Who thought this was a good idea?

AnnoyedDragon · 07-09-2008, 08:24 PM

Not pirates, I don't even care about pirates at this point. I only just entered the space phase today so all I have is my home planet and the tutorial planet, it wasn't long after the tutorial that this happened.

I was going around minding my own business when an unknown alien race decided to demand a ridicules some of money I couldn't spare. 5-15k I would consider reasonable to temporarily keep a hostile race at bay, but they were asking for 65K, my entire saving up to this point was only around 70k.

So I rejected their demand and they became hostile, not long after they attacked my home world.

When I arrived it wasn't long before I realised just how unbalanced the situation was, who at Maxis thought a strong UFO + 4 fighters Vs the players single UFO was a good idea? Two groups at once even? They gang up on the player and destroy them in a matter of seconds, then again, and again, and... guess what? Again.

God knows how many UFOs I went through in that fight; and this is the easy setting! I just cannot fathom who thought the player could handle all this during testing.

After the fight I spent some time and a good chunk of money repairing all the buildings they had destroyed, after which I collected some spice and 'intended' to go to my colony to get more. The moment I left guess what? They attacked again! The same two overpowered groups tearing the cities I just repaired apart and blowing me up over and over again. After the second attack was over I spent the remainder of my money on a automatic turret for my UFO to help in future fights, because I obviously needed more firepower. I then headed off to my colony to deal with a eco-disaster that popped up during the fight; plus get some spice to help with the repairs at my home planet.

Guess what? Go on, guess what?

The second I left the atmosphere they attacked again! Three times in a row! Is this some sort of continuous process? Is this going to go on forever until I have depleted all funds and all cities are smoking ruins? At that point I exited Spore and went over here to write all this down.

Maxis, EA, are you listening? This is not fun, if it is driving me up the wall I cannot imagine what it would do to a casual gamer. I have looked forward to Spore since the prototype was first shown years ago, I have had the game only for two days and now I have a headache and don't want to touch it for a while.

If a patch is in the works, this is definitely something to fix.

For everyone else, have you found a solution for this?

AnnoyedDragon · 07-09-2008, 09:24 PM

That's it; I'm convinced this is some kind of bug, that or the people at Maxis have turned into masochists.

I grinded my way through the 3rd attack and then spent what little money I had left on the repairs; all while a species went extinct at my colony. When I got the message that a species went extinct; another eco-disaster countdown started up! that's right as soon as the last one ended another one started up.

So I left my home planet to sort out the second eco-disaster at my colony, guess what? My home planet gets instantly attacked a 4th time in a row!

Eco-disasters one right after the other, home planet invasions one right after the other, this has to be a bug.

This isn't a game, this is a repetition and anger stress test.

Blunthead · 07-09-2008, 09:44 PM

The game is like classic space invaders or devender. Stay at your home planet and defend it against never ending waves of enemies. It is not unusual for me to have two empires attacking my planets at once, Another attack may start without even leaving the atmosphere, or before I am even done fending off the first one. I do not go through a lot of ships in my fight as the fights themeselves are not that difficult if you circle around the enemies if you can still keep your cursor on them to keep firing at them, their escort fighters also start going circles then to catch you, and often they do not manage to do that. Does not always work but the times it does work it allows you to destroy a ship without getting hurt by its escort fighters.

Excirial · 07-09-2008, 09:49 PM

The funny thing here is that the amount of attacks you will have to deal with seems to be based upon luck. In my first game as an aggressive creature i managed to create the same problem as you reported. Problem for me was that i got two races at once against me. Worse, it was a class 3 and a class 4 empire. Believe me, 4 attack groups with the main ship having 1000+ HP and invasions at two planets at the same time is no fun. Especially not if knocking down the first invasion means that it will start again by the time you start cleaning the second.

With no way or time to get any money, i ended up losing both my small undeveloped colonies, and about half the buildings on my main planet (It seemed ok there, till they knocked all the turrets down with no rebuild money left). In short, i had to forfeit that game as unplayable.

But the second attempt was better

I played trough the game with three different races by now, and i found that my neutral aligned race seems to thwart virtually all the problems. Trough colonizing a pink spice planet (3 by now, total production over 1000 an hour) , and finding a buyer that pays a staggering 45.666 a piece (Though 10k+ is common, and 20k+ is not rare) it became possible to place maximum turrets everywhere i deem them needed.

Even better, since i got four allies surrounding my territory, i only have an pirate attack every, say, 15 minutes or so. Also quite interesting is that the eco disasters somehow occur once every 20 minutes now, instead of much more often. And ever since i unlocked and places my uber turret (Satellite with 50K hp that patrols between cities) i found it unnecesarily to respond to any form of pirate attack. By now i have almost maxed out all my items and weapons, and i almost completed the entire progress bar.

So, as a conclusion: Start again and play the space phase a bit longer, and try to find a green planet with pink spice. While the game is still not perfect the way it is then, it is actually much more bearable then. The only issues i have at the time being is the flight time, some game crashes and the fact the game is getting to easy as you can destroy a cat 4 civilisation in 15 minutes flat if you feel the need. And that is probally another problem. By now im so spoiled that i find it boring to collect spice to buy my fun terraform stuff over and over, while having to hop around to recharge batteries. A well, guess my game is nothing to complain about, seeing the status of some other player's games.

~Excirial

AnnoyedDragon · 07-09-2008, 10:40 PM

A restart is increasingly seeming the only alternative. The few planets that once paid enough for my spice to keep me going have all gone down to around 200, I cannot financially support this any more; especially after two teraforming device purchases going to waste because of one reason or another. The constant assaults have completely destroyed some of my home planet main cities, it is costing so much time and finance to fend off the attacks I cannot manage to do anything else; even fixing a little eco-disaster.

The problem is even if I do restart; with the widespread issues with the space stage going on I'll most likely end up right back were I am now

.

Do you hear that EA? This needs to be fixed, serously now!

I cannot understand how Maxis/EA messed up so badly, it is like the group responsible for the balancing throughout the game suddenly quit and they had to quickly find someone else for the space stage. I'm struggling to enjoy the game because I have looked forward to it for so long, most people are just going to stick it on the shelf and forget about it.

Pyritie · 07-09-2008, 11:11 PM

EA seriously should've had a public beta.

AnnoyedDragon · 07-09-2008, 11:23 PM

Quick question, during the space tutorial can you place your first colony on any planet; or must it be the one specified by the tutorial? I'd really prefer to populate my solar system before spreading out to others, there was actually a planet in my solar system that was more suitable for a colony than the tutorial one.

Denieru · 08-09-2008, 01:31 AM

lol, I came to this forum to post my views on the space stage, and it looks like everyone feels the same, thank goodness it's not just me.

I can't believe how often these attacks happen. Want to know what made me quit just? Well, I had finally destroyed my single enemy in the galaxy at the time being, I thought great! No more fighting for a long time

... or so I thought. A few minutes later I have no idea what I did or what happened... but a badge appeared congratulating me on being at war with 3 different civilizations... my heart stopped only to discover that my entire home system and allies I had made (all the green areas) were completely surrounded by red.... everywhere! After I had spent so long ridding the area of threats lalalala it's like if you kill one, two are born. I really can't keep my allies and home alive with this now, I'm doomed

Xanru · 08-09-2008, 01:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AnnoyedDragon

Quick question, during the space tutorial can you place your first colony on any planet; or must it be the one specified by the tutorial? I'd really prefer to populate my solar system before spreading out to others, there was actually a planet in my solar system that was more suitable for a colony than the tutorial one.

You have to use the tutorial one I'm afraid. Fortunately for me, one of my allies was selling Colonizers for 65k, so I got that and used it where I wanted :P

Blunthead · 08-09-2008, 03:16 AM

I terraformed my colony to T1 and added plants and animals. went back to another planet in the same system and back to the newly terraformed colony planet and just as I approached the colony, it was squashed by an epic creature in a single hit. Makes you wonder where that epic beast came from so suddenly.

fenrif · 08-09-2008, 04:18 AM

The constant attacks/disasters are an arbitrary way of creating difficulty in a game which would otherwise have been completable inside of 6 hours.

Most people seem to dislike the space phase, and the main reason is because the computer essentially cheats. It doesn't obey the rules the game forces on the player.

Obvioulsy EA and maxis tested the game, focus groups and in house betas and the like, and I'd bet they decided it was too short, and too easy. So they created an artifical difficulty in the space stage. They let the computer cheat.

Hopefully they'll fix it, or the modding scene will get on the case and sort it out.

Ashmo · 08-09-2008, 09:39 AM

This time around I managed to play it safe (omni/predator/industrious/militant->science) and actually befriended the blackmailers somewhat by doing missions for them (one of which involved going to THEIR colonies and zapping THEIR citizens, which temporarily turned them hostile because I missed a few times). The demands (between 10k and 100k most of the time) are still irrational, though, which is why I try to balance my refusals by doing more missions for them.

It's still agonizing, though. Pirates are a laugh -- they're easy money now that I'm halfway through Space -- but the eco-disasters, pirate attacks and allies being attacked (and eventually taken over) by other empires are a serious nuisance. And the ally missions to go and **** off some warrior race? I'm still nowhere near the point I would want to risk open war with anyone, despite 2.5k health and a decent laser -- my allies would probably turn hostile if I used my gravitation wave, anyway.

Space is supposed to be the reward for going through the earlier phases. It's where you're supposed to reap the benefits of having climbed the evolutionary ladder. Instead it feels like a murderous clone of Birth of the Federation (there, I said it) where you have to juggle interstellar relations and avoid war at all costs.

The constant juggling slows my colonisation and terraforming attempts to a crawl, yes, but it also takes out the fun. In the presentations, Will showed us how he could just visit other planets and turn them into fertile land with glorious gadgetry. Great! But he never mentioned having to planet-hop and trade Spices (and have the odd chance to be offered 11k per unit) in order to make the kind of money needed to buy that kind of tools.

Heck, between making my colonies profitable AND defended (i.e. turrets and buildings), I barely have the time to care about artefacts or trading.

The tidepool and creature phases are what's the most hyped part of the game and in the end they're just too short and too limited. The whole idea of starting out as a simple organism is great, but it's all over before you got anywhere close to the armament the other bugs have.

It's similar with the creature phase -- just when you have improved your brain and gained some allies, it's all over. Not to mention the annoyance of trying to socialise one creature and then having it call all of its (maxed out) friends over. And where's the child phase we saw in those demos? You hatch, you are taught your abilities and then you just blink into adulthood? That's not what I was made to expect -- and where's the vast differences in behaviour anyway? I've not seen one species that ISN'T flocking together like chickens -- and none of them is migrating particularly far from their nest either, apart from the glitch-like mass migrations I once experienced at the end of the creature phase where all new nests I encountered were instantly flagged "extinct" though I never touched them.

The tribal phase is kinda fun, but, again, over too soon. It feels odd that you can't change your creature anymore (and why don't you magically have access to all the collectible parts when you hit the tribe phase anyway, it seems to work that way for outfits and such after that) but also can't colour your outfits seperately from the creature itself. Again, more Creators might have improved the phase and maybe more than just a small map full of tribes and maybe some interaction between the tribes like in the civilisation phase -- it's supposed to be the transition from individual to society, right?

The civ phase is well executed, but just a build-up to launching spaceships. It was fun to simply steamroll over my neighbours and take the planet by force (and even have the sole survivor raise the white flag without ever being attacked, because they "realised resistance is futile"), but this phase could have been dragged out a bit -- it felt a bit TOO easy and the international relations didn't seem of any importance; pretty sad for a phase supposed to cover our entire progress from Stone Age to the distant future.

All in all, it's a game of missed opportunities. From what I saw before the release, I would have given it a 10/10 (with a cherry on top), but what I've been playing for the past days was closer to a 6/10 or a 7/10 for effort.

Denieru · 08-09-2008, 12:31 PM

Interesting review there Ashmo.

I can agree that the transition from creature to tribe is a little odd. Odd that you no longer can change your creature except for a few little outfits, and after all that time I spent digging up bones in the creature stage so that I could have maximum flexibility in the tribal stage.

For the civ stage, I thought it was also pretty well done, it was just annoying that I spent a long time fighting other civs only to have to fight empires, pirates and have to save multiple planets from eco disasters, sometimes all at once. I thought space was where you could relax, just as many other people here have thought, no more fighting (or much less fighting at least).

07-09-2008, 08:24 PM	#1 (permalink)
AnnoyedDragon Rookie Join Date: Jun 2008 Posts: 141	Who thought this was a good idea? Not pirates, I don't even care about pirates at this point. I only just entered the space phase today so all I have is my home planet and the tutorial planet, it wasn't long after the tutorial that this happened. I was going around minding my own business when an unknown alien race decided to demand a ridicules some of money I couldn't spare. 5-15k I would consider reasonable to temporarily keep a hostile race at bay, but they were asking for 65K, my entire saving up to this point was only around 70k. So I rejected their demand and they became hostile, not long after they attacked my home world. When I arrived it wasn't long before I realised just how unbalanced the situation was, who at Maxis thought a strong UFO + 4 fighters Vs the players single UFO was a good idea? Two groups at once even? They gang up on the player and destroy them in a matter of seconds, then again, and again, and... guess what? Again. God knows how many UFOs I went through in that fight; and this is the easy setting! I just cannot fathom who thought the player could handle all this during testing. After the fight I spent some time and a good chunk of money repairing all the buildings they had destroyed, after which I collected some spice and 'intended' to go to my colony to get more. The moment I left guess what? They attacked again! The same two overpowered groups tearing the cities I just repaired apart and blowing me up over and over again. After the second attack was over I spent the remainder of my money on a automatic turret for my UFO to help in future fights, because I obviously needed more firepower. I then headed off to my colony to deal with a eco-disaster that popped up during the fight; plus get some spice to help with the repairs at my home planet. Guess what? Go on, guess what? The second I left the atmosphere they attacked again! Three times in a row! Is this some sort of continuous process? Is this going to go on forever until I have depleted all funds and all cities are smoking ruins? At that point I exited Spore and went over here to write all this down. Maxis, EA, are you listening? This is not fun, if it is driving me up the wall I cannot imagine what it would do to a casual gamer. I have looked forward to Spore since the prototype was first shown years ago, I have had the game only for two days and now I have a headache and don't want to touch it for a while. If a patch is in the works, this is definitely something to fix. For everyone else, have you found a solution for this?

07-09-2008, 09:49 PM	#4 (permalink)
Excirial Rookie Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 7	Your Right, but also wrong The funny thing here is that the amount of attacks you will have to deal with seems to be based upon luck. In my first game as an aggressive creature i managed to create the same problem as you reported. Problem for me was that i got two races at once against me. Worse, it was a class 3 and a class 4 empire. Believe me, 4 attack groups with the main ship having 1000+ HP and invasions at two planets at the same time is no fun. Especially not if knocking down the first invasion means that it will start again by the time you start cleaning the second. With no way or time to get any money, i ended up losing both my small undeveloped colonies, and about half the buildings on my main planet (It seemed ok there, till they knocked all the turrets down with no rebuild money left). In short, i had to forfeit that game as unplayable. But the second attempt was better I played trough the game with three different races by now, and i found that my neutral aligned race seems to thwart virtually all the problems. Trough colonizing a pink spice planet (3 by now, total production over 1000 an hour) , and finding a buyer that pays a staggering 45.666 a piece (Though 10k+ is common, and 20k+ is not rare) it became possible to place maximum turrets everywhere i deem them needed. Even better, since i got four allies surrounding my territory, i only have an pirate attack every, say, 15 minutes or so. Also quite interesting is that the eco disasters somehow occur once every 20 minutes now, instead of much more often. And ever since i unlocked and places my uber turret (Satellite with 50K hp that patrols between cities) i found it unnecesarily to respond to any form of pirate attack. By now i have almost maxed out all my items and weapons, and i almost completed the entire progress bar. So, as a conclusion: Start again and play the space phase a bit longer, and try to find a green planet with pink spice. While the game is still not perfect the way it is then, it is actually much more bearable then. The only issues i have at the time being is the flight time, some game crashes and the fact the game is getting to easy as you can destroy a cat 4 civilisation in 15 minutes flat if you feel the need. And that is probally another problem. By now im so spoiled that i find it boring to collect spice to buy my fun terraform stuff over and over, while having to hop around to recharge batteries. A well, guess my game is nothing to complain about, seeing the status of some other player's games. ~Excirial

07-09-2008, 10:40 PM	#5 (permalink)
AnnoyedDragon Rookie Join Date: Jun 2008 Posts: 141	A restart is increasingly seeming the only alternative. The few planets that once paid enough for my spice to keep me going have all gone down to around 200, I cannot financially support this any more; especially after two teraforming device purchases going to waste because of one reason or another. The constant assaults have completely destroyed some of my home planet main cities, it is costing so much time and finance to fend off the attacks I cannot manage to do anything else; even fixing a little eco-disaster. The problem is even if I do restart; with the widespread issues with the space stage going on I'll most likely end up right back were I am now . Do you hear that EA? This needs to be fixed, serously now! I cannot understand how Maxis/EA messed up so badly, it is like the group responsible for the balancing throughout the game suddenly quit and they had to quickly find someone else for the space stage. I'm struggling to enjoy the game because I have looked forward to it for so long, most people are just going to stick it on the shelf and forget about it. Last edited by AnnoyedDragon; 07-09-2008 at 10:43 PM..

07-09-2008, 09:24 PM	#2 (permalink)
AnnoyedDragon Rookie Join Date: Jun 2008 Posts: 141	That's it; I'm convinced this is some kind of bug, that or the people at Maxis have turned into masochists. I grinded my way through the 3rd attack and then spent what little money I had left on the repairs; all while a species went extinct at my colony. When I got the message that a species went extinct; another eco-disaster countdown started up! that's right as soon as the last one ended another one started up. So I left my home planet to sort out the second eco-disaster at my colony, guess what? My home planet gets instantly attacked a 4th time in a row! Eco-disasters one right after the other, home planet invasions one right after the other, this has to be a bug. This isn't a game, this is a repetition and anger stress test.

07-09-2008, 09:44 PM	#3 (permalink)
Blunthead Rookie Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 90	The game is like classic space invaders or devender. Stay at your home planet and defend it against never ending waves of enemies. It is not unusual for me to have two empires attacking my planets at once, Another attack may start without even leaving the atmosphere, or before I am even done fending off the first one. I do not go through a lot of ships in my fight as the fights themeselves are not that difficult if you circle around the enemies if you can still keep your cursor on them to keep firing at them, their escort fighters also start going circles then to catch you, and often they do not manage to do that. Does not always work but the times it does work it allows you to destroy a ship without getting hurt by its escort fighters.

07-09-2008, 11:11 PM	#6 (permalink)
Pyritie Rookie Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: uoıʇɐɔoן Age: 18 Posts: 392	EA seriously should've had a public beta.

07-09-2008, 11:23 PM	#7 (permalink)
AnnoyedDragon Rookie Join Date: Jun 2008 Posts: 141	Quick question, during the space tutorial can you place your first colony on any planet; or must it be the one specified by the tutorial? I'd really prefer to populate my solar system before spreading out to others, there was actually a planet in my solar system that was more suitable for a colony than the tutorial one.

08-09-2008, 01:31 AM	#8 (permalink)
Denieru Rookie Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: England Age: 22 Posts: 22	lol, I came to this forum to post my views on the space stage, and it looks like everyone feels the same, thank goodness it's not just me. I can't believe how often these attacks happen. Want to know what made me quit just? Well, I had finally destroyed my single enemy in the galaxy at the time being, I thought great! No more fighting for a long time ... or so I thought. A few minutes later I have no idea what I did or what happened... but a badge appeared congratulating me on being at war with 3 different civilizations... my heart stopped only to discover that my entire home system and allies I had made (all the green areas) were completely surrounded by red.... everywhere! After I had spent so long ridding the area of threats lalalala it's like if you kill one, two are born. I really can't keep my allies and home alive with this now, I'm doomed

08-09-2008, 03:16 AM	#10 (permalink)
Blunthead Rookie Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 90	I terraformed my colony to T1 and added plants and animals. went back to another planet in the same system and back to the newly terraformed colony planet and just as I approached the colony, it was squashed by an epic creature in a single hit. Makes you wonder where that epic beast came from so suddenly.

08-09-2008, 04:18 AM	#11 (permalink)
fenrif Rookie Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 18	The constant attacks/disasters are an arbitrary way of creating difficulty in a game which would otherwise have been completable inside of 6 hours. Most people seem to dislike the space phase, and the main reason is because the computer essentially cheats. It doesn't obey the rules the game forces on the player. Obvioulsy EA and maxis tested the game, focus groups and in house betas and the like, and I'd bet they decided it was too short, and too easy. So they created an artifical difficulty in the space stage. They let the computer cheat. Hopefully they'll fix it, or the modding scene will get on the case and sort it out.

08-09-2008, 09:39 AM	#12 (permalink)
Ashmo Rookie Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 95	This time around I managed to play it safe (omni/predator/industrious/militant->science) and actually befriended the blackmailers somewhat by doing missions for them (one of which involved going to THEIR colonies and zapping THEIR citizens, which temporarily turned them hostile because I missed a few times). The demands (between 10k and 100k most of the time) are still irrational, though, which is why I try to balance my refusals by doing more missions for them. It's still agonizing, though. Pirates are a laugh -- they're easy money now that I'm halfway through Space -- but the eco-disasters, pirate attacks and allies being attacked (and eventually taken over) by other empires are a serious nuisance. And the ally missions to go and **** off some warrior race? I'm still nowhere near the point I would want to risk open war with anyone, despite 2.5k health and a decent laser -- my allies would probably turn hostile if I used my gravitation wave, anyway. Space is supposed to be the reward for going through the earlier phases. It's where you're supposed to reap the benefits of having climbed the evolutionary ladder. Instead it feels like a murderous clone of Birth of the Federation (there, I said it) where you have to juggle interstellar relations and avoid war at all costs. The constant juggling slows my colonisation and terraforming attempts to a crawl, yes, but it also takes out the fun. In the presentations, Will showed us how he could just visit other planets and turn them into fertile land with glorious gadgetry. Great! But he never mentioned having to planet-hop and trade Spices (and have the odd chance to be offered 11k per unit) in order to make the kind of money needed to buy that kind of tools. Heck, between making my colonies profitable AND defended (i.e. turrets and buildings), I barely have the time to care about artefacts or trading. The tidepool and creature phases are what's the most hyped part of the game and in the end they're just too short and too limited. The whole idea of starting out as a simple organism is great, but it's all over before you got anywhere close to the armament the other bugs have. It's similar with the creature phase -- just when you have improved your brain and gained some allies, it's all over. Not to mention the annoyance of trying to socialise one creature and then having it call all of its (maxed out) friends over. And where's the child phase we saw in those demos? You hatch, you are taught your abilities and then you just blink into adulthood? That's not what I was made to expect -- and where's the vast differences in behaviour anyway? I've not seen one species that ISN'T flocking together like chickens -- and none of them is migrating particularly far from their nest either, apart from the glitch-like mass migrations I once experienced at the end of the creature phase where all new nests I encountered were instantly flagged "extinct" though I never touched them. The tribal phase is kinda fun, but, again, over too soon. It feels odd that you can't change your creature anymore (and why don't you magically have access to all the collectible parts when you hit the tribe phase anyway, it seems to work that way for outfits and such after that) but also can't colour your outfits seperately from the creature itself. Again, more Creators might have improved the phase and maybe more than just a small map full of tribes and maybe some interaction between the tribes like in the civilisation phase -- it's supposed to be the transition from individual to society, right? The civ phase is well executed, but just a build-up to launching spaceships. It was fun to simply steamroll over my neighbours and take the planet by force (and even have the sole survivor raise the white flag without ever being attacked, because they "realised resistance is futile"), but this phase could have been dragged out a bit -- it felt a bit TOO easy and the international relations didn't seem of any importance; pretty sad for a phase supposed to cover our entire progress from Stone Age to the distant future. All in all, it's a game of missed opportunities. From what I saw before the release, I would have given it a 10/10 (with a cherry on top), but what I've been playing for the past days was closer to a 6/10 or a 7/10 for effort.

08-09-2008, 12:31 PM	#13 (permalink)
Denieru Rookie Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: England Age: 22 Posts: 22	Interesting review there Ashmo. I can agree that the transition from creature to tribe is a little odd. Odd that you no longer can change your creature except for a few little outfits, and after all that time I spent digging up bones in the creature stage so that I could have maximum flexibility in the tribal stage. For the civ stage, I thought it was also pretty well done, it was just annoying that I spent a long time fighting other civs only to have to fight empires, pirates and have to save multiple planets from eco disasters, sometimes all at once. I thought space was where you could relax, just as many other people here have thought, no more fighting (or much less fighting at least).