1) There are no "same" weapons in each alignment.

2) Global.

Your second question has two compleatly different answers. The morality of the choice is universal (How it would be isolated, moraly, to a single colony I would have no idea how that would work) however the actual benifit is almost always local. A PQ plus colonization event wont raise every planet in your empire by 50% obviously.

To expand on that. The bonus you get from moral choices when you colonize a planet is only applied to this particular planet. The moral conseqences counts on your moral rating.

The moral choices you get sometimes without colonizing (i.e. the random choices inbetween) are always global.

What exactly are the same weapons and defenses of Good,evil,neutral?

Good gets defenses. (Choose good to find out what.) Evil gets weapons (Choose evil to..) and neutral gets nothing. (Choose neutral to... oh... well... anyway. )

Might as well ask more questions.

1) What branch of weapons do you need to research to get nanorippers?

2) What does creative do? Does it give you more tech? more super projects? More trade goods?

3) What does the PQ racial ability do? Does it give you more usable tiles like the alignment question seem to do? Or is it merely a increase in PQ on paper for population growth?

4) I read on the forum some people with insanely high PQ colonies. How is that possible?

I figure, the only things that can affect PQ (in terms of number of usable tiles) are

1. The colony event, where you choose evil (only once per colony).

2. Choosing neturality apparantly does that too.

3. Some random event??

1) Mass Drivers. Personaly, I would remove these weapons, or at least tone them down and add similarly good one-offs to the other tech trees. As is, the species which uses Mass Drivers gets more firepower for the same research, albeit at a high cost.

2) It is supposed to cause to to spontaneously complete a research project occasioanly, rather than having to wait for your scientists to get there. However, Ive never bothered with it, the occasional boost to research dosent begin to compare with a permanent boost to economy or some of the other abilities you can get.

3) It makes your homeworld bigger, and it increases PQ on other planets - but not the number of tiles. Another ability pick of questionable value.

4) Theres a random event which doubles the PQ of a planet. There are probably others which enhance it as well. A string of luck - I heard of one guy getting the PQ doubled twice - and you have your insane PQ planet.

the PQ of a planet is the number of usable tiles. before any soil enhancement, habitat improvement, or terraforming that planet was a pq10 world. .

Are you sure? The yellow tiles are those that are available after soil enhancement right? I checked, that when my planet said class 10 (before selecting netural), there was really 10 usable tiles (including soil enhancement)!

I actually tried neturality learning center, yeah it's better than a discovery sphere, but by then i was winning already.

You have to build each one manually, I'm not sure if it's upgradable from the normal research improvements.

Is 'rushing' to Good/evil/neutrality and exploiting their advantages a viable strategy?

Are you sure? The yellow tiles are those that are available after soil enhancement right? I checked, that when my planet said class 10 (before selecting netural), there was really 10 usable tiles (including soil enhancement)!

Keep in mind that not everything shows up at once. If you don't have Soil Enhancement, you won't see tiles you could get via ...whatsit. The second one. Habitat Enrichment? Something like that? If you don't have Habitat whatever, you won't see tiles you can get via Terraforming. You always get to see what's available next.

The 'Good' path seems to be defensive in nature, but not terribly wonderful- you get a few discounts, and you get some new buildings, but there's little real change that I've seen. Neutral path you get the fast and cheap branch on the Research tree, more trade, tiles, and morale. Evil... you get weaponry, cheap starbases, and money from others' trade ships.

I dunno. Good seems to be getting the shaft, Evil's not much better off. But then... well, guess what choice I take nearly every time?

Yep, it works now. Quite nice to have in the late game when the other bonuses aren't nescessary anymore. Although it doesn't help you much in the start to have more tiles.

thanks vandenburg. A follow up question: I assume, that choosing PQ racial trait will only improve COLONIZED planets, not CONQUERED ones?

So if you go for a influence or diplomatic victory, choose good, when going for a tech victory choose neutral and when you want to conquer everything choose evil.

That is a very interesting observation... also to add, although I never played as neutral yet, I think the discount for rush purchasing might prove useful as well... but i dunno how significant is the discount is. 10% off? 20%?

I just wanted to say that the "rush to neutral" is, imo, a very valid strategy (if a bit cheesy).

I would go so far as to say its out of balance. Neutral is just soooo much better than the other alignments.

Here's what I do:

Build up a basic economy, colonising using the evil option everytime (completely for the cheesy bonuses).
Research my but off til I get to choose neutral (the 10bc / mo is a trival cost, no matter how many months I'm in debt - there's not even any interest paid on this debt).
Manually go through ever planet to upgrade to Neutral Learning Centers.

Watch as I fly through the tech tree to the top of defense & weapons & miniaturization and go crush all living things.

---

In fact, I just started a new game in which I'm restraining myself to not choose neutral - to force myself to give the AI a chance of competing. It would be a harder strategy were I to play on smaller maps where the AI is a close neighbor from the get-go. But since I like the big maps, with lots of distances involved, I tend to have time to build up my economy adequately in order to rush to neutrality which catapults me to a win.

The thing is, Neutral Learning Centers means I'm light-years ahead of my opponents in ship tech anyway - so I have yet to play a game where Evil or Good special techs would ever matter. I suppose if I let the computer fully research its tech trees before going to war that this would give them a possible edge - but I doubt it.

After all the other *amazing* (and again, probably unbalanced) advantage of neutral is automatic, global PQ bonus to every world due to the insta-terraform-amatic effect. I have 18s jump to 26s overnight. my 5s suddenly become 10s (in many cases). In fact, I have to avoid researching any of the habitability techs because otherwise the planetary governors foolishly spend time terraforming a yellow tile rather than alerting me that more green tiles are available to build new buildings on first.

Lastly, neutrality gets the nutral trading, which is +10 to trade income, and +3 trade routes! That's another sweet bonus, which helps with income, but more to the point helps you to stay on everyone's good side - who wants to cut off the throat that feeds them??? lol - the AIs tend to let a lot slide if you're making them $$$$ every turn.

Just my 2c

And the NLC's are not overpowered. They are 22 vs. 20 of the Discovery Sphere. Get enough Discovery Spheres and you can research very fast too. And it helps if you can snag a research resource or two.

If you look at it that way, then you are right, they aren't overpowered. But if you compare them to what the Good/Evil races are using at the same point in the game, then you are looking at 22 research vs. what, 10? By the time the Good/Evil races have researched Discovery Spheres, you are so far ahead of them in research the game is literally over. Add that to the fact that you will most likely also be the one building the +50% research bonus galactic wonder you have available at Discovery Spheres, and the rest of the game turns into 'How many Metaverse points can I rack up before the game ends'.

The Evil weapons are VERY powerful for the particular point of the game that they are available, but Neutrals with loads of NLC's will be flying around in ships sporting weapons that make the Evil weapons look like pea shooters.

I've won all my games so far playing Evil, but by looking at Mordachai's strategy, I think my next game will be as a Neutral and bump up the difficulty a couple of levels!

Lets say you race up the tech tree to the tech where you select your alignment while still in the colonization phase.

Do you still get the Moral Choices to make when you colonize a new planet?

If so, what happens when you choose the path different from your alignment?

If not, are you given/saddled with the modifications that would have been presented or are these events just bypassed altogether?

Cheers,
Reaver

As far as I can tell, the best strategy hence is to pick the evil option as much as possible , and then ensure that you have sufficient cash (about $2,500), when researching xeno-ethics and switch to neutral.

If you intend to choose good (for whatever reason), it makes sense to quickly research xeno-ethics to end all the moral choices, since those tend to be bad for you if you choose good. You might choose neutral and then pay $$$ to select good, Some of the neutral options might be beneficial, but most are slightly disadvantageous. Of course choosing good is possible even if you are leaning towards evil (or vice versa), but it's way too expensive.

If not, are you given/saddled with the modifications that would have been presented or are these events just bypassed altogether?

Getting Xeno Ethics stops all moral random events. so the earlier you get it, the less likely you will be to get the good stuff.

But, of course, getting NLCs early could be considered more important

Imho it's way too cheap. If you play on larger maps you'll can easily spare those 10k credits and the benefits you sometimes get from evil choices are just too good to pass them. Imho after a certain "evilness" you shouldn't be able to choose good anymore (or vica versa).

By the time I get Xeno Ethics (early), I've probably only had 3-4 events (I don't play on big galaxies. Takes too long). I always take the advantageous one (typically evil), and just bite down on the cost of going neutral. If Neutral is overpowered, your suggestion just makes going Neutral even easier. You still get all of the Evil event bonuses, and you still get NLCs.