I LOVE SPORE! But... V2.0

korlath wrote:i agree 100% developers need to look at this.
however, if they do change the trade system they need to lower the amount of money you make otherwise making money is going to be really easy.

you need a lot of money, though. It costs about half a million bucks to fully upgrade ONE colony, and many of my planets have two or three, so I end up spending a little over a million per planet just for the colonies themselves.

The uber turret costs another 450,000, and then theres the 300,000 eco stabilizer and bio protector.

Altogether a fully upgraded and managed planet is gonna run you about 2 mil each, and you still have to terraform it yourself.

Combine this with a 2 million buck level 6 drive, mega weapons costing upwards of 1.5 mil each, and of course dozens of other single-use items, and you really do need lots of money, especially since you're constantly rebuilding any colonies you're too slow to get back to in time.

Plus if they do let us build our own ships for fleets, we'll need money to maintain them.

I would love to see some sort in game messaging that you could attach pictures and creations to and then send it to yer BFF?????

I definitely agree with the ships idea, and that was about as far as I got on reading, haha
I mean, I can't build vehicles or spaceships for my cities, because they can apparently do that for themselves, yet they don't. I got to other planets to attack, and there's like 6 ships flying around waiting to attack me. WTH?

And I would love to have a fleet as well. I'm tired of having a ship with 11k health, teaming up with allies that have ships with 1k health. They're pretty much useless when I attack the Grox. It would be wonderful to be able to buy more ships, and hell I'd be willing to spend a good bit on them, since money is so easy to come by once you get a good trade route going within your planets with the right spices. I have about 10 planets colonized, and I've got $30M. What's the point of even having money when I have nothing to spend it on?

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 09/19/2008 01:50:12

I completely agree with pretty much everyone in this thread.

Copied my reply from a previous thread (There may be repeat suggestions):

SketchyChik wrote:
Cell stage:
- start as an actual one-cell organism and grow to be multi-celled.

Sea stage:
- WHAT? Non-existant?? This needs to be part of the game. Needs fish.

Creature stage:
- survival. You actually have to try to keep your species and nest(s) alive. Such as dragging home a dead carcasses or gathering small amounts of fruit.
- being able to hunt in slightly larger packs

Tribal stage:
- ability to continue to evolve your creature
- being able to establish more than one 'tribe nest'
- larger area/more rival tribes.
- enlarging the space to place buildings. (So that you can actually have one of each of the buildings provided.)
- customize weapons and instruments, as well as huts.
- ability to give food gifts even after becoming allies (unless that is a glitch in only my game)
- color your 'clothing' different from your creature's coloration
- simple pre-made attack formations (ambush, head-on, etc)
- chose between vocal, intrumental, or dancing as forms of social interaction. (instead of only intrumental)
- guard placements. I usually leave two guys behind when going off to destroy the surrounding villages. One to guard the food and the other to gather it. However, I find that he wonders off and somehow is totally oblivious to sneaky critters until it has already started to take off with the food. Having an actual guard option would be great.

Civilization Stage:
- ability to continue to evolve your creature
- color clothing different from creature's coloration
- social. Where did this option go? It went from "let us play song to you" to "hey look at my giant hologram I am using! He is God, he will bring a down a mighty wrath on you until you convert!"
You should still be able to form alliances by social interaction like previous stages.. maybe if they have a theatre you can chose to put on a play for them, or play an orchestra. Then again it might feel too repetitive.
- setting up "farms" of local wild creatures.
- having more freedom when placing buildings as well as being able to place a War vehicle factory, a Religious vehicle factory, and a trading vehicle factory on any base/city.
- being able to set up various "attack formations"
- set up a research facility. You select what is getting researched (better weapons/speed/religous effect/buildings/city defenses/ability to tame epics/etc etc), wait whatever amount of time stated for it, then you have to pay the researchers (or you pay them beforehand). Can only research a set amount of things at a time. Would be set up like a branch
.- Example:

.- - I didn't feel like coming up with names for everything so there would be a couple starting options, then it branches off.. at some places separate branches connect, you would have to complete both in order to start researching the one that is connected to them.

Space Stage:
- everything stated in the civilization stage. (With waaay more things to research)
- religious conversion abilities carried over. (ability to convert other planets to your belief system)
- better social options. The social options provided are not very social. Either you pay them, or you go somewhere and do something for them. There is not very much socializing to it.
- being able to have more then one space ship on your own planets as well as having various attack formations chosen to use when planet goes under attack.
- control larger fleets
- spies (not the hologram). You pay the spy (from your own colony) to use a small ship to fly over to neutral or allied planets and spy. Would cost more to send to hostile planets, and has a 45% success rate. Information brought back might include list of said planet's allies, attack formations used, ways to make them happy/allies, etc.
- allied planets help defend your planets against enemies.
- place space docks in allied systems to help defend allies against enemies
- being able to walk around on a planet. When I create a planet sometimes I just want to check it out from normal view and be able to run around. I do not enjoy the hologram. (Then again, I guess it keeps you from getting killed..)

I agree. Whenever I am in the space stage and blowing up all the grox's colonies, A message pops up:
ZOMG YOUR PLANET IS GOING UNDER ECO-DISASTER! SAVE US OR WE'LL ALL DIE!
First of all, I don't care about them. If they're under eco-disaster, they can help themselves, not bug me about all of their problems.Obviously, I don't have time to travel ALL the way back to my planet on the other side of the galaxy, saving their sorry little butts from retarded diseases that probably aren't even harmful, and going ALL the way back to the middle of the universe. And the turrets are either out of order, or they put a sign on it, saying "KIDDIE RIDE:25 SPUCKS!"
And when I first saw a spaceship in Creature stage, I thought it was going to track me down and abduct me, not just fly pointlessly around like it doesn't know why all the creatures are having seizures on the planet, and abducting the other creatures. And the meteor showers are pathetic...the rocks look like flaming snowflakes, drifting gleefully to the ground, not big, demented rocks that create explosions and kill you.
I'm just saying.

I agree with most ideas here, but let's get something straight:

What spore needs right now aren't new phases, but content to polish the already existing ones. Especially Tribal and civ need a lot (and I mean A LOT) of love.

What spore needs right now aren't new phases, but content to polish the already existing ones. Especially Tribal and civ need a lot (and I mean A LOT) of love.

I definitely agree with this. New phases should be left to expansions. As much as I'd love to see a fish phase (or better yet, fish and amphibians in the creature phase), they need some serious polish on what's already here.

Zephaniah wrote:

What spore needs right now aren't new phases, but content to polish the already existing ones. Especially Tribal and civ need a lot (and I mean A LOT) of love.

I definitely agree with this. New phases should be left to expansions. As much as I'd love to see a fish phase (or better yet, fish and amphibians in the creature phase), they need some serious polish on what's already here.

I second that notion.

The patch seems to have toned some of the troubles down for some people, and presented new problems for other people...

They are trying to fine tune the game...

But since they've already put out a patch, I stand on my original opinion... Spore isn't finished yet.

Colony turrets don't shoot spice stealing pirates but they WILL shoot normal attacks if your not there. One half dead fighter can almost defeat a maxed out city though.

Well said, i think most of your ideas are quite good. I really love spore, but like you said...it's not quite done. With a few "good" expansions and patches it could be the game I was waiting for, but for now i'll just play the beta.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 09/21/2008 02:21:42

I love Spore! However (I'm sure others have suggested this too)...

A menu containing information about planet ecology and colonies. Perhaps this could be tracked in the sporepedia in the planet cards.
This would be very helpful because after I fight off pirates and make the neighbors happy I forget what plants I was collecting for my terraforming projects. I'm running out of junk mail to make notes on...

Auto save could be handy but not a big deal for me.
Although I do forget to save sometimes, nothing bad has happened (knocks on wood)

Other than that, it's been very enjoyable so far. It can feel a little busy when both your neighbors get attacked by hostile races while the pirates are raiding what little spice I have. But I'm sure this is just the growing pains a being a new empire in an old galaxy.
I'm not a super power yet...

This next bit is nice.
I've defended my neighbors from hostile empires 5 times without firing a shot! Just showing up seems to make my allies stronger and they are pleased that I show up! Sometimes I drop an AOE repair to help out... I love it! The fights look cool and I even found terraforming tools during two of the battles. Plus I can always choose to fight if I want/when I'm strong enough to have an enemy.

PS It would be nice to be able to rename stars and planets that are under our control, so the names have more personal meaning

Checking back on this thread, glad to see it got some responses since i left. Still holding out for some content patches and fixes.

OP

It's virtually impossible to follow a conquest path in the early game, because your weapons cant take down cities or deal with the legitemate fleets you end up facing with your little rag-tag armada of one or two vessels scraped together from the bottom of the charity bin, if you're lucky enough to even have an ally, and if your wingman gets shot down, you have to run all the way back to your ally's territory and beg them for a new one. How pathetic is that?

Not only do you have to go back to get another one... you are hated more by your ally for their ship commiting hari kari. So you are punished for the actions of the AI. The AI for your allied ships is horrible to say the least.

Totally agree, You have covered the things that are lacking in spore quite well. The major problem that I see is that many of these thing will be fixed but they will do it in expansions. I don't think I want to pay more for the game we should have gotten in the first place.

Ok, I am reposting my vote. I have now completed this game and now absolutely hate it!

Every aspect of this game needs serious improvements. I would have say this game is too console like. PC games in my opinion should have lots of depth to micromanagement. This game would be awesome for MMORPG! or small LAN party for PVP and/or commerce. I like the sharing of other people content, but that soon died for me. I guess my expectations of this game were a lot higher...

On the cell stage, I wanted to make this crazy creature like the ones in game with tons of eyes or fins, but the DNA points don't allow it and the SPORE parts limitation bar don't help either. Now that I have played the game I think a water species would have been a different evolution to the game. Why do you have to evolve to just land?

Creature stage was awesome, but it is extremely limited. This was mentioned in other entries... You really only have three ways you can go and it gets old fast. I suppose I could just make creatures all day...

Civilization stage is pretty cool. If you don't leave a couple of intercepting defending units and immediately start taking city's when they all populate, some other race will one up you. You will end up with your enemies attacking you from land, air, and sea. You must also get 4 cities to get air units. Once you get the air units the game is over and your off to space soon.

Space... well quiet frankly... it just sucked. The zoom in was pretty nice, but could be more smooth. Maybe it just my PC... But when I would zoom into a star system it would start to lag a bit. FPS seemed to go down... Anyhow this got really repetitive zooming in and out. All you do is run around to each star system collecting spice, saving you and your allies systems from attacks, terraforming, AND saving eco disasters. The only real thing that kept going in this game was I had a purpose to kill Spode believers after I found Grox and killed them off. I was going try and take over every star system in my game and rule the galaxy!!! This inspiration fell short lived.

Some ideas...
Cell Stage: Should be able to control more than one cell. My complaint earlier…

Creature Stage: Instead of abandoning nests why not just take over the nests and populate more nests with more creatures. If you kill off your food supply (i.e. herbivore nests nearby, fruit from the trees/ a stash of food) your creatures will starve. You could definitely down elite monsters with a swarm of your creatures. This could also allow for LAN party PVP or online multiplayer PVP.

Tribe Stage:Make other tribe camps surrender instead of just destroying them. Although it is fun to completely kill them off. You can then make them your slaves, fight for you, or trade. Again, more PVP viable options…

Civilization Stage: Allow more diplomacy options (i.e. reply comments, trade for upgradeable parts, or production increase). It would be cool to go underwater and have an underwater civilization. I could live without underwater civ. Why not let the allied creatures from other stages flourish within your civ.as another race. You can then use your race and others to run your cities. Depending how you treated other races in other stages, will play a factor on how they act or play a role in civilization stage.

Space Stage: Definitely need more diplomacy options here. This really gets me the most! You have this race that is being pushy and asking for outrageous amount of money. I would like to say something to them and give some kind of reaction back. Of course whatever you say to them would have to improve relations with them to a point. Only so much flattery can so far… I WANT TO COMMAND A WHOLE FLEET! Why do you have to go down to a planet to talk to them? That’s kind of silly. Why not have little wars in the star system or even outside in the galaxy view?