LordKillerClown

Join Date 03/2006

Neutral: Will it be balanced somewhat or is it that way to stay? (some suggestions at end)

After a 1 week break playing oblivion (7.5 out of 10 all graphics toned down version of morrowind.) im back into Gal Civ with a vengance, which is testimony as to just what a great game it is (i am VERY fickle with my gaming)

Not a major issue but it does i feel take some "flavour" out of the game when playing metaverse (and score counts) because atm i can see absolutely no reason to choose either of the other two alignments. the response "turn the difficulty up" does not apply here because that gives MORE reason to choose it at higher difficulty levels.

First of all most neutral ethical choices dont affect the game at all.... no downside there..

The PQ bonus is AWESOME. total of 3 techs the last of which is worth alot of reasearch even later in the game.

Neutrality research centres i feel are the biggest unbalancer, these things are just too awesome for words... majority of the
time i crank out late game techs in 1 or 2 turns max with science at 20 % or something neither good nor evil special techs really matter because im so far ahead that my weapons/shields tech that what they are flinging at me is irrelevant.

3 extra trade routes for which i cant even think of a "roleplay" explanation for considering that the game says that the routes are "restricted by galactic law".

add the morale bonus and i see NO downside to neutral.

plus a few other smaller perks in there cheaper bought ships, bonus against non neutral civs when ground fighting ect

My suggestion:

Kill the 3 extra trade routes
No morale bonus (i feel good civs deserve it more, ie we are all in this together , lets help our benevolant rulers spread our "goodness" to other unelightened races)
Significant influence penalty.. i feel this one makes the most sense in terms of "roleplay" , charismatic leaders/ideas/cultures have definite feelings towards good or evil they dont sit on the fence.

Id say that even with these nerf's, good and evil both need some buffs.
Evil should get an advantage for invading and perhaps as an idea with trade routes to ONLY produce money for the Evil empire and not the other race they have traded with (think pirates/smugglers ect) or give evil empires the ability to trade with anyone regardless of whether they are at war or not.

Good needs the most buffing i feel. The lousy 200 or so credits from maintainance free 5 colonies (tho ok on smaller galaxies) is lame, and the diplomatic benifits are only with 1/3 of the races... defences are similar to the evils weapons ok but not that good and next to useless further on in the game. then the fact you have to choose all the negative ethical dillemas there is no GOOD reason to be good

Which is perhaps a statement on interplanetary politics but doesnt do much for balance or flavour of the ethical choices.

Im not sure what to do with Good actually...
giving them a major morale bonus and perhaps more control over the galactic senate or whatever its called
an influence bonus makes sense too (who would the citizens of the galaxy rather be ruled by?)
ect

anyways just some suggestions... wont stop me playing but would love to see some tweaks made or even for the expansion... i just feel that id love the different alignments to be closer in power rather than neutral being the obvious choice all the time.

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I don't like the idea of nerfing things. Just bring the others up to par. A morale bonus for good and maybe a hitpoint bonus as well as defenses. (good guys can keep fighting with bullet holes, bad guys die if you shoot sort of near them. Movies never lie.)

Evil should get some kind of evil power, like maybe pirates spawn often in their empire yet always go elsewhere to attack other races. Or maybe an evil logistics bonus, but not a whole lot.

Leave neutral alone. At most I'd say drop the advantage to invading other alignments. Neutrals never go on rampages or jihads, its not their style.

Making the other alignments more powerful would make a bigger incentive to get the morality tech branch. As it is, neutral is the only incentive laden one. I could really not give a crap about the temples. They're pretty pointless. The weapons evil gets are okay for a while, but they're spendy. Not taking an alignment is better when you're playing evil since you keep getting the random events.

For random events, how about in a future version, they keep occuring, but you get forced to take the choice of your chosen alignment? Then you'd have to choose between three really powerful alignment options, or the ability to pick your path? Good alignments would need another bonus to compensate for the fact that most morality choices screw them though.

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Good is just plain hard to play..and this from a pally player here. Ive always enjoyed Lawful Good types or just plain Good, but man in this game its harsh to try and keep your alignment that way. With the random events and some of them plain nasty if you choose good ouch..and the benefits..well heck...I tend to hit neutral more just because and I find that somewhat sad. I would like to see them bring up good and not nerf. I dislike nerfs intensly so lets hope they do something small to fix good a bit.

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add more stuff to good!
also change it so that if you start as a good race and pick evil choices and still got netral civ. maby a mod ifier for evil choichs if your a good civ?

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then the fact you have to choose all the negative ethical dillemas there is no GOOD reason to be good

This one I agree 100% with. Good shouldn't always have the negitive choice, and neutral should be just that and take a smaller % of both good and bad. if good/evil get 30% +/- then neutral should get 1-15% of both +/-. Also, the 2500 penalty when choosing Ethic's is WAY too low. (I've also found if you are in the red at the time of chosing, it doesn't cost you a thing..It SHOULD be if you cant afford it you should have to pick the one you can afford or just not research the tech.) Just take all evil events then take ethics and pay the meager 2500 to get all of neutrals bonuses as well. As mentioned above, there is just no incentive to be good/evil. Evil's weapons are nice and good's defences are all but a waste (at least until 1.2), but they do not equal the techs that can be pumped out with the NLC's and a captial on a 15+ planet surrounded by eco starbases fairly early in the game.

Just my 2 pieces of scrap metal...

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Good needs more of an influence bonus. As it is now, Neutral can win with tech and Evil with military conquest. Perhaps have Good have good defense so they can win with influence? Perhaps give them a special culture building or something that gives a big influence and/or diplomatic bonus.

I think Evil is pretty powerful, and at most need just a little tweaking. The slave center and free invasions are really great buildings. And you get all the goodies from random events.

But I agree. Good just plain sucks. It's not beneficial in any sort of strategy. Its military isn't as good, neutral has better science, and gets an insignificant amount of savings from initial colonies. Diplomacy? That's only with the other good races! It's only good at defense: in military and influence. Everyone knows that in war games, the defender always loses.

Also, just as a sidenote: Secret Police suck. So do propoganda centers. Just imho.

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I think Evil is pretty powerful, and at most need just a little tweaking. The slave center and free invasions are really great buildings. And you get all the goodies from random events.

I second that, IMHO evil and neutral are nearly equal, maybe evil is a bit stronger. While the special weapons aren't that good, the Artificial Slave Center rocks and the Mind Control Center gives a 100% boost to your whole economy (not only the planet it is built upon).
The only alignment that should maybe get some special buildings/abilitys/whatever is good, which is by far the lousiest. Don't get me wrong, I like playing good but I would love to see it pimped up.

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Good definately needs improving. I like defense overall, but it's not worth going to good. They're generally cheap to research, so with neutral you get good defense anyway.

NLC are awesome. Getting all the terraforming is very nice. With good there's nothing even close. IMO good needs :
1) perhaps more good civs in the game overall. (work together, and smash evil...)
2) significant trade bonuses. (way way more than what neutral gets) I mean huge trade bonuses, like +100%. This would make trade worthwhile, and help form alliances amongst the good races. (as well as give lots of money obviously)
3) some influence bonus( as said above)
4) some morale bonus
In GC1 trade was much better, and it made going evil very tricky. (because the AI's tended to gang up on you, the UN event that could limit your trade, and trade easily could be ~ 30-40% of your economy)

In GC2 i regularly vote for imperial gov, or limiting starbases, and then promptly leave the UN...

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The goofy Goodies should remain as they are now : weak & pathetic, easy preys for the Dark Side.

And the same goes on this forum in what concerns all the timid nice-guys who feel the need to add to their posts : "Please don't flame me"... accompanied by those naive yellow smileys & their dumb thumbs-up.

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As far as good bonuses are concerned, I'm going to have to disagree with your (gallagher118's) second point--the whole idea behind Neutral Shipping is that your empire takes a "trade with everyone" stance when trading with two or more powers that are at war with each other. Thus, the trade route bonus makes sense for neutral, but what sort of reasoning is there for good nations getting a trade bonus?

...Actually, a fitting trade bonus might be to have good nations gain better relations with trade partners (like it works now); meanwhile, neutral civs would have no bonus, and any nation seen trading with an evil empire would be looked down upon (which of course makes nations reluctant to trade with said evil powers, and gives the trade embargo an actual use). Of course, that's not really much of a bonus, given how the system works currently.

I'll agree that influence and morale bonuses would definitely be appropriate for the good alignment. It makes sense that the foreign and domestic masses are going to more readily follow the good guys--no one really sees themselves as actually being evil, afterall.

I'll also mention that it's pretty cheap that you can just buy your way into whatever alignment you want. I mean, what's ten trillion credits when you make a profit of four trillion every week? You shouldn't be able to buy your alignment--heck, it should never be made into a permanent choice!

Your alignment, and the bonuses/disadvantages that come with it, should be entirely dependant on the various choices you make as a leader. The closer you are to one end of the scale, the more pronounced the advantages and disadvantages for that end of the scale should be. For instance: if you're neutral, and start moving towards good, then your neutral bonuses and such would become smaller (neutral shipping only giving 2, then just 1 extra trade route), while the good bonuses, etc., would begin to appear, and become more pronounced (a small diplomatic bonus appearing, which then proceeds to grow). The same effect would happen if you were to start moving from neutral to evil.

That would add a whole new level of significance to the choices you make as a leader--imagine your senate or military disarming your battleships of their psionic weapons because you set one too many good examples, and your empire feels it can't live with itself as long as said weapons are in use! And of course, to help you get started on whatever path you wish to persue, you'd be able to choose a starting alignment.

Yet another twist would be governments that are more appropriate for an evil empire. I mean, it seems kind of odd to me that Lord Kona, on his quest to dominate the galaxy (and eat Torian skin), would find it beneficial to throw his totalitarian regime out the window and begin running things as a star democracy. As your alignment becomes less appropriate for the current form of government, that government (and its citizens) would become more and more unstable.

Granted, such a drastic change to such a prominent part of the game would have to happen through an expansion... But I'd gladly wait (and pay) for it. Really, though, I just hate to see something with so much potential go largely wasted.

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Franco fx

Join Date 04/2003

+59

I don't like the idea of nerfing things

I'm with you Big Jim. IMO too many things have been nerfed already. (okay, the game is still great but...)

Originally the rail gun had an early advantage of 2 firepower that was nerfed. I would have rather seen the rail guns penalized at the end of the tech to pay for that early bonus rather than make the rail gun a ho-hum choice of weapons. There is absolutely nothing now that makes any weapons system better than the other in spite of all the cost analysis that some indulge in to prove that this one is better than that one.

As for the ethical choices, no doubt neutral is by far the best but there are other reasons to make the good or evil choice. The first being to prove that you can win with a less than best choice and the other being that, at the point you make the choice a particular ethical allignment may be a huge startegic move in your favor, depending on who has the power in the game.

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I personally think the values assigned to the 'ethical dilemma's' in the game are overly weighted toward evil. It takes 3 major good events (with the corresponding penalties) to balance out some minor evil choice. The Good ethic does NOT reward players (properly) IMO. There is no real incentive to suffer through all the 'penalties' so you can earn a Good alignment, when you can choose evil in every choice and it only cost you 2500 bc's to change it.

I do think good should receive more bonuses to balance out all the hardship/penalties incurred in trying to 'earn' a good alignment. I also think the monetary cost to 'choose' an alignment that hasn't been followed should be much higher (like around 50,000 bc). I also think most races (especially custom/modified races) should start out neutral. OK, you can leave the Drengin evil and the Altarins good, but all the OTHER races should be neutral.

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Maybe it's just because I've only recently had the whole game, but I see the opposite of what people are saying. For me, Good is overpowered. You become good, EVERYONE seems to like you. Even the evil races seem more at ease with you on their boarder. You become evil, and everyone turns on you. Even the other evil races jump on the bandwagon and attack.

The only neutral bonuses that really seem to affect are the trade routes, PQ, and neutral research centres. While these are pretty good, because of the large number of people you like you as good, it's incredibly easy to get a diplomatic victory.

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I agree with the OP 100%

haha.. he said "fickle"

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Interesting, I seem most liked when I'm neutral, by both good and bad.

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Well if I had the say I'd get rid the possibility of paying money to change your allignment. It just isn't right that one has the possiblity of always choosing the evil option at the ethical random events and than paying 10000bc to become good or natural.
Honestly its a joke: The 10000 bc is mostly more than worth the beneifits of choosing evil: 40% planet quality increase, 50% starship bonus, 40%Moral Bonus etc. 10000bc you get by switching Production off a few turns.

Not a major issue but it does i feel take some "flavour" out of the game when playing metaverse (and score counts) because atm i can see absolutely no reason to choose either of the other two alignments. the response "turn the difficulty up" does not apply here because that gives MORE reason to choose it at higher difficulty levels.

Well I think your vastly underestimating the evil allignment. On difficulty modes below masochistic I find evil almost trivial. As soon as I have the evil weapons (psionic) I just about won. I usully rush for these weapons. Now at the time I've got the psionic shredders my enemies are still shooting around with railguns and lasers-no match at all. One fleet completely equipped with psionic weapons at this stage of the game is enough to kill the entire enemy military.
At the time my opponants have weapons that match my psionics I have already conquered 1 or 2 empires. From this point on the game is already determined.
And on difficulty modes masochist and above I find evil the only viable option (With trading swithed off). At the time you've equipped your worlds with NLC's the Ai has already decaled war on you and than you're cought with your pants down-having a bunch of NLC's but no weapons to defend your self. At least I have my butt utterly kicked as neutral/good on masochist.

One more thing: while the neutral civs get a permanent resaerch bonus(NLC's) evil and good races don't get anything like that. I think good races should have slight permanent defence bonus by adding a new high-end tech and with evil civs the same thing but with weapons. That because the superior defence/attack bonus of these races become obsolete once a better tech has been researched, and in case of defence that happens very quickly.
And for the psionic shredders, in my oppinion they are to powerful, but maybe that will change now with 1.2 and simultaneously firing.

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As I said many times before neutrality is a long term strategy, while evil is short term.
Evil has to use the weapons it gets early, or netural will win.

As for Good, well, let's hope the diplomacy thingie helps.

I don't understand why Netural has the morale bonus and Good the loyalty bonus, if you ask me the loyalty bonus is fairly useless. I would give Good , both the morale and loyalty bonus.

I would also give the bonus against invasions to Good (good people fight harder to protect their family).

Also Good needs a equalavant of NLC, maybe some super economic building ?

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Good could be improved by increasing the power of their defensive systems. i like the idea of good ships getting systems that protect against all damage types, rather than just one. Also the price for selecting an alignment you are not leaning toward should be increased by a factor of 10 or 100, with the option blocked if you cannot pay up front.

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good is just great as it is, everyone starts to like you
even with low military you can easily win a diplo victory (when you get rid of that evil guys, which is usually no problem with a strong alliance)
the armor techs could be beefed up, i'd like to see a super armor at the end of the tech tree that just good can research and thats better then anything available to the other alignments
the same for evil would be great, a new weapon at the end of the tree better then anything anyone else can research
then those alignments would have an advantage over neutral in end game
(btw i never ever research a whole weapon tree because its nearly as expensive as tech victory ... research through a defense tree is quick enough but the weapons are really hard)
neutral morale bonus is great
the invasion bonus is not really fitting imho

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Let's just have all the alignments be exactly the same...except in name. While we're at it, let's just have all the races be the same except for their portraits.

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I would give Good , both the morale and loyalty bonus.

For random events, how about in a future version, they keep occuring, but you get forced to take the choice of your chosen alignment? Then you'd have to choose between three really powerful alignment options, or the ability to pick your path? Good alignments would need another bonus to compensate for the fact that most morality choices screw them though.

I think good races should have slight permanent defence bonus by adding a new high-end tech and with evil civs the same thing but with weapons. That because the superior defence/attack bonus of these races become obsolete once a better tech has been researched, and in case of defence that happens very quickly.

Some very good ideas, I think. I especially like the idea of random events still occuring and forcing you to stay true to your alignement!

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I won a recent game by playing evilly but not researching evil for a long time. It was a smallish(random, I think small) map with sparse stars and planets and 9 races, so everyone basically got their homeworld and the other one in system and thats it. By being unaligned and evil acting, I kept getting pq events on my homeworld and ended up rocking harder than the other races that just aligned when they got the techs. Those evil events become huge boons on maps with no planets worth colonizing.

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