Ok this is extremely odd. I have a save before this happened and after, I essentialy colonized 15% of the galaxy and fully developed it these colonies, my civ was about 10x what the other AI's were, and this was on a harder setting.
I really just wanted to make it a point to build up defenses before going to war with anyone. Anyway shortly after I stationed a ship in one of my 80 colonies (I know gamesettings were unfriendsly to the AI). I switched from imperial dicatorship to democracy, suddenly approval started to drop, so I opted to change governments as that's the last thing I had done.
The senate didn't go for it as my approval was already so low, for no apperent reason. In any case, the idea was it was no longer economicaly beneficial to be a democracy, so I pumped my approval up to 100%, losing 10 trillion credits a day. This lasted for a few weeks and finally the senate voted in my favor.
Yet my approval continued to drop. I started to build 4-7 virtual reality centers on about 40 of the 80 colonies that were the least happy. This helped them for a turn or two but did not last long.
Finally I just quite.
I'm completly boggled as to the cause of this sudden government hate, espetialy considering the dicatorship made the empire 10x more powerfull than all the others.
No mega events were active I can assure that.
The only ideas besides the above events could have been, overcrowding though I am not sure the game takes that into account, or lack of social and military production. (I bought the VR centers outright anyway, and social production or "jobs" didn't seem to have an effect on the planets I did try that out on, but perhapse it was just not for long enough.)
Anyway, does anyone have a solution to this crazyness?