also i noticed if you have multiple entertainment centers you dont get any added benifit.

thanks for the heads up on the other ones todd.

Also, can anyone explain the difference of the approval rating displayed in the planet screen, and morale value displayed in tooltip when you hover above the approval rating number? Why are they different? What's the difference?

Definitely not fixed in 1.0D1.008.

I was able to reproduce a more extreme version of Citizen kaitro's scenario almost exactly. I had political capital, civ capital, multimedia center for a total of 105% planetary morale bonus - and this was correctly reported on the planetary details screen.

But the morale tooltip reported "+31 buildings". Is there some kind of undocumented cap here?

I also should have had civ-wide morale boosts from trade goods and a developed morale resource starbase, but I saw only a paltry "+4 native ability".

Can someone from Stardock explain what's going on?

Peace Phoenix said...

I have tried to do some tests, I have think to have found where the 31% come from: Civilization capital : 25% Stock Market : 10% Multimedia center on bonus: 30% * (1 + 100%) = 60 % Total moral bonus: 95% impact of morale building: 95% (1 - 67%) = 95%/3 = 31%. Here is where the 31% come from. Basically, your population have a huge negative impact onf your morale. And it seems to work the same way for native ability: it is based on you empire morale bonus and decrease with the population.

I think you're on the right track. I copied down numbers from planets in my current game, and I get a pretty close match to the observed values. Here are the formulae I used:

If
B = total morale increase of all buildings on a planet (as shown on planet details)
and
P = percent unhappy due to population (from Approval tooltip)
then
"+x% from buildings" = (1-P) * B

Moreover, if
C = total civ-wide morale increase (as shown on civ statistics page)
then
"+x% from native ability" ˜= ( (1-P) * C ) ^ 0.8

I don't get exact matches to the values shown in the game, but they're within a percent most of the time. Moreover, the tooltip morale value is always the sum of the other values in the tooltip. But it's usually different from the displayed "Approval" value. I don't understand what factor converts from morale to approval.


After playing with this math in Excel for a while, I learned a couple of things.

(1) This is an extremely unintuitive way to calculate morale. When you read a description that, say, Ultra Spices give a 10% morale boost, it's basically a complete lie. The actual boost will range from 15% on a planet with no population unhappiness, to 3% on a planet with extreme population unhappiness.

(2) The more population you have, the less improvement you'll get from a +morale building, tech or trade good. So rush-buying an Entertainment Network on a planet with lots of population unhappiness is probably not going to help much. There appears to be no effective way to keep a high population planet happy. The only real solution is to keep your populate low in the first place (or to send billions out in a transport to die, thus making all the survivors "happy").

(3) The AI doesn't seem to be playing by the same calculation as the player. I have several times conquered an AI planet late in the game, and found 3-4 farms with no happiness buildings. For the human player, this would be a recipie for extremely low morale. How does the AI get away with it?


Does anyone from Stardock want to respond to this thread? Have we figured out the mechanics correctly? Is the really the inteded behavior of the morale system, or is it a bug?

As to how the AI does it with multiple farms, I am not sure but I have taken planets and looked at planets via espionage and found that the AI uses the option to spend planetary income for approval big time.

I thought propoganda wasn't in GC2. Where is the option to do this?

I haven't made any calculations, but it seemed to me that morale was measured in one planet, and aproval is empire wide: so if you have 3 planets with high morale but with almost noone on it (because you just conquered it and only 1/10th of your soldiers survived to colonize it) and you capital with 30bi people on class 10 and therefore very low morale, then your approval is low because of earth's huge relative population.

I understand the empire-wide approval rating, the percentage displayed in the lower-left corner of the main screen.

However, the planet detail screen also has a number labeled "Approval". It is a different number from the empire-wide value. If you hover over it, you get a tooltip which shows you how "Morale" is calculated. But the "Morale" and "Approval" numbers for the planet do not not match. I would like to understand why.

I thought propoganda wasn't in GC2. Where is the option to do this?

Under the planet details screen, if I remember correctly. During the beta, one of the strategies I tried was using propoganda on my homeworld to offset a high tax rate until other worlds got enough population to have morale issues.

I think I have read somewhere, that they are going to put it back in the future...