Millions of years of evolution have led up to this point: Spore has finally wrapped development and will be shipping in early September. Over the past few months we've taken close looks at the early modes of the game, followed by some hands-on time with the tribal phase and the space phase. But during the annual Games Convention in Leipzig Germany, we had the opportunity to sit down undisturbed with the final version, and global conquest via the "civilization" phase of the game was the only thing on our minds.
The civilization phase kicks off once your tribal creatures have gained intelligence and founded a successful culture with a capital city. After a celebratory cut-scene, the camera pulls out to reveal your walled city in all its glory. Moreover, the entire planet is now your playground. The level kicks off with a short tutorial demonstrating how to maneuver around the spherical play space and play with the camera. We found it a little bit disorienting to play across the whole of the globe (it was very easy to get turned around), but after 10 minutes of play finding your way around becomes second nature.
Since we jumped straight into the civilization part of the game, our species didn't have the long history that we would have had if we'd played from the cellular phase on up. As such, we didn't get any of the bonus abilities you'd normally get from winning each phase. For this reason -- and because we were chicken -- we decided to play on the easy difficulty. We're serious about the chicken part. The creatures we selected as our race resembled blue two-headed chickens.
In earlier phases of the game, your species is struggling for survival against other species. But the civilization phase presumes that your race has become the dominant intelligence on the planet. As you fortify your capital city, other members of your species will found their own empires. It's up to you to unify the planet through any means, peaceful or not.
Cities and Spice
This part of the game ignores individual creatures completely and focuses on cities, the vehicles you drive between then, and the resource nodes scattered randomly around the planet. These "Spice Geysers" are your only natural resource, and one of your first goals is to claim one for your faction.
But first, we took a look at the cities themselves. Every city has a town hall in the middle, surrounded by various nodes where other buildings, defenses, or decorations can be placed. Before a new building is built you have to decide what it looks like -- you can either edit your own (which is amazingly intuitive if you're already used to the creature editor), or choose from any buildings other users have already uploaded to the Sporepedia. Factories, houses, and entertainment venues are the types of buildings available.
Mousing over a city reveals details about the town's production. Each city is ranked for happiness, income, and defense. A simple but interesting mechanic determines how a metropolis fares: Each node within the walls that you can build on is connected to other nearby nodes, and these connections determine what a city produces. For example: Every connection between a factory and a house generates income. Unfortunately, every factory creates unhappiness. But every connection between a house and an entertainment venue creates happiness. There's no way to build a perfect city, but you can smartly choose whether to focus on happiness or income, hopefully laying out a city plan that optimizes each building. Boosting a city's defenses is easier, as you can just buy turrets for your walls -- expensive, but enough of them will make mincemeat of attackers not smart enough to assault en masse.
