Spore's 'Civilization' phase

[Locutus]

I haven't seen any details on the Civilization phase of Spore yet, but 1Up published some details about it:

http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3168495

The Civilization phase presents you with three roads to global domination. If you begin with a religious city, you've gotta build the faith and dispatch missionaries to convert rival cities to your cause. Alternatively, you can take the military route and raise a conquering army to take the world by force. I elected to take the remaining choice and began my quest on the economic path.

From reading the article it sounds very much like a simplified version of the Civ we all know and love -- perhaps not all that much unlike CivRev...

[DarkCloud]

Sounds interesting.

[EPW]

0 challenge

[Donegeal]

This makes me wonder how customizable the game itself will be.

Will it be able to let some one expand each phase by the creation of fan mods?

[Locutus]

I suspect the moddability in this game will mostly come from the editors, though I seem to remember someone saying most of the data is stored in XML so that opens it up nicely, but it remains to be seen to what extent that'll be meaningfully moddable (it's not like this game has a fixed tree of units/buildings/etc a la Civ).

IGN now has a preview of the Civ phase as well:

http://pc.ign.com/articles/885/885477p1.html

The strategy in civilization mode is to build vehicles to capture spice nodes, which gives you money to upgrade your city and build more vehicles. Each city has a limited number of build nodes, so what you decide to place on each node determines what type of strategy to pursue. For instance, a factory would let you churn out more units faster. Taking over other cities can be done in different ways. There's the regular military conquest idea, where you build vehicles and aircraft and bulldoze the opposition. But there's also a spiritual method of conversion, which can be done by constructing special units that basically roll up outside a city and start blasting them with propaganda. In Spore's case, it's a giant holographic version of your creature.

[DarkCloud]

...Spice nodes- like Dune.

I really hope this game lives up to its hype- it seems almost far too ambitious... it implies the civ mode will be expansive, but looking at that picture, it appears to be quite limited, one, two, three, maybe four cities max.

[Locutus]

Originally posted by DarkCloud
I really hope this game lives up to its hype- it seems almost far too ambitious... it implies the civ mode will be expansive, but looking at that picture, it appears to be quite limited, one, two, three, maybe four cities max.

I think you're grossly underestimating the size of that sphere, the upper screenshot shows probably less than 10% of the total surface area and it has 2 cities on the foreground, which would imply a planet should be able to support 20+ cities. It's obviously not a Civ world with room for a few hundred cities but it looks like a lot more than just 3 or 4 (and that's only one planet, we don't know how representative it is for others in the game).

Anyway, GameSpot posted their preview of the civ phase as well, revealing more details about the gameplay:

Back at our capital city we began to poke around in the build menu that dropped down on the left side of the screen. Flush with newfound income, we started by installing some relatively cheap defensive turrets at a few of the set build points along our outer wall. Then we started churning out some more vehicles, only to have our stockpiling abruptly halted by the unit cap. Factories increase this cap and can be constructed inside your city at one of the many preestablished build points. This seemed like business as usual until we constructed another factory and were rewarded with a productivity bonus for putting the two next to each other. It seems that the placement of structures within your cities will have certain effects on their functionality, though our time was too short to further explore this interplay.

The article also talks about numerous cities across multiple continents, so it seems planets are big enough. Of course, whether that translates to good gameplay remains to be seen, but the fact that Soren Johnson is heading the design team for this phase certainly gives me plenty of hope...

[Cartimandua]

Pardon me for my late reply, but I've just barely discovered this wonderful Spore world.

From what I have read, it seems that the "Civilization" phase is quite similar in concept to our beloved Civilization, and that includes a form of strategy (so it's not too easy) and building (both of which I love!). I doubt we will be disappointed, I would like to think that the hype is not over-played judging from what we've seen so far. Besides, the graphics look amazing!

[Imran Siddiqui]

Yeah, it seems kind of CivRev-ish in a simplified Civ way (though even more simplified than CivRev, obviously... I don't think there will be any diplomacy there). It looks pretty sweet though.

[Metaliturtle]

I'm looking forward to what Soren may have brought to the table in SPORE's civ phase that may not have come out in the Civilization games he worked on.