Spore Archetype Abilities Tier List 

Raider Rally should be S tier since I like to imagine that the pirates you summon and are killed almost instantly help to reduce piracy in the galaxy

14:16 is comedy gold. Never knew the creatures would literally walk all the way to city hall

Learning that spice savant is broken and doesn't work while off world felt like learning santa wasn't real X3 Great tier list!

"Sending an Ad Blitz, otherwise known as 'Watching RU-vid'" 😂

i appreciate that this channel continues to create spore content 🙏

Hello, I want to thank you for creating Spore content. This community is very dear to me, since I've played this game as a child and I still do now. I am very glad to see people still playing this awesome game and even uncovering new secrets and ways to enjoy it. Please keep on doing what you're doing. Cheers!

oh this is exactly the kind of hyper specific, nerdy content i need Also, i’d really like to thank you for having captions on your videos! I have an auditory processing disorder and often struggle with understanding words. captions allow me to not have to spend so much energy on listening and interpreting and let me just enjoy the video. :]

I kinda like Flying Fish as well. However, one thing I dislike about it is a glitch that sometime occurs where the sea monster will pop above the water, but then immediately go back under and never do the big splash that sends the fish to the shore. Not only that, but it means that unless I reload an older save I’ll be forced to listen to the sound of that sea monster consistently howling for the rest of tribal stage.

I haven't played in a long time so I could be misremembering. But one use for raider rally is to stop two allies fighting each other without angering either one, since I think the game always allows there to be only one invader at a time.

as someone who almost always does shaman for most of my creatures (unless I intentionally want otherwise) I'm glad to see return ticket get the appreciation it deserves!

Let me know what you thought of this Tier List ranking! Additional finding for Pleasing Performance (22:35): while a colony is striking and not producing spice, if we save and quit and reload the game, the colony will start producing spice again without fixing the colony! The colony will still be treated as if it’s under attack and can’t be contacted like normal and can start protesting again, but this is an interesting glitch and work around to keep collecting spice while not needing to add entertainments. I found this after finishing the video, but this wouldn’t have changed Pleasing Performance’s placement on the Tier List. Additional uses for Raider Rally (1:55), thanks to @danielgrizzlus3950 @Daedwartin2 @matatic3689 for explaining it to me, Raider Rally can be used during an attack and will replace the first attacking fleet and make them leave! The pirates can then be easily dispatched and quickly stop an attack on our colonies or allied planets. Defending from a Raider Rally on a colony or allies will also count towards, and can be used to grind, the Body Guard badge. These additions may have raised Raider Rally from the bottom to the top of F Tier for me. However, thwarting an attack on a colony isn't necessary with an Uber Turret and I typically ignore allies' defense requests anyway because failing a defense I believe only results in up to -50 "You Failed Missions" after many failings, which isn't too steep for allied empires. The Body Guard Badge also unlocks passively in the background from attacks on our own colonies defended by Uber Turrets, or from successful defenses of allies on their own.

Safari Vacuum is my hero because I love balancing out planets. Whenever I wander past one with an unfinished ecosystem I stop what I’m doing and fill it out. I don’t place a colony or anything, I just get joy from doing it. Safari Vacuum is perfect for easily gathering samples and refreshing my stocks when I get bored of the same animals.

What I love doing is bringing a purple planet to 3rd teir, placing a monolith, and then using cash infusion on it. I can make billions of spore bucks using this method in space stage because it allows me to have purple planets with 6-10 cities on them. This also allows me to reach deep into grox space, making a habital space zone for me to eazily make it to the center. It also makes other playthroughs easier as I can just start on space stage, race to the middle of the galaxy, then use the Staff of Life to make it so the grox cannot inhabit that planet anymore. I can then use my other saves to inhabit those worlds with either monoliths or my own colonies. the staff of life usually takes 30 seconds, while terraforming normally with all the tools usually takes 2 minutes a planet.

Can we all just take a second to thank this man for making spore content in 2023 ?!?

The endgame civilization stage abilities are such a great idea from Maxis. Every 4X game has a point where you've become the most powerful empire on the planet and it's obvious you're the one going to win, but you still have to go through the slog of actually finishing off the rest of the players or teching to the science victory or something. It's the reason why nobody ever actually plays one of these types of games to their ending screen and just starts a new game instead. Maxis is such a genius for adding a way to skip this and go on to the space stage, otherwise the slog of obtaining the last four cities in the civilization stage would be horrendous and I guarantee you people would be calling it the worst stage instead of tribal had they not done it that way.

I seriously love your channel man, it's super cozy and I love learning more about this game I adored as a kid!

Once again, thank you for covering more Spore topic! It makes me feel like a kid again. I probably spent hundreds of hours playing Spore as a kid, after all...

Welcome back, buddy! I miss you a lot.

Back in the day i found a guide of abilities, optimizing for only the ones that affect Space stage, in an overall sense taking into account what combo you would be able to get together, not just the Archetype ability. Once reading them all i pretty much always went Red for Cell stage, flipped between Green and Red for Creature stage, Green for Tribal stage, and Blue for Civ stage.

Raider Rally isn't meant to conquer you planets for free. Of course anything is weak compared to Fanatical Frenzy, but I think the inteded use case for Raider Rally is just more ships the enemies can target instead of you, basically acting as meat shields. Idk though, it's been years and years since I played Spore. Your content is making me want to play again though so kudos man.

Probably one of my favorite videos you’ve done. Always love it when you post, keep it up and keep spore alive!!

This was very well put together, thankee for sharing

I think gravitation wave is D or F tier. I have never once used it, despite finishing as a scientist more than once. It is the worst way to take over a planet because you don’t get the benefit of the buildings. And for tribal and civilization planets, I would rather use a monolith then take it over later.

summon flock is god tier, you can effortlessly kill/ally anything and beat creature stage in minutes

This makes me want to play so badly

Thank you for this tierlist its really gonna help

Finally new video

Finally a new video! Keep making awesome videos! You're the reason spore is still alive somewhat.

Thanks for still making vidoes on this game that are interesting.

I don't play spore anymore, but it holds a strong place in my heart. I only ever played easy difficulty, never completed space stage and spent most of my time in the creature editor having fun, but it still was a very formative game for me. so, thank you for making spore content when so few others want to

thank you for keeping my favourite game on the youtube

i likey thanks for pointing out the bugged spice savant too, but i'll prob just dupe purple spice anyway

Just noticed you colored the tiers based on spice value; nice touch!

PLEASE KEEP MAKING CONTENT! made my day kinglyvalence :)

So cool. I never realized how many different abilities there were when I played spore as a kid, or even when I replayed it as an adult.

you did a really good job with the spread, not too much in any specific tier. a mistake a lot of tier lists make

Flying Fish S tier because it's silly and I like it, all religious skills go into Burn in Hell tier because when I was doing a no death run in spore the first city that popped up was a religious one that came over and immediately kicked my shit in and I've had a burning hatred for religious cities ever since

I have found that Raider Rally can be used for a little useful glitch I found. In the event the grox invade an ally’s planet, you can use Raider Rally and the grox will leave immediately. I think it also works on empire and pirate invasions as well, but I might be wrong. It works for sure on the Grox.

Great video, and I generally agree with most of the rankings. In my casual playthroughs, I typically care more about creating an interesting story and lineup for my species than min/maxing the specific consequence traits. It's not like it's a detriment to have any of them really, they all do something as opposed to beginning Space with no traits. Still, I guess there's a reason I rarely ever do Social in creature stage or Aggressive in tribal (though that may have to do with how I find those particular playstyles more boring but I digress).

Love your content and channel. I’d love to see a creature stage speedrun to try and get level 5 in every single possible stat. Health, speed, sprint, sneak, Jump, glide, social and attack stats, everything.

This was a awesome vid. I remember finding refreshing storm nice but I don't think it generates really more food than flying fish for sure. I didn't know a lot about the space stage abilities you can unlock. Maybe it was just my playstyle but I never got super far with them and reading about them from the instruction booklet made some of them sound really unapealling. that being said return ticket is a must have for real.

I do think Mini-U deserves at least a small bump up for the fact that it is the only architype ability that cannot be unlocked through galactic adventures, making the Knight one of the better architypes to start with.

I really have to say, I love the rise of channels that focus almost purely on a nieche game forgotten nowadays. Love your content, really makes me wanna give Spore another chance. Used to love it back then, hell my biggest videos are all Spore-related.

That's amazing. One thing I wish you'd also show the path to get to each ability somewhere on the screen, so this video could also be used to decide your playthroughs :)

Best spore content!!!! You are a beast! 🦁

I actually did something similar to this, but it was for consequence traits. I evaluated them based on the costs/benefits of their required gameplay and the benefit they bring to the future stages. Space archetypes were also thrown in but were evaluated less on what is missed out, and more on the benefit of their supertool (this is because an archetype change is possible, so technically any consequence trait combination is possible). If I remember correctly, my S tier consisted of Herbivore, Economic, Scientist, and Shaman.

Curious if you would ever be interested in doing other tier lists. I love the playthroughs that are the main draw of this channel and will eagerly await more, but I think it might be interesting to see a tier list of, say, creature parts (like comparing different parts within the same category, (ex: mouths, hands, feet, weapons, or details) with each other).

yay you're alive :3

Imagine your species just built your first tribe, your chillin, and some guy in a ship comes by and says "Nah this is mine" and sends you back a few million years with a massive gravity wave

This is super late, but Raider Rally does have a pretty niche but useful application!! If you have two allies who are at war with each other, and one sends an attack on the other, normally you have two choices-- you can either shoot down the attackers, and take up to -100 reputation for destroying their ships, or you can do nothing, and take up to -100 reputation (both of these values are at maximum, and not immediate). However, if you have Raider Rally, you can go to the planet being fought over and activate it. The attackers will leave, and the pirates will arrive, giving you a much easier and less consequential set of targets to destroy, and you still get credit toward the Body Guard badge! This is a niche ability, I'd say it's no better than C tier as it is, and it's hardly warrior behavior, but it can help you salvage a relationship with two empires at war.

ive never even played spore i just love your videos

A suggestion for a video: Quick ways to grind the space stage medals. You already showcased the exploit with frequent flyer and i'm sure there are other similar exploits for the other medals.

So I feel like the ideal is carnivore, adaptable, friendly, economic, and then doing the quest to change from a bard

Great video

7:56 The safari vacuum is amazing at helping with terraforming a planet, so you may have the 3 colonies you need on two planets

I hope some of the Spore devs find this channel. If I were them, watching someone so interested in understanding how my game works after all these years would be something special.

A spore video in the year 2023, wow, my faith in humanity is back

Good Fun Nostalgic video

I kinda want to see the Galactic Adventures missions speedrun, either each mission individually or how fast you can do all of them from the beginning of space stage.

Once I was playing an herbivore in tribal, and I had just gotten back from wiping out one tribe when another decided to raid us the moment we got home. Most of my tribe was just wiped out, we had no food, it looked like it was all over. So I desperately clicked fireworks for the first time and they immediately backed off and just went home allowing me to recoup my losses and eek out the dub

awesome stuff, I just wish you had mentioned how each abilities is obtained. Not a dealbreaker but could have put things into perspective

hey i love the video, great to see spore tier lists being made in 2023 in your opinion if you hypothetically wanted to conquer the entire spore galaxy what would you suggest would be the optimal combination of bonuses for space stage i was thinking zealot R/R/G/G but id love to hear your input

I have a suggestion for a video you could make. It is similar to this one, but instead of ranking the consequence abilities, you rank all default max's made adventures (the ones that are included in a new instilation of spore GA)

I sometimes used Soothing Song to make an agressive empire trade with me for a short time, especially in early game, where I can´t just throw money at them. It is useful with warrior and zealot empires, since they dislike you by default, but have some great deals.

8:07 Siren Song can even let you friend an epic, but its very rare, for more details sometimes in spore 2 creatures can spawn in 2 ways so if an epic spawns then another creature that is the same creature as that same epic but its not an epic you can use Siren Song on it become friends with it and boom your now friends with the epic, you can NOT get the epic in your pack but its still really cool

Gravitation Wave also has the extremely major downside of being made redundant once you unlock the infinite use variants of the planetary alteration tools, since the effect of destroying all colonies at the cost of angering the original owners is done better by a tool you already need in order to modify unowned uninhabitable planets into habitable planets without the need to abuse glitches the only upside it has is retaining trees which is... definitely something

Pretty good tierlist, but firebomb could be very useful at demolishing the tribe huts. If you know any glitch that could clip the tribe leader inside an enemy tribal hut, i think the ability could be pretty devastating.

Alright, since you stepped upon this path, now you must make a creature parts tier list.

I actually found the Raider Rally really handy combined with the Save/Load exploit early in my Warrior Run. Summon Raiders directly over city, drop low and bomb the crap out of it, go into orbit, save/load, repeat. Barely dinged my ship at all. That said, that Warrior File's now doing Galactic Adventures to unlock the Frenzy.

I always encounter a bug where using the 'flying fish' tribal stage ability causes the monster to (the best of my descriptions) 'mate call' permanently, and persist through space stage, which makes me never want to use that ability. I think this only happens on a save where you use the texture settings glitch to pop out more tribals with the cost of one.

To add to the usefulness of the fanatical frenzy: the use of it on Grox systems while you're at war seems to have this confusing effect on them that I don't think is intended. Basically the Grox attempts to attack random systems repeatedly, except when they're conquered with fanatical frenzy, but they will still try to target them, making your colonies never a target for an attack. When I first defeated the Grox and I learned of this it saved me so much time from defending my owns systems since it seems they're capable of destroying your systems even if you have an uber turrent (though it takes a few rounds of attacks). I haven't done enough testing so take what I say with a grain of salt but ever since I used the fanatical frenzy on their systems while I was at war I was never attacked by the Grox. Also i think the raider rally is super underated here, they're incredibly useful for quickly dealing with attacks, as using them will undo the current attack, and since they all spawn in a wormhole you can just fire a mega laser at them and quickly wipe them clean.

Fanatical Frenzy was broken enough to have kid me go from system to system taking over almost an entire arm of the galaxy, and the species which I did that with ended up being the basis behind the primary villains of a sci-fi story I've been working on now as an adult. Meanwhile, Raider Rally was always just an inconvenient button I had to avoid while having the combat tab open at all; being pretty much a punishment for doing murder hobo runs. It's baffling how different those two abilities are in terms of usefulness. In terms of the final tier list, the only placement I (very mildly) disagree with is Summon Flock. The sheer social power it can give, plus the extra bit of dps and damage sponging the flock offers during combat if it ever comes to that, makes early-mid Creature Stage a cakewalk. It _is_ pretty RNG-based, with the species summoned with it being randomized with every use iirc, so that could skew how people see it. But when a species is brought in that has +2 in every social category, it pretty much guarantees an instant win for every social interaction even if you haven't unlocked the stronger social parts yet. I would put it just under Siren Song since it allows you to muscle past a majority of social interactions with minimal investment (slap on the base 25 cost social parts and you're good to go) vs Siren Song giving you access to more social opportunities, but requiring more investment (finding and putting on parts with higher social abilities and/or bringing along pack members with a good social spread).

Flying fish should be in S tier, there is a glitch where you can farm a lot of food. When you call the sea monster and fish fall to the ground, you have to lower the graphics, when you detect that the cinematic does not end, it continues farming more fish. It's like the duplicate babies glitch

I love spore, loved it since I was a kid, but I always stopped at either creature or civilization, I plan to do a full playthrough soon, and when this popped up I knew I had to watch, the only downside is I have no clue which ability is tied to how I complete each stage for space stage abilities

One obscure use of firebombs is using them to attack tribes you have previously allied. I sometimes do this if I want to start civilization stage as an economic civ and not a religious one.

very interesting, i saw on the spore wiki that *objectively* the best path would be RRGB but it's super cool seeing your take on it! ...even if that (RBGB) would lead to the worst archetype in the game plus spice savant only working sometimes lol

a fun and painful run is ture Passivist where you have to start as a meat eater and not eat a single cell or you reload the last size increase, not killing any creaturs, and civ where you are only allowed to take one merchant civ so you can get the trading ability

The worst part about new version of Spore is addition of empty "cube" planets. Really want to see the version differences video. I wonder if there are mods for the game that fix or change things.

Back to the Stone Age with you 🫵

One of your arguments against refreshing storm was that it doesn't help carnivores... but it's the reward you get for being an herbivore. So unless you kept jaws from the cell stage and never put on an herbivore mouth you can't be a carnivore with refreshing storm. Still a bad ability though.

Soothing song is at LEAST better than raider rally, since any positive relationship gained while it is active stays. This can easily stop wars with empires you don't want to war with, since you can just use the super happy laser, put down an embassy, or buy their stuff for positive relationship. I've used it a ton to supplement my Zealot playthrough when I didn't realize that a useful ally was nearby so I could completely negate the "broke galactic code" negative modifier.

I guess the only real good thing about soothing song is that the music is nice lol

I'm 24 and this popped up on my feed, Spore was my childhood although my parents did not let me play a lot back in 2009 haha otherwise i would've been on it all day

Suggestion: since you’ve now graded all the abilities, maybe make a video about suggested “paths” through the Stages?

Ive been using fireworks (not the bombs) in tribal stage near the beginning of fights to get in a few extra shots on the enemy while they are CCed. I can do this by spam right clicking the rest of my units while my chief is occupied. this can bring down the enemy count by 1 or 2 before they even start fighting.

Thanks

Somehow, Palpatine has returned

The only thing I was missing from the list was what combination of stage endings you would need to acquire these abilities

I innitially thought Raider Rally was helpful because it would distract spaceships while you are trying to take over a planet but... yeah it honestly doesn't work that well

My understanding if eco disasters (and all alerts if im not mistaken) is that they dont scale based on empure size, instead the game just randomly picks a colony once every so often to have a disaster

Thanks for this. I mostly agree, but I don't think you're giving Static Cling or Soothing Song enough credit. While war is easy once you've reached the end of the space stage, sometimes you want a peaceful solution, or need an edge before all your ducks are in a row.

It sucks when you want Power Monger in space stage, but you also want an omnivorous or herbivorous creature with their respective mouths.

I dont remember tribal stage fondly because I remember how not being able to speak english I had no way to get past the tutorial and the game just stayed paused and I couldnt play. Other than that I love the fish rain and firebombs very fun.

I really don't like being bard. Soothing song is almost useless when you have near infinite money from that one spice glitch For raider rally, I wish that the ships summoned would be part of your empire. This would actually let them conquer cities. To rework traps, I like it to collect food similar to the egg pile. This way, you don't need to worry about angering any powerful creatures (especially if you have mods installed) Fire bombs should have everything about it buffed and maybe set buildings on fire to speed that up

Do you ever play with mods? It'd be cool to see an overview of some of the more interesting mods out there. I haven't played in a long time so I don't even know where to find them.

hey, question! for social suave/gentle generalist/colony craze/arms dealer, i know you said the 20% discount is when buying from 'your own' empire. but does it affect interacting with your other saved games (since other saved game empires sell the same stock as your current empire)? and similarly, does it affect the price of tools when trading with the grox via the one glitch, since it seems to follow that same pattern?

I'd put the first civ stage actives lower, as well as Fireworks- ten food just isn't that much in tribal. And I'd put the civ stage ending abilities off to the side, because while they are objectively really powerful, economic civ is my second favorite stage so I don't want to skip it. Otherwise, I mostly agree, though even without Spice Savant working I tend to just get too many colonies to go around and get their spice before they all fill up.

I honestly didnt know traps could kill Epics, and ive been playing Spore on and off since its release! Noice

I don't care how weird of a choice it was for Maxis to include finish civilisation stage half way through playing it button in the game, getting to that point and unleashing these abilities is always so satisfying

I actually didn't know the trap worked on epics, huh