Evil Alignment

[Churnobyl]

Noob question, but is there any actual benefit to being an evil faction in this game? Outside of "declare war without worry"? Cause all I could see in the tool tips seemed to indicate you just getting smacked with penalties.

[RaptorZefier]

I will say, after playing both Good and Evil factions. Evil was *insanely strong*.

If you're going Chaos it synergizes like crazy with Evil. The key is to Raze every soft target settlement within striking distance. I was burning down City States for 1000's of gold at practically no cost to myself.

Late in the Chaos tree, you get an absolutely disgusting +20 PERMANENT Gold income per turn for razing cities. If you back off, let enemies re-settle stuff, then the moment it's resettled move in and burn it down again that gold keeps going up and up and your army quickly spirals out of control.

By endgame my human barbarians where a steamroller that printed an absurd amount of gold and could just buy anything they wanted.


Good is... A lot more reliant on city states. If you can get the allies, great, if some other Ai undercuts you and takes them from you? Oww.

[Dynamo Rex (mrrexplorer)]

Originally posted by Failm:

You get the feeling of being the evil villain, can stroke your mustache with one hand while your other hand swirls a glas of Chateau Le Pin 2016 for 4.000€ and you give in to a manical laughter during your slaughter of innocents...

TL:DR
I have no clue either... maaaaaybe negative events might be "positive" for evil alignment?

Mon dieu

[Zebulon Ecthelion]

Originally posted by Churnobyl:

Noob question, but is there any actual benefit to being an evil faction in this game? Outside of "declare war without worry"? Cause all I could see in the tool tips seemed to indicate you just getting smacked with penalties.

I think if you have evil alignment, you gain relations with other evil aligned factions.

If you're going evil, you should take those evil alliance too, unless you like getting dogpiled or are just amazing at the game.

[Xari]

Just for reference; /pt means per turn.

I've been primarily creating and playing scions of evil, and trying out the other evil alignment starts, I can honestly say that being evil needs a buff or a re-work.

Declaring surprise wars only works against vassals. Declaring against other factions without justifications will see you take a huge imperium/pt hit.

Another downside is that you will suffer heavily from stability. Positive stability flat out increases food production and production of a city in general. Playing an evil faction, you have to build buildings (City level 2 - Overlord Tower (City 3)) to negate this, however that still means you don't get a buff from having higher stability.

The more evil you are alignment wise, the stronger your 'supposed' buffs become, however the more evil you are, the higher the percentage chance of receiving negative events/outcomes are.

For those saying that you get evil decisions that straight up allow you to take things; so do the other races. For example I was playing material dwarves and got the option to take all 3 pieces of equipment from my city state, suffering only a relations debuff.

However with most evil decisions, unless you're paying imperium, you'll be suffering flat stability hits, or stability debuffs/pt.

Now you might say " But being evil means you can raid and get loads of gold "

Yes, that's true. When it comes to being evil, raiding is an absolute must, however you still need to go through the hassle of declaring war like every other nation, through building justifications and acquiring grievances.

You'll increment evil alignment through raiding/pillaging, meaning you'll stack the event percent chance quicker as well, but you'll only be getting income/p3t unless you take the raiding and pillaging perks in the Imperium tree. That will see you raid/pt and quickly you'll be able to get income from just sending a bunch of tier 1 units to your neighbors and raiding their provinces.

To finally sum it up, being evil means at the start of the game you'll be utilizing the shadow affinity, and from my usage of the tree it's pretty flat and mundane. Chaos is definitely the way to go, but you can go chaos affinity with any build.

[Blanch Warren]

yes

[Mermidion]

To further explain and clarify a few things that Xari got wrong:

Originally posted by Xari:

Another downside is that you will suffer heavily from stability. Positive stability flat out increases food production and production of a city in general. Playing an evil faction, you have to build buildings (City level 2 - Overlord Tower (City 3)) to negate this, however that still means you don't get a buff from having higher stability.

You dont need a "buff from higher Stability" since Dark Culture gets a few extra buildungs that give you bonuses but lowers city stability AND you can pile on as much extra spells (from different tomes)on your citys that also lower your city stability without caring. that is the whole point of the concept.(also no need to build Bathhouses or tavern, but thats more of a minor gold and time saving)

Originally posted by Xari:

For those saying that you get evil decisions that straight up allow you to take things; so do the other races. For example I was playing material dwarves and got the option to take all 3 pieces of equipment from my city state, suffering only a relations debuff.

For free, the point is for free, without suffering anything. for example claiming an ancient wonder, gave five options, the first three were to pick an artefact, the last one was the "good alaignment" to refuse to take any. but the fourth one let you take all three without ANY consequences besides becoming more evil....which is the point of an evil play.

Originally posted by Xari:

The more evil you are alignment wise, the stronger your 'supposed' buffs become, however the more evil you are, the higher the percentage chance of receiving negative events/outcomes are.

i have played 6+ games as Dark culture and can savily say 95% these "negative events" dont matter at all cause with a dark culture you can simply choose the evil solution that would make you suffer City stabiliy...and again...city stability doesnt matter. should be clear by now how usefull that is, since the same goes for neutral or "good" events where you can pick the best (evil) outcome that gives you the most and only makes you "suffer" city stability.

---------
To make my own addendum: Playing evil allows you for a faster realm growing playstyle. for example while "good" players have to give stones to citys and then wait alot of rounds for free citys to come around ,sometimes fighting other leaders on it (or they "waste" extra imperium on it), you can simply take a free city 2-5 turns an vassalies it immidiatly, sure they hate you in the beginning, but after that they get along.
And you can than immidiatly Vassalize the next free city without wasting imperium on buying an extra whisper stone.

Dark culure profits from being combined with chaos but also, if you are going focused on magic, its always good to combine with Astral since they compliment each other quite well.

[Sifer2]

Right now the main benefit to being Evil is you can pillage as much as you want. Try that as Good, and you will be Evil fast lol.

[Sebastiano]

1 The booty.
2 The booty.

[Slapstick]

The evil playstile is it's own reward. I can just pillage, raze, conquer and murder my way across the realm with no impunity. This holds certain benefits. Being good means taking it slow, building alliances, limiting my expansion, allowing cities to remain after conquest - opening them up to reconquest. It should have and needs other benefits, as opposed to evil romping through everything like a plague of locusts.

[aqvamare]

Originally posted by Churnobyl:

Noob question, but is there any actual benefit to being an evil faction in this game? Outside of "declare war without worry"? Cause all I could see in the tool tips seemed to indicate you just getting smacked with penalties.

When me got "pure evil" in my High culture evil run, i got a quest reward, were me could choose "chaos tome V" for free, or a free balrog, or a level up of my hero, because the chaos god were super pleased.

You also getr as high culture with evil aligment the "awakend" status always active.

in the dark affinty line, there is also a ability to use wispering stone on enemy vassals, to steal there income.

[Wlerin]

Originally posted by Churnobyl:

Originally posted by Seedy:

Why should there be a benefit to being evil?

I'm referring to in-game mechanics. Being Good aligned gives you a bunch of buffs. Being Evil aligned gives you a bunch of debuffs. I was curious if there were any buffs that I wasn't seeing but that doesn't seem to be the case for the most part. Most strategy games I've played don't really have an alignment meter, so I was curious how it worked. Game clearly wants to encourage the player not to be a murder-hobo, which is fine.

Evil usually means choosing your own short term gains over the longterm wellbeing of the rest of the world. The "buffs" are right there when you make the evil choice, getting the XP from killing a bunch of weak enemies instead of letting them flee, rampant pillaging, kicking the inferior races out into the snow, etc.

[Hivemind]

Originally posted by Xari:

I've been primarily creating and playing scions of evil, and trying out the other evil alignment starts, I can honestly say that being evil needs a buff or a re-work.

I couldn't disagree with this more. A re-work, maybe; buffs, no, absolutely not.

Evil is better than good to a stupid degree. We can consider that you have a higher chance of negative events if evil and a higher chance of positive events for being good, sure, along with the alignment boost/penalty to relations with free cities of that alignment (more often than not, good/neutral). But the event probability swing isn't particularly noticeable, and the bad events in this game are almost all tame enough that the costs are negligible. These differences are pretty much abstract, too nebulous and unimportant to weigh on game strategy.

The concrete gains and losses, by contrast, very explicitly weigh in favour of evil actions. Declaring wars without enough grievances gives you stability penalties which can certainly hurt economically (if you're not playing a Dark culture which ignores negative stability, that is), but this is pretty much the only example of an evil action with a directly negative consequence on your resource gains in this game. (It's also an alignment-agnostic decision; neither good nor non-Dark evil wants stability penalties for declaring without sufficient grievances. So it can't be characterised as a "downside" of evil specifically.) Mass province razing, ad infinitum vassalise->wardec->vassalise->wardec Free City farming, and general freedom to be as much of a warmonger ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ as you want without caring about the decrease in your karma rating, on the other hand, will massively benefit your resource gains beyond anything that trying to stay good could possibly offer. The degree to which you can rake in dozens of free units and thousands of gold, knowledge, mana, and even food from this -- *per turn* if you're really optimising/exploiting vassals -- is frankly overpowered. Free City farming might be a flat-out exploit which should reasonably get patched.

People like to turn up their noses on Shadow's empire developments and focus on Chaos, but its Knowledge Extraction (+50 knowledge per defeated hero level) and Stolen Power (+200 mana/knowledge for city conquest) skills offer almost as much as the Chaos line does for the warmonger snowball and Free City/vassal extraction. Of note with this is that you get the potential for a ton of free items from the Free Cities' chain-slaughtered hero leaders, to equip your own heroes with or sell. You also get their bodies. There is the option of selling the remains for the flat cash and items, but Dark has the advantage of eventually getting extra mana and knowledge per corpse in your crypt. Several cities with the stacking improvement for this crypt income means it very easily reaches hundreds of mana and dozens of knowledge per turn if you're shooting up a lot of Free Cities. Even without Free City cheese, the gains from picking up those two Shadow skills along with the Chaos line's Battlefield Looting (+3 gold per killed unit tier), Lure of the Horde (everyone knows this one), and Skilled Raiders (that beloved -1 turn pillage+heal and +50% rewards) makes all wars and combat immensely more profitable. You can stick that cannibals culture trait on top too for more free mana and food.

Let's say we're doing a more relaxed kind of evil that isn't at war with everything and everyone over and over again. Province razing justifies going evil entirely by itself. You're at war, the enemy has several cities; casual razing (with a scatter-carpet of your many spare t1s) of all the province improvements of a medium-sized "okay" city of theirs which you just intend to vassalise will give you 1000-1500 gold on the spot. Repeat for every conquered city you don't intend to directly control (but you can still do it anyway for their capital or whatever, and turn a ~40g profit per raze after province reconstruction). You'll get marginally less in the long-term because vassal free cities aren't very good about repairing razed provinces, but who cares about that compared to many hundreds of gold gained immediately to spend on improvements and units in your metropole now? It is a maxim of every strategy game that gains in the present have a disproportionately higher value than gains later. You will end up with an evil score in the hundreds, and that's really not any price at all for an economy and cash reserves that blow any goodmonger out of the water.

This post has gotten too long, but try a Dark culture with primary focus on Chaos and Shadow in the third story mission if anyone wants a direct taste of what I'm talking about. Most maps can't get as extreme as this one about it, but the potential and incentives still exist on anything larger than smallish skirmish maps. If anything, the evil playstyle will probably get heavily nerfed and the entire alignment system slated for eventual rework.

[Stormwind]

Your benefit is the actions you are doing, like declaring war against a peaceful neighbor and taking all his stuff

[Shadowfox]

chaos / darkness is op as ♥♥♥♥ especially on the story campaign where everyone is always at war (fun fact it only force wars free cities that existed in the world at the start)

[WarHøg]

yes