Any ethical choices ever reward "good" behavior?

Good is rewarded in long term with specific technologies that are only awailable to "Good" empires.

~SDC~

Also, good empires tend to "team up", where as evil empires are "every man for themselves". If you're good and need help, your good neighbors will send you ships, or ofen times join your side in the war. Evil empires will see you need help and probably go to war with you if you're weak enough.

~SDC~

One game I was playing neutral (maybe even good) and Drengin was giving me ships to fight one of the "goodie two shoes" Empires and than every 5-6 turns he would come to me and demand tribute. Shugar and cane aproach I guess

~SDC~

IT seems to me that the "good" aligned choices are principle choices, so that in fact it is inconvenient to take that path but it does pay off in the long run. As they say, a principle is only a principle when its inconvenient.

Another benefit from "good" behavior is increased influence points. This is usefull when there are United Planet votes. The more influence you have the more weight your vote has.

~SDC~

Is there anywhere in the game interface where I can check what my alignment is, other than the interface changing colors when evil?

If not it would be nice to know whether you are neutral or good and to what degree. I know someone might say to just pay attention to the decisions you make but if you've gone through 10 or 20 events and have chosen different alignment outcomes it might get hard to remember where your alignment is.

Well, the interface scheme will let you know if you're currently rated as good, evil, or neutral, but yeah it would be interesting to know just how good/evil I was and whether I'm on the cusp of going from neutral to good, etc.

~SDC~

Good question.

Having a statistical rating of how Good or Evil you were would take some of the fun out having to make the tough choices. People would end up straddling the line between Good and Neutral or Neutral and Evil too much. If you want to be good, but know that you can make 2 more Evil choices without becoming neutral, you'd naturally make those choices for the extra benfits. Not knowing how Good or Evil you are makes those ethical decisions that much harder and a bigger part of the game play.

Your alignment is shown on one of the stats pages. I don't remember which one it is, but it does exist.

Not sure if it was added in the beta version or the gamma version. I seem to remember that it was on one of the sub-screens on the stats page.

I'm sure this probably isn't a great idea as far as making gameplay "balanced" in terms of good vs. evil. But I think being evil should allow the player to have inherently more advantages then if you were being good.

Being good usually translates to being bound to make ethically and morally sound decisions i.e. you aren't making decisions solely on the basis of maximizing your chance of winning at any cost; you're doing it while upholding certain principles and values, whereas you have the choice of doing anything you damn well please if you're evil... because you're evil!

I can understand that good races will tend to stick together, and evil races will be more likely to just look after themselves and be more opportunistic. That seems pretty reasonable. But as far as alternate techs you can research or the different good/evil choices you have to make, I feel that the being evil should give you a better bonus for the most part.

"I'm sure this probably isn't a great idea as far as making gameplay "balanced" in terms of good vs. evil. But I think being evil should allow the player to have inherently more advantages then if you were being good."

Evil usually comes around to bite itself in the ass. Whatever "advantages" there are to being evil are always eventually balanced out by low loyalty and moral, lack of trust and teamwork, and the general effect of what are usually short sighted decisions.

So for example, maybe enslaving a whole planet of conquered citizens and using them for scientific experiments might SEEM to give you a large research advantage, there are many less obvious and immediate side effects of that action:

1) Once news of something like that gets out, the any other planet attacked by your empire would likely fall to the last man, woman, and child defending itself with tootah and toenails if necessary rather than surrendering. This would make every invasion you attempted to make after an action like this much more costly in terms of both money and casualties.

2) There is no way to predict what "side effects" might result from this experimentation. Maybe the experimentation involves psionically crushing the willpower of the test subjects. What prevents an underling leader with an evil disposition who acquires such a technology from using it against YOU in an attempt to gain power for themself? What if the research process spawns some kind of psychic "disease" that begins to rot the minds of your own civilization beginning with your own best scientists, etc. The possible list is endless.

I guess all I am trying to say is that it is only an ILLUSION that evil is inherently "more powerful" than good, and to the extent there is any advantage is alost always purely of a short term nature. *shrug*

--Soulfire

"Is the dark side more powerful?"

"NO! No. Quicker. Easier. More seductive it is."


(I hope I quoted that right... it's been a while...)

From the sound of it, it would only be a good idea to play as evil in a really small map, so that you can reap the benefits before it all comes crashing down on you. But I could be wrong.

"... evil in a really small ...". Maybe until you get used to the game. I think that an advanced player could succeed quite well as an evil empire on any galaxy size.


~SDC~

"From the sound of it, it would only be a good idea to play as evil in a really small map, so that you can reap the benefits before it all comes crashing down on you. But I could be wrong. "

From everything I have read, they made a sincere effort to make all three alignments balanced in terms of overall power, while still providing very different play experiences.

--Soulfire