How many succesful, long lasting and prosperous nations without any armed forces or other deterrent have there been during our history? I'll give you a hint: not many. A nation that seeks conflict and assets of others through conflict isnt necessarily outright evil, no matter how much propaganda you consume. Perhaps your neighbours felt that your benevolence was lacking? Or that they could take you over without bloodshed since you seemed like a pacifistic nation and thus acquire your wealth easily. I've found that this game does offer you other choices than outright conquest, but to be able to choose those choices you must first safeguard your own nation.

tl,dr: Secure your borders before you try anything else.

I appreciate your advice. I do recognize the need to build some ships, as a deterrent. However, I think your missing my concern. What is the point of ideologies if "Benevolent" acts no different than "Evil?" You ask if my neighbors felt my "benevolence was lacking?" I checked every game box possible: gave tech, said yes to requests, (which get ridiculous by the way,) traded, opened borders, and professed continuing support in these trying times. All to no avail. Inevitably, they each began with the "You realize we eventually plan to consume you?" message followed by the "Your planets would look better under our leadership."

(Note to game editors); at one point, they even reported "despite our differing ideologies..." and we had the SAME benevolent ideology.

Is Ideology and Diplomacy functioning?

By the way Rectunator, I have to politely disagree. If we chose to take anything from Mexico or Canada, you would have to consider us "evil," propaganda notwithstanding.

You can start with the Likeable trait, research the Diplomacy techs, build Embassies, and Cultural Starbases with Diplomatic Outposts to raise DIplomacy. The higher your Diplomacy.

Hello,

You can build embassies. Like 10 or 12.

In my current game (insane map, abundant planets), I have build 10 embassies and every factions I meet has been ally with me as soon as they can.

I did not build a single ship with weapon.

I will culture flip them... in the long run!

Sorry for my English, I'm not a native speaker.

I want to point out that the us has bren to war with mexico and canada over land actually.

Something to keep in mind about most games, and certainly GC, is that while we the players try to roleplay, the game's objective and design is not generally focused on that.

The game is much more object/resource based, than action based. Which is classic for any strategy game, IE will you build research stations or factories? That is a strategy, and to GC diplomacy is no different. Will you spend X resources building out embassies?

The game does not care about your "actions" nearly as much. To GCs credit, it does have a framework for this, it cares about ongoing wars and such, but the level your asking for isn't there.

Your benevolent if you pick those traits, or spend resources on benevolence buildings, there is no "action" that makes you benevolent or not. Which to be fair, lets you roleplay as you see fit, and rationalize your behavior however you want, in one way its limiting in another its freeing.

Gauntlet, if what you say is true, why does the game have those options? Why does it actually keep a running checklist as to why a race likes or dislikes your race? When you check status, it actually has pluses next to factors like "gave us a gift," "Same ideology," "open boarders." Why do this if they don't matter? Why bother with that aspect when, in the next turn, the same race says, "you realize we're going to eventually enslave you?"

I think you misunderstood my frustration. I don't want to role play. I want to play a style other than Risk. I'm hopeful that I'm simply playing in an ignorant fashion to my goals. Tung and Ghislain pointed out some tangible ideas I will try. Maybe by using the game mechanics I've been neglecting I will find a little of the balance I'm seeking. LMAO, I sound like the narrator at the end of "The Last Samurai."

I always play pragmatic. Didn`t know pragmatic empires hated benevolent ones. That really does make little sense. Shouldn`t they have a neutral attitude?

As for diplomacy work on those diplomacy inventions like crazy and choose the (I think pragmatic) option that stops Empires declaring war with you for 50 turns. that should keep peace for a while.

So,  opportunistically benevolent and opportunistically malevolent. 

That doesnt sound lke a triangle to me

Those things do matter, just not as much as you would like. As Naselus would point out, your relationship system is on a very small scale, and many factors deemed important  add +3 per turn, spamming even 4 embassies has a large effect, the occasional gift barely registers because it doesn't really last for very long. 

At any rate, I think your right, I misunderstood. I thought you were confused as to why doing "benevloent" things didn't make you benevolent and affect relationships, but now it sounds like you just want to know how to win without a superior military, which others are advising you on well enough.

"The devs have said they were deliberately avoiding the good vs evil dichotomy." 

I'm surprised that the devs seriously thought this (and if they did, I'd have to disagree with their execution). GC3 has a simplistic conception of morality. It is a hard triangle with essentially "Generous" "Greedy but not Murderous" and "Greedy AND Murderous" points. That middle option really isn't great.

Two of which (because pragmatism is not very well developed) are basically following a formula of morality better suited to Lord of the Rings, or Loony Toons. That is not to detract, these things hold great value, its fun, playful, and provides necessary formulas for conflict in GC3. But its definitely a good vs evil dichotomy with a enforced "gray area" that is poorly defined in comparison to the other two, and shoehorned in simply to provide a third point on their conflict triangle.

Civ Beyond Earth for example, while still a hard and somewhat contrived triangle, has much more nuanced ideas behind the three philosophies (authenticity VS harmony VS dominance). 

It also works well in Civ because all of the players are human and share a common ancestry of thought and psychology. Morality to various aliens will undoubtedly take many forms. Some races may be very "benevolent", but so focused on long or short term results, that to the average human, their immediate actions are quite malevolent, or for that matter, maybe that proves them to be too utilitarian for human tastes? GC3 assumes that all sentient life agrees that there is a universal morality spectrum, they disagree about where its right to land on that spectrum, but nobody really questions the limits of the spectrum itself.

In ideal circumstances, I'd probably break down the ideology sections into five competing themes, and every decision would up/down a pair of these. Being extreme in any one could cause issues. You'd find that these five would likely work well if they corresponded to personality analysis tools like DISC or Myer's Briggs assessments and the like.

But hey! THAT might not actually be any fun. Now if you will excuse me, I have a death furnace ribbon cutting ceremony to attend.

How the hell do you run a 50-race game succesfully? I'm running this on a pretty good rig and my game creation starts ctd'ng on insane maps with 15-20 races. 

I'd agree with this; the reason many players think 'benevolent' races mean 'good' is because every dictionary in the world will tell you that 'benevolent' is a synonym for 'good'. And most will use the word 'evil' in the definition for malevolent, too. 

If they wanted to escape from moralism, then there were plenty of alternatives that would move away from the simplistic good vs neutral vs evil paradigm of the previous games. Pragmatic was a good choice - it doesn't mean 'neutral' but rather suggests political flexibility. Malevolent could have instead been changed to 'militaristic' and benevolent to 'utopian' or 'egalitarian' or 'jurisprudence' or whatever; things which you may or may not regard as being actually good or evil, but are actually neutral terms that can be used for either. 

One thing that might be interesting for modding is to see is if we can lock out specific lines of ideology when a different one is picked. If malevolent row 2 was mutually exclusive with benevolent and pragmatic row 2, you could convert the different rows into 'policy types' - so like row 1 economic, row 2 diplomatic etc - and then have different policy types dependent on the ideologies. Consider:

Row 1 becomes the 'foreign policy' row. Malevolent has militarism and is all about frightening other races and buffing ship performance, benevolent has diplomacy and so is good for bringing people onto your side in a war and building treaties etc and pragmatic has trade and is all about making stonking great wads of cash and having hundreds of trade routes. Once you pick one set to follow, the other two are permanently locked out. 

Row 2 becomes 'economic policy'. Malevolent is planned economy, pragmatic is free market and benevolent is welfare state.

Row 3 becomes domestic policy. Malevolent gets police state, pragmatic takes rule of law and benevolent takes individual freedom.

And row 4 becomes political structure, with malevolent getting authoritarianism, pragmatic taking oligarchy and benevolent picking up democracy.

Then ditch escalating costs, because no-one can ever have more than 20 ideology traits anyway due to the lockouts. This allows you to sketch out the social structure of your empire without dumping morale judgements onto it - some people think a individual freedoms go too far, others think police states are automatically bad (myself included), some people think free markets are the best thing ever. It wasn't that long ago that most human beings thought democracy was a bad idea - it was a borderline curseword in the USA right up until the 1830s, which is why it's never used in the constitution. People can design the empire in line with their own politics, rather than having to think 'do I want to be nice or nasty?'. No-one wakes up and decides 'I'm gonna be a total git today'; even Stalin probably thought he was trying to do more or less the right thing most of the time (Hitler was definitely convinced. Syphilis does that).

Even if we know that some things just won't work with human beings, alien races might be happy with military dictatorships (the Drengin), or some kind of anarcho-democracy of small councils (Iconians maybe?)  or a rigorously planned economy (Thalans all over).