However, the complete nerfing of morale (and farm output) has removed a significant portion of this replayability from the game. It is now not viable to pursue a high population planet build strategy, and I'm not sure that constantly having an empire made up exclusively of planets with 19 billion population will help maintain a level of interest in the game.

1.3 overall is an improvement on 1.2 but I would add my voice to the choir about this point. I really liked getting PQ 18+ planets to 95B population, it was not easy to do, but made the end game a bit more fun (like a side game) and there was a economic trade off in building those planets to 95B as they would produce less money.

Now I am not building ANY morale buildings and all planets r ending up at 19billion population.

I think that smaller populations add a new dimension. It is no longer an option to pump out troop transports every 4 turns from a hive world. In my current game I am juggling troop production across 5 worlds on the other side of the galaxy from my battle front. In 1.2 I would have been producing them from newly conquered planets, but in 1.3 I don't want to lose the population. A new problem to solve...

If you think about it that way. It nerfs the AI into not being able to pump out troop transports out of one planet. So it can focus its invasions into actaully conquering the one planet its attacking.

I have never had a planet go past 24 Billion. I like to play with 100% approval.

I have not tried v1.3 but I think NLCs (now 500) are now to expensive; 300->400 would have been more appropriate.

In v1.2 I would race to from Research Centers to NLC but now it will take too long on anything other than a highly developed planet. When I play v1.3 I think I will only upgrade to NLC on worlds that have nothing else to build.

I have to chime in that I don't like the changes to the morale system either. Now, at least based on what I have seen in admittedly only 2 games of V1.3, you can get a planet up to 21 billion with high morale, but above that it became almost impossible to get morale above the 44% danger level. I had maxed out the entertainment tech tree, I had all the trade goods, but the only thing that really helped was, on one planet, building a Political Capital on a bonus tile!

It used to be fun, stumbling over a high quality planet with a farm bonus tile or two, and/or the entertainment bonus tile, and seeing how high a population you could get before the morale problems became too difficult. Now there seems to be an effective hard cap for population. It definitely reduces the fun factor.

i like 1.3, however economy is really hard to get right.
all spent my 10 ability points on economics and moral thingy's.

As a new player that never played anything before 1.3 I don't think it is "too hard" as a game. It may very well be "too hard" compared to earlier versions because it broke your favorite strategy, I can't really comment on that though. If you play it as a new game and compare it to other games rather than older versions of itself it feels well balanced and definitely not overly hard.

With a few exceptions, the complaint is not that the v1.3 changes have made the game "too hard" but that the changes reduce the number of viable options of play. I play many different strategies on different galaxy sizes of different composition with different numbers and types of opponents.

The strategy broken by these changes wasn’t necessarily my “favorite” and certainly wasn’t my only strategy, but it was one that I sometimes used. Is this (new) game still better than 99.9% of all games out there? I think so. Is this (new) game less than what it was? In some ways, yes.

Anyway...

Back to the OP.

How about a poll on 1.3? Frogboy said he would have a poll.

Most of us have played 1.3 now, so we all have our opinions.

Give us our poll.

had 100% tax and no spending and was still going in the hole fast & furious

The people should be in complete revolt!

I really think some people just didn't realize that you're not supposed to be able to tax away most of people's income and for the people to basically react by saying "Thank you, may I have another?"

You're not supposed to be able to tax people at really high levels. That was the problem with 1.2. People were running around taxing at 70% while providing their citizens in return.

You can still tax at high levels, you just have to bulid a lot more to get there.

Moreover, IF you don't like the changes, easy solution: Open up notepad, go to the data\english directory and open up planetimprovements.xml and find Entertainment Network and Multimedia Center and increase the value of the MoraleBonus to say 2X what it is in there. Voila.

Overall, the net result is that making tons of money isn't as easy.

But it's still pretty easy IMO.  In the design of the game, the ideas was that you would get 50% of your wealth from taxes, 40% from trade, and 10% from tourism. 

But people were playing the game where they would have thousands of $ per turn above their spending without even having trade going. That's just not reasonable.  Sitting back and cranking out farms, morale buildings and stock exchanges on some back planet is not a strategy unto itself. There should be more to it than that. And there is now.

Now players can still get money they just have to actually do something othre than lay down tons of farms. They have to create trade routes. They need to control that economic resource.

But that aside, there's nothing stopping someone from just modifying the data file to whatever they want it to be. 

I really think some people just didn't realize that you're not supposed to be able to tax away most of people's income and for the people to basically react by saying "Thank you, may I have another?" You're not supposed to be able to tax people at really high levels. That was the problem with 1.2. People were running around taxing at 70% while providing their citizens in return.

This is completely true. Just think how much people moan, rant, rave about taxes today. Here in the UK, historically we have a overall tax level tolerance of 50% (this includes all types of taxes, income tax, VAT, fuel duty etc...), if any political party is stupid enough to go over that 50% barrier, its virtually 100% certain they will be voted out at the next election.

Moreover, IF you don't like the changes, easy solution: Open up notepad, go to the data\english directory and open up planetimprovements.xml and find Entertainment Network and Multimedia Center and increase the value of the MoraleBonus to say 2X what it is in there. Voila.

One word 'metaverse'.

Should'nt u have said to players who moaned about making too much money (how many were there???), 1/2 morale bonus?

But it's still pretty easy IMO. In the design of the game, the ideas was that you would get 50% of your wealth from taxes, 40% from trade, and 10% from tourism.

This is still not true. I am playing 1.3, getting 80% of my money via taxing population.

But people were playing the game where they would have thousands of $ per turn above their spending without even having trade going. That's just not reasonable. Sitting back and cranking out farms, morale buildings and stock exchanges on some back planet is not a strategy unto itself. There should be more to it than that. And there is now. Now players can still get money they just have to actually do something othre than lay down tons of farms. They have to create trade routes. They need to control that economic resource.

U still do not need to create trade routes.

Now every planet is covered in banks/stock exchanges. No morale buildings in sight. Economic resource is not the most important resource to control, its moral resource. U need not build any of the inferior morale buildings by having morale resource's (far more crucial then economic now).

I think a better solution would have been to keep the buildings exactly the same as 1.2 but raise the research costs of the entertainment tech line and the research costs of the economic tech line. The aim being that really high populations/huge tax income would have been reserved solely for the end game and not just 2-3 yrs into a game.