Interstellar Drive 3 or higher Reaching the centre of the Spore galaxy is impossible without Interstellar Drive 3. And even so, that's a minimum - you need lots of health and energy packs too. Interstellar Drive 5 is vastly better. To get it you need either a Frequent Flyer 5 badge (1500 flights) or a Gopher 4 badge (40 delivery missions).
Extra equipment If you plan to make an alliance with the Grox, there's some special stuff you should pack:
1. Super Happy Ray 2. Planet Buster 3. 500,000 Sporebucks 4. Laser or Pulse 5. embassy
Peace If you're at war when you set off for the Galactic core, chances are enemies will invade your system while you're out of the office. You may come back to find smoking ruins and a bunch of four-faced tree-lickers calling your planets home. So make sure you're at peace. This won't stop pirates attacking while you're away - and you may see some disastrous-sounding messages - but nothing too bad will happen. Pirates won't conquer your system and do anything much bar stealing a bit of spice, and even that is probably tarragon. And who's got thyme for tarragon? Certainly not us.
WHO YOU'RE GOING TO FACE...
The Grox The Grox control a massive empire that unhelpfully lies between you and the centre of the galaxy. There are only three ways to deal with it: either declare war, make an alliance with them, or just try to avoid them.
Fighting the Grox You don't have to destroy them completely but even smashing a path through their strongholds takes considerable time. You should aim to have large stockpiles of energy and health Mega Packs plus all military upgrades, or at the very least these:
1. Extreme Energy Storage 2. Extreme Health3 3. Mega Auto Blaster 4. Mega Bomb 5. Mega Pulse 6. Shield
Without these you're toast. There are two ways of taking out Grox planets - bomb their colonies from low orbit with the Mega Pulse, or terraform the whole globe (making them uninhabitable for the Grox).
Is it a good idea? In a word, no. The Grox don't take kindly to it whichever method you use to destroy them, and they may even attack your homeworld - leading to a tiresome journey back to save it. And even if they don't, smashing your way through like this takes a very, very long time. Try something else.
Befriending the Grox Do this and they'll simply leave you alone to journey to the core, but there's no such thing as a free launch - you must work hard to win them over. So make sure to pack the right stuff to get yourself in their good books. They really don't like you at first and you must tread very carefully.
It's vital you don't do anything to annoy them, so get rid of any allies with you and deactivate your Auto Blaster to avoid accidents. If you reach the hatred stage, all is lost - you'll never gain them as allies. Burn several Extreme Energy Storage packs with the Super Happy Ray to get the 30-point max, place Embassies for 10 points and blow up neutral planets for 50 (at seven points a pop). They like that. They also like money - give them the 500,000 Sporebucks for 10 points, but don't bother donating any more as it won't help. Also, make sure to ignore the way the jerks continue to attack you even as you're being nice (they won't stop until you're allies). Don't attack them.
Once you've warmed them up from dislike to neutral, you can request missions. Save first, though. The missions tend to be either collecting artefacts, destroying other civilisations or abducting things. Sometimes this involves declaring war on other civilisations, which can cause ongoing problems for you. Other times they want you to collect artefacts from one of their own planets, which causes problems whether you do (they hate you for stealing) or don't (they dislike you for failing) do it. So just quit and reload - it's not worth the hassle. You can get 55 points for a maximum of 15 missions.
Is it a good idea? While the result is the freedom to travel towards the core unmolested, it's not actually a great option at all. Why? Because everyone else hates the Grox, and when you ally with them they declare war on you. It's an instant minus 200 points with every other civilisation in the galaxy, even if you later decide to declare war on the dirty Grox.
Dodging the Grox This is quite tricky, and only gets harder as you approach the core itself. Fortunately there's the occasional system that's uninhabited by Grox, so head through these whenever you can and think hard about building a base - if you're blown up later on you'll have a new ship built there. It's a good idea to click on a further system even as you're travelling to another; that way you'll skip straight past the one you clicked on first without going through it, avoiding the enemies there.
It also pays to take plenty of allies... as bullet sponges, basically. Towards the end you take a lot of damage, continuously, which only makes navigating the increasingly awkward space corridors harder. And there's the small issue that you've got to go through the whole thing once again to get out...
Is it a good idea? Not really.
SECRET ACHIEVEMENTS
0H THE HUMANITY How to get it: Destroy Earth
Can't Win For Losing How to get it: Die once in each stage
Cerberus How to get it: Create a creature with three heads
Conclusions How to get it: Complete Civilization stage by nuking everyone else
Fear of Flying How to get it: Complete Civilization stage without air vehicles
General Custer How to get it: Get 30 posse members killed in one stupid action
Medic How to get it: Fully heal a tribe member five times in one game
Bad Baby! How to get it: Create a creature that gets banned
Pathological Cheater How to get it: Use a cheat over 50 times
Slugger How to get it: Finish Creature stage without legs
Well, EA put a lot of their games up on steam, and the best part is, they left SecuROM out of most of them.
The downside, it's Steam. No physical copy of your game, you need to download the whole thing, and Steam's pricing, which may make it more expensive than the normal retail version depending on where you're from. But atleast you're not poisoning your PC with SecuROM.
Thanks to these efforts on Steam I now own Mass Effect, a game I refused to buy previously because of it's SecuROM issues.
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath, UK BA1 2BW England and Wales company registration number 2008885
anybody know if mac version has got the ott drm that pc version has?
