a stupid question from a total n00b ^^

Research the entertainment branch, and build wonders like Harmony Crystals, Virtual Reality thingys, etc.

I also put at least one entertainment thing on each planet, by late game I can run 80% taxes with about 90% approval.

Also keep your population under control. Don't build more than 2 farms per planet unless you know what you're doing. Yes, that means avoiding the +300% food tile like the plague.

If all else fails, morale resources are your friends (right next to the economic, military and influence ones).

Both are right, you "happiness" is a combination of moral boosting strucutres on each planet and your tax level.

If you have farms set up, then over crowding can occur... this makes people unhappy. The remedy is to either place extra moral structures on the planet or not use farms. (Both stratedgies have their place)

The second is your tax level. By playing with the tax slider, you can pretty easily see how it effects moral.

Hope that helps!

Also morale resources are your friends. You can crank up the taxes sooner rather than later by building those up.

it helps to colonize planets with +10 PQ, these would give you some bonus to your approval as well, 10-15% iinm.

one laborious idea is to keep balancing your populations across planets... build a colony/transport ship, and use it to shuttle population from the lowest approval planet to the highest approval one. granted, you might lose the pop growth bonus that comes above the 75% and 100% approval mark on the happiest planet... just an option to be considered if your lpwest ones start to drop really low into the red, for example.

Build entertainment buildings, be careful building farms, choose the Neutral alignment, and if a planet's pop. gets to high, load the people onto troop transports.

Build colony ships and dump the no good bastards into space and decommish the ship. That'll teach-um.