Trafalgar

How does Spore fare in comparison to Noctis? It's got the creatures beaten hands-down, of course, but how about in terms of solar system variability? Noctis can have up to 80 bodies per solar system, including multiple stars, and there's no pause when you fly into the system to load them or when you start flying to them, etc. The solar system contents as well as planet textures are all generated procedurally in Noctis. However, the planet textures probably have much less detail than the ones in Spore, and you can't seamlessly fly down to the surface and fly around on it without black-screen-transitions in Noctis. There also isn't a separate floating cloud overlay in Noctis or anything like that.

If you wanted Spore to be more like Noctis, one of your concerns might be to be able to explore without being harassed or killed by hostile aliens, or without running out of resources. In Spore, does your UFO have fuel, or do you spend money to travel like in the space prototype? If you spend money, are colonies the only way to gather it?

Has anyone found anything like a cloaking device or fuel scoop or the like?

sulfur

Never heard of Noctis what's this game about ?

__________________
"I love the sweet smell of napalm roasted 'Sporn Creatures' in the morning" - sulfur

- Producing Spore ... $100M
- Years of PR work on the game .. $Who knows
- Getting your game ripped off because your a tool and use DRM ... priceless

Trafalgar

Noctis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia can tell you about it. It's basically about exploration. The website for the game is This is the WebTerritory of Fottifoh (click 'Noctis' at the top of the window to go to the right section)

keeper5

The solar systems a re minimal. Maybe 5 or 6 planets at max that I've seen so far (16 hours in). The zooming in is pretty seamless, there are small loading times (like 5 seconds) when zooming in from galaxy to solar view and again from olar to planetary, but not too bad,you basically get a close-up of your ship hovering over the planet model used for solar view (low-res textured) before it pops in the entire rendered planet, atmosphere and all. Moons can be habitable, and there are gas giants as well, but you can't visit them, since well, obviously it would damage your ship to get too close.

i have not yet seen a multiple-star system, but again, I'm only 16 hours in, maybe about 3 to 5 of those spent exploring other galaxies.

your ship uses 'energy' basically, fuel, but you can visit 10 different systems scanning literally everything and going back before running out, and all the ship's features are upgradeable as you progress, bigger energy reserves, larger cargo bay, etc.

The more you explore, the more risky it becomes. Basically once you get your UFO and do you warm-up missions, you'll start getting contacted by other empires regardless of if you like it or not, and they will attack you if they want. I had some war monkeys completely remove half my cities from the map, no chance to rebuild unless you use up one of your colonization kits (really expensive). Unless you're a diplomat or a complete pushover (paying 'protection money' to hostile empires, joining religions to avoid confrontation, etc.), you'll need to defend yourself. But if you can make friends and establish trade routes, your allies will often come to your aid.

The money system is basically a galatic economy, differenc olonies can manufacture different types of 'spice' that can be traded to other planets within other empires for different amounts of money. you play the market. Buy red spice at 255 and sell at 15,000, rinse repeat, etc. there are alos rare gems, artifacts and other things you can collect and sell for large amounts of money. It's very well designed.

Trafalgar

Hmmm. That actually sounds fairly deep, unlike the complaints I've been hearing about "you can only build three kinds of buildings in civ phase" and "the AI is retarded" and "there's no free-form way to play in creature, tribal, or civ, it's always along one of the railroaded paths." So space, from your description, sounds a lot better.

I've heard a lot of complaints about being constantly attacked by fleets of ships every 3 minutes, though, and being unable to get anything done simply for that reason, and having the game crash upon leaving the planet after successfully winning a defensive battle.

niftygecko

Even if that stuff were true (I'm not saying it's not, I couldn't tell you), I'm sure it wouldn't take too much away from the game for the die-hards who have been waiting for the game since its announcement, almost 3 years ago. That's like saying you won't eat your chicken nuggets because you have no sweet and sour sauce...

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"ETA......... IT'S HERE! IT'S HERE!"

keeper5

The space stage is where this game really shines. Yes, you can only build three different kinds of buildings in civ phase, that's true, but the game's not really about the city planning, it's about happiness/production ratio, strike a good balance and it benfits you greatly, it's about putting the buildings in the right spots so as not to affect each other too negatively. That's as deep as it gets.

Also, you can only have three ships, land air and sea. (The UFO is separate from that) But I found that you can change the vehicles based on what kind of colony you are viewing, for example, your social colony vehicles can be different from your military colony vehicles, i dont think that's the case with buildings though, not sure i didn't actually try.

I haven't noticed the AI being that bad at all, not any worse but not any better than what you'd expect from any other game nowadays.

Tribal and civ phase, to be completely honest, are like just excuses to get to space stage. It's a real grind sometimes, though there are some moments that make it worth it, but otherwise getting from creature to space stage is more like mini-games by comparison, but not so much that you'll mind.

Getting attacked often does happen, and just like with any other war, you have to devote your resources and attention if you're going to survive. The easiest way to do it is just bribe them to death til they stop attacking, and eventually into forming an alliance where they'll actually help you, but that's hard to do when they're constantly messing with your resource production. The best way to do it is to get your cities and such in order BEFORE heading to space stage, cause you'll lose any money past 100k when you do, and outfitting all your cities with full defenses is expensive, so if you can, save up durign civ ptage and then spend it all on defenses and building your cities to be profitable.

EDIT: Once you do that, explore and stockpile money as you trade with other empires, buy low sell high, make money and have some reserves in case someone sends you a transmission saying they're gonna attack you unless you fork over 50k money. it may be cheaper in the long run to just pay them, depending on how well defended you are.

blipblipblur

ive found the space stage the best part of the game so far (ov), but one thing annoys me is the constant cry for help and the constant attacks/demands for money, personally im doing ok now because i was lucky enough to befriend two strong races and get them to fight for me, but its hard to do your own thing when ur constantly being harassed because pirates are steeling ur spice or ur ecosystem has become infected, i wanna terrform on my own with out having to drop what im doing to save some half built colony, which btw has the worst defenses in the world, takes the attacker half a minuet to take down and there not even damaged.

so yer thats my lil rant about the tough space stage. kinda wishing there was a planet search bar because they keep giving missions to planets that ive never even heard of let alone know where it is or how far away it is from the big red sun called kyangerfub.

__________________
Spore's taking one tentacle forward and two tentacles back.
Right men shoot on sight, we must not let the dreaded sporn leave this planet.
So pimp up ur ships and warm the cannons, Theres gunna be some cooked Grox wrapped in a bun and smothered in mustered.

Trafalgar

There are efforts going on with regard to the foundations for early modding, currently, so things may be improving soon - plus, we might be seeing a patch soon, too.

Some things have already been figured out:
Spview (Custom Sims 3 Forums - Technical Discussion) can extract the contents of Spore and Spore CC .package files and compress files into .package files. There are a ton of different files in the game data package, and some of them are text files that seem to define variables - specifying their names, a hash value for them, their variable type, and some have a value which may possibly be a default value.

Models have been able to be extracted for some time now, too, but that's not what I'm interested in. :P

More is being figured out pretty quickly, too.

sulfur

Ooo i smell a mod in the brewing

__________________
"I love the sweet smell of napalm roasted 'Sporn Creatures' in the morning" - sulfur

- Producing Spore ... $100M
- Years of PR work on the game .. $Who knows
- Getting your game ripped off because your a tool and use DRM ... priceless