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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.