Many people say spore doesn't immitate evolution in any way because you can change your creature at any time.

1. The amount of years in a timeline whenever you change you creature that pass gets bigger with more extensive changes.

2. You are at least 3x (not even exagerating) more likely to get upgraded parts of one you already have than one you never got, and even more likely to get upgrades of parts you have on your creature.

Still, there is the fact that you can continue getting DNA points even after you're ready to evolve to tribal, which I dislike.

Well, I like how you still get DNA after finishing Creature and can go onto Tribal. Becuase at NO point in time to people/creatures stop evolving. Even in space, civ, and tirbe would people evovle / creatures evovle.

Worldbreaker276 wrote:Still, there is the fact that you can continue getting DNA points even after you're ready to evolve to tribal, which I dislike.

Why on earth would you dislike that?

If Spore would follow evolution stricter, the game would be a tad longer, I guess..

bones1138 wrote:If Spore would follow evolution stricter, the game would be a tad longer, I guess..

LOL, I have thought the same thing many times when I have read various complaining threads. I guess WW and Maxis could have made a game where you get a nice primordial soup and then you just wait millions of years for something to happen but then we would really have people complaining. lol

I much prefer the Intelligent Design model they gave us. Yes, that is what it is whether anyone wants to admit it or not. You, a god of sorts, decide how things evolve and move the game forward.

Anyway, I agree that the DNA points should be through all phases of the game since in theory we never stop evolving or God never stops guiding His creation depending on how you view it.

Agree with above post totally. I have stated in other posts in order to make anything that makes sense in terms of how a human views their world you have to fudge things a little here and there. Besides as with WoW, when you get bored, just do something else, it is just a game afterall.

I was able to go from this:


...to this:


...in a single generation. That ain't evolution!

rocketgirl wrote:I was able to go from this:


...to this:


...in a single generation. That ain't evolution!

Well since we have no idea how long the time frame is, yes it is.

First my credentials, I'm an evolutionary biologist. You can go from a proto-hippo to a great blue whale in about 50 million years. You can go from a treeshrew like animal to a human.

So that part is not unbelievable.

What I do wish is they had more generations so the change could be more gradual. The problem is that the game at that stage is just 'fast'. I find myself enjoying the creature stage the best on hard, but its so quickly over that while it really represents about 300 million years or so of time, it feels far shorter.

Its not so much that its not possible by evolution, its just that it is intelligent design. This was admitted by Will, and is unavoidable. I'd love to see a true 'evolution' game where what you do helps shape it, but thats most likely VERY deep but not very fun for anyone who's not an evolutionary biologist.

rocketgirl wrote:I was able to go from this:
...in a single generation. That ain't evolution!

So what? Are you honestly saying you wish the game designers had given you less freedom?

Plenty of people have been complaining about the evolution model Spore uses. But quess what? It's not an evolution sim. It's a software toy. It's all about options and the ability to change things to see what happens. Personally I find the end of a creature phase a creative bonanza. Freed from the constraints of min-maxing, I can instead decide on a look I'll be happy with for the later phases.

So in summary, to all those complaining about the way your creatures evolve not matching evolution: build a bridge and get over it.

I hope you realize that when you progress through cell and creature stage the time line is much larger (like real evolution). It just so happens that the fastest stages are the stages where the most time is passing. Kind of counter intuitive but just think about it. As far as your "one generation" thing goes, considering the creature stage is hundreds of millions of years do you think it would make sense to go through every single individual generation? No. Its just evolution on steroids.

the freedom of designing the creatures and everything else it the real saving grace of the game. quite frankly sometimes i think i should just stick to the creature creator and return the actual game if it wasnt for the addition stuff on planet creation and vehicles. <sigh>

anyways, the DNA points should continue but after the creature stage should be a little harder to obtain because animals evolve mainly thru isolation and need (large groups evolve slower than small ones).

one thing i would like to see added in the mysporepage is a small transforming program that starts the creature from the beginning stages and show it evolve into the next. not a slide show because that would be jumpy but like how Adobe photoshop has the transform tool that shows all the steps between making a triangle into circle (which you can filter into however many segments.

I don't think evolution never stops, But there are times
when i wonder if it's going backwards. ha ha!!
Anyway it could be for exp packs later on too.

I was also bothered by looking back at my first creature's progress and observing the jumps its form took. Then I took it upon myself to only change a little each generation. I am, after all, in control. This makes for a much more satisfying creature history. But I still have the freedom to completely overhaul a creature in a single generation; I now just choose not to.

4ferrets wrote: I don't think evolution never stops, But there are times
when i wonder if it's going backwards. ha ha!!
Anyway it could be for exp packs later on too.

On of the most common evolution myths...

"Evolution has a direction, where things get progressively more complex."

This is not true, evolution is direction less. Things don't go back or forwards. For example, dophins started out as a finned sea animal, which became a 4 limbed land animal which is now a finned sea animal. What direction was that?

One that gives us really nice swimming companions?

To add to Herc's notes and to essentially paraphrase something Will Wright has said before about the game, evolution in real life is a -slow- process. It takes thousands of generations and thousands of individuals to produce something interesting; it's not like the popular conception of evolution and mutants where the next generation is all of a sudden sporting tentacles and has laser beam eyes and then the next generation beyond that is ready to go to another plane of existence.

To make a true to life evolution game would probably be very boring as you'd probably at most be changing one or two thing a generation and have to be churning out generations like nobody's business. It might be fun for evolutionary biologists doing some research, but from a gameplay standpoint, there'd have to be a heck of a lot more to make it have interesting gameplay.