WHY become a "Good Empire"???

"but I need that "carrot" to get my "horse" going in the right direction".

The "right direction" is, I think, a matter of choice. If you like being evil then GC lets you be evil. On GC/OS2 there were many people who really enjoyed playing as an evil empire.

Brad has stated some time ago that there will be some drawbacks to playing evil and advantages to playing good, somewhat like was the case on GC/OS2. The different techs that you can research only if you are one or the other (and that even the "neutral" player can't researh) is one. Another is definitely a drawback (when they get it in, or is it in already?) for playing evil. Evil civs tend to try to start trouble with everyone else, but the good civs tend to support each other while trying to get rid of the evil empires. So if you play evil, theoretically, the other AIs should be more prone to attack you. Of course, its been a while since I have heard anything along these lines, so Brad and SD may have changed their plans by now.

I wasn't trying to say that "good" was the "right" direction or way to play. It is just that if I wanted to play a good empire, right now there is nothing to draw me in to play that way.

In fact, I've played at least my last 5 games with a "red" border. I've played this way because it afforded me the best opportunity to win and there is no "apparent" drawback for playing this way.

If I knew there was some "golden halo" to strive for, I would be willing to put up with all the negative modifiers for choosing a "good" path. As of right now, I know of no "golden halo" to reach for though.

If they plan on making the choices for good and evil more drastic on the outcome of your empire, great! It would be nice to know what these outcomes might be, but I can wait.

But if things are pretty much gonna be the way they are right now with good/evil, I guess I'll be getting used to that "red border" and creepy music. Why bother with being good.

Yes, I agree, there needs to be a "payoff" for being good. Right now every "good" when you discover something on one of your worlds has only bad consequences. It needs to be more nuanced.

Example:

The water creatures that get everyone upset when you find them in your water. Why not a morale hit (as already exists) when you don't do anything, but some kind of science benefit due to your ability to continue studying these creatures? Or you displease one political party with one action and please another. Just some ideas here.

Grifman

Being bad effects relations with good aliens does'nt it.

But to what effect?

It seems the benefits you get from the choices you make to become bad greatly outweigh the effects of having a couple races dislike you more than they already do.

Doing the right thing can be hard.

Few civilizations are able to do so.

Take the United States:
"Your colonists hvae come across a vast pre-industiral society that is inhabiting large portions of the continent. What should we do?"

A) We will simply not move into any territory they currently occupy [-40% to economy)

We will round them up and put them into reservations on small areas of land that won't affect us (-5% to economy)

C) Excellent, enslave them and get them to work in the mines. (+10% to economy)

The US obviously chose option B.

It IS hard to be a good guy sometimes. There's no promise of benefits. Being evil is easier. Being good has much less connected benefits (technologies only available to them, ability to get along better with neutral and good civilizations).

I think in a early thread it was mentioned if you want a real challange play evil and have all the other alien civs play good. They gang up to wipe the galaxy clean of the evil scum which in this case would be humanity.

The way I understand the game and what makes GC great is it does not matter how you play.

Play Evil,
Build you fleets, research weapons and ways to dominate the galaxy.

Do not expect to make friends with any Aliens, they learn fast you will betray them as soon as possible.

The technology branches and allows all sorts of cool weapons to be reasearched.

After all you want to wipe the aliens out.


Play Good,
Research ways to keep your population growing and happy and ways to get along with the alien.

You will not get to research techs like advanced slavery but why do you need these evil techs.

You end up getting to a point where all the races join together a control the galaxy as one.

Both are good and evil are valid ways to win.

I like to win a game playing nice then playing evil.

You can also win through influence having you culture dominate the galaxy or by research.

AARRGGHH...must...resist...temptation...to...become...evil........

I think it would be cool to see some correspondence from the good races, warning me of my evil ways as I make those "bad" choices!

The warnings could become more and more threatening as I spiral downward into my evil madness...MUHAHAHA!

Totally agree on those messages/warnings.

The drengin could say like:
"I know you would eventially turn over to the dark side, it was a wise desition. Welcome brother"

Hahahaha.

Historically, the difference between good and evil is longevity. Evil decisions tend to have fairly nasty long term side effects, while good decisions tend to have positive long term benifits. This happens even today - be a bad person, you'll get away with it for a while, but it will evetually catch up with you. Be a good person, you'll fall behind at first but eventually catch up.
My reccomendation is to have "good" acts eventually have positive long term effect, and "Bad" Acts a negative one. Say that over the course of 96 turns, the -16% water creature morale transformes to a +8% morale as people get used to them. (1% change very 4 turns). And vice versa - The +10% economy cited in the above example eventually turns into a -5% economy (or the -40% becomes a +20% as your empire absorbs the natives - Imagine if the Iriquios confederacy became 5-6 states instead of being overrun, or if Andy Jackson had obeyed the Supreme Court). This models the need for evil empires to agressively expand (Nazis, Mongols, Spanish) to outrun the negative effects of their acts and to collapse if they can't expand (USSR), but the ability of good empires (US, EU) to keep growing. Our mistreatment of the Indians caused problems all the way into the late 1800's; England's mistreatment of its non-anglic colonies destroyed the British Empire.
You'd have to playtest this to keep the early pluses / long term plusses balanced. My suggestion is to take 100 turns to switch it around to half as effective; dunno how that would effect play test / game balance.

Well said.

Incidentally, there are events being put into the game that are exceedingly rare (i.e. you may never even see them unless you play a lot of games) where there is a moral revolution in your civilization (or in foreign evil ones).

I like the idea of the benefits changing over time.

paul.

One idea I've seen elsewhere before is to have some type of galactic karma. Bad things happen to bad people, and vice versa. It would require that random events be implemented that don't give you choices like the ones in the current build do. The more evil you are, the more likely you are to get bad events, and the more good you are, the more likely you are to have good things happen to you.

I like the idea of having a greater affect on your civilization from being either good or bad, or even neutral. (I personally think that neutral civs should be rewarded.) I also think it should be long term, and ongoing. By that, I mean something like a bonus to production for evil civs that goes up as you fall more deeply to the dark side, or a morality bonus for good civs. Perhaps good civs' planets fight harder against evil civs' soldiers or something. All this may be in there, but if it is, then I'm not seeing it, and you can read my suggestion as 'point it out in game'.

What if there was a morale bonus for good and penalty for evil? say, up to +/- 20% empire wide (-20% for evil, +20 for good). Given that one good act is a -16% empire wide morale, and some evil acts grant hundreds (thousands?) of bc, this doesn't seem all that excessive. Even a +/- 50% morale based on Good/Evil would probably not be excessive. But the bonus should be no more than 1% per act (you need 20 good acts to get to +20 or 50 to get to +50, can't get it from just 1 good act).

I like the idea of good acts having long term benefits, while evil ones having short term benefits. That seems to balance things quite well, and seems "realistic" to me. The idea of good karma and bad karma does not seem realistic - good things to happen to bad people, and bad things to happen to good people, though we may wish it were the other way around.

Grifman

here are some examples of long term benefits of being good:

Random events:
1) Good emperor gives a good example to his citizens. Crime on planet X is down, increasing the moral of planet X by 3%.

vice versa:
2) The evil nature of the emperor gives a bad example to its citizens. Crime on planet X is up, refucing moral by 3%.

There could be random events that add bonus to population growth, and pretty much every other statistic related to a specific planet. The key concept here is that these events are random. When the player is presented which good/neutral/evil choice, he is told about the immidiate consequences of his action. But he also has to worry about the long term consequences that influence the types of random events he may be getting in the future.

I like those ideas above, so that each descicion shifts your alignment and within a certain range a random event is chosen based dependingly on your alignment.

What if the rate in which those random events occur is based on the alignment itself. i.e. an very evil empire gets more quite frequently evil events, than a less evil empire. As culture and society gets more and more extreme.
Cheers,

TT

I remember in the OS/2 version, Good civs were able to research 'Advanced Phasers' and get Corvetts (3att&6def) early in game and Evil were able to build 'Terminators' (20att/1def) later in game.
Will something like this be in ver 1.x?