Pro and cons of good and evil alignment

[Private Pyle]

How impactful is this in the long run? I havent made it far enough to know.

Specifically i was wondering what happens if your vassal is the opposite alignment?

[MrLuckless]

Good alignment is solid if you want to make free cities become vassals sooner, and will generally have most AI of neutral or good alignments more willing to ally with you off the bat. Downsides are that you can't just declare war on people willy-nilly without incurring some penalties and you lose out on xp from world spawns from time to time.

Evil alignment lets you be more aggressive and expand quickly, at the expense of being friendless and eventually people will declare war on you out of principal. If you're going for a military win then it's the go to for it, and you can still do expansion as well, as cities you don't burn to the ground can be vassalized and will give you resources and provinces that count towards the total needed. It's also a lot easier to get pure evil, then it is to get pure good.

[Midas]

The long run tends to be where it's most impactful, but it's not an arbitrary choice, it's informed by your actions.

Positive alignment affects relations with positive-aligned free-cities and empires. Negative-aligned free cities and empires don't seem to care. It's neither beneficial nor detrimental.

Your elemental affinity impacts this a great deal as well. Order passives lean a lot towards things that work well with a high alignment, while chaos passives lean a lot towards low alignment. For example, Order has a lot of stuff about vassals, while chaos has stuff to reward raiding provinces and razing settlements.

[Private Pyle]

Thx for the answers very helpful, ill slowly go full evil then after early game wars.

[Gnoraks]

The game also notes that random events might get potentially better with good alignment and have worse outcomes with bad alignment.

In my last pure evil game I came across some deamon that I could awaken and recruit. Good thing right? But the best possible option was to reduce my leader to 1 hp. While in enemy territory. I could have killed her instead too with another outcome.

[Mechalibur]

Good helps with diplomacy early on, especially with city states. There's an... unfortunate situation that happens all the time for me, however, where almost all AI rulers end up evil in the late game due to razing/treaty breaking. This causes them to suddenly start hating your guts if you're good aligned. I've found evil to be more consistently rewarding, but it can make it hard to get an alliance going.

[Midas]

Originally posted by Gnoraks:

The game also notes that random events might get potentially better with good alignment and have worse outcomes with bad alignment.

In my last pure evil game I came across some deamon that I could awaken and recruit. Good thing right? But the best possible option was to reduce my leader to 1 hp. While in enemy territory. I could have killed her instead too with another outcome.

I don't think they mean 'better' or 'worse' by good or bad, so much as good-aligned events and evil-aligned events. As in, when I played a pure evil vampire-themed faction, I got a lot of random events for things like sacrificing people for souls/knowledge/money, and things like that. It was almost never anything that was 'bad' for my situation, but a lot of it had the best outcomes leaning on doing evil things.