Civilization Stage



After organizing into a city and creating vehicles, the player leaves the Tribal stage and begins the Civilization stage, the foruth of Spore's Game stages. In the Civilization stage, players focus on interactions, either peaceful or violent, between their civilization and other civilizations on their Homeworld. One of the main objectives is to collect the spice geysers located around the planet, and prevent the enemy from accessing any themselves. Another is conquering all of the other cities religiously, economically, militarily, or diplomatically. The entrance into space marks the beginning of the Space stage, but not necessarily the end of control on the Civilization stage.

Like in Tribal stage other civilizations can be dealt with peacefully or by war. The main resource of the Civilization stage is spice that can be gathered from nodes on land or sea. Controlling as many spice nodes as possible gives an advantage. There is a diplomatic system in the Civilization stage that looks very similar to Sid Meier's Civilization diplomatic system.

Each civilization can build three types of vehicles: cars, planes and ships. They differ by graphic appearance and three attributes: speed, power and stamina. Making one attribute stronger in the Vehicle Editor means that other attributes will be weaker. For example, if you put many guns on a tank, you'll make it more vulnerable and slower, but it can crush other vehicles more quickly. If you add a powerful engine after that, firepower will be weaker, but the vehicle will be faster. This is made for balance considerations. In addition, planes can only be created and bought after four cities are under a civilization's control.



There are different types of buildings in cities:


 * Turrets attack enemy vehicles on sight. Turrets differ with civilization type, but do the same damage. The only variable is how many slots the city can handle.
 * Houses make the population of a city increase, which allows you to make more vehicles.
 * Entertainment Centers make a city's population more happy and loyal, especially when placed beside Houses.
 * Factories help effectively gather Spice from controlled nodes, especially when placed beside Houses, but causes unhappiness in cities, especially when placed beside Entertainment Centers.

In Civilization stage and Tribal stage players can't edit their creatures anymore, but can add different accessories like hats, pauldrons, masks etc.

Check out the list of Civilization stage stubs if you're looking to add something.

Civilization Consequence Abilities
The Civilization stage is the first of the four preliminary stages to alter the nature of the trait cards. Whereas in previous stages, Green and Red represented opposite approaches to game-play with Blue representing a balance of the two, Green Red and Blue all represent unique ways to play the game. As such, the player's timeline in Civilization is reorganized, placing the strategy which they entered the phase from in the center, with the other two on the extremes.

Civilization stage Achievements
Hidden achievements


 * Fear of Flying - Complete the Civilization stage without ever buying an aircraft.


 * Conclusion - Finish the Civilization stage by launching ICBM weapons and destroying all other cities.

Strategies for Hard Difficulty
The Civilization stage on Hard is quite difficult. A good approach is to use a mixed economic/religious or economic/military strategy. Going hard core on any of them also works, though. The reason for this is that in Hard mode the relationship penalties for being a large nation, or having your borders too close are very big. This makes it difficult to improve your relationship enough to start trading, and if you can't trade its impossible to win economically. On the other hand, cities are much more difficult to capture in Hard mode, so if a city is willing to trade with you an economic takeover is the safest method. A decent strategic outline is the following:

Economic Strategy

 * End as an industrious Tribe. At the start of the level do two things. First, buy another vehicle or two and send them out to get the closest spice geysers. The other cities appear so quickly that its not worth it to try for more than 2 or 3. Second, contact and compliment all of the closest cities so that you don't get attacked right away. If your city is on the continent, then make sure to create a new vehicle that is specialized in speed. Use rockets and wheels. If you are a city by the shore, do the same thing for the boats. Oars add to the speed.


 * Next, find the closest friendly religious or military city and do what it takes to get a trade route going. You may need to give some money as a gift. Once their city is available for purchase, buy it and don't change its type. If you buy the city right after it is available for purchase, your first city (as in the first city you conquer) will always cost 4,000 Sporebucks. Otherwise it should cost around 32,000 Sporebucks. The huge sum that you paid will balance out other negative relations such as "you are a threat," "your nation is too big," and "your boundaries are too close." At some point, someone is going to demand that you stop trading and you should turn them down, of course. If there is a choice between Military and Religious, choose either since Military because they have the strongest fighters or Religious because they capture unhappy cities faster which means only a small anti relation bonus.


 * At this point, several things can happen. If the nation you first started trading with has captured another city, then use your good relationship with that nation to start a trade route. Otherwise, there may be other cities near by which are close enough to trade with. In any case you should be trying to buy another city, if possible. Always keep your economic fleet centred on one or two cities and remember that they will cost more than in Easy or Normal Mode. Once you buy a city always keep it as a Military or Religious. Though optional, you can capture a sea city and keep it economic. Then start trading with a nation that is about to capture or has captured another city.


 * Once the Civilization stage enters its middle part its likely that there will be an emerging enemy power, which we will call Green. Because of the penalties mentioned earlier it will be very difficult/impossible to trade with Green. At this point, you should ramp up production of your military/religious vehicles and attempt to take over Green cities by force. Remember that the number of religious/military vehicles you have is determined by the number of Houses in religious/military cities. So, put more Houses in your religious/military cities and more Factories in your economic ones. Your fleet should be divided into two main parts: 1. The smaller one should be a mobile defensive group to help protect whichever town Green is attacking. 2. The larger one should be used for attacking Green's cities. Time is of the essence, so try and take over cities quickly, using your superpowers when appropriate. When you capture a city, change it to religious/military, whichever you've been using.


 * In the last part of the Civilization stage, if your fleet is strong enough, you may be able to finish by conquering Green. However, Green will build up a massive army and will be giving the hurt out in buckets. The easiest way to win is to get to six/seven cities, switch over to pure defence, and save up for the Global Merger superweapon. With any luck, you will save up enough to purchase the planet before Green knocks you back down to fewer than 6 cities.
 * You could also maintain two alliances as well. One of them will get destroyed, of course, so you should trade with the other one until you could afford the Global Merger.

Black Cloud strategy
A friendly tribe will earn the Black Cloud superpower. Black Cloud disables entertainment centres and turrets, which are a major problem to military civilizations. An effective strategy is to capture an unhappy military city and keep it as a military city. Then use the Black Cloud to disable turrets in other cities when capturing them.

Tips & Tricks

 * A useful exploit during Civilization stage is that you can instantly switch the attributes of your vehicles whenever you want. For example, during the start of the game, you can focus your vehicles entirely on speed, and use that to rapidly seize a lot of spice geysers and tribal villages. If you are attacking a defenceless city, you can orient your vehicles entirely toward religious/military power to rapidly take the city - after all, they won't be moving, and they aren't being attacked. In the event that enemy vehicles show up, you can just switch them to a mixture of religious/military power and health, then switch them back once the threat is past. Taking advantage of this can give you a nice head start in the early game, and speed up city takeover. Another way is to make speedy vehicles and once they arrive for a takeover switch to Military/Religious power as the dominant stat and it will take over the city at a faster rate.


 * Finally, before advancing to Space stage, make sure all your cities have an optimal building layout and all their Turrets. This way, you don't have to spend money later on building them, and since you start with 100k Sporebucks in the Space stage no matter what, well, it speaks for itself. Adding Extras will also help, as after you have advanced, you can sell them for 25 Sporebucks each. This may not seem like much, but since each city can hold many of them, possibly 20-50, it really adds up.


 * Take your time when mapping your city. It may take a while, but it really is worth it in the long run. Remember that Factories are more productive when linked to Houses and the City Hall, but they lower happiness and cancel Entertainment buildings when linked. Entertainment buildings are more effective when linked to City Hall and Houses.


 * Keep in mind that if you are a military city, you will have to take over the planet by attacking the other cities. This will damage them and make it easier for your enemies to conquest your Homeworld in Space stage, unless you rebuild them.


 * Owning one Spice geyser at the beginning of the civilization stage game is about as good as owning multiple towards the end. Spice geysers start out with giving 1000/min. But, as the game goes on the efficiency will drop. This may be a reference to earth depleting its natural resources.


 * If you have an economic city on your continent, you might want to make it a protectorate of your own nation you can trade with it for extra money. To be sure it isn't captured, send at least 5 military vehicles (religious also works) to protect it from invaders (economic cities have no defence except turrets).


 * There are almost always four cities on your continent. You may notice that in the hard difficulty, one of them has a blue face.  You start out by attacking a nation on your continent that has a yellow face, usually a military city.


 * On the normal difficulty, there are two nations with blue faces, and you may notice the one with the yellow face usually has the largest military. To prevent it from being a threat in the future and capturing another city, try to capture that city first.

Citizens
The citizens are an obvious reference to the Sims, such as the activities and interactions they play out.

Along with keeping them happy, the citizens, if observed long enough do many things such as weddings, protests, military drills, mass praying, and more. They will also have minor activities such as looking through telescopes, holding an exercise group, if they are citizens of a military city they will do push-ups or boxing (this may happen in other city types), etc. There are many speech bubbles, one even with a picture of Will Wrights face, and another with a planet, an early idea of interstellar travel, so these include Space stage as well. The citizens will also act accordingly to what the type of city they are residing in. If the city is Military, citizens are fighting and training, and fire guns when they aren't doing anything. If the city is Religious, they pray and sing, and they also seem to do strange rituals when other citizens die. If the city is Economic, they will carry large money bags and play roulette and other lottery games. When the city is attacked, the citizens will often fire guns at the attacking vehicles and/or panic and start screaming.

When new buildings are placed, such as a factory, often the citizens will react with protests against the placement of factories or cheers when an entertainment system is placed.

Trivia

 * Civilization Stage can be compared to the near future on Earth.
 * When you are converting a city, your religious vehicles seem to lose health. The reason is that (if you look closely at citizens looking at your vehicles) the citizens are throwing burning rocks and trash at your vehicles.
 * Cities in Civilization Stage could be based off medieval castles, due to the fact that the cities themselves are surrounded by walls.