Population, food, morale

If a planet is suffering, building farms is one is not going to help you. High population planets oftentimes are suffering from overcrowdedness so adding farms means you simply get more people complicating the situation. To understand what is affecting the planet's morale, open up the planet view screen and place your mouse cursor over the planets moral number and you will get a breakdown of what is affecting the planet so you get an idea of what you may need to do to fix it. Sometimes, however, its pretty much unavoidable to have a few pissed off planets so dont worry too much about it.

Food allows a rise in the maximum population of a planet. As long as your morale is "high enough" you will get an increase in population. The thresholds of "high enough" are: 100% approval twice the growth rate (4x with the torian super ability); 75% morale gives another bonus to population growth but I forget what that is. At or above 42% will grant growth without bonuses, below 42% will mean no growth. At 21% or less you lose population.

A planet's morale will decrease automatically with an increase in population and an increase in taxes. At 20 billion people a planet's morale is unmanageable. If one planet has a much lower morale than the others it most likely has a much higher population. Unless you had a Random Choice when you colonized the planet and you picked one that gave a morale penalty. In the early game, your homeplanet will jhave a much higher population that your colonies and it will most likely control your tax rate. If you try to keep your colonies at say 50%, your homeworld is probably going to be in the red. Many people keep taxes so low that they have 100% morale to take advantage of the growth bonus.

Morale buildings will help with a planet's morale but you shouldn't have to build more than one on your most populus planet to get in even with your other planets. I don't build any morale structures at all but rely on The techs that give inate bonuses, trade goods and morale resources. I usually can have an 80% tax rate with a single farm on every planet (13 billion people) and have an average morale of like 60%. Over 80% morale drops to like 20%. Just remember that you cabn always build over the morale buildings later if you want to.

Other then the yellow resource that can be mined, there are no starbase modules that aid with morale.

Morale has no bearing on influence except that better morale (see thresholds) will mean greater population growth and more people means more influence. But thats an indirect relationship. In other words, a planet that has 100% morale can still have an influence flip.

Even if any numbers above that 'barrier' represent a steady flow of Invasion forces continually in transit by building transports every few turns, somewhat?

Yes.

Since base growth stabilizes at or before 2.5B (race dependent), you *technically* don't need any more than 2.5B+enough people to man a transport on a planet for producing transports, as long as your growth is sufficient.  Since in DL/DA you have 5(?)/6B and in TA you have 8B with no farms, you can fill out the rest with fertility centers.

This holds particularly when you get into the >15B range BECAUSE your pop growth is limited by your approval-you're much, much better off having 10B people on a planet with 100% approval than with 18B at 60%, in terms of growth.  And the "extra" cash from taxes is minimal if you're continually shuttling them off onto transports, unless your growth matches or exceeds your transport capacity, in which case refer back to point 1.

Just out of curiosity - is there any bad point to low Morale *besides* elections? I started a game this weekend to get myself back into practice for 2.0, and I've been doing well on all my planets except for the Thalan homeword, where they built some neat little super-project that generates eight food on a capital world that already has 16 from the capital - so a 24 Billion Population cap, and that jump from 20 billion to 24 billion is a doozy (Terakris, the psilon capital world, has 20 billion, no entertainment, and an 80% tax rate for a morale in the 90's somewhere. Thala has two entertainment centers, anothe Thalan project with a 50% moral bonus, and morale of like 40% - {G}. Oh, and counterespionage units for everybody, whether they need them or not! That may change in 2.0, but for the moment - {G})

Jonnan

Population growth.  (Think transports mainly, at this point.)

< 19% (and maybe 19% as well) = 10% loss per turn.

>19/20% (20/21% and up) = no growth

>40% (41% & up) = normal growth.

>74% (75% and up) = 1.25x growth.

100% = 2x growth.

Technically, you should have no problem, after your pop has grown to its potential, with running an empire at 41% (or even 21% if you really wanted to push it, but it's nice to have some room to grow if necessary, as well as the fact that at some point it's simply not worth taxing any more).  I tend to run mine more so in the ~60% range, which allows me to win elections with relative ease (although sometimes it IS close), while not being quite as difficult to pull off as the 75% necessary for a 25% growth bonus.

Additionally, when looking at empire-wide morale, it helps to take into account that certain planets will be higher or lower (low PQ planets, particularly those low enough to not reach their farm cap, and then there's the civ capitals), so to keep your planets in line with the 41% above you'd probably run around a 46% or 47% empire-wide.

I don't generally have a problem running 20 billion even at 100% approval(in DA, that is, I haven't gone enough of it to make generalizations yet in TA), but only on selected planets. Usually this is based on the bonuses on that planet (either tile or colonization event).

What you need to consider is the tradeoff between population and stock exchanges. Since tax income is linked to the square root of population, a lower pop cap often generates a better income because you get 3-4 more stock exchanges instead of farms and entertainment.

That's not a very good feature in my opinion, because you never need more than 1 farm per planet. And if you get a planet with good conditions for growth (several food tiles), these tile are wasted as it is impossible to keep morale above 42% with high population, even if you build plenty morale improvements.