the last remaning faction with 2 economic vehicles, which eventually bumped my relationship to Happy, ending the game.

Only 1 of my city captures were military, the other 5 were economic. But my military air vehicles were involved in lots of killing at the end of the game, destroying over 20 buildings and turrets, and over 20 enemy military vehicles. I refused to go to war with several nations, after being asked many times throughout the game, (if that has anything to do with the timeline alignment).


Hope that helps if anyone is willing to test!


Edit 1: Im starting to think there is a bug related to the alignments, if you are right on the borderline of an alignment change, the color may not properly depict your alignment. This situation that I recieved here was the second of 2 times that I recieved a creature trait card for a different colored alignment. Both times this occured was when I was on the border of the two. If I find out this is true, I will edit my statement here and above to not confuse new players.
http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/0/5089.page#46645

I'm stuck in my Civ Phase, and could use some help.

I'm a military civilization on Normal mode, post-patch. To start, I nabbed two or three geysers and captured the first AI city immediately after it appeared. The next city that appeared was on my continent, is a military powerhouse, and immediately declared war on me. They've captured all of the spice geysers on the continent except for one (which is mine), and they also managed to get my only military city. I made the mistake of backing myself into a corner by saving just before they launched a mixed ground/sea assault on my religious city (which also has a seaport). I don't make money fast enough to roll out vehicles, and the ones I manage to buy seem to get destroyed too quickly. Each time I load, I'm about 15 seconds or less from a large-scale attack on my only city.

Obviously, I'm not great at RTS games. Is there any way to get through this without restarting or cheating?

O man, I could have used all these tips about 2 nights ago. >_< lol
Thanks so much for sharing y'all tips /creating this thread.
It's going to come in soooo handy with my new civilization haha. :3
I've kind of lost all hope for my first one.. :/
~Kp.

I don't see how you're supposed to settle by the sea in
creature stage to get a seaside city at start of civ stage.
I've only been given the option to migrate to one set
nest each time it moves; are there more nests than one
you could find each migration?
You can't move the target nest by the sea so how do we settle there??

buglunch wrote:I don't see how you're supposed to settle by the sea in
creature stage to get a seaside city at start of civ stage.
I've only been given the option to migrate to one set
nest each time it moves; are there more nests than one
you could find each migration?
You can't move the target nest by the sea so how do we settle there??

follow the dotted line on the minimap past your current nest, you should eventualy find one by the sea which has your type of creature in it, one of which you can mate with. if you do, your home symbol will switch to there, with it wanting you to migrate back to the one you were at before. dont, instead advance while you are there, and your starting city will have a seaport in civ mode.

chaosbote wrote:an other good idea which actually begins at the creature stage, is to make your last nest by the water, then when you are in the civ stage, you are already have the option of making boats, thus easier to claim everything

You make your last nest by calling a mate at one of your species nest locations. If you travel down the path in creature stage there are many often even beyond the migration quest chain. Check your history after doing so and it should say something like claimed a new nest and you are ready to go.

This was something I recently learned and it is very useful especially on hard settings if you are economic.

For those having trouble:

Today I had some issues as well, trying to rush to conquer a few cities. Turns out that turtling in your starting city and letting the others grow and hammer each others head actually helps out a lot. I spent the first 15 minutes designing a city for maximum profit with maximum defense. After a while I was able to spam vehicles and turn the tide in my favor.

marshallsucks wrote:I'm stuck in my Civ Phase, and could use some help.

I'm a military civilization on Normal mode, post-patch. To start, I nabbed two or three geysers and captured the first AI city immediately after it appeared. The next city that appeared was on my continent, is a military powerhouse, and immediately declared war on me. They've captured all of the spice geysers on the continent except for one (which is mine), and they also managed to get my only military city. I made the mistake of backing myself into a corner by saving just before they launched a mixed ground/sea assault on my religious city (which also has a seaport). I don't make money fast enough to roll out vehicles, and the ones I manage to buy seem to get destroyed too quickly. Each time I load, I'm about 15 seconds or less from a large-scale attack on my only city.

Obviously, I'm not great at RTS games. Is there any way to get through this without restarting or cheating?

Psh, cheating is for wimps. Restarting's ok by me since practice = learning. But anyway.

Give them gifts, as much as you can, until they are at least blue-face. Paise the game frequently to save precious time while you switch between any other tasks that need your attention. Seriously, money fixes EVERYTHING sometimes. Then just save up, keep giving gifts to stave off a war (but not so much you're not developing your economy) and when you're more prepared roll up a bunch of tanks to the edge of the city that started it, wait for them to get all rearranged (since they won't shoot if they like you) and launch the assault.

DarthDoggie wrote:The ideal stat distribution for all economic vehicles is 0% health, 44% economic power, 56% speed. Technically it should be 43.75% economic power and 56.25% speed but 44/56 is the best you can do to my knowledge. This applies to all economic vehicles. Also in terms of profit, air > sea > land. The justification for this requires calculus and I really don't feel like typing that out.

Haha thats great. I would actually really love to see the calculus, or a link to it. (Engineering student )

Choosing your path in the Civ stage - a theory

I'm one who likes to be able to choose the consequence skills and archetype. In all the other stages, I found this very easy: choose your mouth(s)/diet for cell, kill/flirt/or balance for creature, kill/perform/or balance for tribal. (Though the need for a carnivore to eat his neighbors in creature can make the more peaceful paths a bit trickier.) However, I could never get civ to let me pick my path fully. I would habitually take peaceful path in tribal because I liked the gracious greeter bonus in space. Every time I get to civ, I'd be religious. Even when I did red/red/green. So my first theory is that your tribal path determines your starting civ type. I think I may have seen others saying as much elsewhere on the forum.

Second issue, is I seem to never find the type of city I want to shift into. Specifically, in my red/red/green game, I was wanting to pick up blue so that I'd be a knight rather than warrior or spodeling. I saved before any more cities popped up in case I could get some randomization working for me, but that didn't work. The only cities I saw were military(red) or religious(green). In my first game I went straight green and don't remember seeing any economic cities there either. In a game I played green/blue/green, I did find an economic city or 2. So my second theory is that if you want the economic path to appear in some of your cohort cities, you need to have blue in your collective history somewhere. (I believe I saw some military cities in my straight green path so I'm not generalizing yet that all city colors have to come from your history.)

I'm less confidant in the second theory since I don't pay that close of attention to my kids' games so don't notice what cities they meet, and this was the first time I tried to go economic in civ only to find no economic cities (I usually don't care about the types of any cities after the second conquest or so). So my theory 2b is that my luck doesn't like me, for which there's plenty of support.

So has anyone figured this out more specifically who'd be willing to share?

Does anyone have an idea on how you can go from blue to green in the civ stage? If you start as an economic city, all economic takeovers keep you in blue, and either a military or a religious takeover send you to red. Offering gifts has no effect.

I was trying to make Knights out of my race, but I started carnivore and predator, so I'll have to try to get from red to green (friendly) in the tribal stage if there's no other way. It's not so easy on hard though, and I'll eventually lose the colony discount in favor of Spice Savant

Sotris wrote:Does anyone have an idea on how you can go from blue to green in the civ stage? If you start as an economic city, all economic takeovers keep you in blue, and either a military or a religious takeover send you to red. Offering gifts has no effect.

I was trying to make Knights out of my race, but I started carnivore and predator, so I'll have to try to get from red to green (friendly) in the tribal stage if there's no other way. It's not so easy on hard though, and I'll eventually lose the colony discount in favor of Spice Savant

You have to take over a religious city and keep it as a Religious city. Build religious vehicles from it and use those vehicles more then your economic ones.

Although that might be hassle on hard mode considering other nations may conquer them and convert them to a different type before you get there.

Immediatly buy many vehicles and send half to spice places and half to tribes. You do it right if you right click the main hut when there is a ? mark. They may give you a random land vehicle (I was religous and it gave me military), money, or they attack you. There might be more. Also, if they give you money/vehicle, thier tribe goes away, so bye bye any civilization that would form there!