Shiny cylinder
Blazing through the atmosphere;
Death rides a new horse.
Spore ships are SO worth it, it just takes a little more management to keep your economy going during your first couple of wars.
I've played several games as the Korath - here's my basic spore strat.
If I'm crammed into a corner and must take out a neighbor early, I race to ion engines, missile or mass driver theory, and spore tech. Before I build any serious warships, I build spore ships with one cheap weapon that will take out colony, scout, and other unarmed vessels the AI parks in orbit. Go for the home planet first in a sneak attack, then grab as many more as I want/need/can.
Follow spore with colony vessels; you can put multiple colony modules on one hull, and use those ships as shuttles afterward. Sometimes I make several round trips to siphon population to newly-spored planets this early in the game.
Still, you eventually need to research Planetary Invasion for to get the important Troops Module so you can carry loads of people to your new planets
No, all you need is miniaturization so you can fit more and more colony modules onto a hull. They hold fewer colonists than troop modules, but if you want to avoid antagonizing neighbors by having transports zooming around their planets, colony modules are the way to go.
With spore, the only colonization tech you will ever need is advanced toxic. As someone said above, let the AI take the other planet types and build some improvements for you, then spore them at your leisure. You will never lose an invasion or risk destroying improvements on the ground or lowering a planet's PQ when you take it. If a spore ship is destroyed in space, you don't lose any valuable population.
Another cornerstone of my spore strategy is the fertility clinic. As soon as you are able to build these, make it the first thing you build on a spored planet. Better yet, buy it if you can; they're cheap. Even if you can't migrate population right away, the clinic will provide a nice boost to your pop growth.
I normally follow spore invasions with colony or transport ships until I control about half of the galaxy. By that point, my economy can handle empty planets, so I just keep building fertility clinics and forget the migration.
I've also played a Good civilization with spore before. My rationalization was that they were saving the lives of billions of their own soldiers...
