Spore Evolution Walkthrough

Alright, so "creature creation" for the civilization stage is a bit of a misnomer as you don't actually customize your creatures here. Rather, you only need to worry about designing the look of your buildings, cities and vehicles. Building design is actually completely irrelevant—the design doesn't dictate any stats, so do as much or as little as you'd like. City layout is very important, though, so pay attention not only to the building types in your city but also to the arrangement of those cities.

Vehicle design is important, but it's simpler than creature creation. Stats are based on percentage sliders—add more parts of a certain statistic and the sliders will give more of your available 100% to those statistics. Before you can even spawn vehicles, you need to create a model in the vehicles section of the city planner. You're forced to make your first land vehicle, but you'll have to take the initiative to build sample sea and air vehicles before you can start spawning them.

The buildings you place in your city and—more importantly—the arrangement of those buildings determines the happiness and cash flow generated by your cities. Add one factory to your city and your existing population will start pumping out cash. Add a second factory and you may generate even more cash, or you may not—usually, you'll need to add another house to the city to increase the population in order to boost output before considering a second factory.

When placing a new building into your city, move it around between available spots and notice the changes it makes to your city statistics. Positioning homes near factories boosts cash flow further, though it leads to less happy residents. Alternating factory-house-factory-house generally yields the most cash output. Putting entertainment buildings adjacent to houses will help boost happiness.

The moral of this story is to always play with building placement. Just because you have the right buildings in your city doesn't mean you'll have the maximum balance of cash and happiness. Also note that the little decorations you can add to the city do nothing for your stats. Since they still cost money, we suggest ignoring them entirely. If you capture a city that is adorned with these decorations, quickly sell them off.

As already mentioned, vehicle construction is simpler than creature creation. For one, your resources are basically unlimited—you don't really need to worry about the cost of parts you equip. Continuing with the theme of simplicity, there are only three stats to concern yourself with, including vehicle health, speed and power.

The core parts of your vehicles contribute weight to each of those three stats, sliding percentages for each stat. If you want a faster vehicle, add lots of speed parts (you can add multiples of the same part) to slide your percentage rule—as shown in the upper-right corner of the screen—more toward speed.

Early in the civilization stage, speed is very important so feel free to heavily weight your percentage sliders toward speed. As you start establishing your empire, you can go back into the city planner and change your template's makeup so that future spawned vehicles will have different stats, not so heavily weighted toward speed as health and power become more important.