I made it to the Space stage in Spore after conquering all before me in the Civilization stage. In the process of doing that, I earned the Rolling Thunder achievement for beating the Civ stage within an hour. This is less impressive than it sounds since this wasn’t one continuous hour and this was actually my second attempt. Embarrassingly, I managed to screw up my strategy so badly on my first attempt I ended up having no hope of a comeback.

As I was playing as a belligerent Military civilization, I began my first campaign aggressively acquiring resources and territory on my home continent. This was a sound strategy for the early game. Unfortunately, I made the criminal mistake of neglecting my manufacturing and production, and as history has shown us, it’s the economy, stupid.

My lack of foresight and planning left my military swarmed and completely annihilated by the airforce from hell. The dastardly AI opponent, having wisely built up his economy, could churn out fighter aircraft faster than I could shoot them down, and having achieved air supremacy with trivial ease, the AI proceeded to slowly wrest one city after another from my grasp. There was absolutely no chance of defending myself since the interminable terror bombing campaign prevented me from building up my cities’ defences.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I had saved at an untenable position which meant I was well and truly screwed as Maxis only provided a single savegame per campaign. With no hope of a recovery and no other choice, I had to delete my game and start a new campaign on a new world.

You know a savegame scheme really sucks when players need to destroy an entire world to avoid a bad situation.

A heavily-armed Spore creation kept airborne by flapping batwings, gumption and derring-do.

In Spore’s Civilization phase, players will need to balance form and function when designing air, sea and land vehicles. Each vehicle design is a compromise between durability, firepower and speed with final vehicle stats determined by the parts chosen. For instance, additional wings would improve speed at the expense of firepower and durability.

Players have a limited budget for parts and are further limited by a Complexity Meter which limits the number of parts used (presumably to prevent problems with overall game performance). Oddly, however, parts have no impact whatsoever on the final manufacturing cost of the vehicle.

I chose to play as a warmonger on my first Spore run and I found myself stymied because my airforce was being consistently bested. Anton Fokker, I am not. I then switched to the design above. Though it was cumbersome, it could dish it out as well as take it, and my air campaign proved more successful with it.

A starfaring Spore vessel for the serpents that walk:


The vehicle editors appear to be the most freeform from what I can tell. They’re not without their frustrations, however. Taking a simple clutter-free screenshot is a lot tougher compared to the creature editors since there’s no Test Mode for the vehicle editors. You can hide the interface with CTRL+H but that still leaves the dais.