The first thing you want to do is get yourself the shield upgrade, and also update to mega lazor. If you have allied with any empires, fly there and open up diplomacy and ask for one of their ships which they will agree to and you now have an allied ship flying with you to help, you can have up to 4 allied ships with you. If you have allies you may also want to buy a couple heal packs for allied ships so you don't lose them if they get damaged on a planet, hover your mouse over them to get status on their health.

Now it's time for war.

In this example I'm going to use the Tiramizu empire that kept fucking up my colonies near their empire.

First turn on the Empires icon and also friends and allies icon, that way you can see the red circles around the empire you want to beat down.

Now quickly fly to the enemy star system that's closest to your nearest star system, just keep zooming in until you are on their planet.

Hit your shield icon under weapons, as long as shield is on (Sphere around your ship) they can't touch you. Now click one of their colonies on your map and just fly in and hover over their city hall. Since they can't touch you select your best weapon and hammer their city hall. Look at the little power bar that pops up, this tells you how close they are to surrender. When the bar reaches zero a white flag will pop up telling you they surrender, at this point STOP firing and fly to the next colony, rinse and repeat.

If you run out of energy or your shield runs out bail the fuck out, go to your nearest friendly system, go to trade and buy energy and repairs, then zoom down to their planet and wait for your shield to recharge.

Once shield is recharged, fly back to the enemy planet and keep taking out the rest of the colonies. As soon as all colonies have surrendered an option at the top of the screen will say "capture system" hit the button and voila, you have taken over that system, it now belongs to your empire.

We are still not done though. Fly back to a friendly and heal up.

Look at the red enemy zone again, fly to the next system they have and rinse and repeat. If you look at the Empire trail, you will notice one of their systems is brighter in color, that's their home system and you want to leave that for last. As you keep taking out their minor star systems their empire strength goes down, that's what you want, because if it's at full strength, taking over their home system is going to take ages.

All done? Now lets take over their home system. This is not going to be as easy, as home systems have many more colonies to take down and have surrender, but it's worth it trust me.

The strategy for taking over the home system is the same, shield on, hammer a colony into surrendering, then the next, and so on until you can capture the home system.

Here's the cool thing, when you take over the home system you have ton's of spice producing colonies that you only have to heal by replacing any buildings you destroyed, once that's done, you have not only taken down this pesky empire that kept messing you up, but you also have all their minor star systems PLUS the home system, all producing spice for YOU.

When you have taken over a system or two you will be rolling in sporebucks, I'm at something like 60 millions so I don't care about money anymore. Once you have that kind of cash, just boy a Planet Buster and fly straight for the enemy empire home system and blow it away. Using a planet buster for the first time WILL make your jaw drop, it's seriously Star Wars blow up the death star awesome

If like me, you downloaded Spore using EA downloader you won't have much of a manual, so terraforming is a tough nut to crack.

Terraforming made easy in Spore

There's a lot a parameters that needs to be just right in order to raise a planets T score, for that you need some tools, plants and creatures.

You need to buy an atmospere generator, and if you can afford it and have the badges to unlock them, also get some tools that can raise and lower temperature to.

Now fly to any planet that already has another civilization and lets go nature shopping. In order to stabilize a T score level you need:

3 Large plants each for a different T score level.
3 Medium plants each for a different T score level.
3 Small plants each for a different T score level.
6 Herbivores each for a different T score level.
3 Carnivorea each for a different T score level.

To make it easy to find the different plants and creatures look at the area where you also have the T score rings, see all those little dots next to the plant and creature icons? That's called the "food web" and it's VERY usefull if you know how to use it.

You got one row for each T score, if the T score is 1 and stabilized the first row of little dots should be all solid dots. Now, since we are looking for these creatures make sure you'r radar is turned on and click the dot in the "large plant" row. Now fly around a bit and your radar will start beeping and the beam will point in the direction of the "large plant", once you found it, select your abduction beam and beam that sucker up. Repeat this for the medium and small plant and then use the radar to find the remaining 2 herbivores and one carnivore. Note that you need creatures from all 3 stages of T scores. Learning how to use the food web will make it a LOT easier for you to locate the fauna to fill out a T score.

Phew, got all that?

Now lets go to a planet, pick one with a T score of a big fat zero and make sure it's worth all the work so look for anything but red spice, look at the little icon next to the hover tips over a planet that's not claimed yet. If you are willing to fly around a bit try to find purple or pink, those will sell for mad sporebucks.

Look at your controls where you have your map of the planet, see that little globe icon? Click on that.

Now you see 3 rings, these match the current T score of a planet, right now they are all greyed out, lets do something about that.

Look in your cargo hold and find the atmospere generator, drop one down and wait it out a bit, doesn't take long.

After that is done doing its thing, we need to stabilize the T score, if you just leave it like it is now it will drop down and you lost all your work.

HUGE TIMESAVING TIP

When you drop down the plants and creatures as explained below, once you drop something down, IMMIDIATELY switch to your abduction bean and beam whatever you just placed up again. As soon as something is placed the planet will be populated with it, so you can just suck whatever you placed right back up again and you will never have to go find plants and creatures again to terraform.

First we need to drop down one large plant, one medium plant and one small plant, you should get a message that you raised the T score, but it's still not stable.

To make it easy and fast to drop the correct fauna down we can use the food web again. Make sure your cargo hold is selected (Where all your creatures are stored and also where the abduction bean icon is) See the row of dots for the current T score? They are all hollow, not solid. First click the large plant dot. See how a couple icons for large plants are now blinking in your cargo hold? The food web tools are showing you exactly what you need to drop down. If one of the plant icons have a green checkmark it means that is already on the planet so click ones without a checkmark and drop that down. Click the medium plant, icons will blink again etc..

Now drop down 2 DIFFERENT herbivores FIRST, and THEN drop down one carnivore.

Voila, now you should get a message that the T score of 1 has been stabilized and you can now place down a colony, you need a colony incredy pack for that so if you don't have one, go buy one.

Now all that's left is to raise this planets T score 2 more levels and you got a money maker.

T score 2 and 3 is not going to be so simple to get though, an atmosphere generator will not cut it.

Look at the T score rings, see that little dot somewhere? You need to use atmosphere altering tools to nudge it into the next T score ring.

If you look you have temperature gauges and atmosphere gauges (The little cloud icons). Lets say the dot is to the hot side outside the next ring, that means we need to make the climate colder. For that you could use an ice storm for example. If it's the other way around you would use something like a meteor shower. All tools are pretty logically named so just think a bit and you should be able to figure out that to lower the temp you would need a tool that lowers the atmosphere or the other way around.

After you raised the T score you need to place the 3 different plants, 2 herbivores and one carnivore again, these have to be different than ones you allready placed so lets go find some new ones.

When you have raised the T score to 3 you can place 3 colonies (Use colony encredy packs)

It's not enough to just drop down colonies, remember the Civilization stage and how you needed to click the city hall icon and place buildings? You need to do that for all 3 colonies or they won't produce any spice so remember to do that and to optimize the spice production refer to the optimal city layout for max spice-production page.

TIPS

As soon as you get the badges making these tools available GET THEM:

Uber Turret

Put that baby on your money maker spice planets. It RAPES pirates and alien attackers. It does insane damage and has 50.000 health points but nobody ever hurts it because they are dead before they know it.

Extra spice storage

This will raise the amount of spice a planet can hold until you come by to pick it up to 30 packs of spice.

Going it alone and trying to kill other creatures when playing as a carnivore is hard and time consuming. Many times you are at a disadvantage because all other creatures in walking distance has many more health points than you, so here's an easy way to kill other creatures in Spore.

First, mate and go into the creature editor. You want to get spit ability as you can now attack and piss of other powerfull creatures from a distance. Now go to the first pack of creatures that's near you, target one and spit at it. This will piss it off and it will come running at you. Slowly move backwards and stay out of its reach until you make it home to your nest. As soon as you get home standing in your nest attack it. not only will you constantly heal while in your nest, but your pack members will attack with you and easily kill much more powerfull creatures.

Rinse and repeat until you have killed off that pack of creatures. This gets you mad DNA points you can spend to get even more powerfull fast so you have an easy way to kill other creatures in Spore.

Any information about Spore Civilization Stage Strategies and guides should be put in here.

Any information about Spore Creature Stage Strategies and guides should be put in here.

Any information about Spore Cell Stage Strategies and guides should be put in here.

Any information about Spore Space Stage Strategies and guides should be put in here.

First let's setup a key that allows you to suicide.

Open UTInput.ini in your my documents\games\unreal tournament 3\config folder

Find a key that you don't use, I used F6 because I can allways just type "stat net" if I need to see my network settings ingame.

Bindings=(Name="F6",Command="suicide")

So how the hell can suiciding help you?

Here's a few scenarios:

You are on defense, you just killed the enemy offense trying to grab your flag, your low on ammo and low on health, and you know enemy offense will be back in a few seconds. Instead of trying to get health and ammo, of which there is none available in a worst case scenario, suicide. You are now back with 100 health and you can just grab a gun from a gun spawn. if you wait chances are you will be jumped by enemy offense with none or low ammo and health, they will escape and you have to chase them with no guns, or a low power gun, not good.

Enemy flag carrier grabbed your flag, you chased him all the way to enemy base and killed him. Now you need to get home, so you translocate as fast as you can home, but enemy was in your base and grabbed your flag before you got there. Instead of translocating home, just hit suicide key the second you return the flag and your instantly back home ready to guard your flag.

You'r on offense, your are on route to back up your flag carrier and you get cornered by enemy, you spend time trying to escape and kill them off, all the while your flag carrier gets killed because you weren't there to back him up. Don't fight, hit suicide, now you'r back and not cornered anymore.

You'r on offense, either as flag runner or backup and you get nailed by someone down to 25 health, now you have to spend time getting health back up to 100, all the while the enemy is hammering your denfense and have time to run your flag home. Don't spend time getting health if you get down to 25, suicide and you'r back with 100 health ready to hammer the enemy defence.

Remember, in ctf and other team games (Except TDM of course) kills does NOT matter, personal score does NOT matter. Every second you do anything else than a team objective, of somewhere playing deathmatch or whatever, you are HURTING your team and helping the enemy by letting them have time to get stacked on health and ammo.

You might have noticed some players are almost impossible to kill, even when you land 3 rockets in thier face they still survive and kill you.

That's because they have taken powerups such as shieldbelt, armor pads, armor west and armor helmet and loaded up thier health by picking up health vials.

The secret to always getting the powerups is to time them. It's quite easy to do, all you got to know is how many seconds in between each spawn.

Powerup Times for UT3:

Shieldbelt 55 seconds.
Keg of health 55 seconds.
Damage Amplifier 80 seconds.
Everything else, thigh pads, west, helmet, health, health vials + weapons and ammo, 27 seconds.

A good technique for standard FFA deathmatch, is to time the 55 spawning items and run a route between the rest. Don't time all the 27 items as you will be spending to much time concentrating on that and get less frags.

To do this, load a map offline with no bots, start at the main powerup you want to get, in most cases the shieldbelt or keg of health, then figure out the shortest possible route that you can run between the rest of the powerups while running over any health vials near that route while also picking up weapons and ammo along this route of course

This has 2 advantages.

1st, you get all the powerups of course, and you are constantly stacking up on health vials so you will soon be maxed out with 199 health and lots of armor.

2nd, it keeps you constantly on the move. While running the route, don't get hung up in extended fights, you see someone in your immidiate path take them down, but if you don't get them with the first 2-3 shots move on, because taking the extended fight someone else will come along and take you both down while you are distracted fighting eachother and it will be easy because you probably drained all your health and armor, meaning you just gave someone else 2 frags for free. Rockets and flak are your friends here, predict by using sound, if you hear someone around the corner fighting load up 3 rockets and hurl them at them when you come around the corner, you will be surprised how often you get 1 or 2 kills like this. Also shoot a couple rockets at any doorways further away from you, you never know when someone gets a rocket in the face when you spam random doorways like this, and you are far away from them so you won't risk getting hit.