the evil races should ally together against the good and make grand alliances...

Evil races are too evil to cooperate properly. As they say, there is no honur among thieves.

Unfortunately, for some reason, Altarians are classified as a "good" race, despite the fact that their behaviour is closer to "Chaotic Evil".

Altarians arn't evil

Just because you are militiristic that does not make you evil. I picture the Altarians as Crusaders or Inquisitor's of sort. Completely blinded by their goodness and dogma. They are, in fact, the closest thing to a "pure good" society (as defined by AD&D).

The Drengin and Yor do need some help. It's not the good races that pummel them, but the neutral races that join in. Neutral should be just that.. Neutral. They provide support to both sides, but unfortunately, this never happens.

A race can be neutral and not intially engage in hostillities towards good or evil..but perhaps the neutral races are having war declared on them or are responding because they are allied with someone who has been attacked. The "true Neutral" from AD&D would be very hard to implement as a race. While some like Switzerland and others have successfully done it for quite a few years, it makes you wonder though if they were fully invaded how they would respond. In my games, I have had no trouble with neutrals..I tend towards good though and make allys of them..while going to war with the evil. I have yet to have a neutral up and attack me. I have also played with the Drengin and had no probs with the neutrals either..though the good races did tend to not like me much!

after 1.1 there are alot of tweeks needed to fine tune the game.. but it is a large improvement over 1.0x


the game is really good though... it has some ways to go... but it is good/fun

I've never seen the Torians do well, not in the late game. They expand quickly at the beginning, but in my experience they seem to fall behind on tech and then get swamped by more advanced civs (often me, but not always).

The Drengi do seem to be too evil for their own good though. Although I think that depends a lot on what the player is doing. I find that the civs that survive tend to be the ones with the same alignment as me (counting Good and Neutral as a single alignment). This is because if I'm good/neutral, I'll usually be killing the evil civs first, and if I'm evil, I'll be distracting the good/neutral civs from attacking the other evils. Maybe it's because I tend to wage war depending on my personal alignment.

I suspect that evil civs would fare better with less opponents, but I haven't really tested this.

I'm playing my first galatic size game (3rd game overall, the others were small maps with 3-5 oppoents under 1.0x) with 9 oppoents under normal difficulty and in my game, the Torians were the first race to surrender. Drengins is now 3rd in the rankings, was like 7th before. I guess it helped that my starting position as Terrans was on the far side of the Drengins so haven't had to fight a war with them yet. But I'm looking forward to it...

Dreadlords suck butt.

Anyway, in the two sandbox games that I've played, I've always been situated next to the Drengin, out of NINE other opponents. The first one was a medium map, and they were peaceful for a while... but since I hadn't built up too many defenses yet, they declared war on me. They surrounded my outer planets and I just got tired and handed all of my planets over to the Torians. The second, and current, game I'm playing is on a large or gigantic map, one of those two. I thought I would be relatively safe and have time to take it easy, but then I noticed a tiny red dot flash by on the minimap. I went in to confirm and yes... I was right next to the Drengin... again. They haven't been that bad this time around though. That may have something to do with the Altarians who have a whopping 50+ planets right next to us. The Drengin were at war with them and the Iconians for a while, but after having their fleets decimated and losing planets and starbases, they negotiated a peace treaty. No race has been knocked out yet. Once these cache crashes are cleared up, I should be able to finish this game much faster.

well if you remember from AP (Altarian Prophecy) The altarians were made by the human-like (i forgot his name) and forced the Drath to pack up and git. I've always wondered what the marks ment though...

I digress. usually the bigest races in my games are the torians and Arceans. I fixed that by going in to raceconfig.xml and giving the drengin (and arcean, to simulate a galactic rivalry) 200% Pop growth, social, military, and research production, 50% Trade bonus, 40% Defence and Attack bounus, and 60 logistics bonus. Then i playec a maso game...

Now, if only I could do the same against the frickin' Dread Lords! Wars of attrition do NOT work against them.

They do, but i would not recommend them, my longest game ever was the apocalypse scenario, a real war of attrition against the dreadlords. Two and a half week slugfest, where i tried to go toe to toe vs the dreadlords, it was murder! Finally got black hole weapon when i conquered one of there planets. Which swung the war in my favour.

I've always thought of the Vorlons as lawful netural, not lawful good.

The Vorlons were an enigma, supposedly Lawful Good (they appeared as angels remember, who virtually r always considered LG). I was a big Babylon 5 fan and loved the mysterious, secretive Vorlons.

Consider this, the reason given in the series they appeared as angels to all the younger races, was that they had visited the homeworlds of all the races and changed there DNA (when they were at a primitive evolutionary stage) so that any Vorlon would be viewed as an angel or equivalent by all the younger races. Thus those races would view the Vorlons as the good guys automatically and side with them against the shadow.

Also when the Centuria 'sided' with the shadow, the Vorlons were perfectly prepared to blow the Centuria homeworld (deathstar style) away, in order to get rid of the shadow presence on that world. Even though 90% of the centuria were innocent of any wrong doing.

So the Vorlon alignment is open to alot of debate. A bit like the Altarians in GC 2!