Better Spore

[Ball Lightning]

Welcome to the Better Spore University of Spore Creations forum page. This is a spore mod which aims to make spore a better game for a more enjoyable experience. Currently this mod is in beta and will need testing in many areas including bug testing and game balance issues. Please give it a try and give me some feedback. Once again thanks to Void for the creation of SporeMaster.

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Current Version: 1.48 Released 25th January

Features


- The intro now skips the opening movie.
- Now includes a in game help, just go to Spore guide to find out everything about BetterSpore.



Creature Stage:
- Longer Creature Stage, requires more DNA for each brain level
- Even longer creature stage then before. (a normal creature stage version is uncluded)
- No more annoying sea monsters!



Tribal Stage:
- Increases health points for the tribal hut to 800, 1500, and 2500
- starting food is set to 100 instead of 15
- Have more tribal members, more than ever before! (Reduced from 1.3 to decrease chance of crashing)



Space Stage:
- You can now buy the staff of life if you have nearly all the badges.
- It now takes longer to get the high end badges.
- Now find items like healing tools as random items on planets.
- Base of 8 spice stored per colony.
- More variation in price of items between empires.

- Reduce the amount spice is worth on hard difficulty.
- Tools cost more on hard and less on easy difficulty.
- Money dropped from ships is worth more.
- Enemy ships now have more health.
- Ally ships now have more health.

- Costs more to request allies to attack someone.
- Store 999 of everything, except spice!
- Cost more to repair and recharge.
- Your home world produces more spice.
- Costs more to buy up solar systems.

- Now have up to 5 trade routes.
- Easier to fly in the galactic centre.
- There are less large empires.
- Have up to 10 planets in a solar system.
- More chance of a barren planet then T1-3 compared to the original game.

- Abduct from higher up, so you don't have to keep going lower!
- More buildings and Turrets on T1 and T2 planets.
- Turrets are better defenders.
- Less attacks, less disasters.
- Now up to 3 artifacts per planet.

- Items cost more to buy.
- All items which you place (eg colonies, spice storage, uber turret etc) now do not need to be bought multiply times, but instead cost sporebucks everytime you use it.
- Interstellar Drives have been increased slightly.
- A collection of rare items (Having all 10 of a set) have had their prices increase by over 500%.
- More variation in price of items between empires.

- Items will not always appear when at a shop, depending on each civilization.
- Now as you gain badges you get more cargo storage slots.
- Permanent Terraform tools no longer cost money each use.
- Grow Reachable mod is now included in this mod.



New Items in space stage:
- Ultra Cargo Hold
- Ultra Energy Storage
- Ultra Health Upgrade
- Interstellar Drive 6
- Ultra Laser

- Ultra Proton Missile
- Ultra Bomb
- Ultra Pulse
- Staff of the Apocalypse
- Wand of Life

- Tactical Nuke.


New Artifacts in space stage:

- Ring of the Valaykna
- Ring of the Zorg
- Ring of Atane
- Ring of Klingon
- Ring of the Quarim

- Ring of the Zen Empire
- Ring of Achmenmon
- Ring of Turcus
- Ring of Stellatus
- Ring of the Grox



Resource links:
Spore Mod Index
How to mod Spore
How to Install Mods
Sporemaster
How to create an item
Spore Modding Wikia
A large list of spore properties



Changes in V1.48:


Fixes:
- Fixed spice storage.
- Fixed problem where it still cost money to travel from planet to planet.
- Fixed Tribal stage


Additions/Removals:
- Improved Complexity removed.
- Permanent Terraform tools no longer cost money each use.
- Now as you gain badges you get more cargo storage slots.
- Grow Reachable mod is now included in this mod.
- Ultra Auto Blaster removed due to crashes.



Balance Changes:
- Even longer creature stage.


New Items:
- 10 new artifacts:
- Ring of the Valaykna
- Ring of the Zorg
- Ring of Atane
- Ring of Klingon
- Ring of the Quarim
- Ring of the Zen Empire
- Ring of Achmenmon
- Ring of Turcus
- Ring of Stellatus
- Ring of the Grox

- Tactical Nuke.

 

[Chiyochan]

these changes seem rather superficial, spore needs much more than this to even become playable, Civilization and cell are the only really playable stages,

top priority should be the following
better less twinked AI, all the AI does is wander around and kill you in packs, theres no variation here, they dont need to eat, they always target you, they dont take into consideration their health or hunger level, I could go on for days here though, theres so many problems with the main part of the game its a joke,

Space stage,
basicaly if you thought the creature stage was unplayable wait till you get to the space age. Space age, the open sand box end of the game is terrible, absolutely horrendous. Rather than an open sandbox game, imediately your set in this sort of story mode, and in order to get better parts and advance, you cant skip it, theres no sense of pacing, you dont spend the time wandering around your solar system like Will right claimed, infact you leave it very shortly. ultimately instead of 'researching' and exploring you have to go around and complete each little mission to get the next part rather than enjoying the late game and researching space your jumping through hoops

once you hit the space age, pirates and other people attack you constantly, and aliens are just outside your front door, almost every planet is inhabitable and full of jerks who want to shove rockets up your posterior, theres no wandering around and enjoying the sights because every 2 minutes you'll be called away to either fight pirates or someone who wants to kill you,

not that there will be much reason to stay in the space age pretty much all you can do to a planet is colonize it and change its temperature and the water, all of the terrain deforming tools are useless except to attack because the second you leave that planet almost every painstaking detail or interesting mechanic you've added is undone,

 

[Ball Lightning]

They definitely are superficial. However we don't have an xml to work with and no help from EA/Maxis so there is a big limit on what we can do.

 

[Rub'Rum]

Space stage,
basicaly if you thought the creature stage was unplayable wait till you get to the space age. Space age, the open sand box end of the game is terrible, absolutely horrendous. Rather than an open sandbox game, imediately your set in this sort of story mode, and in order to get better parts and advance, you cant skip it, theres no sense of pacing, you dont spend the time wandering around your solar system like Will right claimed, infact you leave it very shortly. ultimately instead of 'researching' and exploring you have to go around and complete each little mission to get the next part rather than enjoying the late game and researching space your jumping through hoops

once you hit the space age, pirates and other people attack you constantly, and aliens are just outside your front door, almost every planet is inhabitable and full of jerks who want to shove rockets up your posterior, theres no wandering around and enjoying the sights because every 2 minutes you'll be called away to either fight pirates or someone who wants to kill you,

not that there will be much reason to stay in the space age pretty much all you can do to a planet is colonize it and change its temperature and the water, all of the terrain deforming tools are useless except to attack because the second you leave that planet almost every painstaking detail or interesting mechanic you've added is undone,

Yeah, you're so right. There is no leisurely and pleasurable exploration of space. No fun exploring specific planets, and even if you could, the level of detail on each planet is rather low.

Playing Spore space age, and Noctis IV recently, got me thinking that my ideal PC game would be a random massively multiplayer procedurally generated giant universe exploration game with awesome details a la Crysis for each planet. And there would be no limit to what you could do on planets, build houses to show off to your friends in awesome spots on the planets, raze forests for the fun of it, hunt game, explore other planets. Find random rare artifacts... Huuuge planets. Terraforming... Yay! I want it now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis (link to actual Noctis at bottom of article, for those who don't know Noctis, it's kind of fun, but the graphics are just too crude for me at this point, there's nothing much to see and do).

 

[Lord_Iggy]

One thing that annoys me is how flying low over a hostile planet causes damage to your ship...

 

[GoodGame]

One thing that annoys me is how flying low over a hostile planet causes damage to your ship...

On the barren planets? That's there to test your skill while grabbing the relics.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

It prevents you from ever getting to enjoy the visual extremes of the planets of the game, and it doesn't give you any test of skill at all! You just have to fly at high altitude and spend more time picking it up from low orbit. There's no reason for it whatsoever!

 

[Civanator]

Unfortunately, EA is the bane of anything that should have modification in the game, so until/if we ever get an SDK, the only changes we will be able to make is with some of the XML; but with that said we can still do some pretty neat things. Check out the forums at sporemods.org.

 

[Rub'Rum]

Now that I think of it, with the SDK (talking like I know what I'm talking about), I'm pretty sure you could turn the Space Stage in a pretty cool game on its own. Given a lot of time.

 

[Ball Lightning]

Unfortunately, EA is the bane of anything that should have modification in the game, so until/if we ever get an SDK, the only changes we will be able to make is with some of the XML; but with that said we can still do some pretty neat things. Check out the forums at sporemods.org.

Great site that one, i'm one of the moderators over there


New version of BetterSpore coming today, nothing big, a few new (not ultra) items and a lot of bug fixes.

 

[Ball Lightning]

BetterSpore v1.45 Released.

 

[Ball Lightning]

I am now moving into a phase with the Better Spore mod where it changes from better gameplay to other things. If you want to suggest gameplay stuff go to this thread. Right now i am looking for new ideas for artifacts.

What i really want is a set of 10 items based around a topic and for each to have its own meaningful descriptions and title.

Also another project i would like to work on is the history of the grox captured in artifacts.

So, start pouring those ideas in.

ALSO: anyone who is good with creating images, if you want to help with creating the icons for the artifacts that would be fantastic!

 

[Ball Lightning]

BetterSpore v1.48 released

 

[Abaddon]

Is anyone concentrating on the other Spore stages?

 

[Ball Lightning]

There isn't as much to mod, however now our team gone from me to about 5-6 people we are going to look into it more.

 

[Abaddon]

Well good luck. An thankyou :0

 

[Chiyochan]

couldnt you guys always reverse engineer the game?

 

[Ball Lightning]

Most of it is hardcoded, its very hard to do anything when you don't have open source like civ does.