So, I reinstalled Galactic Civilizations II the other day (it had stopped working last fall for an as yet unexplained reason) and to my delight it worked perfectly well!  Needless to say, I immediately immersed myself in the struggle for galactic domination.

It had been a while since I played (5 or 6 months I think) and I decided to put the computer on Beginner so that I could adequately reacquaint myself with the game mechanics and subtleties before the computers overwhelmed me.  I relearned all of my old habits and strategies much faster than I had anticipated, however, and began to culturally dominate - my preferred form of intimidating the other civilizations.

To make an already long story shorter, I wound up with a half dozen or so class 10-11 planets all at once, and began filling them with structures.  One such planet, which I call Sartorius, had two farming bonus panels, one 100% and one 300%.  Since I had plenty of other planets with which to fill my research, monetary, and military needs, I decided to experiment with Sartorius.  I built Intensive Farms on both panels, and built an Extreme Stadium in my 100% approval panel.  I went on to do other things, forgetting about Sartorius and my population experiment.

Despite playing an evil civilization (the Yor) I had tried to keep my approval rating extremely high, in the 90s, when possible.  However, despite low taxes and Extreme Stadiums on every planet, I found my approval dropping quickly.  I checked the civilization management screen and located the problem, one 20% approval planet:  Sartorius.

It turned out that the other structures I had put into the queue had not been completed yet, so the little green icon indicating a finished social project had not come up, which means, for me anyway, that I hadn't paid any attention to it.  In the intervening months, Sartorius (with the help of a Fertility Clinic and my newly reacquired Aphrodisiacs) had climbed to a population of 24.31 billion, all of whom hated me.  I quickly replaced the various nonessential structures with Extreme Stadiums, and built my Secret Police there.

However, the approval rating has never managed to get above 40% there, despite 6 or 7 newly researched Zero-G Arenas, a Secret Police center, and a cut in taxes.  I am now replacing the Zero-Gs with Virtual Reality Centers and my approval is still quite low, but only on Sartorius.  So I guess I have three questions:

1. Is there a way to get my approval rating on Sartorius back into a reasonable 60 or 70 percent, short of killing 6 billion hard-working robots?

2. I know planetary production is affected by population, but does approval have any effect on production, research, etc.  How much more useful could my robot-people be if they were 18 billion really happy robots instead of 24 billion unhappy ones?

3. Whether I can make them happy or not, what possible use could I have for 24 billion robots on a class 10 world?

EDIT: By the way, I'm playing Dark Avatar, not Twilight of the Arnor.