A good Korath player can get money rolling really fast. With even a small amount of time the pirates are off of you, onto others, and you have the extra time you need to start mass producing. Just how my games have been so far

I've seen some other references to using SA with other races and setting other home planets, but have not found out how to do this. How do I use ARC? Is is legal for the metaverse?

ARC is Metaverse legal, as long as you only change certain things. You edit the customrace file for the civ you want to modify. The significant things you can change are super-ability, alignment, and homestar. For example, changing the homestar to Iconis will give you the Iconian homeworld which is PQ 14, rather than the standard PQ10 for a custom race. Changing "homeworld" merely changes the name, but nothing else. Here is a link to another thread with some info on Advanced Race Customization, or the MVL Rulebook thread also has some info.

Sentient species taste better...

I haven't played as the Korath yet. I don't know if my play style would negate the sopre ship ability. The way i see it, it works just like anyother race except for 2 things; you don't need to research all of the soldering techs and you dont need to have population floating in space not paying taxes.

As the Korath, are you required to rush into wars? If you wait to colonize a little and then build some factories and economy buildings to get those spore ships built, won't your opponents have some sort of military? That is, you will then need to research for and build attack ships. At this point it seems to be just like tradition invading except the planet's population doesn't matter. On the other hand, traditional invading at least gives a decent population to the conquored world. Also, without soldering you are very susetible to invasion.

Is the fact that new colonies with virtually no population can build spore ships really that much or a plus? As opposed to limited number of colonies that have a population great enough to fill a transport with 3000, at least early in the game.

Thanks, KP for the info on ARC. I'm not a modder, so I don't know if I'll try messing with that or not. It's nice to have such a responsive and benevolent dictator leading my empire!    

CaptainYar: I'm currently playing a custom race with the spore ships. They are nice in that you automatically win the planet with a single ship, but you take a econ hit due all the infrastructure upkeep with no population. I found that I needed to research the invasion techs later to bolster my defences. On the war front the three opponents and I sometime trade planets back and forth since I easily take them, but then can't defend them with such low populations. I found you have to start using some transports or colony ships to ferry in population to bolster newly spored worlds. You also need to research the advanced toxic colony tech or you only get %50 production on your new conquests.

Getting military tech is still paramount so you can eliminate the AI's orbiting ships. Unless you go for a very quick rush, as in a ZYW, the AI will ussully have something there to defend the planet.

All in all, I still have a huge population because I don't have to expend it to invade (zero casualties with the spore ships) and like you said the taxes don't get wasted with population floating in space. I'me doing better than ususal with the economy in this game as well. Of course, maybe I'm just getting better at the game.  

It's a double-sided sword. On one hand you don't lose many soldiers during each invasion (and you can always move population from your bigger planets to the newly conquered ones afterwards) but yes, claiming too many worlds using spore ships can be a big cost: colony maintenance without taxable population. Then again, losing 3000 soldiers that could have been mostly taxable inhabitants is an economic drawback of traditional invasion.
You're capable of much more massive invasion though, as long as you have the military to clear the AI's planet orbits - which you needed to do for traditional invasion anyway.

I Just got the game yesterday, and spent an hour messing with each race (only in cakewalk though, since I got DA and twilight at the same time and it was all confusing =P) and i did like the korath. I just pile reasearch and get the spore ships before any otehr races built anything. i don't usually play on cakewalk, but mock me if you wish!