The way I understand it at the moment is that Alignment is a form of in-game difficulty setting.
Evil gets a bunch of bonuses that make it easier to win.
Good forfeits those bonuses (and pays large sums of income), which makes it harder to win.

I think the whole concept of paying to change your alignment is a bit odd. Surely you should have to stick with the consequences of your actions, instead of paying everyone off so they forget about them. But, you should keep on getting events that can alter your alignment (and probably not just when colonizing planets), so you can change your alignent after researching Xeno Ethics.
Although that would make it difficult to deal with the research options afterwards...

If you win a game with Pure Good alignment, then you earn the title of a good player (pun intended). Cause it's hard to do. Chaotic good is easier, because that's taking a little cheese when some real sweet deal comes along. And Evil, well...I play evil cause I just wanna win on tough

there should be more then 3 alignments... each alignment should have 3 within it....

.....oh, NOW i find out being goods meant to be hard, right after the drengin start expanding locust like across my space...thenks for the warning! well i suppose now im gonna sow terror and discord across the universe....or sleep coz ive been playing like 10 hours straight...meh its all good....

The way I understand it at the moment is that Alignment is a form of in-game difficulty setting. Evil gets a bunch of bonuses that make it easier to win. Good forfeits those bonuses (and pays large sums of income), which makes it harder to win.

Huh? What about Neutrality? IMO, the bonuses received from selecting Neutral alignment outpace either Good or Evil. I'll take zero-turn terraforming (or is it Habitat Improvement) and 22 rp/turn Neutrality Learning Centers any day. But, I guess I'm just engaging in "my alignment can beat up your alignment" diatribe which drives a race-to-the-bottom flamewar. I'll just shut up here.

there should be more then 3 alignments... each alignment should have 3 within it....

No. Please, no.

If that happened, GalCiv 2 would remind me too much of D&D. Computer/console RPGs have been stuck in that mold for decades now (if admittedly in a different way), with little sign that they will ever leave. It would be a damn shame if strategy games fell into that rut, too.

I'd rather have had _philosophies_ than alignments. Instead of Good vs. Evil, you'd have Nietzschean vs. Existentialist vs. Materialist vs. Nihilist vs. whatever. It'd be more complex, and probably tie up all those alignment loopholes. I still love how I can be the saintly Altarans, declare war out of the blue on another "good" civilization that's never done me wrong, and invade their planets, committing ethnic cleansings that are literally a thousand times worse than the Holocaust - all without shifting my alignment a single point.

As for the original post, it surprises me that people choose evil in the random events, then select a non-evil alignment. I usually keep the evil alignment - free starbase upgrades are hard to pass up, especially for those influence strategies.

Actually, now that I think about it, I would think that paying your way to a new alignment is an official way of cheesing.

I usually play neutral, yes they rock, but occasionally I play good. When I play good, I have to manipulate my other good races with technology to catch up, free ships for defence, and sometimes paying the enemy out of warring with them. Sure I'm basically being the races babysitter, but having an extra pair of votes, allies, and buffer really settle my mind of the micromanaging.