Good vs Evil balance

Depends on whether or not you're planning on taking the galaxy by force. If yes, then I would say evil is probably superior.

otherwise, I'd say not necessarily.
The short-term benefits of being evil are obviously better than being good.
but all the benefits of being good (and neutral, too) are based around fairly significant economic, technological and loyalty/morale bonuses. So whatever losses in money and production you take by choosing the good and neutral choices are made up later.
All of these are listed in the manual.

Also, you have to consider what alignment the other races are. If the major powers in the galaxy are all aligned with good, it can be a serious blow to your relations with them if you become evil.

edit: it's also possible to balance out your choices. I played one game as the Drath, who start out leaning toward good... and had an event that gave me a +44% bonus to my ships if I chose the evil option, which I did... then, later, I chose a good option that only caused me to lose some money. When it came time to choose my alignment, I was still able to choose Good without having to pay for it.

In my last couple of games I monitored my alignment so that I was just a little evil when it came time to chose. Then I picked neutral and paid a few thousand bc for it. It was worth it in the long run.

I love the evil "Don't pay for starbase upgrades" ability. I build starbases like a mad man.

-Dewar

Let that be a lesson to you: Evil always triumphs over good. In GalCiv 2, good guys are finished-off first.

Actaully, it looks to me like neutral (IE The Arceans) triumphs over everything.

A couple days ago I thought Evil was to obvious a choice.. but ive been playing around with Good and beleive me..it is very beneficial...maybe TOO powerful.

for one.. its bonuses to moral and such are inherant.. Evil has to build stuff to get the bonuses.. which not only takes time and money, but precious spots on your planets.

for two.. the Good temple gives you a portion of all other good race's trade profits.. and there are alot more good than evil civs.

third.. the temple of harmony (or whatever its called) that doubles your chances of someone surrendering their planets to you..is a HUGE benefit. I just had someone surrender their planets to me for the first time in a game (first time ive had the temple too).. and I doubled my planet count and got two class 21 planets out of it.


Good definatly has its strengths..and its really not THAT hard to go good. Rarely will you come across a situation where you have to take a big sacrifice. Alot of the time you can go the neutral route for no bonus.. or the good route if its a minor thing.

I take the neutral alignment as do most of the AIs. The trade benefits are nice, plus the added weapons and defenses.

Neutral trade benefits my butt, the free and instant terraforming even if you don't have the terraforming techs combined with the morale boost outweigh almost any bonus any of the races have, the free evil starbase upgrades being the only thing that really comes close. Oh, and Evil does get some nasty weapons.

Personally, I almost always pick the evil colonization event, then pay my way back to Neutral when I get Xeno Ethics. It's never more than 2500 BC, even if you're pure evil.

It seems like there's only one good race, the altarians. Hehe, I always end up with a lot of enemies and no friends playing them. There's a treesome of evil but the biggest bunch is the neutrals.

Actually there are three good, three evil and four neutral races.

I don't find the neutral terraforming benefit to be much use. Terraforming is cheap enough that each step generally only takes 1 or 2 turns. I may have to give good a try since it sounds like it might match up well to a turtle strategy which is fairly typical for me. The starbase benefit for evil would be huge for me as well though so I guess it comes down to a choice between good and evil for me.