I’ve been playing the space stage of Spore recently and one of my planets,  which I had been in the process of terraforming, decided to randomly warm up (even though the planet was “stable”), brining the planet from “T2” to “T1”, and eventually to “T0”.

This had the effect of causing everything on the planet to go extinct and destroying all but one of the colonies I had placed there.

After the initial frustration subsided, I realized that this could be used as an excellent offensive weapon against heavily fortified enemy homeworlds. One good turn deserved another, and if the game was going to enforce funny physical rules, it had better enforce them consistently.

It was pretty simple: I bought the cloud vacuum, although any persistent terraforming tool would work. I went to an enemy homeworld, invariably a “T3” planet with 6 or 7 cities.

They attacked me, but my ship was faster. I simply kept flying around their planet and no one could catch me. I probably could not have reduced that planet by military means.

And while they chased me around their planet, I literally sucked the atmosphere out of it. It dropped from T3, to T2, to T1… and when it reached T0, every city but one blew up at once.

This isn’t a strategy if you want to take the planet intact. “Reverse terraforming” a world like that not only destroyed enemy colonies, but also caused all life on the planet to go extinct. Yes, with a cloud vacuum and a little bit of energy, I brought an apocalypse on an enemy world.

Now, I could use the cloud seeder tool to restore the atmosphere (one of the nice things about using one tool to do this is that you only need to use the opposite tool to reverse the effects), but then I’d need to repopulate all of the life on the planet before I could do that.

I thought it was an interesting strategy to use, however. Interesting enough to post about, in any case.

The game isn’t nearly as fun as it sounds. The space stage is probably the most fun (when you’re not fighting entire empires in your one ship or running all over the place trying to prevent your colonies from falling apart on their own), but the rest of the game is an epic fail. As in “supersized creature named fail”.