High morale on a colony increases the population growth rate.

Whatever you want to call it, happiness, morale, or approval, I'm only concerned with the number for each planet individually and the overall number (displayed in the console). The planet number needs to be above 41% to keep population growing. The overall number needs to be high enough to keep my party in power for elections. It doesn't have to be kept up all the time, just during an election week. I normally run taxes as high as I can without losing population growth then drop taxes just for an election week. I use morale buildings on the higher population planets to even them up with the rest of them. I think that's about all there is to it.

so, as long as colonies are remaining above 41% approval rating, there's really no danger or reason to alter it?

I do notice occasionally my colonies seem to stop growing (at a whole number like, 9.0b out of a possible 12.0b, or 12.0b out of 16.0b), but never compared the stopped growth to whether they were unhappy or not.

Does growth require minimum levels of happiness to continue growing? Meaning:

In order to obtain 12b people via growth on a colony, does the colony need to be at 55+ happiness?

Or to get to 16b, does it need to be 70+ happiness?

These are just example numbers, just to express what im asking.

Also, if a colony's happiness is very low (usually my high pop planets), what should I be building there or doing to increase it? Entertainment centers for +happiness? Other buildings for +loyalty?

I havent gotten around to reading the happiness section on wiki, but ill read that next.

As always, thank you all for your advice, particularly craighb, who has likely drastically altered my tax rate (ive been maintaining 70% happiness on average, so....TAX THEM FURTHER! BWAHAHAHA)

Yea, you don't *really* need morale buildings except on 16b homeworlds. However, for metaverse games, I've found you can increase your society score a bit if you run higher populations wherever you can. Higher pops versus more stock markets is pretty much of a wash economically, but I do run 20b on higher class planets that can spare the tiles for a few VRC's. Another advantage is higher overall population increases influence which is great for playing Neutral (only because the MCC nerfs planet flipping and I hope that's fixed in TA).

One other point not explictly brought out is the difference between an approval bonus and a morale bonus.

All morale bonus be they from morale buildings, racial ability, morale resource mining, wonders or tech are multiplied by a planets "base morale". Base morale is determined by the planets population. For DL a planet of 15B has a base morale of -40% (i.e. 0.6) and a 20B planet has a base morale of -60% (i.e 0.4).

To get the effect on approval you multiply the base morale times the bonus. For example the 40% morale bonus of a VRC is really only 16% (.4 x .4) on a 20B planet (in DL). There are other aspects of morale and the effect of taxes on it that make the morale penalty in DA even more severe than in DL.

However, the point I'm trying to make is that there are two sources of direct approval bonus that are unaffected by base morale and that makes these two items *much* more important than ordinary morale bonuses. These two sources of direct approval bonus are the 10% approval bonus you get for planets PQ11 and above and the 10% approval bonus you get for being neutral. These are both a direct 10% increase in your approval that does not depreciate as your population increases.

There's really not much to do about these other than be aware of them. One way that I take advantage of them is to (game settings allowing) only colonize PQ11 planets and above. Or in the case I do have a few PQ9's and PQ10's I might research Soil Improvement far earlier just so that I can get these to the PQ11 threshold.

As far as the 10% approval bonus for being Neutral, I don't think on a whole it out-weighs the benefit of being evil but I used to play neutral exclusively and it was a tremendous boost to my economy the instant I researched Xeno Ethics and selected Neutral. As I said I don't think this soley makes Neutral as good as evil but it's very easy to underestimate how much bigger a 10% direct bonus to approval is over a similar 10% morale bonus.