what advantages to being neutral?

Just a quick off hand thought . . .

You should get the benefit of having more choices politically.

ie. Until you drift one way or the other you should be able to more easily make deals with any of the other alignments as they have no grudges against you because of your previous reputation.


Elrikk


~SDC~

Well, having had a good race declare war on me for being evil when I had a neutral alignment of 53 or so, I have to disagree with the thing about no grudges...

~SDC~

OK. So go and ruin a perfectly good theory why don't ya.

From one point of view they should have relatively less of a grudge then if you were alligned further away from them so that should be a benefit.

From another point of view though everybody who is not neutral will see you as being relativly unlike them and that would make the game harder.

Ya pays your money and ya takes your choice.

Elrikk

~SDC~

The annoying thing about said war was that I'd set out explicitly to play that game as good. It all went down the drain because I didn't get enough events to move my morality away from neutral before the good empires decided to declare war.

~SDC~

The benefits of a good alignment seem to be...

1): Diplomatic relationships with good races will improve naturally over time.

2): Good races are more likely to assist fellow good races while evil races don't care much about other evil races.

3): Nifty technologies that are somewhat better than their evil counterparts.

I have observed three triggers for the AI to declare war spontaneously so far...

1): You are at war with an AI's ally or trade partner. Since alliances are binding, your alignment will have no effect here. A favorable alignment may help slightly with the later case however.

2): Your empire is too weak and the AI just wants to wipe you out. While alignment may help a bit here, it probably doesn't have too large an effect.

3): Diplomatic relationships with races of opposing alignments will naturally degrade over time, at a rate that seems to exactly offset the improvements from trading routes. Once your relationship degrades past hostile naturally, the AI will declare war on you. Giving into extortions can delay this deterioration but it won't last forever.

I'm in the middle of a game. In reality, if you hover around 50 (and make an effort to do so, you get nothing, but if you vary up and down (say between 70-30) you get some special techs from each.

Other than that, the pure evil empires declare war no matter what I am whenever they darn well please. Careful in your sliding however. If you slip too far towared evil, the chaotic good races will declare war. If you slip too far towards good, there's not much consequence as the evil races tend to want to fight anyway. I've noticed that evil deads take you toward evil much faster than good deads take you toward good. Either that or it's just hard to be good when you're as conquer happy as I am.

The UI is nicer

Pontius,
I believe there is a correlation between the number of alignment points awarded vs the extent of the bonus or penalty. So stop picking the neutral option (like i did) when the really tough penalties come up and your goodness would rise much faster.

Pontius: If by "slipping too far toward evil" you also mean "not slipping quickly enough toward good," sure.



~SDC~

Thanx Ray. My problem isn't picking the neutral option too much, My problem is I just like killing off those worms (planetary quality bonus of 30%) which undoes about 10 good pix too much. I'll just have to be more repentant next time.

Where can you see your alignment point rating?

~SDC~

Domestic screen, Society tab. IIRC.

Beware that Altarians seem to remember any evil deed.
A single evil choice will get you nailed with them.

My biggest problem with alignment is map size.
On tiny, it is hard not to be neutral, because you get so few events from planets. On large+, it is easier to shift your alignment.

The problem with giving neutrals a bonus is that it is too easy to choose the neutral option. It generally does little in terms of benefit/problems, so you can always fall back on a neutral choice if the good one is too terrible (like you're already broke and they ask you to lose another 66bc).
If you do that, neutral will always be better than good. Currently, good makes you pay for its good techs. Neutral doesn't cost anything. If it gave some advantage, it would be unbalancing, unless Stardock somehow makes it 1) late-game only and 2)incompatible with good/evil benefits (techs).

I tend to think that neutral choices should have transitory and minor bonuses, or transitory and minor penalties. But in either case, it should never be more attractive than evil or more harmful than good.

(one of my problems with a lot of the library mods)

~SDC~