Just wanted to bring to light,  some ideas were already given in the thread about powerful random events, as well as discussion on natural disease events in the thread by the same name.   (those are links if you couldn't tell. on my laptop it looks very similar color, though thats probebly the limited view angle.)

I don't want to see is what we had in GalCiv2, namely the random ethical events. Those events unfairly punished "good" decisions, while rewarding the decisions that were evil, or neutral in nature. In theory, the penalties created by picking the "good" choice could be great enough to cripple an empire, possible worse than the disease mega-event does (an event that reduced all stats to zero, including logistics, until a cure was found).

I would rather that any random events in this game be based upon something in game that required you to do, or not do, something before something else happened. I would like multiple possible outcomes, some with positive results, and others with negative results.

For instance, a small settlement of humans have survived because they managed to keep their settlement hidden from the world. Recently, someone has came from that settlement asking for help because some lizardfolk from a nearby swap started acting hostile. You could choose to ignore him, and he'll go elsewhere for help, or you could follow him home. There, after investigating the situation, you learn the attacks are caused by a small number of lizardfolk with delusion of grandaur are responcible for the attacks, and not the whole tribe itself. From there, you could try to deal with the troublesome lizardfolk, and mend relations between the tribe and the settlement, or you could decide that these lizardfolk would be a powerful addition to your military if you somehow managed to assinate this trouble some tribe leader and raze the nearby settlement to the ground.

In this case, the "neutral" decision would not waste your time. The "good" decision would have 2 communities added to the list of minor civs, ones you could improve your relations with until they share knowledge with you, and possibly join you civilization. The "evil" decision would give you a supply of lizardfolk seeking to conquor the world, ready to be trained and put to service by your military.

I'd like them to expand on the galciv2 random event system; having some events present the player with choices that affect their empire's alignment and some that don't require any user input would be a nice step up. For example, DivineWrath's hidden village event is a good example of the former, while a violent storm striking one of your settlements, killing some and causing some structural damage is a good example of the latter. On further thought, actually, I wouldn't mind some events that present the player with choices, but don't affect alignment.

That said I definitely agree that the rewards/penalties for the different alignment choices need to be much more evenly distributed than they are in GalCiv2. Some quests can present options in which one alignment clearly has the best choice (for example, only one provides a reward and the others get penalties) - so long as on average it balances out; but others can just provide different types of rewards/penalties - meaning that the best becomes contextual. A good example of this is, again, DivineWrath's hidden village event. In his example the good and evil choices provide completely different types of rewards, while the neutral option gives nothing (although I also imagine quests where all three choices are roughly equivalent, out of context).