At the outset of the civilization phase, you choose what specialization you want your starting city to have: economic, religious or military. Much like the classic PC game Empire, each city can only have one specialization, so don't expect to produce tanks at your economic cities. Your initial city choice is important because it determines what strategy you'll need to use to overcome your first opponent.
Spore Goes to War
On the easy difficulty level, we were given a few minutes to trundle around the planet uninterrupted before other civilizations started to appear. Simply clicking on a nearby city allows you to open up a dialogue with your neighbors. The choices are sometimes funny -- announcing "your people are descended from limbless space slugs" to another civilization, while true, may not get your relationship off on the best foot.
As an economic power, we decided to play nice with our nearest neighbors. First we gave them a hefty gift, which is always a good way to kick off a friendship based on greed and mutual self-interest. Once we had friendly relations, we established a trade route. One of our vehicles started driving back and forth between their capital and ours, carrying little floating balloons of presumably awesome... stuff. Both sides were making money, but more importantly, an economic gauge appeared over the enemy city demonstrating our progress toward an economic victory. Once the gauge filled up (which only took a few minutes on the easy difficulty level), the opposing city basically went up for sale. We clicked on it, named our price, and thanks to mutually friendly relations (and the fact that we threw a bucketload of cash their way), the city became ours! A cut-scene showed our creatures waltzing through the city gates with big massive bags of cash, "converting" the citizens within to our way of life.
Because of our economic victory over a military city, we had a choice -- we could convert the city to an economic powerhouse, or keep it as-is. We decided to keep it as-is, so that now our empire had one city specializing in each.
There are three ways to take over enemy cities (military, economic, or religious conquests), which fits in nicely with the fact that cities are scored in three ways: happiness, defense and income. A city with poor income is ripe for an economic takeover, since they'll probably sell out cheaply. A city with poor happiness is just begging for a religious attack, converting its unhappy citizens to your way of thinking. And naturally a military conquest is going to be tough against a military powerhouse. How you tackle each city is up to your overall strategy and the resources you have available. It's a simple system -- not very deep, but easy to understand. And the gameplay supports a few different approaches.
We decided to try the military approach next, just to get a feel for it. Our single military city only had enough houses to support a couple of military vehicles (to build one, you can either edit it from scratch or select an existing vehicle from the Sporepedia). We rolled out a couple of tanks and sent them tearing toward another empire's city. When military vehicles assault an enemy town, they first destroy all of the support buildings, and then finally move in to start shelling the city hall. Once all the buildings are leveled, the city surrenders and converts to your empire... although you'll have to rebuild it from scratch. How you take over a city determines what you can do with it -- for instance, a military conquest of a military city means that it has to stay as a military city, whereas other forms of conquest would've allowed us to convert it to something else.
Don't expect deep military tactics with Spore. For the most part, numerical superiority wins the day. Whoever can bring the most tanks to the front line will come out the winner, so the real heart of the game is planning out your resources and building smartly. After we had our third city, it was relatively easy to create a mob of tanks to overwhelm the next one. (Once you opt for military conquest, it's really easy to stay on an offensive footing.)
The object in this phase of the game is to conquer the planet, one city at a time. Your progress is shown on a bar at the bottom of the screen, which is consistent with the other phases. Once you take over four cities, you unlock a new vehicle type: flying vehicles! While expensive, these suckers make ocean-hopping easy. Which was good news, because while we were working our magic on our home continent, other empires were forged overseas and they already had significant defenses set up. A two-headed chicken's work is never done, even once he's downloaded an authentic World War II-era replica fighter plane from the Sporepedia.
We found that Spore's civilization mode had a good mix of simplicity and depth. It might not be meaty enough to satisfy a hardcore strategy gamer, but it definitely fits in with the fast, freewheeling fun of the game as a whole. Look for Spore's release September 7th.
