Spore Tips and Tricks

[Lippy]

UPDATED 9/22/08
I've re-written some of the tips to shorten them up a bit. 

CELL PHASE:

  - you can get parts close together by shrinking them, moving them into place and then growing them again. But be careful because it is possible to get spikes so close to the mouth that you can't eat anymore. -immortius

  - Keep a few of those electrodes from the Cell stage when you evolve into a Creature, and you'll get a nice visual treat whenever you 'impress' another animal. -Moogie

  - A pair of max sized spikes on the rear aft of the cell in a wide arc, will basically make you immune to rear facing attacks.  -Pinstar

  - Put an opposing diet mouth (or the omnivore mouth) on at the end of the cell phase so that you can use it to either eat fruit if you're a carnivore, or eat meat if you're a herbivore.  -Yokto  (You won't find any mouths that go against your chosen diet when you left the cell stage, so keep it until you don't need it anymore.  -Lippy)

CREATURE PHASE:

  - You can socialize "rogue" creatures... -Rusted
  - ...for 100 points... -MasterChiToes
  - ...or kill them for 100 points. -Lippy

  - If you have other species in your pack when you enter Tribal phase, they automatically end up in your pen for harvesting eggs.  -Lippy

  - If you destroy eggs in the creature stage, you get some DNA points. They count as food as well. You can eat eggs if you're hungry. -immortius  (Always 25DNA per egg.  This is a pretty large amount of DNA that can be gained easily.  Couple this with the raging roar power, and your carnivore can get a quick boost of DNA easily. If you're extincting a species, check to see if they have any eggs in their nest to eat before killing them off to get that extra boost.  -Lippy)

  - If you are impressing a creature and know you are not going to make it, quickly press a move button and you stop your dance/singing and you can try impressing the same creature again... -SporeForSure

  - I find that trying to same creature again will result in them giving you the exact same routine...try another member of the same species to try for a routine that hits your strengths. -Cobra

  - You have a better chance of finding higher rated parts in the same rows as the parts you have on your creature. -MindMuncher

  - You can swim by clicking on water.  You will pathfind around it if you click on the opposite bank of a lake.  -mappam  (Be careful.  Swimming or flying out into the ocean is hazardous to your health. -Lippy)

  - Always have a pack.  Get other creatures into your pack to help complement your play style.  -Yokto

  - Socializing is easier when the creature you're trying to socialize is on their own.  Push them away from their pack until no other creatures come to help them when you socialize with them.  -Yokto

  - Simple way to get parts early -FR27


TRIBAL PHASE:

  - You can steal harvest/steal food from dead Villages in tribe. Also stealing a large amount of food just before you finish off their hut works as well.  Enter aggressive stance and click on a tribe's food supply.  You will give them a gift if you're in social stance. -OpDDay2001

  - When entertaining a tribe, try to find one or two members off on their own, it makes it much easier. This is because you get full "entertainment" points if you player the same or more instruments that are requested at each point, and one member can only request one. -immortius

  - When winning through aggressive means, best time to attack is generally immediately after they've attacked you and you've slaughtered their force. -immortius
 
  - When the strong (last) village spawns, it can be useful to bribe the other, weaker, remaining village and save them for last, thus avoiding the stronger village attacking while you're dealing with them. -immortius


CIV PHASE:

  - religious vehicles can charm epics and other creatures, who will then follow you around and attack your enemies. -immortius

  - Before entering the Space stage from civ, finish maxing out all your cities.  These carry across, but your cash won't. -immortius

  - Pardan's civ tactics

  - Changes you make to your vehicles happen instantly.  Have a very fast vehicle in your sporepedia to make quick runs to the spice nodes.  And then if you start to be attacked, change the vehicle to have a lot of health and/or firepower.  You can make fast jets and turn them into bombers when they get to their target city.  -Lippy

  - Spam aircraft to easily destroy cities.  Ships can be used as well.  -smjjames  (..and land vehicles.  It seems the civ game is abundantly easy if you do any type of land/ship/air rush. -Lippy)

  - In the Civ stage, no other civs will appear until you capture your first spice point. So you can spend however long you want collecting tribes, building up your city and producing vehicles.  You can generate an income by building factories without having captured any spice geysers. -immortius  (This is no longer the case in v1.01)

  - No one will capture your spice geysers unless their face is red. Even orange ones need to be angered before stealing your geysers, unless your geyser is right next to their city. -Yannick
 
  - A very easy way to reverse wheel rotation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX3Ifw8ANSY -spiritofcat


SPACE PHASE:

  DIPLOMACY, MISSIONS, and TRADING:

    - Using the planet buster will harm your standing with all eco-friendly races by 105 points within about 30pc from where you used it. -Rusted

    - Spice prices tend to fluctuate on their own, and the forces of supply and demand seem to be modeled to some extent.  -spiritofcat

    - The mission "circle" on the galactic map shows only the radius the mission is in, not always centered on the location. -Rusted

    - Different philosophies sell at different rates. -Rusted

    - If you terraform an allies planet for the better it is a HUGE diplomacy bonus. -Rusted

    - If you take an artifact from a planet belonging to another species, you get negative relationship points. However, you can pick up terraforming tools and they will not mind. -Jomander

    - When collecting spice from one of your worlds that is connected to a trade route you will get a small bit of bonus spice according to whatever is located on the partners world. -FR27

  WAR:

    - Enemy bombers (the bigger ships) have no Air to Air.  Laser is most efficient. -Rusted

    - If an enemy flees, he will heal. -Rusted

    - Fly backwards, keeping the enemy in range of your guns, but out of range of theirs -GrapeFruit and Cobra

    - Knock a planet's T-score down to 0 to remove all but one city, which can then be destroyed.  Constantly fly around the planet using terraform rays, and be sure to have energy refillers. -GrapeFruit

    - If you don't have megabombs, or don't have the budget, but you have picked up some fancy land modelling tools like Crystal Seas or Terra Seas, use it on your enemies. It is an instakill. -Yannick

    - AoE heal will not heal you if your shields are up. -Rusted

    - It's also smart to put your colonies so close to each other as possible. Enemy ships have to attack on 1 place and although the turrets don't overlap each other with their range of fire, they fire more concentrated. -Loerelau

    - The rarer the spice on a planet, the higher the chance the Pirates will raid that planet. -FR27

    - Grox tend to attack planets closer to the center of the galaxy.  Homeworlds are the exception and will be raided no matter what.  -FR27

  OTHER SPACE TIPS:

    - Enter the Sporepedia, open up a planet and press a button to "Track" it, which causes it to be marked in the galactic map. You can only track one planet at a time. -immortius

    - Click on the dots of the flora and fauna on the TerraScore display to get a radar ping to them.  -Lippy

    - Green bar at the bottom of galaxy screen with co-ordinates. -Rusted

    - X,Space both zoom you in and out keyboard wise (+/- work) -Rusted

    - You can zoom in and out to the max for the current "view" while paused.  Useful when trying not to get killed when you can't fight back. -Rusted

    - Galactic filters don't always refresh, may have to zoom in and out. -Rusted

    - Items are in no way static. -Rusted

    - Once they have been beamed down, you can beam the plant/creature up again. Now you dont have to run out of them. -SporeForSure

    - you can change your UFO by designing a new one from the UFO editor in the colony planner.  -Atarr

    - Uplift a species to Space stage on a rare spice planet (pink or purple) and then take over the planet without destroying the cities to get a planet that will produce an enormous amount of rare spice.  -Prathic in THIS THREAD

    - You can use the Supersizer on any non-sentient creature, even if it's already dead or turned into an epic. -Yuu

MISCELLANEOUS:

  - SAVE OFTEN -Common sense

  - Ctrl-S = Quicksave -Rusted

  - Alt is your eyedrop/match color tool! -Rusted

  - Advanced Painting Tricks -spiritofcat

  - Read the manual. -Alvin Flummox

  - V makes videos, C screenshots. -Rusted

  - If you clear out the My Spore Creations\Creatures (or Buildings/Vehicles/etc) before installing Spore or in addition to deleting the various hidden caches, then next time you run the game Spore will automatically download your creations off of Sporepedia and they will  appear under My Creations and be marked as uploaded. -immortius

  - There are some building textures that don't appear in the vehicle texture palette, but they can still get them on your vehicle by using the "Paint Like" feature and then copy them around with the eyedrop. -immortius

  - If you delete a save game the planet will explode. -Rusted

  - Spice appears in Civ stage or later as a small blue (several different colors) box in a city. (or elsewhere) -Rusted

  - Add people to your buddies list who comment on your creatures, and do likewise for them. It'll help keep our games populated with quality Gamingsteve content.

  - Alt+Enter will switch between full-screen and windowed mode -Pixxel  (This is a common key combination to go full screen in many Windows applications. -Lippy)

  - Research prehistoric animals for inspiration (i.e. Watch Discovery Channel documentaries)  -Logan Felipe

  - It seems the entire character map can be used in naming things. -MasterChiToes 

  - If you play Spore in a window instead of full screen you can select widescreen resolutions for that cinematic feel even if you don't have a widescreen monitor. -spiritofcat

  - Sporepedia Searching Tips -spiritofcat

[Doomsday]

You can steal harvest/steal food from dead Villages in tribe. Also stealing a large amount of food just before you finish off their hut works as well.

If of course you'v enot figured out stealing or gift giving.. you enter a social stance and click on a tribe's food supply.

[immortius]

If you destroy eggs in the creature stage, you get some DNA points.

During the space phase you can enter the Sporepedia, open up a planet and press a button to "Track" it, which causes it to be marked in the galactic map. You can only track one planet at a time.

In the cell stage, you can get parts close together by shrinking them, moving them into place and then growing them again. But be careful because it is possible to get spikes so close to the mouth that you can't eat anymore.

In the civilisation stage, religious vehicles can charm epics and other creatures, who will then follow you around and attack your enemies.

[Doomsday]

If you destroy eggs in the creature stage, you get some DNA points.

They count as food as well. You can eat eggs if you're hungry.

[immortius]

 - If you clear out the My Spore Creations\Creatures (or Buildings/Vehicles/etc) before installing Spore or in addition to deleting the various hidden caches, then next time you run the game Spore will automatically download your creations off of Sporepedia and they will appear under My Creations and be marked as uploaded.

[Rusted]

Edit: Do not worry about save game slots, it will generate more. (I mention this only because their seems to be a thread about it daily)

Edit: If you delete a save game the planet will explode. -Thanks \¿(4Ä└

Green bar at the bottom of galaxy screen with co-ordinates.

Ctrl-S=Quicksave

Alt is your eyedrop/match color tool!

X,Space both zoom you in and out keyboard wise (+/- work)

Spice appears in Civ stage or later as a small blue box in a city.

The mission "circle" on the galactic map shows only the radius the mission is in, not always centered on the location.

You can zoom in and out to the max for the current "view" while paused.  Useful when trying not to get killed when you can't fight back. (An autoblaster isn't fighting)

Enemy bombers (the bigger ships) have no Air to Air.  Laser is most efficient.

If an enemy flees, he will heal.

Different philosophies sell at different rates.

Galactic filters don't always refresh, may have to zoom in and out.

If you hit T, look at the arrow on the far side of the screen, you will see green and red arrows moving up and down, this shows instant by instant what "path" you're taking.  Highlight the abilities to know what they do and which stage they influence.  This is how to get omnivore mouths! Thanks to whoever told me this, I can't find the post in my history, sorry for not giving credit.


You can socialize "rogue" creatures.  (that might be too obvious, but who knows)


if you activate the "visited" filter on the bottom left of the screen it shows a purple line between the two *black* holes, granted you passed through it at least once. -Grapefruit

V makes videos, C screenshots.


When making Sporn... go offline first ;p


Edit: 1) The planet buster diplomacy effect is called "Broke Galactic Code" it is a penalty of about -105.  But more importantly, it is a LOCALIZED effect.  It seems the range is around 15-20 parsecs or so.


2)  It appears if a planet is raided it will auto defend and auto repair.  However, it seems that if turrets are damaged during the attack they must be manually fixed, damaged turrets will appear as slightly tilted.  (You may notice they only sell for 12k as well.)

3) Improving the T score of another races planet will earn you a large diplomatic bonus.

[GrapeFruit]

If you want to kill your enemy home planet (and not conquer it) without the planetbuster, grab one or two energy refiller and a tool to increase/decrease atmosphere/temperature (only one needed). Now plunge down to the planet at average height, hold down the 'w' key and keep altering the planet until it's a T0 (they won't be able to shoot you while you're flying around, avoid flying over cities though)
Now all you have to do is to destroy the last remaining city and the ufos.
Done.


You know the damn attacks with the mothership and the small and fast hunters?
I highly recommend to fly with the wasd keys (and w and r to strafe) when fighting, because it's easier to control, you don't stop in mid-air accidentaly, allowing the enemy to instant-fry you and you have the whole mouse available for the shooting.
You have two options:
1. circle the mothership and shoot at it with the rockets. you can focus on not getting shot, because you just have to lock on the ship once and then you can just press the mousebutton to fire at it, no need to aim. If it's down, take care of the little ones
2. If the the mothership is currently not attacking a city/colony, you can take out the little bastards first, then kill the mothership all easily.

How to kill the little bastards (2 options again):
1. Have the shield activated, fry them with the laser.
2. If your shield is down or you don't have it yet, keep flying straight backwards by holding down the 's' key. They will follow you and you can control the distance between you and them. now you can use the rockets to shoot them while their rockets keep missing you. The difficult part is to keep them at the correct distance. The hard part is, that they will hurry away when low on health and return shortly afterwards with full health. That's where your allies come in handy, but it's possible alone. Just before they go down, let them get closer, so the fatal rockets hits them.


Fighting with allies:
Your allies will always attack the target you have locked on, even if they are getting shot at by another enemy. If you have no target locked, they won't attack (but I think they defend themselves, not sure though).
This makes them vulnerable to the little bastards.
If you're fighting with your allies, always kill the small ones first, preferrably you draw the fire onto you, by doing the flying backwards thing locking on the enemy the furthest away from you (shooting is not necessary, but you lose them easier if you don't). Your allies will follow up and take the little bastards out from behind, taking only little damage (hopefully).


There may be better ways to fight, but I did very well with these.

[SporeForSure]

When you do the social game and try to dance/sing or impress another creature, they usually get "locked" if you fail to impress them.

If you have done your 3 "impresses" and realise you are not going to make it, quickly press a move button and you stop your dance/singing and you can try impressing the same creature again.

[Cobra]

I find that trying to same creature again will result in them giving you the exact same routine. If you you can't impress one try another member of the same species for hopefully a routine that hits your strengths.

As for space stage dog fighting I'll have to try reversing to fight currently I just flew in a clockwise direction over the city I was defending more often than not when being chased they can't get you in there site and dont fire on you but you can see them in the corner of the screen and pick them off. Only one time it didn't work for me and the enemy ship blasted me. With the bomber though mostly just sit and pound it.

[Rusted]

So I go to a planet, there is NOTHING there.  I'm playing around with the terraforming tools, using them a lot etc.  About 10-15 minutes into it, I suddenly get a radar ping.

I go there and it's a new unique terraforming item.  I know that you get badges and more access to terraforming tools as you "level up". But this was a spawn while on the planet, so items apparently are in no way static.

[Necrox]

Aye I've noticed that they're not static either.
I went to a system (no ping), bought some spice, left the system, remembered I'd forgotten to check something, went back again - and there was a ping on the planet I'd just left. So they're not static, they're being seeded all the time

[Rusted]

Aye I've noticed that they're not static either.
I went to a system (no ping), bought some spice, left the system, remembered I'd forgotten to check something, went back again - and there was a ping on the planet I'd just left. So they're not static, they're being seeded all the time

I also get duplicate terraforming items, and they seem to be in similar orders, or based on what I've been using?  I suspect this may be why it'll take awhile to get all the tools as was hinted.

[Spore-addict]

Hi

Am I the only one that is pissed off when an 20 hour+ game gets screwed. you have saved a place where a butterfly affect, strikes you in the face and you cant really load any save games before that.... or perhaps you want to start the space age with your history and the special trait you earned....that is also gone...so new game is not really that cool!

Well in c:\document and settings\user\application data\spore\games\game0

is your save games....

They are listed as your homeworld name.spo

Just copy them outside and replace in case you need an older save game.

Not sure that you need other files than the mentioned file since there are other files in that folder. If you want to be on the safe side you could just copy the whole game0 folder!


     

[Rusted]

Nice tip.


http://www.gamingsteve.com/blab/index.php?topic=14271.0


Por favor?

(If we consolidate it's more likely to get a sticky.)

[Branko]

What you mean with butterfly affect?