Spore Evolution Walkthrough

Before you're dropped off in the next stage of evolution, you get the chance to construct a building and a land vehicle. Note that there are no stats to worry about when constructing the building—just make it look however you'd like as the parts don't matter. Vehicle construction does require attention to the parts, though it's a lot more simplified than creature creation. We highly suggest loading your vehicle with lots of speed. You'll be able to change your vehicle later, but at the very start of the civilization stage speed is of the utmost importance.

Now before you finish up creating your vehicle and are dumped off into the civilization stage, it's important to really understand what this stage is about. Like the last stage, tribal, there's not a lot of explanation to let you know what's going on in the civilization stage. Though you're the first city to appear on the world map, you won't be alone for long so it's extremely important you get to working aggressively right away. Though you're given options for playing around with your city, know that if you dink around too long you'll get overrun quickly. The civilization stage is about aggressively taking over other cities by converting them to your religion, beating them with military, or conquering them with money. Your ideal method depends on how you completed the tribal stage.

If you completed the tribal stage as we suggested, making allies with everyone, religion will be your weapon of choice in the civilization stage. Thusly, this walkthrough will assume you're using religion to convert other cities, though the same basic strategies will work for other methods as well. As a general rule, the goal here is to be the first to control at least four cities (four including the city you start with). When you control four cities you'll be able to build aircraft, and he who has aircraft rules the civilizations.

There's a little trick we never really suggested before, but in the civilization stage it is key. Hit the pause button! With the action paused, you can still pan around the world, assess what's going on, and even issue commands to your units. It is key to make the most of every second of your time at the start of the stage, so we suggest heavy usage of the pause button. Take your time to plan a strategy, take your time in the city planner, and issue all commands before unpausing the game to the let the action play out.

As soon as the stage starts, hit the pause button. We suggest going into the city planner and creating (or choosing existing) models for houses, entertainment and factory buildings, as well as creating or choosing a model for your sea vehicle. Choosing these models now will make it easier to equip your civilization with the items in the heat of gameplay.

Now the goal for the early part of the stage is to build up your Sporebucks resources. Check out the map in the lower-left corner of the screen and you'll see various triangle-like shapes that show the locations of various spice geysers that you can capture to add to your cash flow. Spawn two land vehicles and immediately issue them separate commands to start capturing the geysers that are furthest from your city but on the same continent (land vehicles can't cross the water). Other cities will start appearing after you've captured your first geyser, so it's best to capture the furthest ones first so that other cities can't get them before you can reach them.

We also suggest building a factory in your first city to start the cash flow. At this point, it's not worth worrying about your city's happiness rating or its military defenses (turrets)—just focus on collecting as much cash as quickly as possible. You should also work to spend your money as quickly as possible. Letting the money sit unused is essentially wasting time.

Before long, other cities will start appearing over the landscape. A city's most vulnerable state is in its early stage, so be quick to strike on the very nearest city. Select all of your land vehicles, right click on the target city, and choose to "convert" it. As your money supply grows, spawn more land vehicles and send them to the aid of the others in order to convert the city as quickly as possible. When you capture a city of another specialty (religion, military, or economic) you have the option of keeping it as is or converting it to your specialty. We suggest always converting it to your specialty.

When you've captured your first city, things start to get strategic. A landlocked city is less likely to be attacked, so working it to the bone with factories in order to earn money is okay even if it lowers their happiness since they're not likely to be attacked anyway (and happiness is essentially defense). The first thing you should do upon capturing a city is going into the city planner, removing any extraneous items (trees and such cost money and add nothing to your stats), and start fiddling with the building positions to get the best cash flow. Generally, alternating houses and factories will yield the best results.

In our experience, there have always been four cities that cropped up on the first continent (first being the continent your civilization starts on). Work quickly to conquer all four of these cities and then start building an army of air vehicles. Air vehicles are exceptionally good at converting cities and they're able to jump to other continents.

Some notes for continuing your expansion: Try to focus on one continent at a time. Only start attacking a city on another colony after you've conquered all cities on your current continent.