Alignment
From Cities
There are 11 alignments in Cities. 4 of them are standard player/monster alignments:
Note that the above are the only alignments that players may choose when they start.
The main 4 alignments are powerful against each other like this:
"Air over Water, Earth displaces Air, Fire scorches Earth, Water quenches Fire". If an alignment is strong against another, it does twice as much damage.
For example, an Earth player does a base 3 damage.
- Against a Water, Fire, Earth, Neutral or Spirit monster, he should do 3 damage.
- Against an Air monster, he should do 6 damage, twice as much as before.
If he then wields an Earth weapon, such as an Earth Knife, then he will do another 2 times as much damage against an Air monster, doing 12 damage. (Assuming an Earth Knife does 3 damage also).
If he wields an Air weapon causing a basic 3 damage, he will only do 6 damage to Air creatures (compared to 12 with an Earth Knife), but he will do double the normal damage to Water mosnters, which are weak to Air.
There are also seven other alignments. Typically, these may be found on monsters, though there are several ways (Mixology Drinks, Rainbow Wand) that players can change to them:
Ice-aligned players do double damage against all other alignments. Ice players are colder than normal, and will get frostbite faster.
Spirit-aligned players can see invisible things, as can a player holding any Spirit Stone/Sword/Knife/Catana/Sword2. Spirit has no opposite alignment.
- if you could already see spirit monsters and become aligned to spirit then you won't be able to see them
Neutral is its own opposite; if you become neutral and attack a neutral monster, you will do double damage, or quadruple if you are using a neutral weapon.
Shrimp is also also its own opposite.
Goth is its own opposite, but in an odd way. When a monster is turned goth by attacking it with a Dark weapon ("The <monster> is depressed, and more annoying."), it will deal quadruple damage; if the player is also goth, this turns into octuple damage. Note that if you keep attacking with the dark weapon, it will do double damage, because goth is its own opposite. A "naturally" goth monster (or one turned gothy by a Dark Wand) will not gain the extra quadrupling of damage.
Alignments can be changed by using certain Wands. For example, an Air wand will turn a monster with any alignment other than Air to Air, meaning Earth aligned characters will do twice as much damage. This is clearly advantageous, especially for fighting tougher monsters such as dragons, whales, Ophannim, and elder gods.
