Civic Council

Don’t worry though, it isn’t all doom and gloom and our least-favourite section of the game is swiftly followed by our favourite. In fact, if you’re having trouble getting through the tribal stage then you can always choose a new planet and skip one stage ahead to the civilisation stage.

And you may want to do that too because whereas the tribal phase of the game gives you only limited choices and actions, it’s the civilisation stage where things start to really kick up a notch and you’ll get an explosion of choices and variation.

True to the name, the civilisation stage is where your viewpoint zooms out to cover the international level, rather than the purely local. You start with one city, one vehicle and a nearby spice node. I’ve briefly mentioned that the earlier stages of the game may have been influenced by cheesy pop-music and the children’s movies of yesteryear, but the civilisation era is probably more akin to Frank Herbert’s Dune series; the spice must flow.

Spice, which vents from the planet in geysers, is the currency of the civilisation era and by harvesting it you’ll be able to do all the fun stuff like build and customise your own cities, nations on continents - even orchestrate your own national anthem!


Spore has often been marvelled at for the way that players can create their own content and most of that acclaim has been squarely levelled at the creature creator, but it’s in the civilisation stage where the real user-generated gloves come off. You go from creating a creature – and it’s worth noting that by this point my Cardigan species from before had evolved to look like winged sharks on legs, with spit valves on their tails – to creating an entire culture and architectural style.

Building, vehicles, defences, costumes; you create and place them all, adding backpacks and necklaces to your citizens, turrets and balconies to your city halls and theatres, and so on. You can reshape almost everything and bling anything you could ever want blung.

Again, the basic pattern for the game is the same. You explore a little bit, find some neighbours and either destroy them or become chums with them. The only real difference is that this time you’re becoming friends with them by trading spice and so on and you’re destroying them with mecha-robots instead of spears. It’s an important difference, so we'll say it again; mecha-robots.


Added into this are a few nice touches, such as the ability to choose whether your culture is founded on military, economic or religious ideals and the chance to explore the world and find technology in abandoned villages. It’s an apparently small thing, but one that harks back to games like Civ (ironically) and it doesn’t matter how completely inconsequential it is to your playing style, the rise of curiosity and wonderment as you find a new, abandoned tech cannot be repressed. It's like searching for the monasteries and temples in Civilisation.

The civilisation era is also the stage of the game where the art style starts to come into its own and as you roll your view back and forth across the globe and look down on your antlike followers/soldiers/employees you’ll wonder how you ever managed to cope with top-down viewpoints and ‘serious’ graphics before Spore. The game may look cute and casual, but at this point it’s becoming just as fun and addictive as something like Populous, even if the complexity is scaled down closer to something like The Sims.

And to be honest, that’s not really all that surprising, is it? Will Wright and his Maxis team cut their teeth on Sim City back in the day, so it stands to reason that this should be the stage they understand the most and their confidence and ability really shines through here.

Naturally, there are a few quirks, and again controlling specific minions for precise tactics can be a bit problematic, but when the game is being played on this larger scale then it isn’t really such an issue as it was in the earlier stages.