1 sided scoring

So, Lone Starr, now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.

I see your schwartz is as big as mine!

The OP is correct, from all I can see, and this has been discussed frequently in these forums. A few rare individuals have tried to make a case that good is in balance, but I'm far from convinced. The only real debate is whether evil or neutral is best. I have been playing "evil" in the TA betas, after playing mostly "good" in my metaverse games. I have been a bit surprised how much advantage is gained by the evil choices, now that I am taking them myself. The conventional wisdom is that playing as "good" equals playing at one higher difficulty level. I don't know why that is at this point, but I agree that it would be nice to see this aspect of the game balanced properly.

One possible partial work-around now is for a player to take all of the "juicy" evil bonuses when colonizing, and then "repent" by "buying" good when you research Xeno Ethics.   You get to keep all the early "advantages of evil" while finishing the game as "good." That's pretty bad theology and ethics and I would not recommend the practice in real life, but this is, after all, only a game! Still, since this game involves "role playing," and many of us would like to role play as "good," it would be nice to see the ethical alignments such that each one may be played without penalty.

The biggest problem I have with the current ethics is that you have to freeze when you research xeno ethics. After that, no more ethical dilemas... Why?

All that would be needed is to make things delivered by your ethical choice(s) not function if you deviated. I know that could be a pain in the coding side of things, so I understand why they did it this way.

The other big issues are that there simply are not enough other good civs and the value of trade is far too weak to make chosing good meaningfull. I loved how in GC1, if you went evil, you were generally:
1) ganged up on
2) not able to trade. (which ment something back then)

In DL/DA i don't even bother researching trade anymore. It used to be one of the most important aspects of the game, and now it is just a joke.

I do think Evil is a bit overpowered, but I'm not sure I'd like to see a big boost to taking the Good path. Here's my thinking, and it's based on (imagined) sci-fi "realism" and not abstract game balancing:

A mature planet-wide civilization might eventually reach a point where a "good" path is eventually adopted, within that civilization. Our current world civilization isn't there yet, but it's a much less brutal planet than it was in the Middle Ages. We wiped out any close intelligent competitors long ago (Neanderthals), so we can afford to settle down and try to get along with our fellow humans.

But what happens when you go out into the galaxy, and meet other intelligent species? That starts the Darwinian "survival of the fittest intelligence" battle all over again.

A Good-aligned civilization would have no natural advantage there, and in fact it would probably be a handicap. That's the premise of the Human/Kzin conflict in the Niven novels. The humans had achieved world peace, and had to re-learn how to fight wars after meeting the Kzinti. Not all alien species might be that bloodthirsty, but you'd still have to learn what nasty tricks you could, even to compete with a benign trading race like Niven's Puppeteers (who actually aren't all that benign, as it turned out).

So, yes... in game balancing terms it might not be fair, but I can see a justification for setting it up this way. Nice guys finish last, etc. At least you're not absolutely forced to take the Evil path, unless you're going for high scores. Neutral works pretty well for just solo gaming. That's usually what I go for, unless I'm just itching for a fight and want to role-play the bad guys.

Zenicetus-

I agree mainly with you in my stand point with the exception with the game as far as scoring, if the game would not be changed to help the good choices I would hope that if one would choose the good path from the begining, not with xeno ethics they should get a score boost to compensate them for taking the high ground or the more difficult choice. If you take it with xeno ethics I think you should still get a boost just not as much as one would see choosing and sticking with the good alignment the whole game.

I understand to a point how in real life the bad choice of things might typically give you advantages or bonus's, however, in the same side of things the good choice of things can also give the same bonus's and usually in my experience when they do happen they typically are a higher bonus but, usually start off very slow and grow over time where as evil choices typically give you a huge reward and one normally will feel some backlash from thier choice as time goes on therefore slowly pulling back thier reward.

This is what creates that little pause when you have a moral dilemma isn't it?Although I can see that if being good makes winning tougher it should be reflected in the game scoring.You would probably have to chose good every time to get the score bonus,no I'll go neutral on this one so the Arceans won't attack me now.
but then good traditionally gets their reward in heaven while evil seems to enjoy it in the material world  

I'm not sure, but I don't think the fundalmentalists or Jagged knife effect you as harshly if you are good, I could be wrong

Fundies only take planets from evil players, IIRC. JK is an equal-opportunity annoyance, though.

I agree with the OP sometimes being good should have the benefit, it's always seemed strange to me that the eveil option is always best.

yeah but I only see thier appearence once out of every few games I play so it doesn't handicap an evil player that much, plus they respond like a minor race which are usually a minor annoyance at best. I've seen in the suggestions post to make minor's more of a threat, which would be nice, being that the last time that I felt actually threatened by a minor was back in DL.

Well, I guess that I am a bit unique. I choose Yor and take all of the evil choices and then I endup paying the 10,000 BC to be good. I used to be in the top 3 a long time ago. There are a few things that help. If you are good, the other races tend to not want to go to war with you, giving you an easier time to develop an army. It is also easier to get an alliance with the other good races, so they will come to your aid when other races declare war on you. Plus, your colonies are less likely to be subverted culturally. However, if none of these are factors in your game (you never get subverted and are always more powerful than everyone else in the game), then Evil will be the more logical choice.

Oh, there are also a few UP items that severly limit Evil races.

I pretty much always go for neutrality myself after picking mostly evil choices during colonization. The approval bonus, the Neutrality Learning Centers, the extra trade routes (if you go evil you usually get all but one trade route outlawed), the bonus on ground invasion against non-neutral opponents, the extra income from the temple, free terraforming for tiles, and you're usually in a better situation diplomatically than if you go evil.

In my mind the only thing that makes evil that great is the mind control center, the rest are relatively smaller perks. I'd prefer the multiple decent bonuses of neutrality to the big bonus of evil plus a bunch of minor perks.

The problem with good is that it only consists of minor perks and there is nothing big to make going good worthwhile. To be fair they did change the tech trees for the Altarians and the Thalans and made the choices more balanced in TA. So I'm pretty sure they are looking at this to some extent, but I don't know if they planning on changing anything in DA.

i'm usually evil and so are most people because evil is better by nature. really, in a game who would want to be good when you could be a villain? Good just doesn't compare to bad, so why should they make being good better than evil, if they know that you know that evil is always better and that you should definitely always be evil?

Although i couldn't really care less, you could mod the game to balance it. you could add more planetary improvements with vast bonuses to good civilizations or you could even take away some the bonuses and improvements evil races get!

I would consider making a mod to for this when i finish the mod I'm working on now (The Bringers of Light). It would be fairly simple with the correct amount of skill, brains, creativity and of course TIME( ;)) ! So maybe in a few months or something. if i start on something for this i'll let you know.

-DSep

If you are good then you do not have sin weighing on your soul.

That IS the reward/bonus.

I feel that good civs should get morale bonuses for working to improve the lives of their citizens while evil civs should get approval penalties for not caring/abusing their citizens for profit. That, if applied properly, should help a great deal and stay faithful to real life. I mean, when was the last time a justly ruled kingdom had any royalty defenestrated? Most revolts in history were because the royalty just sucked and they were hungry. Oh so hungry. But the royalty didn't do anything, so the peasants revolted and threw the royalty OUT THE BLOODY WINDOW. Maybe a reflection of that lack of appreciation would solve these alignment woes.

Okay, I'm laying down the gauntlet right here. Explain how "evil is better by nature."

it's very simple, if you're evil, you don't have to care about anyone but yourself and how well you do. If you decide not to be a tyrant and to rule with justice you always end up losing in the end because you have to pay more to take care of your people. This is because you have to look at the big picture and make decisions that benefit you as well as your empire, whereas villains only have to look at the immediate benefit of things because they only care about themeselves and not the good of the people in their civilizations; so they can improve their military or influence (or anything else) if they want to, while not actually caring about the morale of the people (to a certain extent) or how they are influenced.
Therefore i stand by my opinion that evil is better by nature in "most" games.

-DSep

You don't in games, which is a shame, because in real life, you also don't. That is until your 'citizens' revolt and freaking SHOOT YOU. REPEATEDLY. IN THE FACE. I hope stardock decides to include how unpopular tyrannical governments can get.

But yeah, in most games, evil is easier. It shouldn't be, though because there are consequences. For example, if you go on a robbing spree where you kill anybody who tries to stop you, the SWAT team won't show you any mercy. If you take over a country and kill your people to maintain control and happen to be taken from power, your people will find you. And then hang you. It'd be cool if GalCiv reflected this.

I was wondering how long it'd be before someone was going to post that crap.

yeah, the reward should be not having to duck and cover when the rioters come for your head because there aren't any. That's a real reward.

That's just silly. It's entirely possible to run an "evil" empire (by Galciv ethics, anyway)without fearing the lynch mob every second of your life. The Romans held slaves, fed people to the lions, conquered their neighbors, etc and very rarely did emperors die to mob-related violence. Of course, like every other "evil" empire, the majority of citizens didn't think of themselves as "evil".

For that matter, the British would have been considered "evil" during most of their colonial phase - exploiting natives and colonists, denying people say in the government, encouraging the slave trade, exiling criminals to Australia and forcing them to work, etc. None of that resulted in any monarch's head being forcibly removed, at least not by mobs

Similar things could be said of the Mongols, the Greeks, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Communist China, the USSR, the US, and darn near any other civilization you could name. Every one of them would be considered "evil" from many points of view, but none of them have lost entire governments to mob violence.

There are some that have, of course. Pre-Revolution France, Czarist Russia, and pre-Communist China spring to mind, and I'm sure I could think of others if I tried. These seem to have happened either by being too evil, or not evil enough, - either they failed horribly at maintaining a bare minimum of morale and the illusion of stability, or they didn't sufficiently suppress internal dissent. Probably both at once, of course.

If you truly want to play a "good" civilization, you would have to win by diplomacy or tech, assuming there is at least one other "good" civilization in the game. Conquering an evil civ might be justified (of course, for moral sanctity it would be called "liberating"), but no "good" civ could justify the suffering and deaths of invading another "good" civ, and probably not a neutral one. Ruthlessly crushing their culture would also be contrary to moral policy.

Yeah, I did get a bit carried away with the exaggeration, didn't I? My point is that running an evil empire, no matter how well you cow the populace, isn't good for morale. Even if you appeal to your race's feelings of superiority, all the other groups will be pretty ticked off. For example, in Nazi Germany's empire, even though the actual Germans were pretty happy with the setup, everybody else was kind of angry.



You want to know why so many barbarians hated the Romans? I think the whole 'slaves' thing was a pretty big part of it, and that type of unpopularity would be a neat feature in GalCiv. And I doubt that whole Spartacus business would've happened without slavery. Also, considering the turnover rate of emperors at the hands of the praetorians, I wouldn't use Rome as a case for the safety of running a corrupt, "evil" government. I should've specified that lynch mobs weren't the only danger that arises, but the point is that there tends to be a much less satisfied population in "evil" empires, and bad, unproductive things happen when people aren't happy. Also, the budget the Romans put into bread and circuses was enough to run a few small kingdoms, so when you factor in that many morale buildings, it's hardly surprising that there weren't that many riots (not counting the ones inspired by the chariot races)



A lot of the reason for that was they took brilliant advantage of pre-existent racial enmity. I'm not saying that evil empires should be fearing for their lives, just less popular.



Considering that a rather autocratic type of rule was the norm, it's understandable that the resistance to these countries' reign wasn't always the least popular thing, but there were a few uprisings: Philippines in a state of guerrilla warfare (US), Warsaw Riots (Nazi Germany), Czechoslovakia and Hungary (USSR). These reflect a low level of morale in the brutally subjugated outlying colonies, something a morale modifier would accomplish.



Don't forget the revolutions of 1848 that happened in pretty much every country in Europe. Those were a pretty big deal, even though they didn't overthrow the rulers, an equivalent rash of riots would've caused some serious problems in GalCiv. But these failures show how delicate a balance running an "evil" empire really is.



Yeah, sounds about right. Some alignment penalties for war would be nice, can't help but agree there. An influence and morale bonus for being good would help guide "good" civs onto an influence/diplomacy path, and the bonuses for good are more desperately needed than the penalties for evil (but those are important, too). And you aren't crushing their culture, you're 'enlightening' them, and incorporating them into the 'greater good' See the Warhammer 40k tau for how to run an occasionally violent, aggressively expanding, but "good" empire. Remember, "good" is in they eye of the beholder, and morality is relative. It seems that the "good" races are "good" in the same way that paladins in Dungeons and Dragons are: moral and incredibly stuck up about it, and completely willing to justify killing most things by saying that they were evil or 'not good enough' and their destruction was justified, and even necessary.

You know what? That doesn't matter. I know quite a few people who are blind to their own faults. Just because people believed they were justified and thought they were doing good doesn't mean they were justified and doing good. It just means they were engaged in heavy denial and revisionist history. The statement that "[they] didn't think of themselves as evil" is just an empty platitude. It's irrelevant.



Morality is not relative in Dungeons & Dragons or Galactic Civilizations. That's why D&D has the alignment system - to lay it out relatively objectively - and GalCiv has actual technology to research being more efficiently and effectively good, evil, or neutral.

Also, the idea that paladins are stuck up prigs is just poor roleplay or prejudiced players, not the default way to play the class.

He probably meant sanctimonious. Which, yeah, since the idea of Paladins were inquisitors like Torquemada... that's a pretty fair assessment. The problem at least was that in D&D, they WERE justified, as it as never really an issue. Slaughtering a town of heretics might be justifiable as good, but is still an intrinsically evil thing, but it works for Lawful Good all the same.