Part 1
So I started Tribal Stage as a Herbivore with the Easy setting. I wonder why the creatures using those big hammers to build their hut don't keep them to use as weapons...
Soon we get a message: "You must ally or conquer other tribes to advance your own tribe."
First, why are they constantly pushing us to get to Space? Is it because they KNOW the content in the earlier phases is so weak, they don't want you sticking around in there long enough to figure it out?
Second, why must advancement hinge on interacting with other tribes? Why not allow my creatures the possibility to invent maracas and spears on their own, through research and discovery and engineering? Why do the few things they give us access to in Tribal Phase require us to get them from someone else?
So our first task is going into the Tribal Outfitter. To do this you have to mouse over the hut and click the button.
I hate it when I'm looking at my village from a good angle and I need to click the hut, only to find the button is off the screen. Can't it just say "ok, they moused over the hut, but they don't see the center of the hut. Let's just move the button to where they CAN see it.
So then we get this ridiculous multi-click sequence to make a tribal outfit. Into the Hut optionn, then the tribal outfitter, then we select our creature from a list of... one... then we click on the edit outfit option. oddly enough the hint bok refers to these as the "Tribe Member panel" (tribal outfitter) and the "tribe member" (Tribal outfit) -- as if you could dress each member differently.
It's pretty obvious the outfit creator was tacked on at the last minute to give this phase SOME kind of editor. But I think they could do a lot more.
For starters, why can't I change the name? It's always "NameOfSpecies Villager". What if I want to make two different types of tribal outfits and upload them both?
Or better yet, actually let us USE multiple outfits in the game. Have there be a separate outfit for the Chief from all the other members (not just the uber staff). Why not have different outfits to match the specialty tools - give the musicians a "band outfit" with high social, and the weapon carriers a suit of armor with high defense and combat. It could be attached to the tools (whenever you send a creature to the flute hut, not only do they get a flute but their outfit switches to the flutist social outfit).
Or just let us dress each tribe member in different outfits if we chose. Charge the tribe more food to do it to balance it, I guess.
Also, why are new tribe babies decked out in the whole tribal outfit? Let them run nude or with a special baby outfit until they're ready to contribute to the tribe.
I suppose you could let us dress up our domesticated animals, too -- harnesses and saddles even if we never see them ridden... brands marking them as ours (considering no other tribes have an animal pen, I don't see that as a problem... but there's a feature they could add in to create "cattle rustling" events in the Tribal Phase).
So the "Tribe Color" comes from the Coat color layer of your creature. And for the other tribes, it picks a random color and then CHANGES the Coat color of that creature. Which sucks when changing that color totally ruins the creature design. Now if you change your creature's coat color after you start Tribal, their tribe color won't change (I tend to start with a lot of "Brown Tribe" identities). Why not simply let you pick a color and then assign that to a FOURTH color layer - one reserved for clothing parts and/or tatoos? Let us pick it at the same time we set the first Tribal outfit -- then it can apply to all the buildings or whatever it needs before any other tribes have risen.
If your creature is supposed to be finished evolving, then it makes no sense to allow you to modify its skin textures and colors. And if a Coat marking is due to evolution, how likely is it the tribe would then color over those natural markings in exactly the same places with some arbitrary color?
There needs to be a FOURTH layer just for tribal. You could then add on additional textures or maybe even tatoos of that color on your creature. You could have some system of adding alpha masked patches to the UV mapped surface, right? Perhaps each tribe could have a tribal symbol as well as a color - similar to the symbols used in "Black and White"?
And please, let us choose colors for the clothing that does not affect the coloring of the creature's skin. Let it at least use one separate color (the tribe color perhaps) - separate from the creature's coat color. It can be as fancy as the building editor or as simple as a fourth color option which matches the tribe color and can't be changed after you first assign it.
I'm assuming Spore treats clothing as non-animated design parts no different than armor plates and spikes in the creature editor. I've had ideas for a system that goes along with that for a sort of "catsuit" layer that goes over body and limbs and can be adjusted for length along all open ends. But letting us separate the color of the blocks from our body color should be enough. And we need a LOT more parts in there. There seems to be a real bias to humanoid, bipedal cephaloids. Certainly we could take some of the more extreme creature designs and come up with parts that could fit them better, too. If you won't release a rig-block editor, just give us a lot more parts in an expansion.
Part 2 will be about the oddness of panning and selecting, while Part 3 discusses why the fact each tribe member is given a name at birth needs to be expounded on to really give our tribe that person feeling it is missing which game the Sims so much popularity. If I'm supposed to be creating a story about my little tribe, I want to get to know the members and CARE when one of them dies -- as an individual, not as a replenishable resource.
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