I am copying this from two posts I made in the old forums in order to make sure my feedback is not lost. Right now they are still available along with all replies by others following this link.

Original Post 1:

The space phase of Spore has always been advertised as an open sandbox where everyone would bw able to choose his own playing style and I was planning to concentrate on exploring other worlds, finding and collecting items, terraforming planets and filling them with life plus maybe have some peaceful diplomacy. Will Wright always emphasized that you would only get into intergalactic war business if you chose to.

So I enjoyed the cell and creatures pases within their limited scope and played through tribe and civ that both turned out to be quite easy (on easy mode) after an initial moment of confusion - but what I was really looking forward to was the space phase and its previously mentioned possibilities. I went along the green path all the way and though the slightly militaristic feel of the religious civ path irritated me for a moment I fully expected to be able to live in peace in space as well.

I finally reached space and there my whole concept collapsed like a house of cards. Not only was my species pushing me to colonize, colonize, colonize (and I really had to as I was running out of money really fast), but also it got attacked by pirates every five minutes. Soon I had federates crying for my help as they were being attacked and other species threatening to start a war if I didn't give them money that I didn't have. When they finally carried out their threat and I (!) was awarded a warmonger badge I got so sick of it that I stopped playing immediately. I started another game from space phase but soon got similar results and decided not to touch the space phase anymore until this is fixed.

Now I might still play around with the creature phase a bit, but as I have already played it to the point where I had all creature parts unlocked except the carnivorous and omnivorous mouthes, I don't think there will be much to do for me anymore and there's no way that I would play this for anywhere as long as The Sims - probably not even weeks.

While I do understand that you try to capture some "hardcore players" as well, I don't understand why you didn't free the "casual players" of those game elements in the space phase - unless you could not, what would be really sad news as it would destroy the hope for a fix.

Original Post 2 on comments that I was whining and winning wars was not difficult if a good strategy was applied:

I'm not talking about difficulty levels here, I'm talking about playstyles. As I said the space phase has been advertised as a place where you could do what you want. I don't want to make war. I don't want to think about war strategies. The team always promised that I would not need to - and broke the promise. I did not get the game that was advertised. This is what I am complaining about.

I understand the feeling. I haven't had free time to do any random missions for planet (which most every planet has something). All those lovely terraforming tools sitting in my inventory are useless since I have to go from one disaster, on to pirate raids, then finding a way to deal with two allies that are fighting which both start to hate you if you don't help (failed mission). Who has time for enjoying the game when you have errands to run every 2 minutes?

Totally agree! WAYYYYYYYYY to hectic!

Better planet defenses could help.

More creative weapons that mimick weapons all the way back to the early epochs.

I love it but I feel it needs tweaking fast.

Hell it would help if the 10 or so colony planes would at least attack. Or the tanks or anything other than the super weak turrets. Or maybe if we could make more than 1 ship and just leave the others to defend.

kinneas wrote:Totally agree! WAYYYYYYYYY to hectic!

Better planet defenses could help.

More creative weapons that mimick weapons all the way back to the early epochs.

I love it but I feel it needs tweaking fast.

Just found the uber turret

Uber Turret still doesn't help much unless you are at the planet. The OP doesn't want to fight, at all. I can understand that since I too wish to create a race that is 100% peaceful. Everyone other way to play works, but we aren't allowed to have peaceful nations if we want. My 3yo niece wants to play but the game gets too violent for me to let her.

Yeah, this was a major problem for me too. And when I used the ability to convert an entire planet, *EVERY* contact I have ever made declared war on me. It was Terrible! Not fun at all! Especially since I was an Herbivore that didn't even want to participate in any space battles. I had no trade routes and I was constantly under attack! Then I had an eco-disaster every 10 minutes, and when I finally established a trade partner they broke trade relations within a minute for "failing to provide tribute" !!!

To make matters worse, my space age save is totally useless now thanks to a very serious bug that, for some insane reason, no longer exists on the forums (what, they don't take bug reports seriously!?) And that is if I defeat an em[ire while they are still attacking one of my planets, when I get the message they are defeated they are still seen attacking my planet and if I save and exit, the game crashes every time I try to load the saved game.

I am still able to create a new world and load from those games just fine, but if I try to load my first space age save it just crashes because of this error.

Any Game where a player choice can result in the player being unable to finish the game has some serious problems, imho.

oh, and also...

We are unable to build effective defences for our planets. Often get 3 planets being attacked at once. We only get the one ship but the enemy has several. And the game doesn't even finish loading the ships before combat starts so I have to sit there and wait for it to finish rendering for a few moments, which on a small colony can mean certain destruction!

And this was on "Easy" - If I knew it was going to be this bad I don't know if I would have bought it.

I have an empire of over 100 systems and such and I dont see much action to be truthful.
The game is alot more quiet when you unlock more stuff, ally with every friggin race, and get powerful.
So I dont see any issues with the hostile empires, maybe a tone down of pirates though, because they are too easy for me to kill and just plain uselesss and boring for the gameplay.

Honestly, I was having fun until I got to space. I won't bother repeating everything that many many people have said already. But, I am stuck at a point where I can't seem to make any money. I can't get missions done quickly enough because I have to defend my home world and colonies and I end up failing missions. If I ignore the raids until I finish the missions I have to pay the money I just made from the mission to rebuild. I also have issues with things not being explained clearly. I was told to improve the atmosphere of a new planet that I had put a colony on. Okay, I got the atmo generator and it did nothing. So I waisted 80% of the money I had banked. Now I'm struggling to get money and basically do anything in the game. I am no longer having any fun playing this game. Civi stage was on the right track if a bit boring. But now in space it's freakin' ridiculously annoying. I'm having more fun playing L.E.D. Football on my iPhone. =P

I have stopped playing spore due to this issue. If a patch is released soon to fix it I may start playing again...but untill then I just cant bring myself to play anymore. Babysitting planets feels more like tedious work than fun.

Making money in the Space Phase is simple - just buy spice from empires for a small sum, then sell it to another system for more. I already have over 100m SB in the bank, purely from spice trading from both buying from other empires and getting my own and selling.

Perhaps I'm wrong (I have yet to fight a major war involving more than 2 contested planets), but it doesn't seem like you really have to respond to any incoming calls. Your allies might get slightly annoyed, and you might lose some spice to pirate raiders. But, playing as a non-violent species, I can build up a nice network of planets pumping out a few million sporebucks worth of spice every hour within 3-4 hours. That's enough to placate my hostile neighbors, and pirate attack losses are so small as to be negligible. At that point, I only feel the need to respond to about half of the calls, and then only if I'm not in the middle of something more interesting. Perhaps this will turn out to be a disastrous policy -- but not as of yet.

If what you want to do is fly around the galaxy as a carefree demigod without doing any work at all from the instant you get into space (but how utterly boring that would be!), just use the moreMoney cheat a dozen times to buy off any hostile neighbors and colonize a nice little cluster of planets around your home star.

For those of you stuck in space unable to progress, I found out how to cheat without any tools or codes. It's very simple.

Fanatic Frenzy converts an entire planet to your control. Go to the surface of a planet, convert it.
Quickly zoom out.
Save your game.
Exit to main menu.
Load saved game.

Notice how Fanatic Frenzy is fully charged? There appears to be a bit of a bug. The state of the timer is NOT saved and starts out fully charged on game load.

Do this if you are totally stuck, and need a foot hold. Eventually you will get a planet that will buy your spice at 11k or more. One even fought it at 16k each and got a few million money quickly.

WARNING:

Do *NOT* under any circumstance use Fanatic Frenzy on the last planet an empire controls while they are still attacking one of your own planets. Doing so will result in them still being seen attacking even though they no longer exist. If you save after doing this, exit and try to load, the game will crash every time and the space age save will basically become unusuable.

(I really hope they fix the above problem so I can finish my space age game.)

I didn't even notice the timer thing at first, but then realized that when I loaded a game the timer was reset when I used it right before logging out. I destroyed an empire of 10 planets in a matter of minutes doing this.

I played a non-violent race, but all of my neighbors were basically violent themselves and they all waged war on me. It seems to be totally random who you are placed near, and luck of the draw. I had at least 5 empires at war with me. Plus pirates. And I wanted to play my first game without any war at all. I wanted to play the creative aspect.