A message from the Neutral Newbie

Well, one reason evil positions are popular in games (and other fantasy roles) is because the player would NEVER take that ethical stance in life, or even in a multiplayer environment. But it is hard to actually hurt or REALLY be cruel to a batch of memory locations and electrons.

Also evil gets cool weapons, and free SB modules.

drrider

Evil gets the best advantages. First off there's the Mind Control Center that's documented as causing planets to flip to you immediately but actually gives you a global 100% economic bonus. Also the Artifical Slave Center gives a .5 increase to military production. Not exactly what .5 means and it doesn't show up listed in any of your stats but it appears that's it's a hard coded 50% bonus that is actually multiplicative as opposed to additive. By that I mean most bonuses merely add or what people sometimes refer to as "stack" but the Artifical Slave Center bonus is applied *after* all other bonuses are applied so it actually multplies other production bonuses. Also as drrider pointed out you get early access to some powerful weapons. You can often win pretty much any game with psionic beam. I've won games where I merely had psionic beam and my opponents have had doom rays and black hole eruptors. Another goodie that being evil gets is the No Mercy Invasion Center that gives you free invasion tactics. Finally Evil gets all the good choices during the planet colonization events.

Neutral can be fairly strong. The biggest benefit of going neutral is you get a 10% bonus to approval. This 10% adds directly to approval and not 10% to morale. As such it's much more powerful than a 10% morale bonus. The Neutrality Learning Center is certainly an advantage as well but that's about it.

Good really gets the short end of the stick.

Neutral gets Neutrality Learning Centers for fast research, Neutral Shipping for those who like trade(like me), totally free terraforming(no tech required) and discounts on core ships(which can be used to buy them cheap and sell them to other races at higher prices). Neutral ethical choices have hardly any or no effect on the game at all.

Evil gets the ridiculously overpowered Psyonic Beam, the similarly exaggerated Psyonic Shredder, the comparatively tame Psyonic Missile, and those aforementioned cheap-o Galactic Achievements which reduce game difficulty. The Evil ethical options are disgusting if you actually read them, but make your game easier for no input effort.

Good gets improved defenses like Subspace Rebounders, Dynamic Shielding, Telepathic Defense, and the very nice Arnorian Battle Armor. However, except for Arnorian Battle Armor, the other special defenses are not quite as overpowered as the Evil alignment's Psyonic weaponry is. As for Achievements, the only decent one that the Good alignment gets is the Empathic Tactical Center which increases all your ship defenses by 20%. The Good ethical options are largely self-destructive drawbacks in the name of being a good ruler.

I'm Neutral because of the automatic terraforming, NLCs, Neutral Shipping and ship discounts. The other two alignments may get special stuff to put on their ships and planets, but technology can always be traded and planets can always be conquered.

Terraforming is only automatic in DL. In DA you have to research the techs, but then you don't have to spend any time or points to convert tiles.

drrider

I play them all, But evil is definately the strongest for military conquest.

I choose which ethic the align to depending on how the game goes. If it's in the bag and I feel like something different then I'll choose Good. If I need a better economy and faster research I'll go Neutral. And if I'm being beaten to a pulp (or am approaching that stage) then I'll go Evil and use the powerful weaponary to throw back my opponents and turn the tide.

Most of the time I'll go Neutral as the extra trade routes can be very helpful to keep you afloat early game if you research the techs early enough, and the free terraforming is very useful (I still play DL but hope to upgrade to DA and eventually TotA in time), not to mention having Neutrality Learning Centres as the best reseach facilty in-game.

The No Mercy Invasion Center is only useful on really large maps w/ lots of planets. Otherwise it's just cheaper to pay the invasion tactics.

With Good you get pretty nice defences, which can balance out the weapons of Evil especially at the beginning of the game. At the beginning I always focus on the right defences and therefore my ships have a nice advantage.
Neutral is quite interesting too once you get further into the game (especially because of the NLCs).

I mostly play Good, because it is an interesting challenge and hei we want to do something good for our galaxy, right?    

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I'bve always played on a medium map. All the pop up we get only gives bonuses to Evil char. It would be nice once in a while if the Evil would also get a negative impact. The way it's being done now seems to be ... No good deed goes unpunished. Pretty lame.

I try and play good I like the extra challenge.