Morale in 4D?

Were you changing your government type regularly? I know, as you get into Star Democracy, and later Star Federation, the masses get VERY hard to please. I dont suggest moving past Republic until you have a firm grasp on morale (80% or more).
Population may have also played a negative roll in things...planets overflowing with citizens get unhappy very quickly.

Flemming,

Generally I disagree with Scott on the 80% suggestion he made. I change governments as fast as I can get them. And planets will quit growing when they drop to 50% morale, so I suspect you are having some other problem.

The most common cause with morale for someone new to a game is allowing your treasury to go negative. When that happens the morale of your planets starts dropping. If you let your treasury go below -$500bc your morale will REALLY TANK. When this happens, do not change your tax rate, as this will no longer help the morale of your people. Instead, reduce your spending rate to 0%. If your spending rate is 0% and you still have deficite spending (perhaps you were too aggressive in buying ships and social projects, or buying off the other races), then you will be unable to recover - it is time to start a new game and apply to that new game what you have learned from the old one.

Nope, I have the first new government type available, and every possible morale increaser available to me - I just had three Galactic wonders, giving respectivly, 5, 10, and 15 percent increase in morale - but DOH nothing

Planets overflowing??? I never thought of that? How do you stop that from happening - it seems silly then, that A LOT of galactic wonders and research topics give population booms, doesnt it?


/Flemming Madsen
VP lidium
www.lidiumonline.com

Jack,
I had +102 BC each month, and in excess of 2000 BC in treasury every time
I can see absolutely NO reason for them being unhappy, unless they are too many on the planet, and THAT I can do nothing about?

'Planets overflowing??? I never thought of that? How do you stop that from happening - it seems silly then, that A LOT of galactic wonders and research topics give population booms, doesnt it?'

If you can get morale to settle around 50%, pop. growth should slow or stop entirely, but large planets can have high enough population that +30% growth can result in pop. growth in the billions of persons. At that point, moral can jump from 70% to 30% in one turn.

Once morale is below 50%, the death rate should overtake the birth rate, yielding negative population growth, but that occurs at a slower rate, and impulsive increasing of morale by small factors can bring it back to the range where pop. growth is too large again.

It takes a bit of work to get used things settled down once you have a number of high class planets.

You really don't want to know the kind of mess I had to work with when I was first poking at the improvement definitions in preperation for designing some new improvements of my own and ended up with a class 190 Earth.

Arturus wrote -
"If you can get morale to settle around 50%, pop. growth should slow or stop entirely, but large planets can have high enough population that +30% growth can result in pop. growth in the billions of persons. At that point, moral can jump from 70% to 30% in one turn.
"

Hmm, that makes a certain kind of twisted sense Although it happened almost empire-wide to it seems.
But as I see it, there is absulutely NO way to control Morale then? I mean, we all go for the research right? This means we get +10 population rather easily, and lot's of galactic wonders does this as well.
So, where does that leave us? With a lot of planets going boom, population overcrowding, angry, morale plummeting to 20, and I CANT DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT

Thanks for the feedback though - nice to know it's intentional and not a bug LOL

/Flemming Madsen
VP Lidium
www.lidiumonline.com

To stop planets from overflowing maybe they should have a Birth Control Technology

The discription:
Unrestricted birth control has a negative effect on moral. People complain this planet is nice but way crowded.

With the invention of the condom and birth control pill is problem is in the past.

Technician wrote
"With the invention of the condom and birth control pill is problem is in the past."

Condoms are nice?

I haven't seen a super class planet (50+ after upgrades) in a long time, nor have I seen a planet whose population reached the point where growth caused morale to plummet from 70% to 20%, or where a planet's populaton exceeded 100 billion, in a long time. I thought Stardock had tuned that to the point where it didn't happen any more. Am I the only one NOT seeing this happen?

A GNN report of over population (at least once to give players a hint the there is a population factore to morale would be a GoodThing.

Birthcontrol tech is another very excellent idea.
Different approaches/effectiveness: rhythm, pill, religious. Goverment imposed drinking water, food additives. Evil approaches might be chemical and biological imposements on certian social factions.

'I haven't seen a super class planet (50+ after upgrades) in a long time, nor have I seen a planet whose population reached the point where growth caused morale to plummet from 70% to 20%, or where a planet's populaton exceeded 100 billion, in a long time. I thought Stardock had tuned that to the point where it didn't happen any more. Am I the only one NOT seeing this happen? '

Under normal conditions it doesn't happen anymore, in my experience, but I do see it occasionally when I tweak some custom files I usually have renamed so that the game won't try to use them.

I have seen a few class 46s in a normal game (26 + Earthworms 40% + Soil + Habitat + Terraf. == 46.8). Beyond that you'd need to edit the data files or add new ones.

Planet classes have definitely been tweaked. There are now far more planets in the 15-16 range and I only rarely see a new planet with a rating of 26.

This makes Razon's problem even more puzzling. With the exception of personal mods, why is it that noone but Razon is seeing planets with massive populations and runaway morale?

Sorry, that should have been "Razqon".

There is one possability that I can think of. A very high pop. growth without a moderate bonus to morale could run into the bouncing morale mess just before a class 20+ planet hits max population.

Doing this would require colonizing the planet with an unusually high population (say 700+M) and building all three terraforming improvements before any morale improvements, from what I can tell.

Arturus,
why in the world is that a problem? I guess it's a technical issue then?
I've noticed that shortly into the game, I DO colonize with more than 800M, and I DO tend to at least build Soil Improvement as the first thing. Habitat improvement also as soon as I've researched it.
But not a third item, which I haven't even seen yet
I'm more of a "diplomacy and fast ships" kinda research guy

The version 4 beta is harder to maintain good moral than some of the earlier beta. It's all in the balancing of the bonuses. While I never see the instant drops which have been mentioned, I am often struggling around 50% moral. Perhaps the overcrowding effect on moral should be tweaked down a tad, or some population control research option become available.

Paul.

To keep your people happy you have to continually expand and disperse humankind throughout the galaxy! Nothing like unhappy people on a crowded planet to be shipped off on a transport to kill some alien swine!

yea, if the pop is getting too big and morale is going down - just load 5K into Combat Transport. That works miracles. And when you finally go to way, you already have an army

Loading people onto transports to reduce Moral problems is one of those cheesy tactics that the game should be able to discourage. Unfortunately at the moment it's a very good and useful tactic, and does work well. I can't see any easy way of discouraging it though. Increase transport maintenance costs might work, but doesn't discriminate between empty and full transports. Transport loading costs (at launch you pay for the number of loaded troops) would also work but would add a new element to the game.

You would think that in reality people would be upset if their loved ones were all carted onto huge transports to invade other system (or even worse, to be killed by being disbanded).

Paul.

Solitair said:
"You would think that in reality people would be upset if their loved ones were all carted onto huge transports to invade other system (or even worse, to be killed by being disbanded)."
That depends of course, on who you are taking
Since morale rises, it could just be all the malcontents you take and stowe about the transports. And since no-one likes to hear complaints all the time, the people left on the planet will become happy, and the malcontents who where bitching about being in the planet, are now off-planet, in a ship large enough to hold 5 million people, with people who are just like them. So...now everyone is happy

Seriously though, as long as this "bug" is in the game, I don't think of the use of transports as cheesy, but neccesary.

damn,I should read my posts before posting them - sorry about spelling and syntax

The tactic of loading malcontents onto transports and then decommisioning them was a common one on GC/OS2, one that created a lot of talk about "cheese". But it worked.

But I still have to ask, am I the only one no longer having morale problems? It sure seems strange to see so many comment about how morale goes to pot when I have no problems with it, and can't figure out what I am doing differently from those having problems with morale.

Jack,
You're not the only one. Occasionally I'll have a problem planet, most often one near a highly influential AI planet, but most of the time I've been successful in managing to keep my average morale between 50-60.

Things seems to be much more consistent on this front in beta 4.

'I've noticed that shortly into the game, I DO colonize with more than 800M, and I DO tend to at least build Soil Improvement as the first thing. Habitat improvement also as soon as I've researched it.'

It's probably the 800M colonization that's the problem. I generally use less than 100M except to colonize the rare class 26s, and I still often have an initial morale of less than 60%. On class 15s and 14s, I frequently only colonize with 30M or so and only manage an initial morale of around 30%. (And although it's stupid to try, colonizing a class 1 with 1M and a +100% morale produces a morale of about 50%.)