Idealist-Opportunist would probably be a better way of naming Good vs. Evil

A chaos-law scale (Authoritarian-Anarchic) would also be interesting. Am currently re-watching Babylon 5, and the Law-Chaos conflict is the crux of the show.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! You are ruining what made GalCiv so.. soo.... GALCIV

Good for you. Alwyays thought it was a clunky and relatively arbitrary mechanic.

Yes. As in there isn't "good" and "evil" like that anymore.  It's a different system that's more specific.

Ill take Order and Honor for a Domination win across the Galaxy please......

Right there with ya, and you my friend, have excellent taste in scifi    One of my all time favorite shows, infact, I was thinking about starting to rewatch it again. 

I always (when having the options and controls) approached it as a somewhat laid-back dictator.  Kinda some of the perspective I had in a job from my youth, a bouncer.  I was (still am) quite sizable, polite and well spoken and am inclined to leave you alone if you follow my (the bar's) rules, if you go against the "Law of the Land" to got a VERY firm grip politely asking you to decist, if you choose not to, you will be removed, by any level of force necessary.   Basicaly, ingame, cross me at your own peril as you will find out how much of a totalitarian dictator schmuck I can REALLY be, otherwise I am rather amicable.

Yeah, traditional D&D alignments, that could definitely work.

Yeah Good vs Evil is Old fasioned now, I like how it's done in Sid Meiers Alpha centauri, where you pick from a set of policies Each faction would then like you better if your policies were ones they liked, and would hate you more if you didn't do things their way.

sidenote: does anyone else always wipe out Miriam at earliest opportunity?

GalCivIII could have many many more policies to choose from than in SMAC.

Personally 'alignment' doesn't really work in GalCiv. for my own campaigns alignment was more about the 'broad' morality that a character adhered to. And to be honest I'd only really pin them down on it, if the lawful good paladin suddenly thought that burning down the orphanage full of kids so they could make their escape from the trolls was a 'great idea'.

If you're going to introduce alignment it really needs to be more than some 'checkbox' of how a race is. Gameplay wise how does that matter? Would it impact diplomacy? Would making sepecific choices in quests or such mean your alignment 'shifted'.Does being of alignment A mean that if you do action B your diplomacy would be more impacted perhaps? Would you receive a specific production bonus/penalty for any buildings, units, policies?

I'd only really want it if alignment actually MATTERED in the choices I make. Not some box in the intro screen that I'll never ever see again.

Yep. I find her "holier than thou" rants and "religious proselytizations" very anoying. But I think that was a big part of the game's purpose, having a number of contentious character traits.

Ah yes.. Fresh Slaves!

Love that option, screw saving the colonists and new indigenous inhabitants...."Fresh Slaves'....yep I'm evil....

I don't think that Lawful vs Chaotic is workable too. Just look at Dregin. Are they a chaotic people? A militaristic race usually into law and order more than Democratic ones. And Yor, I can't find a robotic nation could be chaotic / anarchy. Every race has law, and I don't believe that a race that survive into space age has chaotic / anarchy mind.

I wonder if they'll go with some kind of socio-economic compass.

Sword of the Stars 2 uses the compass in an interesting way: many things that you do in the game nudge you along an axis and so, over time, you gravitate towards an area of the compass corresponding with one of the nine government types. Different modifiers come into play based on your government type.

More in depth description here: Sword of the Stars 2 Codex: Government

Agreed that one dimensional morality is pretty lame, how many dimensions before its over complex and un-useful?