question about population and morale

from GalCiv2 Forums
I have a game on 1.1 where my capitol had the 300% food bonus tile. While normally I don't like my capitol to have a huge population I figured I should take advantage of the bonus. I built the farm and built 1 or 2 entertainment centers that I kept upgrading. At first morale was not a problem, I had a custom race with a very high morale bonus and I kept getting bonus from trade goods. I think my normal racial bonus on most of my other planets was somethign like +70%. When the population on the capitol was around 20 million I started seeing a drop. When I looked at morale of the planet it said the negative due to poulations was high, which I expected, but what surprised me was my positive from buildings and natural abilities was going down over time/increasing population. When I upgraded entertainment buildings or added new ones the bonus would increase for a bit but then it would keep going down. I did not have any wars and none of the other colonies seemed to have a significant drop in the bonuses.
Is this normal that morale bonuses are less effective as the population goes up? I swear I have had planets with larger populations than 25 million without this problem. I know that people say the 300% food is a dangerous thing to use but It seems like at under 25 million with low taxes, 5 fully upgraded entertainment centers, and a very high natural morale, I should have a very high approval rating.
It feels like increasing population does a double hit on morale, once for the negative modifier but then also reducing the positive modifiers. If anyone else has noticed this do you know what the ratio of population to declining bonuses is?

I hope this was just a weird occurence and not how the pop impact is figured out in 1.1.I like the way where you just get a negative modifier because it is easier to figure out the impact of more people but if population effects the bonuses as well I can't estimate it in my head without having to do some math, making the game less enjoyable and relaxing. If needed for balance issues make the negative impact bigger or grow exponential, but keep it in one area instead of affecting multiple numbers.
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Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
i hope this helps a bit, i found it today on wikipedia.
according to this, the larger your population, the more difficult it is to get a good morale.
take a look.

Population in billion // fBaseMorale (In-game "-??% From Population" in Approval's Tool Tip)

1 b. // 99 (-1%)
5 b. // 91 (-9%)
10 b. // 77 (-23%)
15 b. // 60 (-40%)
20 b. // 40 (-60%)
25+ b. // 20 (-80%)
Population over 25 billion will always have a Base Morale of 20 (-80%)

Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
You are correct, there is a form of double whammy. The morale buildings add a percentage of the base morale, which is calculated by the formulas in the post above.
I solved the math problem by comparing the maximum possible populations of each planet quality rating to the number of tiles available on those planets, assumed a rule of no more than 1 tile in four would go to entertainment, found the PQ with the most pop per ent center, and that left me with one ent building per 9 billion pop, which is my rule of thumb for all my planets now. It's probably overkill, as so far it's been silly easy to maintain morale, but I go with morale bonuses as a racial pick.
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Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
It's probably overkill, as so far it's been silly easy to maintain morale, but I go with morale bonuses as a racial pick.


I have never been able to keep a planet at 100% happiness when getting close to the minimum base morale. Not once.

The morale ability is a joke at those levels: even a 100% racial morale bonus only counts for a +20 morale (technically less, because they put it through some arbitrary formula).

No, the only way to keep your cities at 100% is to have the high-end morale buildings. And, since you spent time researching those, you're not researching, say, the banking tech tree.

I prefer to stop at 17B population. You can survive with only a few morale buildings, your morale ability still has significant value, and you still have room for those Stock Exchanges.
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I thought it also depended on planet PQ or size. 25 billion on class 10 planet is different than 25 billion on a large class 25 planet.
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Ok greatthanks for mentioning the wiki( I didn't know the game had one), just checked it out and found the formulas. So basically as population increases it will create a smaller base morale, which we see as the -##% for population in the game and stops at - 80%. In addition to being a direct subtractor the base number is also used in calculating fcivability and fimprovements.
For example the formula of fciv abilility= (PlayerMorale * fBaseMorale) ^ 0.75. If I am reading this right if a race has a bonus of 100 in moral would have the following bonus for racial ability shown on the planet screen.

pop = 1b fcivabilty= (100 * 0.99)^.75 = + 31.4%
pop = 10b fcivability = (100 * 0.77)^.75 =+ 26%
pop =25+b fcivability = (100 * 0.2)^ .75 = + 9.5%

These numbers seem to be a little low but does show the impact of population. for fimprovements(entertaiment centers) the formula is fimprovements ( sum of improvement bonuses * fbasemoral) . I am almost wondering if that is the same formula for civability without taking it to the 0.75 power since that would seem to be closer to the bonuses I normally see on a planet.

Either way this shows that the negative moral from higher pop is signifcantly more than just the -% we can easily see in the game. Does anyone else think this is misleading? When I saw a modifier that said -% from pop I assumed that was the only factor that pop had on morale. oh well I guess this encourages people to either have lots of medium sized planets or 1-2 super sized planets over 25b where you get no more penalties. The wiki does mention the orrginal beta had a more straight forward approach of 0.1b -1 approval but they felt it oversimplified things. Myself me I am not sure, I like numbers but this just feels overly complicated and confusing and as I said I deffinatly felt a little misled by the naming.
Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
In my current game, playing a huge galaxy map with a custom race with a high morale bonus, and having gotten all the morale techs and trade goods, I've been running taxes at 80% with 100% approval everywhere (using 1-2 VRC's at most), until my planets started crossing over the 20bil pop line, at which point, approval plummeted even as I cranked out more and more VRC's replacing my stock markets (I didn't want to lower taxes for the other 170+ (!) planets just to appease the few ultra-high-pop ones). After 8 or so VRC's total, I ran out of space to build more, population hit 25bil (and still growing), and approval has stabilized at 75%. I think the planet details showed the morale bonus as something like +565%. Planetary income went from 507bc (at around 19bil pop, with the stock markets) to around 248bc (at around 25bil pop, with no stock markets). I don't see why the higher populations are penalized so badly; IIRC income only goes up with the square root of population.

I hadn't realized that the *base* approval is what drops as population increases. It makes all those morale buildings and bonuses virtually worthless. It just seems wrong that I could be at 19bil pop with 100% approval with 1-2 VRC's, then suddenly hit 20+bil pop and be at 68% approval and dropping rapidly. It's definitely not worth it to use those +300% food tiles, even if you restrict your farm research to 6mt/farm like I did.
Reply #7 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
It's very plausable to have a 30 billion population planet with 100% approval. You need a lot of morale enhancements, but after that you can get a massive population, which makes an excellent reserve of people for wartime (either reinforcing planets that were invaded, or for taking some of your own.)
Reply #8 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Generally I reserve my 'super-planets' to those that are PQ22+. PQ7-21 get only 1 farm with a bank thrown in (capitols get an additional morale building.) At PQ22 you have the tiles to crank up the population and build the morale buildings that are needed to keep them happy. Below that for me though its just not worth it.
Reply #9 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I know this is kind of topic but is there anyway to cap population without destroying a farm? Possibly some type of bar or button to stop growth even if you have extra food. Probably not included in the game now but does anyone else think this could be a nice feature possibly in the future versions? Without it seems like the high food resource tiles are pretty much a waste most of the time since ideal size seems under 20mil.
Reply #10 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
100% morale causes double the population growth.
Does anyone know if this works on a planet by planet basis, or does the whole empire have to be at 100% ?

Reply #11 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I know this is kind of topic but is there anyway to cap population without destroying a farm? Possibly some type of bar or button to stop growth even if you have extra food. Probably not included in the game now but does anyone else think this could be a nice feature possibly in the future versions? Without it seems like the high food resource tiles are pretty much a waste most of the time since ideal size seems under 20mil.


If you have a transport you can do this manually. each turn fly it back to the planet, and lift the excess above your target level off.
Reply #13 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
To reduce your population:
1) Build transports and "recolonize" your enemies planets.
2) If you don't have any enemies, then shuffle the population around between your planets using same transports, or even colony ships in a pinch.
3) Invite invasion from hostile forces (not recommended...)

--Brad