There are no extra weapons or defenses for Neutral. You get the Neutrality Learning Center, all upgrade tiles made available on planets, and a discount when you buy ships outright instead of building them.

The NLC's makes extra weapons and techs unnecessary though, since they increase research ability so much you will be getting better weapons and all other techs faster. And the extra weapons and defenses from the Good and Evil alignments are not as powerfull as the most advanced weapons and defenses. The Evil races seldom research past their bonus weapons, so surpassing them is pretty easily done.

Just make sure you research up to them early enough to really make a difference. The time spent early in the game to get it pays off real quick once you start building te NLC's. Techs that used to take 10-12 turns will only take 3-4.

You also get the Temple of Neutrality, which gives you a portion of all the other races tourism money.

The other alignmets I don't know as much about. I dismissed them long ago in favour of Neutral's research ability. That alone makes it worth more than everything the others get combined.

Knowledge is power, especially in this game.

Netural also gets a 10% approval.morale bonus the last time I checked.

Good gets a loyalty bonus which is far less useful. And instead of free tile upgrades you get a saving
of 12*5=60 bc per turn assuming you have 5 or more colonies (excluding homeworld)

You also get the Temple of Neutrality, which gives you a portion of all the other races tourism money.

I think the text says of all netural races, so it's not very useful.

On higher difficulty levels potentially the biggest benefit you can gain from alignment choice is making freinds with potentially dangerous rivals and getting an alliance.
For instance in my last masochist game I had the drengies and the korxx as neighbours plus the thalians somehow became evil and the yor were in the game too. Guess what alignment I chose

yeah but who needs defense when this game is based on who shoots first?

yea, the Evil alignment sounds like a good one for warmongers and conquerers.

don't the Neutral alignment get some other weapons and defense? because in the online manual that came with the demo, it says the Neutral get some tech stuff. of course though it could easily be outdated.

(Repeating a few things)

All alignments:

- Harmony Crystals trade good. Pretty good morale boost.

EVIL:

- All upgrades to a starbase, which normally costs money, are free.
- Free invasion tactics when you build "no mercy invasion" project.
- Collect a small toll from alien freighters passing through your area of influence.
- Mind control thing, which I didn't realize boosted economy (never built it).
- Hugely powerful weapon techs become available. Psionic beams are second only to doom rays IMHO (expensive as hell though).
- Artificial Slave Center, which gives a nice boost to military production capacity on every world in your empire.
- Everybody hates you, especially Altarians and Torians.

Neutral:

- Morale boost.
- Temple of Neutrality (steals background tourism money from other neutral civs).
- Neutral shipping adds 2 new trade routes (the text saying 3 is incorrect) and adds +10 to your trade income.
- Neutrality Learning Centers, which are the most powerful research buildings in the game.
- All planet tiles that can be upgraded with enhancement are instantly useable. Extremely useful.

Good:
- Loyalty bonus.
- Temple of Righteousness, which steals background trade money from other good civs.
- Hall of empathy, which supposedly doubles the chances that a defeated civ will surrender to you.
- Empathic Tactical Defense, which boosts warship defenses by 20% (or is it +20?).
- Four new defense techs are available. You can install them as modules or not (expensive), but researching three of them increases the defensive strength of your warships. The fourth slightly increases the hit points of all your ships.
- Good and neutral civs like you. Evil races hate you even more than they did before.

I think that's all of them.

That's not going to work on tough or higher. One or the other (or both) will declare war before you've even finished colonizing. They _hate_ evil civs. H A T E. The neutral civs will ally with you, but definitely not the good ones. The best you can do with them is frighten them into submission with a larger military.

And no civ is going to let you build a military base near their world. They assume you're going to attack and they'll preempt you.

swi = first 3 letters of my last name.

I need to play a few good ethics games to get an idea on how they go, but I find neutral the neutral morale boost (higher taxes), terraforming boost (more buildings on every planet right away), and research boost the most appealing. Evil has good weapons but the other races tend to be very cross with you. I think it is better on small galaxies where you only have a few planets and a few other races to play against, which mitigates the alliances of your foes. (2 on 1 is easier than 5 on 1.)