Should the Civs, like the Altarians, act like there supposed to?

A 'good alignment' does not necessarily mean 'religious'.
And even if it did, there are violent religions.

Any time that you are a different alignment, there will be conflict.
It is the same in the real world.

So no, you are not an idiot; but perhaps you are a bit ignorant.

Both the U.S. and Iran consider themselves to be 'good' - and consider the other 'evil'.
And they would both destroy the other in favor of their own ideals.
Each side thinks they are 'right'. And each side wants to force their own 'rightness' upon the other.

It's the way of the world, so get used to it.

I agree with Moosetek on some of his points.

A good alignment does not necessarily have anything to do with the religion. Also on how certain parties may consider themselves to be good where others view them as evil.

What I think Nequa is pointing out and I actually agree with is that the Altarians are generally seen as good guys in the game, same as Torians and Iconians. Good as in, they do not torture other races, use them as slaves and generally do nasty things, 'as the Drengi and Korath tend to'. If this is the case surely they would be more interested in picking a fight with these oppressive / down right evil races or trying to join forces to, if not remove them, then subdue them.

I too have played many games with most of the major races in play and have found they do not mind attacking me if I am week, no matter my ethical stance. This has been whilst I have played as Terran, Drath or Iconian. A week Drengi race yes! A poorly Drath race though!!! and this is without any persuasive race interfering.

Good should mean good.

Dude, you don't need to be so harsh on the guy. He was just stating an opinion. Enough said.

Well, it's something of a convention in single-player strategy games, that the player needs to build up enough military power to deter early war, even from factions that could logically be considered allies. Partly I think this is to prevent the player from just turtling and spending all resources on economy and tech buildup, but it also adds a nice element of unpredictability (well, at least I think it's nice).

For example, in Medieval 2:Total War, playing as a Catholic faction, fellow Catholic factions will attack you even at the risk of angering the Pope, if you're militarily weak, you're not defending your borders, and especially if you're occupying a strategically important area. So you can't always count on "natural" allies, unless you build up relations in other ways (trade, diplomacy, marriage in M2TW, etc.).

If you knew in advance that certain good-aligned factions would always avoid attacking fellow good factions, and would always go after say, the Drengin first, then the game might be too predictable and boring. This current design mixes it up. You have to stay on your toes.

Hey, I'm normally a nice guy myself (always plays good except for a few exceptions), but if you leave yourself vunerable, I too may consider attacking you. I probally choose to culture flip you instead of invading, to minimize the loss of life.

It depends on the circumstances. If the only thing you have to offer are planets, I might be comming after you. If an evil race is attacking you, I might join in to prevent worlds falling into the hands of the bad guys. If you have techs that you can sell me, I probally would buy them instead of attacking you.

You should consider on how useful you can be to me as an independant civ, and how easy it is for me to make your civ to 'join' mine.

Any organism, and thus any civilization's ultimate goal is survival. In this game, you have to expand in order to survive. The Altarians, or any other 'good' civ will do whatever they have to do to insure the safety and prosperity of their people. They may feel bad about it afterwards, but they *would* do it; and I'm willing to bet that you would also.
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I undearstan that being good does not alwasy mean doing the right thing (whatever that means) but I am talking about the Altarians, how's discribtion says there are good peace loving people, so I am left wondering why they attack me.

You have a point and you can do something about it. When you choose the Altarians as an opponent you you can go to edit and move the agressiveness slider as low as you wish. All races are by default at least moderately agressive. At low agressive they will perform the way you perceive them

Not if the civilization is an ideal oriented group. The "good" sides are supposed to be such a philosophical type of people that have such religious ideals. (religious doesn't mean believing in some god)

The Altarians are supposed to be peaceful civilizations, like a holy crusader that protects the good weak civs and attack the evil civs. That's what their profile says. I also feel that ethics matter too little in this game.

I'd really like to see a game that didn't operate on that principle: i.e., survival necessitates expansion. It would be interesting I think to play the game in different ways--for instance as a relatively small but technologically or militarily competitive or even advanced empire. As it stands that's extremely difficult to do. The game would require an entirely different economic mechanism.

Someone mentioned "real life," reality is that aggressive expansion hasn't enhanced the survivability of any empire ever...In fact it does exactly the opposite: drains resources into an endless money pit of "empire maintenance." And then the empire crumbles anyway. Falling dollar anyone?

For example, America's historic wealth and power is not really directly related to control of natural resources, but are derived more from her economic system & guarantee of personal liberties and property rights that allows those resources to be used in the most effective most productive way. Compare this to soviet russia or ancient rome...both of which ultimately collapsed under the crushing economic weight of the empires they had built, quite irrelevant of the fact that they controlled immense resources and in the case of the latter had no peer competitors to speak of.

GalCiv gets it halfway right. You can spend your empire into oblivion in the pursuit of dominance but get's it wrong on a more fundamental level: empires are never economically viable to begin with.

Now I realize that's a tough game development challenge--could an empire game without survivability being tied to conquest even be made fun?

Anyway Devs something to think about for GalCiv3...

Actually what their game lore says is that they're peace-loving NOW, but they have a very violent past, and actually drove the other co-evolved sentient race (the Drath) off their shared home planet:

WWW Link

So they're no stranger to violence. In fact, that "peaceful" thing could be read as inter-species adaptation only... like the way humans have (more or less) learned how to get along with other humans. But we did probably wipe out the other intelligent competing species on our planet: the Neanderthals. It may be that Darwinian competition insures that vastly different intelligent beings will always be in conflict. When a race moves out into space and encounters completely different alien races, the play-nice rules might change.

I'm not sure that's the game devs are thinking along these lines, but it's another perspective on supposedly "good" races. Maybe they're only "good" if you're one of them, and not competing for galactic domination.



Maybe... but on the other hand, I wouldn't want ethical alignment to insure too much predictability either. I like having to be careful, and not depending on another race to avoid stabbing me in the back, just because we share the same alignment. That's too easy.

This is where the 4X genre fails. And I'm an on-record 4X junkie of the first order.

I say this both as a lapsed social scientist who scored degrees from decent schools and a lapsed philosphical anarchist who believes that table-based role playing games might be one of 20th century's best contributions to art history.

If GC3 is to win rave reviews as worthy of being a new release from an established brand, then the underlying political economy models must reflect that, for "sentient" species at least, there is more to life than mere survival.

Well , this is certainly possible with GCII.

I am not saying it is the best way to play or the most fun but many of my games are won without a single war or conquest. Expansion is neccessary and the ability to defend oneself is usually critical but war and conquest are not neccessary.

Yeah, tell that to the Neanderthals.

And it's not even "survival" when a dominant intelligent species arrives on the scene, and starts altering the planet. Tell it to the elephants, the mountain gorillas, the orangutans, the chimpanzees, the dolphins, the whales....

Will any of those very bright (but not like us) species still be around, a hundred years from now?

I agree. The problem I think is the one dimensional and linear relationship between amount resources & game power. Devising a new model is critical especially when one considers multiplayer:

Anyone who's played the Axis & Allies board game or GalCiv2 or MoO or any similiar type multiplayer or single player game knows quite well by mid-game in any resource/power economic system it's pretty obvious who is going to win or at least who the game is really about. Sure one can hold out for the sake of holding out but for how many hours is it worth any player's time to resist the inevitable? Sometimes versus a computer you can turn things around up to a point, at least (I however called it quits in MoO when I discovered the Meklars had a fleet of 32000 destroyers though).

Most games of this sort are conceded when it becomes obvious that further resistance is futile.

This would be the main problem with GalCiv3 multiplayer if it operated on the same type of economic principle: it would be fairly obvious in short order who would be the likely winner or among the potential winners and who is not...and it wouldn't be worth the latter players' time to stay in the game--Because more resources = more money which = more ships & greater technology spending. So what's the guy who only picked up a handful of worlds to do?

It would be the rare game indeed that was actually played to "conclusion." And if it only becomes a race to mid-point dominance what's the point?

Consider Halo for a moment. While some one can run up an insurmountably high frag score--at any given moment he's just as susceptable to being fragged himself and the game only lasts 20 min or so anyway. But if the players' Master Chief became more powerful, harder to kill with every kill and every match lasted hours I think we would see a lot more folks drop out of matches. And I don't think it would be considered a very "fun" multiplayer game.

Which is why I would argue that any multi-player GalCiv type game would need to be designed economically in such a way that 1) players of relatively "minor" empires can still be relatively competitive against "stronger" empires despite their more scant resources and 2) that the game is relatively short or failing that has a nonlinear turn system where players can play at "any point" without requiring that all players be online at the same time.

Yes but you miss my point... survivability is still tied to resources in a way that makes being a "minor" empire of say only 7 worlds in a gigantic map with much bigger empires not economically viable.

Though good Sci-fi and even real history is filled with such David & Goliath type stories. I mean consider for a moment playing according to GalCiv2 rules the Rebel Alliance which controls few if any industrial worlds could never defeat the Empire, the humans could not defeat the Kzinti in Niven's stories, the 300 could never stand against Xerxes, the Soviets who had a horrible economy and scarce resources east of the Urals could not have designed & fielded the superior T-43 tank. I could go on and on but I think the point is made. The American Revolutionaries? No way.

IRL, survivability is not directly linearly tied to the amount of resources in control of a nation people or empire.

WoW.

After reading all that, my eyes are watering. I'm a newb, but here's my 0.02$ worth.

first off, imho the ethics of galciv2 DA is a lil flawed. I have edited the races i have played against. making the dredgin, derdgin(war party, evil, militaristic, etc etc etc) and making terran, terran(populists, peace loving, anti-militaristic) and the results are about the same. somebody will usually try to extort me, and then go to war with me. and half of the time it's a "good" race(yep i say good, cause i edited em to be good, see terran above) I'm not griping when dredgins, or the korx's(they are mercanaries btw, and merk's have a hell of a time being good when the dollar is your final demonitator) but it pisses me off, that the Torians(the once dregin slaves) wanna come at me. i mean come on man, you first contact me say you wanna work with me, and your music is all hippy like then 2 turns later i gotta switch my teks and production, cause you got a bone in your butt to wanna take my house. Not Gonna Happen. We're The Havens, froggie, and I'll be Damned if a Bunch Of TREE HUGGIN HIPPIES IS GONNA TAKE MY HOUSE. WHERE'S MY DOOMLASER. Whew, tension breaker and rant effector. Sorry bout that folks btw the Havens are my custom species but seriously, i wish the algarythims or whateve they're called had a lil more ethics in em, mayby if i played against smarter ai?(Ibelieve you can change that setting) I Rather Hate having to Waste a Terran System, because they keep sending thier vengance's and annoying the heck out of my Military bases. I mean one turn they wanna offer peace, then the next turn, they declare war on me. Sheesh

My current game started out having a mix of Civs. leaning "neutral" and leaning "good" (no evil Civs.).

Those alignments have stayed the same throughout the game, but at late game now an event has occurred (not sure of the name, or even if it had a name) that has the "good" leaning Torians adopting a different philosophy towards life and are suddenly leaning "evil".

This could be a result of being the only survivng "good" Civ. left surrounded by 2 remaining "neutral" Civs. and possibly the AI's attempt to acquire those wonderful evil techs. and weapons in order to achieve a military victory.

As it stands now, the Torians are surrounded by Influence SBs and will fold unless adopting a more aggressive stance by going the evil route I think.
An interesting adaptation on the part of the AI to shake things up for it's own survival.

Well, I been playing for a lil bit now(prolly like 3 or 4 games) with the cpu and ai abilities maxxed out. As well as making sure that the "good guys" are edited to act like good guys. but the results are the same. they all act the same. if your military rating is less than thiers, they gonna try to extort ya and then declare war. the last game i just finished(actually got aniahilated on this one) i had a lil corner all to myself, and was quietly building up my military, earilier the yor tried to attack me(no brainer there, since they're evil) took care of that, thier tons of tiny hulled 1 point mass drivers didn't do jack. but the arcians came bout a few turns later(they took over the yor home system, and didn't stop to bask in thier accomplishments) they came at me with fleets consisting of battleships(4 battleships to a fleet) and basically ate me alive, nothing i had could stand up against it. so the "ethics" didn't really change much if i increased CPU or the AI abilities, they acted like every other game i played(basically they say hi to you, then the next turn they try to extort you and then goto war with you). which is depressing. I dunno, but to me, if your peaceful, you don't go around bullying smaller or weaker civs. it seems to me that this game shouldn't go with a pretense of ethics. basically every civ is out to kill everybody else, unless they ally with you. then you just gotta wait till the game throws out that random, your embassidor was meeting and pissed off somebody's mistress, or some fanatic, kills the other civ's leader etc etc. then the alliance is off, and you have to kill em. Which makes it kinda disappointing for me. I like strategy games, but this one kinda gets on the nerves. it's not a big thing, it's just that to me. if your supposed to be good(good and peaceful), then you don't go around bullying other people. I mean you protect the weak from the cruel, not become cruel and oppress the weak. But here i go ranting about ehtics and such.

So bottom line is, to me, the evil/good paramater and the militaristic/peaceful paramater, doesn't really do much in the game. I'm gonna look at the modding files, and see if i can "Tweak" em myself. I'll let ya know if i can come up with anything. So far i know how to change the rescources and edit planets.

This would be interesting, but it was probably one of those random events that just happened to trigger at a serendipitous moment for the Torians. If not, then I would hve to argue that this is a cheat. The AI shouldn't be allowed to change the rules midstream in order to give itself an advantage. I doubt that this is so, however.

I'm on board with the idea that the good civs should support each other, since they share a common cause, ie, the eradication of evil. At the very least, they shouldn't try to bully or extort from each other. This only goes for the beginning to mid-game. Towards the end of the game, it is kill or be killed, and I could certainly understand the AI changing it's 'attitude' in response to a threat to it's survival.

As far as the evil races go, I think that the good races should be given free reign to do whatever they see fit to remove the threat.

Kinda found out someting about the "ethics"

first off, every custom game i play, I start out as leaning towards evil(in fact the slider is all the way on the evil side) Since i'm playin a custom race, i don't know of any way to change that.(some peeps on another forum post gave me some ideas, but i couldn't make em work, i'm prolly slow:) Anyhoo, after i saw that, i have been doing zeno ehtics as one of my preliminary teks to research, b4 i get deep into the game. and after gettin that, i either choose neutral or good, depending on how i feel. But i noticed that the civs act like they're supposed to. which brought me to the conclusion. . . If your an evil empire, the googguy civs want u dead, the badguy civs will play survival of the fittest and will want u dead, if your not the fittest. and the neutrals will basically flip a coin. So in retrospec, i believe i was wrong about the civs needing a tweak. If your an evil empire, the goodguys will hate you because your evil, and the badguys will hate you if your weak. So my advise to you is research ethics asap.