My current game - gigantic, tough, 6 enemies, playing as Terran.

Started in top right and discovered the Drengens were my neighbors. Next closest were Torians across a large empty gap in space. Went into colony rush and wound up with Drengans completely surrounding me, but with a good tight group of worlds of my own. Grabbed a econ resource right next to a Drengan world and fortified it. I usually play as neutral, but choices and needs in this game have me as evil, so the Drengan didn't attack. Also have 4 minors in this cluster.

I conquered the Dark Yor for their homeworld and began heavy trading with the Arkians. I didn't want to trade with the Drengans because it was obvious I would need to go to war as soon as I could. Econ / morale played a large part in this decision.

Declared war on Drengans and was doing rather well, and then the Arkians declared war on me! ARRGH! My economy collapsed. Five minutes of swearing at my monitor at 1:30AM. No sleep tonight. The only satisfaction was that my battered econ was better than the Drengans. Went to banking centers and pushed for stock markets and cut back production. Transfered fleet elements to attack Arkians. Pushed a few frieghters into the big deep to trade with Torians. Struggled back and had my major econ resource base destroyed by an technologically advanced Drengan fleet, which took so much damage in the counterattack that I destroyed it with a single frigate. The Dregan appear drained by their efforts and are willing to sign a peace treaty. What to do?

This entire game has been dominated by economics and morale. I have been at 45%+ tax and 66%- approval for most of the game. The Drengan AI seems to be making the same decisions as I am, and we are killing each other for resources - just like real life. Will I be strong enough after this bloodbath to go on or will I become easy prey for someone else?

Every time I hear the griping about econ/morale I wonder if everyone watches the new. Most wars are about resources, and the game seems to reflect that. Does that mean it is hard to build uberfleets and rampage across the galaxy? Yes - and it should be! We won the Cold War through economics, remember? Econ/morale IS as important as tactics and weapons, if not more.

Kudus, Frogboy. Nice job.

We like the changes. The majority of users seem to like the changes. You don't. I'm sorry for that. Perhaps the next update you'll like better.

I had argued against *some* of the changes prior to release. It did seem that the most significant changes came right at the end (v1.3b2) with very little time before release. In reality, my main objection were changes that I felt would make it impossible to achieve high pop. Certainly I had operated throughout the bulk of my games at the 79% taxes with 100% approval level, I'm sure that everyone who could did as well.

I have no issue with making high taxes more difficult to achieve, after all, we're all playing the same game with the same rules. I do however regret that the possibility of achieving high pop was apparently sacrificed in order to make the changes that made high taxes more difficult.

There indeed was a poll on this issue, and though you could argue that the poll questions could have been worded differently to address one change or another a little more specifically, what other game company do you know that would have bothered with it at all? In that vein, what other game company do you know that bothers trying to improve a released game for free? None that I know of.

I don’t remember the exact wording. but my response to the poll was “overall like v1.3 but liked some things in v1.2 better”. In any case all this is moot. The game is the game, most players have moved on, the metaverse has moved on. It’s fine to argue for or against something you feel strongly about, but at some point all the arguments have been made and heard and either accepted or rejected. I think that this point has been reached and passed. This topic is close to becoming another carrier or planetary bombardment thread.

Wow, I must be playing very differently than everyone else. For me, a high-pop planet is about 15 billion, and a low pop planet is 2 to 5 billion. Everyone else is busy invading and populating new planets. Low populations like this isn't much problem because of how tax is proportional to the square root of population, and with low pop, I can run a high tax rate. I can't belive that building no factories and buying everything is an efficient strategy. It costs about 10 bc to buy one ru of production, but builing changes 1 bc to more than one ru depending on your manufacturing ability. And I'd rather win a hard game on difficult settings as quickly as possible than milk a metaverse score. So I can't talk about extreme high-pop and high-tax strategies.

I like the 1.3 changes, except for the change to morale buildings. Now they're just too weak to do any good, especially compared to stock exchanges. In my strategy, with a 30% morale ability (20% picked before the game plus Xeno Entertainment) and no morale buildings, I was running 59% taxes very near the beginning of the game. Putting a morale building on the low-pop planets would have taken up a planet tile and wouldn't have let me increase taxes much. I did put a morale building or two on my high-pop planets, but once I got stock exchanges, I didn't need the morale buildings anymore.

I don't know what Brad's goal for the economy is, but if he doesn't like high taxes, then he should increase the morale penalty high taxes produce. The morale buildings are just one of several methods of boosting morale, and weakening them just makes people use the other methods.

There is nothing else to discuss here.

If someone wants to increase the value of the morale buildings, they can simply load up the improvements.xml file into notepad and make them whatever they want.