Hmm... I feel somewhat relieved now.

Sounds like you are staying away from the "evil always wins because good is dumb" model.

The way Galciv2 used the alignments was great. Being good should be hard and cause you grief and being evil should be easy and beneficial. After all, why would someone be evil otherwise?

Anyway, as I understood it, you must choose either Life or Death magic, you can't have both? This was a rather disappointing part of MOM to me, why couldn't you have both?

Well, in a fantasy setting, being evil could be a result of your species being designed by an evil being, who or what you worship, some mistake or bad choice during magical work, or just plain ole bad attitude.

I was mostly just listing common narrative themes that answer the question, to show a game could have short explanations that might work for most players. Re bad attitude "just because," that was an oversimplified way of saying that you can quite consciously decide to be evil even though you were taught it is wrong and understand that you'll be risking very serious consequences for your actions.

I hadn't thought much about the idea of "character choice" in a 4x game, though. I've just been unconsciously accepting that most or all such choices are in the initial game settings. But that's because, other than MoM, I've never played one where the player POV felt anything like role-playing.

This is how most folks seem to describe alignment in GC2. For me, it has too much cultural baggage. I'd prefer to see alignment as a single scale, with a central range that is neutral. The effects of alignment choices would move you along this one scale, and the results would be determined by your distance from 0. Being very close to 0 would generate one set of costs and benefits, being clearly negative a different set, and being clearly good yet another.

And none of the differences should be about "easy vs. hard." It's easy to be good when you live in the Shire. It's hard to be good when you live in Mordor. And Gandalf spent the vast majority of his very long life as "the Grey."

Which brings up the even more fun question--will alignment (good-neutral-evil, not shard stuff) change be possible? If there's a substantial diplomacy layer to Elemental, it could be really interesting to consider shifting your alignment as part of courting an ally, or even better, working magic to shift the alignment of weaker channeler as part of your brilliant long-term strategy. Shifting your own alignment should have consequences along the lines of D&D level loss, maybe a manna drop from which you can slowly recover?

I hope that things are not simply B&W. I would like for neutral or gray alignments as well. Think of the magic as a sort of a triangle instead of a simple line. The top of the triangle would of course be neutral and the left to right good and evil. Of couse all would be equally powerful in their own right at the extremes.

But isn't that what necromancy is for?

Seriously though, I would like a bit more race choice than "humans" and "naughty humans". Though I suppose user-made content will help with that in the long term. 

I hope for a grayish system when you can play neutrals aka. Smugling mass desctruction weapons to help your orphans.

Hmm. 12 civs. That sounds like there's definitely room for the good, the bad, and the indifferent both amongst humans and Fallen.

I agree--*except* I think the "good guy" list should be determined by the character of your channeler and civ. Drengin and Korath may fight and despise each other, but the rest of the GC2 civs are just so much meat (or microchips). For a conservative druid type, the "bad guy" would be anyone doing big, messy things that wreck habitat. (Man, it's been too, too long since I played a game where you could create volcanoes on your enemy's turf. June is sooo long from now.)

I had the same thought.  I think that the GC alignments were more about play-style than anything.  If you wanted to win through winning friends and influencing people (my preference) being a Good civilization gave you a serious leg up.  If, on the other hand, you wanted to crush the other civilizations beneath your sandalled foot-equivalents, going Evil gave you all the nice extra military goodies that those goody-twoshoes were too wussy to use.