The A-maze-ing City
A guide to the City Maze Prototype
City Maze is an agent-based city simulation prototype. The player controls a city of sim creatures. Players may place residential (houses), industrial (factories), entertainment, and defense buildings (walls and turrets). When sims enter these buildings, they rest, produce income, improve their mood, or defend against raider attacks. Happy, safe, rested sims will multiply and produce income. Miserable, threatened,tired sims will get fed up and leave the city. (Maxis)
That's basically what this nifty little prototype is all about, albeit in a much more exciting manner. City Maze is one of the prototypes released for Spore, and is basically a city populated with people (that we get to subject to various degrees of torture). The goal is to be able to defend your city from the attackers and at the same time keep your people happy. Let's start, shall we?
Starting out
When you open the game, you start out with 10 little sim guys that are basically blue circles with legs. Along with this, you get a mysterious blue orb. It's unknown what this is, but the Spores seem to like it (it is rather shiny). A pool of water, maybe? Also in our map are various bushes and trees scattered around, in attempt to simulate real world occurence. These are act as barriers. You can move them and the pool around wherever you want.
Now, first thing to notice is the green bar at the top. This is your money. You use money to build other buildings. As you do, the amount you have (obviously) goes down. How do you generate more money? Simply by building a factory. For this very reason, it is imperative to get a factory up and running as the first building. That way you wont find yourselfout of money and in a position where construction of a factory is not possible. What about those pink triangles? They're attackers and raiders. Basically, they come in at random intervals to try and attack your Spores. When your Spore is touched, it will turn red and move off screen. The attacker will turn green and go as well. It is imperative to defend against them.
Now, what else can cause your Spores to get mad? Well, first off, being tired. After your Spores work in the factory, they need sleep, just like you or me (though they don't get as cranky as Alex without his beauty sleep). For that, they go into houses and sleep. Every now and then, they might also, erm, reproduce. The second thing that makes them mad is too many attacks. If you're not able to defend your Spores adequately, not only will they get angry, they will leave, too. However, there is a way to make Spores happy, and I'll tell you that in due time.
First Few Steps
And now, to play it already. Look on the left side of the screen. You will notice nine buttons:
- The topmost one adds a Spore into the game.
- The second one is a house. Houses make angry Spores happy again by allowing them to rest (when you're cranky, it's always nice to have a nap).
- The third button is a factory. Factories will generate money for your city.
- The fourth button is a mystery, but it is presumed that it is a entertainment building. For some reason, no one has been able to make its doors open yet, so that presents a problem. Why? Well without it, Spores will not reproduce reproduce. However, if your city is generating enough money, you can manually add Spores. In addition, you can click on a Spore and then somewhere else to direct it to that location.
- The fifth button is a defence cannon. Spores enter the cannon, proceed to blow up the triangle raiders, and then come back out. A rather marvellous way to pass the time.
- The next two buttons are bushes and trees. In my experience these are useless though I'm sure there is a use for them. If you can suggest one feel free to tell me so I can add it to this guide
- The penultimate button is another pool. I believe that can work to make a Spore happy, too, but I'm not sure.
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The last button is a wall hub. More about these later.
First off, click the factory icon. Factories are relatively cheap, and you will need them for money. Adding most other items before addinig a factory will make it impossible to get one, so it is imperative that you build it initially. Your Spores all start crawling toward it, and five go in. These Spores will work for a few seconds to generate money (all that money for such a small amount of work *sigh*). As soon as they are done, however, they will come out, with a change in appearnace; red and tired. You need to quickly build one or two houses as the other Spores go into the factory. Houses will make those angry Spores happy again. If your Spores refuse to go inside the house for whatever reason, simply drag the house on top of the Spore and they'll automatically enter. In fact, you can do this with any building. A house can be occupied by a maximum of two Spores at a time, though. Be sure to remember that as the time goes by.
By now, you should have some Spores, a factory, and some houses. What about those pesky attackers? Next step will be to create a defence cannon. These house two Spores who work to blow up the enemy (what a great job). However, for some reason, the defence cannon comes out with its doors closed. To open them, click on the middle of the cannon to open it. Spores will now enter it to defend your city. Like any other building, the doors automatically close when it is full.
A Little More Intelligent
What about Spores that stand still? For these pesky little ones, you need roads. Roads will speed up travel between buildings as well.
How to build them? Look at any building and you'll see the doors around the edge. Hover your mouse over one door and you'll see a pink circle form. Now click this circle and drag out to any other door on any other building. When the road you create turns light gray from dark grey, you can release the mouse button and your road is built. However, this doesn't always help. Make sure your Spores can actually see the factory or other buildings. Move the house around to do that (or any other building).
Eventually you will be attacked and you will start to notice that your cannons aren't able to defend you completely. Your Spores are getting redder and you can forsee your mighty civilisation come crashing down. Need a better defence against those damned attackers, eh? Well, use the wall hubs. Wall hubs aren't too expensive and are very useful . You only need four for a successful strategy.. To utilise them effectively, place each of the wall hubs at the four corners of your city. Then click on any one of the dark circles around the edges and drag to another wall hub (in the samw way that you made roads). This will create a wall. Attackers can't get through, mad Spores can't get out. When city is sufficiently developed, go ahead and create an entertainment building, too. If you figure it out how to make it work, tell me! :p
Final Stages
Well, by now you should have walls and a city built. If you still have only ten Spores, then you should continue creating more manually. To get them into the city, simply drag one of the wall hubs past it really fast and the Spore will enter (this seems to be a glitch). You shouldn't really need a defence cannon at this stage either, and keep building numerous factories. The goal? There is none. Show off by telling us how many Spores you got! And for even more happy feelings... When you have walls, place houses all along the outside edge. You'll never see a mad Spore again!
All in all, it's quite a fun prototype. However, remember that it is only a prototype, and not a substitute for the real game. Do enjoy, though, for as long a time as you can! ;) It will be interesting to see how this prototype is used in the actual game. It is highly likely that it will be used as a model for the tribal and civilisation phases, but its even possible that some semblence of it will be used by the space phase. Now that really does open up some interesting possibilites, though (of course), it's all down to you....
Written by Arvedui
