alignment tech weakness

Why is it nonsensical? Just because you can't develop the tech, due to your views, doesn't mean someone else can't develop it and then you use it.

Although, a 'good' player using 'evil' techs does seem kinda weird, and maybe that should hurt alignment. But if there is an alignment penalty, it should be 'evil' techs lower alignment by one point, but not much more. Evil players should be able to use as many good techs as they like, because they're just evil.

Try thinking of it this way:

The Drengin research Disruptors because they are willing to conduct lethal experiments on sentient life forms. However, now the results of the research have found there way into the galaxy at large. Maybe your civilization would never conduct such cruel and unethical research, but that doesn't mean you feel safe ignoring the technology. Of course, this might work better if "evil" techs, like Disruptors, led to armour/barrier techs that countered the "evil" tech. Which I think I just might have to build into my next game... Thanks!

End transmission.

~SDC~

There definitely isn't enough of a trade penalty. Evil civs should be very reluctant to trade their evil techs to good civs and vice versa. They should also be willing to pay through the nose for techs of the opposite alignment

Take the disrupters for example.Late game the alien ai still wont trade this for a really good tech.You pay alot for this tech even though its usually available in early part of game.This one holds its value well past its prime.

True, but I think disrupters are an exception. Most of the later game evil and good techs can be traded for fairly easily.

I think the unusually high value of Disruptors is an attempt to keep "evil" and "good" tech separate. I don't think it works particularly well, but currently there is no other way to do this. If you've got real problems with the high value, you can always go in and change the AI value of Disruptors. It's currently set to 70, which is absurdly high and looks almost like it might be a typo.

As an aside, I've modified my games so that evil civs get the Death Knight from Disruptors and good civs get the (slightly weaker) Cruiser from Phase Cannons. Works okay.

End transmission.

~SDC~

I wouldn't mind in some cases for some techs (really evil ones & really good ones) to be alignment only.

As for the rest of the tech make them tradable, perhaps some of the more dubious ones give different bonus's based on alignment. Take disruptors, maybe a good civ can use it its less effective due to shielding and or lower power to keep the operators safe, where as a neutral is the smae but cuts corners in the safety and evil of course has no shielding and the power setting way.
So to weapons it gives 4% to good 8% to neutral and 10% to evil. Just a thought...

Otherwise restrict the techs to alignment and balance them on a tech by tech basis so if evil gets disruptors +10 wep, good gets enhanced shields +10 def.



~SDC~

why should good civilizations take advantage of smuggling, slavery, hypersoldiers (controlled breeding)? Doesn't this make them at least a little more evil? Should having the power of The Dark Side grant good techs advantages in diplomacy?

Conversly, how can an evil civilization truely practice Benevolence, or Pacifism? How can an evil, corrupt, untrustworthy regime possibly benefit from the free trade of a Trade Center?

All reality aside (hehe), I think the advantages and disadvantages of alignment, as expressed in the tech tree and resulting social programs and bonuses, basically disappear over time. The only thing alignment really affects is diplo and scoring.

I really thing the ability to *benefit* from an aligned tech and social project should be based on your current alignment.

I think the gameplay would be better if you were restricted to techs you can research, based on your alignment and prerequired techs. For instance, I often never research Deflectors, but buy Shields. That's weird. I also can't start thinking how a good civ would use advanced slavery.

You can rationalize almost anything. Especially since we don't really know how these techs work. What is "the Dark Side," really, and how exactly does it affect your civilization in such a way as to increase your diplomacy? Unless you get a very specific answer to this you can't say whether or not a good civilization will be able to turn it to its own ends. Likewise for benevolence or any good techs, or the good or evil wonders.

Since this is a far-future game it really doesn't matter what we think of as "reasonable."

Think of it this way:-

A 'Vegitarian' doesn't eat any meat

A 'Vegan' doesn't have anything to do with meat or animal produce whatsoever!

Theres a big difference . . . it is all about ethics. Evil Techs if brought/utilized should attract allignment penalties . . . imo.

This isn't the best thread for it, but I'm going to post it here anyway. In my eyes evil tendencies advantages should be curbed somewhat so something with a morality of zero can't go and continue to choose all those beneficial evil advantages. My point is that a player that doesn't care about his morality at all, going for pure evil, can use the "random-load advantage" (meaning they load the game until the random colonization event grants them something really good like a planet quality increase) then keep selecting them, over and over again. In this fashion they can get a HUGE advantage, much bigger then the good guys can ever get.

My suggestion - stop colonization random events once your morality reaches 0 or 100, or disallow the character to select the evil or good path once he reaches the maximum.

I would disagree. The random events should happen just as often. Just because you've defined your morality to the extreme does not mean there shouldn't be more events. And besides, someone may want to flipflop their morality.

You didn't follow my message all the way - I said you shouldn't be able to continue selecting a path when you already reached the maximum - so you can still flip-flop. However, how do you suppose we balance someone who keeps getting big advantages as an evil player but he doesn't continue to suffer any further impact on his morality?

I think there are far bigger exploits that need to be fixed than this one.

well harlan, what you are describing is just plain cheating. we are really discussing game balance. my position is the tech advantages disapear over time which makes choosing an alignment *slightly* less important from a game play standpoint. it is still very important from a diplo and scoring standpoint, of course. By the way I always play pure good, and i usually take the PQ +40% when it happens!

I don't think you can take a game balance position on cheating. Cheating can be limited in any number of ways that don't change game play. For instance by limiting positive colonization events to one per planet, and plus PQ events to a percentage of inhabitable planets or something artificial like that.

Cheers!

I think preventing people to enjoy the game in order to penalize those who exploit its weakness is a bad idea. You're not addrssing the good problem. If you want to fix that, just use a seed in the save game and thus you will be sure that random events are always the same after save/open. No need to trash features because people exploit them.
Furthermore your proposed solution doesn't work at all. I could colonize, save/reload until I reach 0 morality. Then I still want those worms, so I settle a PQ3 planet and pick teh good events. My morality goes up, I can know find worms on the juicy PQ20 right there. The exploit here is not the random events, that's a feature. The exploit is save/reload gives different results after reload. This is what can be fixed, but it remains to be seen whether it's worth 'fixing'.

I would like techs to be obtainable only if you have the prerequisites (techs and alignment) because of gameplay issues. I would have to make a choice: If I stop being evil, I lose the advantage of the Dark Side. That will make me think twice before getting all the +PQ evetns and then trying to go good to get allied with the Altarian-Torian alliance.
As vincible says, Gameplay only, no rationalizing.
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Maybe if there were a way to detect the save/reload exploit and make it turn out an anomalous score.

But then you'd just end up punishing someone who is save/reloading because they botched their strategy repeatedly and wants to give another try.

Such as if I bought a full combat transport from an AI (but don't have the tech for it myself) and need to invade another AI before the planet rebuilds its defenses or gets captured by the other AIs. The problem is the population/soldiering works out to just about the same as that on my transport, so I would need to save/reload a few times if I keep getting the short end of the stick in the advantage randomization.

After I do this, your proposed anti-reloading trap kicks in and gives me a 0 score when I finish the game!

I meant maybe stacked bonus' on a planet. But I don't know if it would really be practical to try to impliment it.

I am expecting the stacked bonus to be fixed in an upcoming patch by limiting each planet to one bonus.

civ 3 had a fixed seed option, which can be gotten around (i got pretty good at it) by a strategy similar to the one written above about colonizing a pq3. You use throw-away colonizers on useless planets and count the number of times it takes to get a good event. reload, burn a couple colonizers, and bingo.

Really, game designers don't much bother thwarting save-reload cheats. It just isn't worth the effort.

Already done, according to CariElf.

And you'd get 0 rightly. If you gambled and used a lower number of troops than what provides you 100% chance of success, then you must face the consequences if you fail. The only reloading that is not a cheese is when your game crashes so you can't continue.

But of course the anti-reload trap would treat such a situation exactly the same if the game kept crasahing in the same place. The point is such a system is unfair and pointless. If someone is willing to waste time reloading for some particular thing, when by all rights they could move on and correct or compensate for the reason they reloaded repeatedly and finish soon enough to get a good lead on another game, well, it's their time to waste.

It is your sort of reasoning that would say, if a person were playing an FPS and had only a few HP left, instead of reloading until they got past a certain point they would have to restart whenever they die.
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It is just about possible to write a trap that distinguishes between crashes and intentional reloads - when you quit the game delibarately or load while playing, it could save this fact to your hard disk and use that information to calculate that you intentionally went back to an earlier point. But probably not worth it.
(If you want a real iron man game, try playing NetHack, which deletes the save game whenever you load it, and if you die or your computer crashes, you have to start all over again... Since games take several weeks to play, this gets pretty stressful.)


~SDC~