nervouspete wrote:
In breaking news, Spore is beginning to annoy NervyP! Whilst Space stage starts out fun, having one's homeplanet attacked by pirates necessiating dropping whatever it was you're doing and rushing back there within the minute or losing lots of cash gets a bit annoying. The reason why? Pirates attack about every four to five minutes, I shit you not. And if you start a war with someone by, for example, passing through their star system and looking at them wrong, then expect to double that attack rate.
I have pirates, other nations and the Grox attacking every few minutes at the moment. I can't do any exploring because I need to be around to fight them all off. You should be able to have several ships dotted around the galaxy at your immediate control should you need to break off your adventures to help out back home yet again.
The defenses of your planets are abysmal; I still find the Grox are able to destroy my cities pretty quickly if I don't react immediately, so I have to re-build them every 20 minutes. And you can't use outer systems as protection because your foes can simply hop to the most fruitful of your colonies to start attacking.
It's also nice how your enemies can attack you as you pass by, but you have to waste time going planet-side to retaliate. So by the time you can fight back, your fleet of incompetent AI ships has been destroyed and you're left alone to protect yourself alone.
It's a fun game, but there are a fair few bloody stupid problems I just can't ignore. The whole thing is nowhere near as fluid as it should be; it just feels like five separate half-assed games with vague links connecting them, filled to the brim with repetition but without enough scope to keep it interesting. Aside from the cell level, I've been thoroughly bored of each stage long before I've been able to progress to the next.
The evolution side is just crap. It's too immediate and you have far too much control. You shouldn't be able to make such drastic, fundamental changes so easily. And having to choose a herbivorous or carnivorous route at the beginning just by pressing a button was a bit rubbish.