Any veteran players with insight on Alignment?

[Cpt-Qc]

I've played this game at release for a few years and just started again with a friend of mine. We have always done Evil characters because it felt better to take the cities you need and migrate to the correct race asap. However, I can't seem to find anyone who thinks evil is better.

So how do you even play Good or Neutral characters without it being worse? How do you mitigate the downside of having different races in each city which dilutes your core strategy? And what about having to wait several turns before being offered quests so you can have cities join your empire? It seems so much slower and I feel the early turns advantage would snowball into the later turns.

We play random maps against AIs or other players sometimes. I feel like these aspects would get magnified in pvp.

[Iguana-on-a-stick]

Both playing good and playing evil and playing neutral can work, but generally I do think it's easier to play good or neutral against the AI. (I've barely played any PVP so don't ask me about that.)

Originally posted by Cpt-Qc:

How do you mitigate the downside of having different races in each city which dilutes your core strategy?

That's not really a downside. Do it right and it's an upside. You could have both Orc berserkers and Elf mounted archers in your army, both of which are much stronger than their normal varieties.

Same for economy. You can have happy goblin cities in the swamps and wealth-producing human cities on the coast rather than having to ignore or terraform half the map to be able to settle there.

But even if you do not want that, generally troop production later on is concentrated in a few core cities that have good mystic city upgrades. These are generally created via settlers, and so will have your core race. By placing cities yourself, you can make sure they have i.e. a ruin and a crystal tree nearby to make super-strong phalanxes. The non-core race cities will just be generating money so these core cities can spam higher-quality troops.

The big downside is that racial governance advances more slowly. If there are some really juicy late-game upgrades you want, you'll get them much faster when playing evil.

And what about having to wait several turns before being offered quests so you can have cities join your empire? It seems so much slower and I feel the early turns advantage would snowball into the later turns.

It's actually the big advantage of playing good that you can expand much faster.

Evil: You have to march over an army strong enough to beat the defenders. You then have to spend several turns migrating the city to your core race. You then have to defend the city. This means you can usually only expand in one or two directions at once at the start of the game.

Good: You can have a single scout discover the city. Then immediately bribe them to become friends. Then a few turns later bribe them to become vassals. You now get money and do not need to defend them, as they have their own defenses. (Don't bother getting them to join your empire unless they're in a really good spot and you can defend them.)

BTW, do NOT wait for quests. In fact, decline them unless you have an army standing right next door. Bribe. Money makes the world go 'round and makes the good strategy work.

This means you can expand as fast as you can make money. At first you need to sell loot from exploration sites to fund your bribery, but later you get tons of money from your vassals and use this to bribe new vassals.

You can also stack traits and abilities to make this strategy stronger. Rogues get a skill to improve relations with neutral cities, and the Torchbearer/Keeper specialisation lets you reduce the amount of turns you have to wait and makes relations even better. Play a Keeper of the Peace rogue and you can make friends insanely fast.

Best of all, this technique snowballs. Once you get a good alignment and make nice with a few neutral cities, other neutral cities of that race will like you better to start with and may even end up becoming your vassals when you meet them without requiring any bribe at all! Plus they end up paying more money and giving you bigger armies when relations are better.

Also, do NOT underestimate the power of vassal armies. When you need to, you can demand tribute from vassals which frequently takes the form of armies. If you have a big vassal city, that can be most of a stack of good units. I do not play PVP, but I've seen videos of players instantly summoning giant armies this way to turn a defeat into a victory.

[Cpt-Qc]

Alright, thanks for the in-depth explanation :) I always thought vassal cities were a downside since you can't control and defend them yourself but this makes sense.

[Serious]

This quickly turned on its head, it seems. Now we have to wonder how we can play evil without it being worst. The only thing I can think about is the ability to migrate in one turn, under expander specialization I believe. If you mix this with Mab's boon in Shadowborn, your newly migrated cites have a considerable production bonus. It is a very narrow strategy of course and it doesn't surpass at all the advantages of good alignment. Still, it is what I've played most of the time. It does seem optimal with the necromancer. Playing evil certainly is a different play rhythm. It's more frantic ; everyone declares on you as soon as you meet them, you can't really afford to make mistakes. More fun then, perhaps. And there is something to be said for the one-race aesthetic (might as well go all out here). I don't pollute my armies with non-elves.

[Cpt-Qc]

I personally would never play a good sorcerer as I use Orc to counter their lack of spammable T4 with spammable T1-3s and having a single pure race is essential in that situation. Orc's units are some of the strongest and T3 plays nicely with arena which also makes T1's stronger, giving a strong early and mid game.

And yeah, as I initially said, everyone on every forum seems to praise good playstyle as the best but I'm not so sure it's that one-sided. It's been a while but I don't remember having as much success with good as I did with evil leaders.

[Iguana-on-a-stick]

There's certainly nothing wrong with playing evil. Fast racial governance gains are not to be sniffed at, and if your race is tolerant of terrain you can settle in most places without trouble. It doesn't snowball quite as fast as a dedicated diplomacy build, but you can get higher quality armies.

I have an evil evil Orc theocrat and a neutral Dwarf sorcerer for similar reasons. (Combine race with tough spammable units with a class that lacks them and get lots of race governance.)

Playing neutral is also quite effective, if you use grey guard specialisation. You need to pay more careful attention to alignment, but the advantage is you can use some vassals in places where you need them, and still attack any juicy cities you want for yourself so you can get them quickly and for free. (And get a lot of racial governance points.) Almost the best of both worlds, except you don't snowball as much later on, and have to balance good and evil actions to avoid penalties.

Either way, playing the same style every time is boring, so I mix it up plenty.

[Fulano]

Wow, that's a lot of good in-depth conversation already. :)

The big advantage good has is I can take over 1/4 to 1/2 the map against even King AIs with heavy use of diplomacy, whether I'm playing good or evil...

I'm not sure why the AI is so bad at it but you can meet and add a ton of towns to your empire early game. Then those towns provide income, which lets you buy more towns, and as long as you keep ahead of the AI with army strength they will all assume you are the best and leave you alone... generally...

I usually play evil because I like getting the race I want for each town to maximize the bonuses the units get. I usually keep 2 races so I've got all the different climates covered. You can still do this while playing good, either by using the excess good points to migrate a few towns, or just take advantage of the various races's abilities. For example, Orcs won't be able to take advantage of cities that have good pikeman bonuses.

I'll still heavily use diplomacy when playing evil too. I will usually pick destruction apprentice so I can spam "Scorched Earth" to keep myself from going too good, and when it's time I will declare war on my vassals and migrate them to the race I want. The only thing you have to be careful of is you will loose relations with the vassal's race when you declare war on them, so I usually try to attack all of the vassals of the same race at the same time when converting them to my main races so I don't have my vassals rebelling on me.

[pipo.p]

Originally posted by Iguana-on-a-stick:

Playing neutral is also quite effective, if you use grey guard specialisation.

Even without a crystal tree in city domain, late game neutral (dispassionate) dwarven infantry are awesome, and more so if you add in Creation adept and a couple of Bless spells on key defenders.

[GreyHuntr]

Yeah neutral Grey Guard human Dreadnought is my favorite playstyle. Tough to balance out, but the flexibility is great. Cardinal Culling is a real blessing against that late game tier 3-4 army spam. Plus gaining casting points from killing magical creatures means you don't have to invest in casting point research, so you can unlock higher tier units faster.

[Cpt-Qc]

Lots of great options that I need to test out :)

[Phirestar]

Alignment kind of feels like more of a “flavor” mechanic that exists for role-playing purposes moreso than for strategic decision-making. It’s just there for whether you want to imagine your character as a goody two shoes or Evil McBad. Even the Theocrat, who is the stereotypical “Man of God”, can be played as a bad guy. One of the alternative outfits has the spikes and whatnot for that cult leader archetype.

There is a mod on the Workshop called “Alignment Compatibility” that reworks the alignment system into something more interesting. It basically turns being good / evil / neutral into a choice that you commit to based on your specializations. With this mod, “minor” alignment changing actions like declaring war on another city / empire or forming an alliance will grant temporary buffs. If you sign a peace treaty, the +25 alignment change will slowly tick down every consecutive turn thereafter, until eventually it disappears and you’re back to pure neutral.

For specializations that have Good / Evil alignment, like Shadowborn, the mod sets it so that the first time you cast a strategic spell from that specialization, whichever one it is, you’ll receive a permanent 200 alignment change in the direction that the specialization matches. In this case, that would be -200 alignment. Casting other spells that normally give alignment change will still do the same as before, but like above they’ll register as temporary changes that fade. The one-time 200 buff will stay on your character for the remainder of the game.

It basically makes it so that leaders will stay with the alignment that synergizes with their specializations, preventing situations where an AI opponent with Dedicated to Good units could commit too many evil actions and end up with an alignment change that gives their entire army negative morale. Likewise, as a player, it’s much easy to quickly change your alignment thanks to the buff being 200 points - the exact amount needed to reach Slightly Good or Slightly Evil from a neutral start. (The only way you can screw this up, of course, is by giving your custom leader two different alignment specializations, like Grey Guard and Keepers of the Peace, but that’s on you to pay attention to.)

It sounds like a good change, so I threw it into my load order. I did select a leader that has no alignment-related specializations for my first game using the mod, which was certainly dumb on my part, but at least it means I won’t have to worry about juggling my alignment or the AIs messing up their’s.

[Iguana-on-a-stick]

I like that mod.

It also has the interesting side effect of giving you better penalties for playing outside your alignment.

Without the mod, you can play Pure Good and as long as you have enough bonus Good points stacked up, the game is fine with you committing the odd ethnic cleansing because you really wanted that halfling city to be an Elf city to build better archers.

With the mod, migrating or razing cities will most likely take you down a notch of alignment temporarily and give you an empire wide morale penalty, because you can no longer just amass points over the course of the game to create a buffer.

It plays well, I think.

[Tullemore]

It is what it is, but the most consequential alignment trap is doing evil deeds,
especially migrating cities. This makes it very difficult to min/max and keep the
various races in the game happy with your faction. If you have any use for units,
heroes or a citizen constituency of a city, do not do anything evil against them.
If you are playing Evil+Mono-culture this is slightly less penalizing, but the more you
want to have all or more types and sources of racial compositions the more the
game compels you to be good. The morale penalties are hard to reverse once
racial grudges are built and options for procuring good racial favor are few.
There's some juking which can by done with buying vassals, buying them out
to join your empire and releasing them back to vassals; all of which takes significant
time.

[Iguana-on-a-stick]

Originally posted by Tullemore:

It is what it is, but the most consequential alignment trap is doing evil deeds,
especially migrating cities. This makes it very difficult to min/max and keep the
various races in the game happy with your faction.

Generally it's fine as long as you pick 1-2 races to play nice with besides your starting race and migrate the rest.

In fact, it is easier that way to give your actual armies super-high morale and high-end racial governance upgrades, as races get happiness bonuses if you migrate cities TO their race.

So I'd say that the evil mono-dual culture armies are on average a bit stronger than the multi-racial good armies.

If you have any use for units,
heroes or a citizen constituency of a city, do not do anything evil against them.

To fix the hero issue, I recommend turning on "random heroes match player race." Honestly I prefer that setting anyway, it is just weird to have my Dwarf armies only led by Draconians and Goblins. (Note that the setting does not force heroes to match your STARTING race, just the ones in your empire. So if you play a multi-race empire you still get multi-race heroes. You just won't get Goblin heroes unless you have Goblin cities.)

For units I find it too much of a hassle to use more than 2 or so races anyway, because of logistics. Easier to mass-produce a few unit types so you can then easily merge armies that take casualties or get reinforcements from wherever.

And for cities... well, that's a feature, not a bug. If the citizens hate you, migrate them to a race that likes you better.

Such is the evil way.

[Tullemore]

1-2 Shadowborn specializations or Necromancy class sets up that evil migration play.
Grey guard has to be measured. Orcs, Dwarfs, Elves, Draconians, Tigrans and Humans all
have perks for using on a balanced map (if you're not exclusively utilizing armies that ignore morale), and if a 1/3rd or more of a map is blighted, you'll want to be friendly with Goblins depending on needing to fight around blight.
Halflings are the least useful to find merit being integrated into armies,
can easily ignore them pretty much whether they like you or not.
Frostlings are a matter of taste, and whether terrain types are going to
favor building stacks that have many more Frostlings than other cold weather
fighting types since Dwarfs, Elves and Humans will comfortably fight from arctic hexes.

[Iguana-on-a-stick]

I do not think it is useful to design armies around certain terrain types. And the minor benefits race X might have over race Y do not outweigh the advantages of specialisation and faster upgrades.

It is helpful on paper, but generally wars move fast, and in unpredictable ways. Terrain sections are not that big, and the decisive battle may well end up taking place somewhere else.

And speed is of the essence in war. It's better to attack with the forces you have rather than try and get the perfectly adjusted army in play, so even if you have those goblins you might still have to use a different type of army that happens to be on the spot.

The only exception to the above is the underground: When you are fighting on a map with underground, it can be useful to have armies that can move fast and see well underground.

The difference is that A] you know ALL cavern terrain will be suited to those dwarves or goblins or whatever, and that there will almost certainly be a large amount of that terrain, and B] cave crawling gives a huge speed advantages that is much more important than morale.