Spore 2: As it Should Be

*Origin Stage: You come upon a swirling gas cloud at some unknown point in the galaxy at some unknown time. Using your mouse you position a gravity well at the center of cloud and use your scroll wheel to increase or decrease the density of the well, and pulling the gasses in forming your star. You settle on an M Class Star, 15% larger than Sol.

Once you've created your star the game highlights two bands orbiting the newly formed star and indicates them to be the Goldilocks zones, one for a terrestrial planet, and another for a potential moon of a Gas Giant. You choose the terrestrial body and position its gravity well at 1 AU, using the scroll wheel to make it 95% the size of Earth, with equal mass. The debris begins to form a molten body where you positioned the well, and the game indicates that it is time to form the planet's satellites. You position three gravity wells, forming three small moons from the debris orbiting your world, but the game indicates that there is still left over debris, if left unused it will from a ring system. You decide to leave it be, and click COMPLETE.

A flash of light goes across the screen and you are still focused on your newly formed planet; the sun dances across the sky and time speeds up revealing a world bombarded by comets, eventually forming into a rocky world with a large ocean, the rings are finally complete.

*Cell Stage: A new comet enters your field of view and careens into the planet's ocean. the game zooms in to reveal a single circular cell with one eye drifting in the water. You take control of the new organism and with little control drift from one organic particle to the next, gaining DNA Points. Eventually you've absorbed enough to where the cell begins to shake and begins to split; you go into the creature editor. You're parts are nonexistent, you only have control over the shape of the creature, but you use it to form a cell with eleven almost-arms, died a clear red.

You re-enter the game still only gathering up simple food pellets and eventually are chased by another cell that appears to be absorbing other organisms. You flee this new creature gathering up DNA points as you do and eventually escape after something else eats it; your creature splits again, bringing you into the editor. You now see that you have the option of making your cell carnivorous, and you chose to do so; your cell can now absorb others like your recent adversary. You re-enter the game.

You now drift about absorbing other creatures, while avoiding others like yours. Eventually your cell becomes large enough to encounter plankton, and you edit your creature to take advantage of the new food source giving it a simple pincer like mouth you absorbed from the leavings of a fallen creature.

*Sea Stage: Time goes on and you eventually develop a creature with simple sensory systems and are aloud to form a simple spine or exoskeleton. You choose a spine and move your parts around to get the most out of your new creature. You swim around, absorbing more features, and forming progressively more complicated defense and offensive features. You avoid larger fish, crustaceans, and any combination in between, to eventually form from your fins, simple limbs that you can use to reach the shallow waters where untapped food dwells. Eventually you evolve lungs and waddle your way onto land, keeping near the waters edge and feeding on simpler organisms.

*Creature Stage: Your creature evolves to include more complex limbs and can now travel freely across the land. You encounter others like your creature and begin to work with them, eventually the game recognizes your cooperation and gives you the status as a pack hunter.

The game continues to progress, and you continue the process of hunting others, learning of their traits and making appropriate changes into your creature's anatomy. You decide that being purely carnivorous isn't the best option after you've hunted most of the creatures in the valley you occupy to extinction and your own creatures begin eating each other. You adapt your creature to eat plants as well.

*Sentience Stage: With the valley largely clear you evolve your creature to sentience and your pack becomes a wandering group of hunter gatherers. You encounter various creatures and other semi-intelligent organisms, all of which try to kill you; so you kill them back. You're choices of evolution are now much more limited, you can continue to increase muscle mass, eyesight, and posture, but as the game progresses time is slowing down. Eventually you have cleared the area of other intelligent lifeforms and have established yourself as the dominant species of the planet.

*Tribal Stage: Now the dominant species your intelligence increase again and you form a simple hut village by the sea. You have little to cloth yourself at first but a loin cloth, but as you discover and gather more resources you are able to form more complicated forms of dress. You domesticate other creatures you contact, some for hunting and labor, others for food.

The game play fundamentally shifts during this point to a kind of exponential crafting game. First your individual tribal character has to do everything themselves, making individual tools for fishing, hunting, gathering, etc. But as you add to the population you're given more abilities to do more stuff. So once you have 5 members of your tribe you can unlock farming and permanent huts. 10 members of the tribe lets you unlock herding, etc. As your population grows you can more rapidly clear forests, grow food and upgrade huts from  wood and reed structures with stone and lumber, and develop weapons to hunt and combat neighboring tribes. Once you've cleared the area of all rival tribes either by incorporating them into your own or by war, you establish your creature as the dominant people of your area.

*Civilization Stage: Now with a large enough area at your control you advance into a civilization. The same principle of the previous game applies, the larger and more complex your society gets the more you can do without having to select individual units. You gain access to more complicated resources by building mines and processing buildings, which in turn let you do build more. At first this includes little more than swords, armor, and stone buildings, but eventually you advance to develop land and sea vehicles. You plant larger buildings in your growing villages, and create the flag of your civilization. You engage in war with neighboring civilizations and your goals grow from consolidating your territory around a small region to conquering the continent you're on.

You continue to upgrade your vehicles and buildings, gaining new parts at a rate that depends on how much of your resources you invest into research, how large your population has become, and how many resources you can exploit. Eventually you achieve space flight and build a launch tower outside one of your cities. The building launches every few minutes and with it you gain the ability to see more of your world at once in real time without having to send a boat or a plane to the area in question. With space flight comes missiles and other weapons of war; which you use to defeat your rivals or build alliances with neighbors.

Once you discover manned spaceflight you can leave your planet and explore the moons you created in the Origin Stage. It costs a lot of resources at first, but you position a mass driver and mine on the surface of the largest body, giving you access to more resources than any other civilization. As you continue to build, many of your cities have formed together into great megalopolises (50 skyscrapers to the eye of you, the player) and mega-structures become available.

With huge resources, and only a few powers still resisting your dominance you position more mining stations on the other moons, and eventually build new versions of the mass driver to destroy your enemies. Leaving your civilization as the dominant one on your planet.

*Solar System Stage: With no more enemies on your world you are now free to invest all your spare capital to space travel, which you use to expand your control over the moons of your planet, and explore a solar system you can now see in further detail. The game zooms out to reveal your planetary system with many space ships going to and fro, you select your editor and build a ship with a range great enough to travel 5 AU back and forth. You click in the void of space, discovering new territory, and eventually find a neighboring planet. Before your ship runs out of fuel you zoom in and build a dome to start a colony.

You build more, ships, and better versions of your first and continue to explore the system while expanding your colonies; eventually discovery geoengineering techniques that will over time make your worlds liveable. You zoom out to reveal the whole solar system, with many cities and colonies scattered about it giving you more resources than ever before.

*Interstellar Stage: You've reached the final stage of the game, and can now spread from star to star, expanding your empire and meeting new species. You can at any time zoom down to any planet or any specific city and change whatever you like, and as you grow and develop your civilization entire planets and moons become resources. You can build megastructures starting small with O'Neil colonies you can place around a planet for defense and resources, or planet-sized death stars to defend or attack star systems, all the way to ring worlds that use the entire resources of your star system and several surrounding systems to be built. You interact with alien worlds with a fleet of spacecraft that you can expand at your leisure, but don't have to manually fly. Rather than defending a planet at a time, you can build up a planet or entire solar system's defenses while you fly around and directly engage when necessary, either by calling in a portion of your space fleet to destroy a planet or setting up a terraforming project. At this phase you have true freedom to build a galaxy spanning civilization.