Hey Carl,
This is a pretty good guide, nices tips especially in the space stage. I'll
definetly be using this.
Spore Walkthrough - a Game Guide by Carl
Complete Tips for all of Spore's Phases
Introduction
It is clearly impossible to write a proper walkthrough for Spore, considering the large amount of variability in the game. Still, there are so many options that some people might like tips and information on what's possible. For this reason, I am working to gather data and strategies about Spore to help players achieve their goals in the space stage. This guide is fairly comprehensive, offering tips for each creature type in each phase. Feel free to email me any suggestions to improve it.
The space stage is obviously the pinnacle of the game and will consume the most time and effort to master. Starting the stage with skills that compliment your playing style will really go a long way toward ensuring your success.
How you play Spore in each stage affects what abilities you receive in subsequent stages, culminating in a collection of four abilities for use in the space stage and an ultimate ability. You will gain an ability that affects each following stage, as well. During your first game you should just have fun, and do whatever feels natural. Later you may like to experiment with diferent paths of evolution.
The difficulty is fairly even no matter which play style you choose, but it may be a bit more challenging, or just time consuming, to succeed as a middle of the road creation in the creature and tribal phases due to the necessity to balance your ratio of conquest to friendship. To make things more difficult, in the tribal stage you must switch back and forth from weapons to instruments. A balance of peaceful and aggressive creature parts and clothing is also more costly.
Ultimately, if you want an easier experience in the space stage of Spore, you should build your creature in a way that most benefits your play style. This is more important the higher your difficulty setting. Also note that if you start directly in any stage you may not receive bonuses depending on which creature you choose. Select a creature that has been through all four phases to gain the maximum benefit, otherwise create a creature from scratch to earn the Wanderer Passion achievement and achieve no bonuses (not recommended).
Spore EndGame Philosophies
The space stage of Spore will likely be the most difficult for many of the people who purchased the game but are new to gaming in general. Choosing a path of evolution and social development that compliments the play style you're adoping for the space stage will be a major help. The path you choose throughout the game determines your race's ultimate philosophy. Philosophy helps you to get along with other races who share your philosophy, and grants your race a unique super-ability to aid them in expanding in the space stage.
It is important to note that you do not have to follow any set path to reach a certain philosophy. For example, the Zealot philosophy requires 2 green and 2 red: 
but could be obtained by any combination for example the pattern:
still contains the necessary 2 green and 2 red to adopt the philosophy. With that in mind, on to the super abilities!.
Red paths are from usually aggressive choices throughout the four stages: Carnivore, Predator, Aggressive, Militaristic
Blue paths are generally somewhere in the middle: Omnivore, Adaptable, Industrious, Economic
Green paths come from making "nice" choices in the game, usually: Herbivore, Social, Friendly, Religious
| Philosophy | Path | Super Power |
| Bard: Any combination of 2 blue, 1 green, and 1 red | |
Soothing Song: Calms your opponents, giving you a break in battle. Use it to regroup, build turrets, even escape! |
| Diplomat: Any combination of 2 blue and 2 green | |
Static Cling: Disables all enemy turrets and spacecraft on the current planet, allowing you to have your way with them and even conquer the planet. |
| Ecologist: Any combination of 2 green, 1 blue, and 1 red | |
Safari Vacuum: Instantly takes 2 of every species from a planet. This is very handy with a large cargohold and the terraforming rays. You automatically gather enough critters and plants to fully terraform 2 planets if used on a planet with a complete ecosystem. |
| Knight: Any combination of 2 red, 1 blue and 1 green. | |
Summon Mini-U: Summons a miniature version of your ship to fight alongside, like a little squire for the 'Knight'. Good for assisting in attacking a planet or even as a defense. |
| Scientist: Any combination of 2 blue and 2 red | |
Gravitational Wave: Lays waste to everything on the planet, but keeping the ecosystem intact. Will affect relations with other (possibly only nearby) races when used. Considered a violation of galactic law. |
| Shaman: 3 green and any 1 of any other color. | |
Return Ticket: Instantly teleports your ship back to the home planet. Useful early on for defense, is not a long cooldown like other powers. Also helps to return home from long journeys, like the one to the center of the galaxy! |
| Trader: 3 blue and 1 of any other color. | |
Cash Infusion: Instantly fills a planet's purchase bar. Does not automatically capture planets, only allows instant purchase without waiting out a trade route. Good if you have money burning a hole in your pocket. |
| Wanderer: begin in the space stage | None | Wanderer: you gain no bonus, and earn the wanderer love achievement. There isn't really any other reason to do this; you could at least complete cell stage to be considered a single color from red blue or green. |
| Warrior: 3 red and 1 of any other color. | |
Raider Rally: Cons pirates into attacking a planet. This will help to weaken the planetary defenses and possibly even take out some ships. Only useful for that purpose, but not necessarily a bad ability. |
| Zealot: any combination of 2 green and 2 red | |
Fanatical Frenzy: Take over a planet, instantly converting the inhabitants to your cause. Another philosophy with an ability that breaks galactic law, but extremely powerful! |
Spore Cell Stage
Omnivores: Placing spikes and other items next to your creature's proboscis mouth can make it more difficult for it to feed on other cells by costing it kills and bumping it away from your prey. Your creature needs to be able to approach their prey as if they were a vampire. You can't eat the meat chunks, only living cells that are intact. Each 'suck'on another creature will earn you DNA points and healing.
You can be an omnivore without a proboscis but it is cheaper to take the single mouth (a difference of only 5 DNA points). You are what you eat, so to speak. Keep this in mind when trying to make a true omnivore. A creature with a proboscis mouth can become a carnivore if you spend too much time sucking everything to death. Use the meter on the history screen to keep track of your position.
Mate as soon as you know you can add a new part to make progression easier. There really are many effective combinations, so use the opportunity to experiment as you progress.
Herbivores will have to search for meteor fragments and utilize natural defenses, such as spikes, to find all the available parts. They will also benefit greatly from speed for both fleeing predators and finding new feeding areas. They can also kill or scare off the competition around plant clusters to hasten their evolution.
Carnivores have a leg up on the competition in the effort to gain all parts in the cell stage of Spore because all things not ten times their size are food. Hunt specific types of creatures to gather the parts you need to be successful. If you want to be an omnivore keep an eye out for green creatures with mosquito-like mouths. Again, speed is important because when you attack you are bumped away and it usually takes two bites to kill a cell of the same size. Higher speed helps you to recover from the bump faster and move in for the kill!
Herbivores are often better off with lighter offensive tools and more jets and flagella to make searching for plants easier. Remember that some of your competition will be omnivorous and you will be hunted by the more obvious predators, so be sure to include some type of damage dealing body part.
Spore Creature Stage
Social: Players who elect to befriend other species and go the green social route will have things only a little differently than an aggressive or adaptable player. This mindset really belongs to the herbivores and omnivores: food should come from plants instead of other species. You could of course have a carnivore feed on some poor species from time to time without driving them to extinction, but that's too time consuming.
Adaptable: The blue option for this phase is adaptable (be a mixture of predator and social) in this stage, try alternating between predatory and social as you move along. If you started as a carnivore, you will have to work more toward being social to achieve this, and vice versa with herbivore. As a carnivore, you'll likely find that many of the jaws are not suited to singing so you may have a harder time impressing certain creatures. Look at the meter on the history screen to see how you're doing! You creatures need a little of everything evolved so they can perform well as both a hunter and social being. Making sure you have strike and bite should suffice, but as far as socializing goes you'll want to go for everything so that you can impress any creature you encounter.
You can impress a lower creature without mimicing it if you have a social skill that overpowers what the creature you're trying to befriend posesses, or more members in your pack. For example, a low DNA score bird creature sings with probably a level 1 song and your creatures counter with a level 3 pose. Your creature's social bar will often go over the halfway mark and grant you a new friend.
Charge is a valuable tool for catching up to fleeing prey. It has a fairly long cooldown, but can be saved for this purpose if you are fighting something weak and fast.
Spore Tribal Stage
Your creature's diet will be your first concern upon entering the tribal phase of Spore. Go into the tribal planner and outfit your people with gathering increases as well as whatever other items you'll need depending on your plan. If you're an herbivore, mass gathering is easy -- simply click on some edible plants with your tribe selected and they'll go off gathering all over the place. With carnivorous creatures, you should slaughter several creatures with your group then select a body to initiate this harvest. Hunting takes a bit more micromanagement. Fishing is also an option if you have access to water available nearby.
The options for conquering here are similar to before, with you choosing between being Friendly and Aggressive, a mixture of both, industrious, is also available. Peaceful tribes will employ musical instruments to woo an audience while aggressives will take up arms in the form of spears, torches and axes.
Aggressive: For aggressive creatures: The RTS elements here are simple, attack with nearly everyone in your tribe with a mixture of axes and spears but don't send all of them you could extinct your race on accident. Torches work well and you don't need many of them to burn down a building faster, so use them sparingly. Eliminating resistance is more important. After the first tribe is destroyed, and the other two pop up you may see a weakness in a village nearby. Exploit it if you can and want to move faster. Gather food in between conquests and heal your people by using the food storage building. When razing an enemy village, go straight for the main hut once the opposition is laid to rest. There's usually no need to take out their other buildings. If a tribe has a load of food you may want to steal it with all your citizens while they are down before taking down the village. You can prevent them from bringing reinforcements and boost your own stores at the same time.
Friendly: Friendly creatures should be more kind to those nearby and even offer gifts of food when other tribes are angry. You can make it so that you have zero opposition to your charms by buying off tribes as they come. Use a mixture of all available instruments to ensure you can meet the requests of the crowd. You needn't be in a rush to push a button when you're performing. Focus calmly and do a visual check on the symbol until you've got them memorized. It's not very hard. Aggressive is probably the more difficult of the pair.
Industrious: Playing an industrious species takes a bit of tact. You'll be able to ally with some tribes and will need to take down others. Give gifts of food to stabilize some species' moods when you are afraid the enemy will attack in force while you're away on another campaign. If you definitely want the blue card at the end of the phase, as always, keep an eye on the history meter to assess your progress.
Spore Civilization Stage
There are three ways to complete the civilization stage of Spore. This part of the game is basically a watered down real-time strategy game, but it's very fun in its simplicity. Veterans of the genre will find this to be a cakewalk, while newbies might still need a bit of help. Among the three options I find that military will provide the highest challenge for people who haven't much experienced this type of gameplay. Economic is the easiest but most boring, followed by Religious which is like military only you keep the cities intact and sometimes it goes fastest because of that.
Basic Strategy:
When you need to look at another area, double click the minimap instead of single clicking to snap instantly to a view of that location. This is a much faster way in the early game to order your vehicles to capture Spice geysers. Navigating the map this way will help speed every order you give for long-distance travel.Read the following passage about economic civilizations to get an idea on how to work diplomatically and increase your income quickly.
With every method for passing the civilization stage economics is important, but especially if you want to complete this phase through pure financial power. You should be able to make so much money that your vehicles are designed around speed with powerful economic parts to carry a large load, and quickly. You don't have to worry about health because you shouldn't see much aggression if you spend your money wisely.Economic Civilizations:
The first thing you should do upon taking control is grab a few extra trader land units.Send them out to individual spice geysers to capture them quickly. Put the money you gain afterward into infrastructure like houses and factories for your city. Making your citizens happy will double the production of a city, so placing one or two entertainment centers in key locations in the city so they affect multiple houses will help. Unhappy cities experience unrest, which isn't good.
When the first city for you to take over pops up, you should donate them some money, but only if you need to increase relations to start a trade route. It seems like the first city is always friendly. Using multiple vehicles will make this go faster, and you can't really go wrong with too many because the units will produce money for each load. Keep putting money into developing your capital at this stage while you watch the trade route. Try to get up to a high rate of at least 2000/minute. When celebrating this can double and bring in some mucho Spore bucks. Buying out a city should be approached cautiously, as a failed deal will reset the trade bar. It's not a huge worry if this happens because you will at least continue to receive the money while you wait on it to build up again. The first civilization to appear is usually fodder, and can be bought with the minimum amount. The more developed and higher population cities will be more expensive to acquire.
As more cities appear you will want to give them gifts of money to aid relations and prevent war. Make sure to compliment them first to grab a free +10 relations boost. By all means trade with multiple cities at once to boost your income rate. Spice geysers can be taken over by purchasing, and it is definitely recommended you do so if you can control the diplomatic situation and avoid them being taken back by force. Continue to develop your economy after you buy the first city, and don't buy another city until you've developed this one to its maximum profit potential. Note that often you can improve a city after you've purchased it even if it's full due to the AI not maximizing its income. Never put a factory next to a factory. Instead, place houses. They produce the same amount of extra Sporebucks as another factory when they touch the lines that spread out from the factory.
Keep up the political friendliness with gifts of money to ensure the safety of your cities. You can start building boats once you own the continent. If you don't build any aircraft in this stage of the game you will earn the 'fear of flying' achievement. This isn't hard to accomplish because really, aircraft aren't that great for this style of gameplay. You can use boats to establish a trade route with a city that shares a continent with other nations, then use your much cheaper land vehicles to trade. If you work at establishing trade routes that are close by and use them to move in an appropriate direction, expansion will come much faster. This is because shorter trade routes allow faster city purchase, as your vehicles will make more trips and the purchase city bar will fill up faster.
Use your boats to buy any spice derricks in the open water and you'll soon be swimming in Spore bucks with the option to make every nation you encounter your puppet state. Making alliances will make this go much faster, as when nothing is left but allies they soon join your great civilization.
Military Civilizations:
play things a bit differently. Money goes into raw miltary power instead of always throwing it into gifts or city purchases. Firstly, health is more important because you don't want to watch your tanks get turned into scrap by turrets. It's pathetic. Try to have at least 25% health, and maybe even a bit more. Attack should be given higher priority than speed for faster bombardment, the part of conquest that usually takes the longest. The first city to pop up can be taken with four tanks rather swiftly. Like usual, try to build up your city's income before growing too large a military. It's more important to establish your economy to allow larger armies later. When the first city is yours, upgrade it as well and the money will start coming in much faster. If you can do it quickly, grab neutral spice geysers after you eliminate a civilization to boost your income. If you don't want to bother, it's much simpler once you control the continent. Build up around ten to twelve tanks and you can finish off the last city, which is usually farthest away and more developed by the time you get there, thus taking longer to capture. With that done, build up your cities even further.
With the continent under your control, you can seriously scale back the land units in your military (delete them with the red 'x') and focus on your navy for a capture. Design your navy similar to land and establish control over a weak coastal target to allow you to again build the cheaper land units. I'm really against air, if you can't already tell. Attack cities one by one (you could of course help with your navy) and keep cash on hand to instantly spawn some defenders if you are attacked.
Religious Civilizations:
Religious civs should play similar to military, but more peacefully. Attempting to convert a friendly city will not immediately result in losing a friendship, so you can use an economic approach as well to tame aggression, although usually this is unnecessary as when you move quickly most civilizations don't make it past their first city. I have found that religious victory usually goes pretty fast, but it may only be my personal experience. Converting cities instead of destroying everything allows you to keep the structures that are already in place then proceed to add more buildings or rearrange them.
Similar to all other methods of conquest capture a base on another continent then have your way with them.
Spore Space Phase
The Spore space phase is probably the deepest, most engaging form of gameplay the title offers. After the initial space tutorials, you are given free control over how you develop your empire. Will you be warlike, economy-focused or a peaceful alliance-maker? All of the options available to you in Spore's space phase may seem overwhelming. With this guide I hope to help you find your focus by providing hints on how to make money ,wage war, shine diplomatically and eventually conquer the space phase. How you play the space phase is entirely up to you, but a mixture of everything below seems to work best. Your particular strengths, discounts, and super power will be calculated based on how your species behaved in previous stages of Spore.
Spore-conomics: Firstly, the best thing you can do for your bank account is to shop around before buying expensive items like colony packs. What sells for 150,000 at your homeworld can be found in other locations for as low as 90,000. You can gain money through multiple avenues: hunting down artifacts on other worlds, building an economy by terraforming planets and dumping cash into their development, as well as performing missions for other empires. I don't usually recommend doing missions for your own planets as they don't help you with diplomacy and in some cases hinder you when they ask you to perform ops on allied worlds. The first phase of getting your economy running should be planning: whatever your goal, you will still need planets producing spice to aid your income. Work on missions for other empires but be on the lookout for uninhabited systems that contain pink, blue or purple spice. You want to make one of these gems your first focus for dumping your cash and finding a location that isn't far from your homeworld will help even more. Vast riches lie in the depths of space, but you're going to need to set up nearby trade routes first for the safety of your planets.
Making Money in Spore: The home planet in Spore is never very good at producing spice. It does have a lot of cities, however and is a wonderful buffer against attack because of this. Building up your cities on the home planet with your starting cash will help to buy you time when the enemy attacks, and boost your income for the short term. The insignificant amounts of red spice you'll gather do help a lot, but later amount to chump change. Take this for example: a planet with three cities producing yellow spice at full capacity can bring in over 500 spice per hour, and with spice storage installed on the planet the capacity becomes 30, allowing it to build over time into even larger loads. One trip with such a load, when sold to the right planet can bring in over 400,000 spore bucks.
Hints for Success in the Space Phase - The best badges in the early game
Spore's Space Phase features badges that you can collect for prestige and to help you in the game. As you complete missions in space, fend off enemy invasions, wage war, trade space and terraform planets you will gain skill badges which allow you to purchase better items. Using your time in the beginning of the space phase doing a bit of everything at once will help you to improve the power of your space ship. Missions, terraforming, buying buildings at cities, and even moving around the spore galaxy map will all earn you badges. Among the best improvements to nab early:
Longer Term-Goals - Getting the Most out of Spore's Space Phase
:All of these goals can be accomplished by following the simple pattern of flying about doing missions, picking up spice and stopping to look at planets that have the gold radar signal around them while saving money for improvments and terraforming of your first target planet. The latest patch makes it much less frustrating to do this even when you're at war because the enemy attacks less often. Aid your allies at your discretion, just remember that while there are no immediate rewards for assisting them it's often preferable to have an old friend as a neighbor than a nasty warmonger. You'll also earn certain badges for fighting off pirates and other empires.
Terraforming in Spore's Space Phase
To make most planets habitable, you will need to first terraform them. The Spore Space phase allows you to improve planets to make money. This can be challenging to players who are new to the game, so I'll try to give you hints on how to accomplish this.
Terraforming is a multi-step process. First, you need to go to the terraform screen while you are on a planet. To the left side of this screen will be a circle with a dot that tells you how far from the center "sweet spot" the planet is on the habitability scale. For example, a planet with its dot in the lower left corner has both little atmosphere and a cold temperature. Using an atmosphere generator (can be found for around 90k spore bucks) will increase the atmosphere (make the dot move up) and a meteor shower will raise the temperature (making it go right). You can use both items at once to cause it to move in both directions at once, or diagonal-right. Clearly some planets will be cheaper to terraform to T3 depending on where they started in the habitability zone. This is almost never an exact science but careful planning can save you spore bucks in the long run. Buy tools on demand: most planets don't stock more than one of any item anyway. Make sure you have enough spore bucks to proceed all the way to the next habitability ring because you could end up wasting money.
Once a planet is settled in at T3 the work is not over. You must place plants and animals. I usually place species in the following order: large plant, medium plant, small plant, two herbivores and finally a meat-eater (carnivore or omnivore). Having these items in your cargo hold and ready to be planted when the planet is good to go will help save you time and possibly money, should you take too long getting your species from another planet and find that the planet requires the use of more terraforming tools to continue. A final note of caution: It's not unheard of for all your hard work to go down the drain so claim your gold mine planet as soon as possible by placing a colony there to prevent enemy empires (or even friends) from taking it from you.
Later in the game you will be able to terraform in bulk very easily with large cargo holds to hold a sample of the entire ecosystem of a T3 planet. You'll also be able to eschew disposable terraforming tools in favor of energy beams that do the same thing only you have more control. It becomes very easy to make cash this way. You can terraform an entire solar system with multiple copies of each species to be placed and some energy packs to help fuel your terraforming rays.
Making money in Spore by Trading Spice
: The best deals for making money in Spore's space phase are always found at your own planets, where you will receive all spice for free. At other worlds, however, you will find spice that is priced relatively cheap, like yellows for 4,000 each. Buy these if you have the spare spore bucks, then turn around and sell them for triple the money! Just because you find a good trade route don't expect it to be succulent forever. After you've met the demands of the planet you were trading with, demand will fall through the floor and another place to trade should be found. Roam space and find other planets of friendly species to find the best deals, and when one is spotted, milk it as long as you can then move on. It's sometimes best to try to sell in bulk (save up in cargo hold) due to this fall in demand. You can pass the maximum amount the planet would have purchased for the high price.Spices in order of value:
Prices vary from planet to planet. Don't neglect the lesser spice colors early on in the phase, because they'll help improve your ability to make money.
Space Diplomatics and Economics
: Once you've got money rolling in, use it to upgrade your ship to suit it to your specialty. You can truly aim for being a jack of all trades. Make friends in one direction and wage war in the other. When you're thinking of expansion consider moving toward the center of the galaxy rather than away from it if you ever want to "beat" the space phase. Befriend species along the way and expand the reach of your empire. When cash is heavy, use it to buy out planets you hand-select for takeover by trade routes. Others can be taken by brute force. Friends can be bought much as in the civilization stage. Donate them 100,000 and they'll usually be quite happy. Ending wars takes quite a lot more money though!Waging War in Space
: Maybe you just enjoy war, or see it as a good way to expand your empire. Either way, you're going to be in combat sooner or later in the space phase. Owning upgraded missiles, auto blasters, and shields certainly helps, but don't forget to treat this like an RPG and buy plenty of 'potions', aka repair kits. They aren't always necessary but it's a pain to lose your progress and have to start back at your homeworld by going unprepared. Most people tend to fly in circles using the WASD keys for controlling the ship while targeting with the mouse. This just plain works, as long as you keep your distance. To me, it makes the end game of Spore much more bland to do it this way too often though.
Many enemy ships have very short range weapons and you can 'kite' them by keeping them inside your range while you're well beyond theirs. What's better, once you've got a lock, the missiles you fire are seekers so you don't have to worry about keeping the mouse on your target. Or the camera for that matter! This circling method works for turrets too, just be careful as once you have a pack on your tail you should never double back through them because you'll take massive damage very quickly. This isn't as much of a problem if you're a prime specimen with 7500 hp though.
Take advantage of your alliances. This is why even warmongers should have some friends. Explore space, meet other gamers' Spore creations and consider letting some of them live. You can have 1 representative ship from each species in your alliance. Fly about to the various friendly empires in known space and gather one of each until your command limit is full. They will go a long way toward helping you, or just soaking up some laser fire. Another great tool of counquering to use is the anti-matter missile you can gain via the colonist 3 badge. These single-use weapons can blow up an entire squadron of enemy ships. Use them wisely!