: Augh... my head. Where am I?
? ? ?: He's awake!
: Wha?
: Captain! You're finally awake! We were beginning to worry you'd never wake up. Of course I knew you would because you're the captain and I've-
: You're in the hospital Captain McCaptain. You've been here a long time. Over a year in fact.
: But how- That's impossible! Why am I in here?!
: A strange dimensional storm of some sort occurred. It destroyed your ship and put you into a coma. As you know, it is illegal to clone someone who is in a coma in order to prevent complications if they ever wake up. As such, you have been here since then.
: A dimensional storm?
: I'll let Mr. Goblkan explain.
: Greetings Captain, I'm Mr. Goblkan from the Department of Space management. It seems that some sort of massive wave washed over the galaxy, changing nearly all of it into... something similar , yet different. As far as we can tell, very little was left untouched. We are the only race in our area that remains the same as it was before. The others have been replaced by new ones. Our histories with them are the same, and they seem utterly ignorant as to what happened. Along with that, our databases were heavily scrambled by the event. We are still researching as to what happened.
: So the worlds gone all screwy... what else is new?
: Well for one thing the storm completely destroyed your ship. The good news is that we were able to build it's next gen successor just recently.
: What's the bad news?
: It put us 3 Trillion Sporebucks in debt. It is for that reason that we... kinda hired you out for mercenary work.
: What?!
: Don't worry, it's just one job. We managed to contact a very rich group who wish for our aid in a couple things.
:*Sigh* I suppose I better get going then don't I?
: No no! the job doesn't really have a time limit on it. Very strange bunch, these Krangrins. You're free to regain your bearings until you feel your ready.
: If you say so...
:
Hey there! It's me Furtuka, and I'm here to welcome you back to this LP of Spore.:
Now I've learned quite a bit more since then, and aim to make this LP much better than it was before! First of all, I realized that I was doing to much storytelling, and not actually explaining how the gameplay is like. It's a bit to late to fix that for some of the earlier stages, but seeing as how the Space Age is so complicated, I figure I can show you it as we go along. Don't worry, we'll still see the misadventures of the captain and his crew, I'll just be popping up from time to time.
:
First of all, I think I should show you the combat controls-
:
And lookee here, it's a convenient pirate attack! I'll just mosey on down to the planets surface and...
:
Drat. Oh well, I suppose I can just tell you in this case. See that red panel up there in the bottom right hand corner? That's our command/inventory/dashboard thingy. It's currently set to our defensive weapons. As you can see, at the start of the space age our ships are equipped with a laser and some missiles. The missile is good against turrets and ships, while the laser is better at shooting individual creatures and other small targets. Both of these weapons drain energy, which when emptied will prevent our energy using devices from working, and cause our ship to take gradual damage to it's health. You move using a mouse,use left click to use tools, and right click to move there. You press the + and - keys to go up or down the Z axis.:
This is the city customization screen, used for choosing what vehicles and buildings your civ uses, and for building within your city.:
We have 5 types of buildings. The city hall is the center of your city, and is built automatically and cannot be removed. Factories increase your spice production, spice being the main commodity of the Spore universe. Possibly as a reference to Dune. However, factories also increase unhappyness in the city. Which in the city age would cause zealot nations to have an easier time conquering you. Not sure what it does in the space age. To counter this, you have to build entertainment buildings to increase happyness. If you build a factory and a entertainment next to eachother, the unhappyness of the factory will double. Houses increase the effect of adjacent buildings. However they are not able to increase the unhappyness of factories.
:
Here you can customize your empires vehicles. It's not useful for much except for aesthetic purposes.
:
This tab lets you place decorations in your cities.
:
Here you can customize your anthem. It's neat little leitmotif that plays whenever you fly over one of your cities. I personally don't fiddle with it that much.
:
This last tab is where you can customize your citizens outfits.:
When you're on or orbiting an empires planet, you can bring up this screen to do business with them. The advantage of having many colonies is that you can repair your ship and recharge your energy at them for free! Other empires will charge you sporebucks for them.:
Here's the trading screen. You have to buy upgrades and tools if you want to do anything to make your ship better. Your own civ will offer you all the available upgrades and items unlocked, but at standard pricing. Other empires will not have as big of a selection, but in exchange they'll have higher or lower prices for certain upgrades.:
Now then, you may have been wondering what was up with that dimensional storm business earlier. Well you see, I kinda messed with Spore's package files while doing maintenance, causing it to reset the sporepedia. So all the creatures got replaced with random different ones. So here's a recap of who've we've encountered so far.
We are still these guys, The Cutebolds. Nothing's changed about them
This is the Sky Moose Empire. They like us. Formerly the Tide Pool Fish Empire.
These are the Green Toads, replacing the Paildramon Empire. They also like us.
The Wheeler Leader Empire. They use to be the Dying Man Empire. They hate us for religious reasons.
The Misti Empire. They dislike us too, but I forgot why. They use to be the Mr Slugy Empire
The Lioness Empire. They're neutral about us right now. They were once... actually they're new. I stumbled onto them on accident last night.
:
So anyways there's a few possible things we could do right now. We could either...
- Go do the story mission that I designed as part of my attempts to give this some sort of plot. It'll bring us closer to learning a bit more about some of the weird stuff I inserted earlier
- Do some tutorial esque missions for our Empire. this is required at some point to obtain most of the starting tools
- Run around, be sandboxy and interact with our neighbors
- Or lastly, you could post nothing and cause me to let this die again
:
So yeah, it's you guy's decision. We can probably do two of these options per update. Don't forget I'm still excepting crew members and buddies. So have fun, don't hate, and see you next episode![/list]