Arg you guys aren't understanding me properly, on your own Planet your race becomes dominate after you finish the tribe stage, meaning your creature has the only brain on your planet. Also there is no space stations or fleets of ships, each race gets a single space ship to explore space with.
As for breezing though the stages, there is no other real choice, sure you can play in some ages for a long time but all you're doing is killing higher level creatures as well as doing the exactly the same thing over and over. And Sporepedia is active, because I'm using it RIGHT NOW and I've seen other peoples content running around my planets.