I played a couple games before updating. The first was a disaster; I had no idea what I was doing. The last two before I updated when much better, though the game would crash after June 22 2227. This is fixed when I updated, but when I loaded one of the games up, the game had taken a turn. I had gone from 60-something approval to about 18 becuase my taxes were so high (not such a huge problem before because of several projects and bonuses). Also, even with taxes so high, I was losing over 3000 a turn when before I had been making a few hundred. My spending was around 72%, but I had to reduce it the 30s to get positive income again, espcially since I had to reduce my taxes by 20% or so. I decided to start a new game (all of this is at normal difficulty, by the way) and ecountered the same basic problems: in order to not lose money I need to have spending so low that I can't stay competitive, in order to make money I have to have taxes so high that rebellion is about to break out on nearly all of my planets, and all of the inverses and converses that result in no money and no productivity.
What happened? What changed? I looked through the history file and couldn't find anything to explain all this.
