Spore... Sigh...

So, I'm still stuck on the "tribal" stage in Spore. Sigh. I'm on normal difficulty and need to figure out how to put it on "easy".

The strange thing is that I'm no RTS dummy. I'm not a competitive player, but I've worked on several RTS games and can usually hold my own against an average player -- or a default AI setting.

Spore suffers from enough usability issues to make this whole process annoying and frustrating instead of challenging and fun.

• Even though I'm obviously having difficulty, there seems to be no dynamic difficulty adjustment. I get crushed the same way every time: Trying to defend one group, attack another, and be diplomatic with a third. I feel like there is some hidden "correct" way to do things that I'm not able to discover.
• As an RTS, this game has all sorts of problems that most 2d and 3d RTS games have solved like: Unit identification (I can't tell the difference between various unit types; it's also hard to tell friend from foe some times); unit selection (there is so much popup text and the camera is allowed to zoom/pan to really into unusable positions); camera controls in a 3d world (why do I need to do so much of it?)... and the list goes on.

I really want to see the rest of the content so I guess I'll try and figure out how to lower the difficulty level (I know there's a setting, I just couldn't adjust it while in game). Failing that I guess I'll have to look on Youtube or GameFAQ for some hints.

•