Is there any advantage to being Evil

[Green Raven]

Even while roleplaying an evil race, it seems like its better to be good. You gain trust from conquered free cities and good things spontanously occur in your empire.

Its almost as if Evilness is a currency, that you "spend" to raze enemy provinces and such, while keeping an eye on your meter to make sure you dont dip beneath neutral.

[Kasmir]

I have the opposite problem; even if I have a build that wants to be Good, I always tend to make Evil choices!

[Green Raven]

Originally posted by Kasmir:

I have the opposite problem; even if I have a build that wants to be Good, I always tend to make Evil choices!

Why?

[PlutonArioch]

Originally posted by Green Raven:

...and good things spontanously occur in your empire.

If you are evil, evil things spontaneusly happen in your empire, which can be just as, if not more profitable as the good things.
Otherwise, off the top of my head:
- The doomdepth trench almost doubles its mana production if you are pure evil (base 10, +3 per evil alignment level, up to +9 at pure evil).
- High culture gets to start combat awakened if pure evil.
- Not to mention all the profits from razing and pillaging which not only give you evil alignment points but also loads of gold.
- If you play with umbral realm enabled, you get trust with umbral dwellings for being evil, and lose it if you are neutral or good.

And who cares about trust from free cities if you are evil? You beat them into submission, they pay tribute almost immediately, and if they get a longing for freedom, you beat them again.
Conquering them gets much faster results than befriending them, which makes up for the trust penalty after conquest.

[Astasia]

Why worry about the opinion of conquered free cities when you can instead just raze them for thousands of gold, transfer the pops to your other cities, and get permanent income bonuses not far off from what you'd get from vassalizing them? Various society traits and much of the chaos empire line are all about evil and benefit from evil actions. If you are going around vassalizing empires and building rep with them, those are "good" and "order" aligned actions which benefit largely from being good and/or order. The benefits of being good or evil depends a lot on your strategy and the choices you've made, the downsides are only downsides when they are relevant to what you are doing.

And ya, the "negative events" aren't really negative, it's generally just another opportunity for a quest reward.

[Pantagruel]

Evil gets you benefits from a few traits and SPIs, but mostly the benefit of being evil is that you can do things like executing prisoners, razing cities, etc.

[suejak]

Even razing improvements is a good injection of money. I would even say if you aren't trying to seduce a bunch of free cities, you should just go full evil because of how profitable it is.

[MrButtermancer]

So... there's a lot going on, and not all of it is symmetrical.

Diplomatically, similar alignments like each-other. That said, the evil factions tend to be ♥♥♥♥♥. Do you want relatively cooperative factions to like you, or the jerks? There are advantages to both.

You tend to get evil points for immediate payout options on events. Good payouts tend to be the payout themselves, but not always. Good gets more positive events, and evil gets more negative ones.

And, of course, being evil means you can raze provinces and cities, as well as migrate without reservations. You win close wars because you can destroy territory you cannot hold. Migrating is faster than absorbing, and you retain access to your primary race and their transformations and synergy constellation. If your build is strong, you probably want at least your personal cities to all be your race.

Free cities like good more. This is probably the largest strategic advantage, because it makes it faster to establish stable vassals when conquering. Evil can raze, but good has an easier time holding. On small maps, this matters less. If you're personally going to control 5-6 cities, it matters less. With low population, it matters less. Reavers can also just intimidate vassals with their war spoils and sidestep the issue.

Then there's the unique society traits for each, as well as some other unique stuff in the tomes. Doomdepth Trenches are pretty dope if you're very evil.

I suspect that in most cases, good tends to be advantaged. I also suspect that there are good-dependent builds which will crush large maps most of the time (I'm running a Keepers of Knowledge/Chosen Uniters + eagle mounts build right now in a game where I spammed explorers and whispering stone affinity traits and hoovered literally every vassal on a medium 5 player map in 30 turns).

But you can win large brutal maps with evil.

[Malaficus Shaikan]

As others pointed out it depends heavly on your build.
Right now i am playing a chaos focus build.
Because of the bonuses of chaos affinity and stuff like pyromancer area of effect ability.
I am now burning down cities, slaughtering armies and showing zero mercy or remorse.
If i was playing an order focus faction i would be actively hurting myself if i destroy cities.
As order is all about those sweet vassals.

My suggest is to look at the affinities and see what playstyle they support.
Shadow is good if you plan a heavy focus on hero killing and conquest.
Astral is good if you focus heavly of summons and spell spamming.
Order is for vassal and empire building.
Nature is good for rapid expensionism.
Materialist i am still trying to wrap my head around.
And chaos.
Chaos is destruction.
You arent going to build.
You are going to burn, raid and pillage.
The only reason you are not at war is because your enemies are dead or you are.

[The Big Brzezinski]

Materium is for booming, i.e. building up rather than out. If you can find enough draft, you can point a fire hose of units at people fairly quickly with not a huge amount of territory.

I think good and evil, intrinsically speaking, are mainly just foreign policy stances. It's more like cooperate versus dominate. Evil just requires a more capable PR department. They may hate you, but if they can't justify war against you, it doesn't matter. So keep that rumor mill churning, and pay off those grievances before they can complain about them.

[Furin]

Originally posted by The Big Brzezinski:

Evil just requires a more capable PR department.

Oh so true, oh so sad at the same time.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Malaficus Shaikan:

Order is for vassal and empire building.
Nature is good for rapid expensionism.
Materialist i am still trying to wrap my head around.

Broadly speaking, order is basically just vassals and rally of the lieges, and very little else (aside from things all affinities have). Nature is food and pops. Materium is buildings and economy.

Most affinities have a resource focus (or two) and many of their special improvements will fit into the same type. Shadow is knowledge, astral is mana, nature is food, chaos is draft, and materium is gold and production. Order distinctly does not have a focus and throughout the order tomes you will find a special improvement for each resource. So all of them are generally "empire building" to some degree. On the empire tree though materium is where most of the general economic benefits are, build cities up faster and cheaper, and support the upkeep of more units in both gold and mana income and upkeep reduction. While nature lets you fill the cities with pops faster and grab more/further tiles.

Order has an extremely powerful empire tree, but I would also say it's the worst in the game because it railroads so hard. If you aren't gobbling up vassals and spamming out diverse rally units, then 90% of the order tree is absolutely useless. Every other tree is full of universally useful options regardless of your alignment or strategy (though Chaos is about half as bad as Order if you aren't razing and pillaging). I just finished an evil order game, the tomes support it pretty well, but at the end of the game, turn 143, the only order empire skill I had taken was Knightly Orders, that's it. Career soldiers isn't bad if you have those unit types, I was playing Reavers.

But ya, if you are doing order things and playing around with free cities instead of razing them, then you basically have to be good. I think that it's fine that evil generally razes for spoils, and good generally vassalizes and cares about relations. The order empire tree being basically vassals or GTFO is kind of annoying though. Bit of a tangent, I don't remember how I got here, what thread is this again?

[TirAsleen]

Originally posted by Green Raven:

Is there any advantage to being evil violent

fix'd,

[Supay]

Originally posted by TirAsleen:

Originally posted by Green Raven:

Is there any advantage to being evil violent

fix'd,

That doesn't make any sense because good is violent also, it will violent attack evil just as a prime example.

[TirAsleen]

Originally posted by Supay:

That doesn't make any sense because good is violent also, it will violent attack evil just as a prime example.

There is only violent and peaceful. Good and Evil are just ideas, that ceased to exist.

You reply just confirmed this truth.

[PlutonArioch]

Originally posted by TirAsleen:

Originally posted by Supay:

That doesn't make any sense because good is violent also, it will violent attack evil just as a prime example.

There is only violent and peaceful. Good and Evil are just ideas, that ceased to exist.

You reply just confirmed this truth.

The ideas very much exist. But this is a game forum about a game which has an alignment mechanic that names the two sides of its alignment axis "good" and "evil", so your personal world view is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand here.