Why 1 morale for new colonies?

The quality of your planet is probably less than 15. Build a Habitat Improvement(must be researched) or a Soil Improvement. This will improve the quality of your planet and you will notice that your moral will shoot up. I don't colonize planets with a value of less than twelve personally since it does not seem to pay.

I have colonized planets with < 15 and the starting morale was never 1. Somethign must have changed to result in this consequence... could it be switching to republican government?

How many people in the starting colony? too many = not happy. If its not too much a few improvement in pq or morale should fix it up.

~SDC~

Most likely, the problem involves sending TOO MANY COLONISTS with your colony ships. The default setting (why is this default???) is to send HALF of whatever is on the planet. That's way too much in almost every case.

Morale is a function of population relative to population capacity. More people than the planet and its improvements can handle, bad morale.

PQ15 planet can only handle about 200 million people or thereabouts before morale starts to drop. If you send half the population off a world with 3 billion and land 1.5 billion on a PQ15, morale will be awful.

One of the keys of making use of PQ13 and PQ14 planets is to send only a couple dozen millions of colonists and to emphasize building morale improvements there so they can keep up in population growth (and thus economy) with the rest of your worlds.


If settling a new colony with no improvements, as opposed to invading, if you are getting morale problems from the get-go, I'd say it has to be related to sending too many colonists. Try adjusting the number downward, never use auto-launch with colony ships, and even (when possible) adjusting for the size of the world you intend to settle. You'd want to send a lot of people to a PQ25, for instance. Even sending MOST of your people from Earth in the early game if a better world than Earth is available nearby.

I hope this helps.


- Sirian

Thanks Sirian, that helps alot. I do beleive that's the problem then.

Is there anywhere I can see how many people a planet can handle?

And somewhat related- is there cany way to do population control on a planet? I thought making colony ships and filling them up would be a clever idea, but if you have more than one planet it will draw population from each and every planet- something I don't want. Is there any tricks to get rid of too many people?

There is a bug to do with load people onto ships, I'm not totally sure but it involves clicking on a ship in orbit without actually selecting it (Click the general area or near the ship until a load button comes up but the ship is not selected), then you can press the load button and the people disappear (not onto the ship so I guess we've spaced them). Give it a few goes and you'll probably get what I'm say. However this bug is annoying wen you need the people as troops LOL . Bit of a bad way to get rid of people, however as you play soon they'll never be such thing as too many people.

~SDC~

How many people a planet can handle depends on PQ and morale bonuses and is very complicated. Cutting taxes and creating morale boosting buildings will help.
If you have two planets in a system, and one is overcrowded, one solution is to build a colony ship there. Fill it up with (say) half the system's population. Then land it on the non-overcrowded planet. That will transfer half the population of the crowded planet to the other planet. Or you could take the population to a high pq planet that is doing a lot of trade, which the most useful place to have lots of people.

~SDC~

I usually put them on a combat transport and move it outside of planet orbit in case I need troops later.

Looks like the basics are covered here. If you want the gory details, check out Frogboy's Strat forum post:

http://www.galciv.com/forum.asp?id=39453&BID=GS&page=1#87312