If there was an apt way to describe the dedicated trader in Spore, the East India Company which dominated a good portion of the British Colonies would be that way. Utilizing money and influence to grease the way for ever expanding profits, they could almost be considered the first modern corporation. Their influence on popular culture has been seen in everything from portrayal of corporations in cyberpunk or their own portrayal in the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. So how exactly is this accurate?

The key principle behind trading is that of regular sales. Rather, it is the basest of all monetary instincts: buy low, sell high. In this case, it revolves around acquiring spice for free and then selling it to other Empires. It is more complicated than just that, though. For you see, there are many elements to take into account, such as storage, finding the highest buyer, production, and trade routes. Not only that, but trading even influences your status diplomatically, and certain things like artifacts can muddy the diplomatic situation as well.

To begin your trade empire, you must start out with your homeworld and a few colonies, gradually increasing your influence in a system, taking over the planets best for spice production. The general value of spice is as such:

• Red and yellow are the most common colors of spice, and usually sell for the least. Red spice sells almost everywhere for 225 Sporebucks, but you can get it from your homeworld in massive amounts. Yellow spice costs between 300-400 almost everywhere, and can usually be found in your home system.


• Green and blue are more uncommon colors than red and yellow for spice. They can be found fairly frequently, but not as often as red or yellow. Both usually sell for between 750-1500 Sporebucks in most locations.


• Pink and purple are the rarest colors of spice, and almost always go for over 5000 Sporebucks with ease. However, systems with those planets are few and far between, and often claimed or contested by other empires. A good colony of either of these colors, though, can easily pay for itself in under 20 minutes of gameplay.

Production of spice is governed much like the production of money in the Civilization Stage. You will want to build factories to increase production, entertainment centers to increase happiness, and houses to increase the effectiveness of both. You can produce all the spice you wish, but if you don't have the storage for it, it will be wasted. Basically, for each colony on a planet that you have, you will have five units of storage on that planet. Therefore, a T3 group of colonies is the most desirable, providing 15 storage and a massive amount of production.


You may also boost the capacity using the single-shot item Spice Storage. be warned, though: the building created by Spice Storage can be destroyed, causing you to lose the spice therein and allowing pirates to claim it for themselves. Spice Storage increases your storage by 15 for each building of its type on the planet. There's one last nuance to storage, and that is that a colony will only fill its own storage. Therefore, you can't build several colonies on a single planet but only have one of them produce spice. You will only get five out of 15 spice maximum. The exception is Spice Storage, which can be filled by anyone.

All of this talk of expanding production is expensive. You have to terraform colonies, plant them, and pay for their growth, and then and only then do they start to pay off. Therefore, you may wish to go a simpler route, one which provides less control but more payoff and the ability to buy a system from another race. I am referring to the trade route.

A trade route is rather simple. What it does is send part of the spice production from another race's planet into the stores of whatever planet you own that it is hooked to. You can store any amount of this trade spice, and it sometimes even sells for a massive amount of money on the planet you took it from. For example, a planet may get pink spice by the boatload from a trade route, and it sells for 20,000-30,000 Sporebucks per unit on the very same planet! You can exploit this to your advantage, and it is highly suggested that you do so.


The other benefit trade routes give you is that they allow you to buy out a system from the person you have the trade route with. It functions much like a capture, only much nicer. While a trade route is functioning, a capture bar displays above the other race's system. Once it reaches maximum, you can offer the race X amount of Sporebucks (depending on how much you want to offer), and the entire system and all colonies will revert to your control! Thusly, it's quite plain to see that trade routes are extremely effective at padding your wallet and expanding at the same time.

There's another element to the trading aspect, and those are the discoverable artifacts. Found on random planets across the galaxy, they sell for 45,000 Sporebucks to most races. However, a race that follows the doctrine of a particular artifact (such as a Science race and a science artifact) will pay double that. A whopping 90,000 Sporebucks for tractoring in a random artifact! There's only two real problems to this equation. First of all, taking an artifact from a planet is considered an act of aggression, and against certain races, even war. Second, you have to find them, and they are really hard to find!

There's a few miscellaneous things for trading that should be mentioned. First of all, it's not a true dynamic economy. Spice prices change arbitrarily and at random. Don't try and analyze it, just approach it from the brute forcing method. Try every other planet! The other major point is that you gain all of your equipment from trading. Races that are happy with you will sell things for cheaper, and even more so if that item matches their faction's mindset. Buying a bomb from a military civilization is cheap, but not so much from the religious nuts.

Much like the rest of Spore, the trading portion of the game is not difficult if given careful scrutiny. If you live by the immutable law of "buy low, sell high", you will become an overlord in no time! Happy hunting for you daring entrepreneurs For those more interested in exploration, terraforming, and diplomacy, stay tuned!