My Approval Rating

Possibly too much. What's the population on Thala?

There are not any of another AIs starbases near to your planet are there? Also if you have lots of manufacturing on the planet that too could reduce morale. Please let us know what you have currently on the planet (just list the buildings below).

Yeah, the higher your population, the lower their morale gets. So I would a) Destroy all of the farms on the planet or b)go for the rumored glitch that if you have a population of 30 billion or higher your morale gets higher. Never tried the second one myself, but the first one I have performed (though your economy dives down).

On all of my capital worlds, the morale goes down. It skyrockets down, actually. Ever since DL, my capital world ends up in the 40s to 70s.

Maybe it's because that the Capital already produces plenty of food?

For a good balance between money and morale, don't let your planets get higher than 13B pop. Anything above you need too many VR centres and you wont make as much money than you would at the lower pop with more stock exchanges. Of course this all depends on bonus's. 18B to 20B is do-able on a high class planet with a morale bonus or two.

Anything above 18 normally sees your morale dropping to the point where it is redundant due to the 5 or 6 VR's needed to keep them happy.

Temple of the Rightesneous
Manufacturing Captial
Adv. Farming X2
Virtual Reality Center X6
Hyperion Shipyard
Tir-Quan Training
Ultra Spices
Xinathium Hull Plant...(sorry, couldn't read mu writing)

approval at 40%

Huh, that explains it... capitals tend to naturally produce more civvies than usual without farms, usually around 10-13 billion. Adding in TWO advanced farms would no doubt send your ratings down the toilet, since you'll end up with over 25 billion easily!

yeah, but not much of those can be decommissioned. I would have to decomission morale bossters like the virtual centers.

Bulldoze a farm and you should be in better shape.

Hi!

As others already said, never let a planet over 13B pop. Having it higher in current game mechancs means just too much hassle with rapidly dropping morale. So you should:
- NEVER build any farm on the homeworld. It already has a food output of 12B.
- NEVER put a farm on 300% food bonus tile,
- put it on a 100% bonus tile only if there's also a morale bonus tile, or you can afford two morale buildings. Also never upgrade that farm over level-2 (5B food).

HTH and BR, Iztok

so the answer is to destroy the farms on thala?

^^ i did it. approcal went to 10% good advice, though I still am not quite sure why it worked or what the problem was.

Farms only control the maximum population on a planet--food doesn't make people content, it makes them multiply

And when things get to crowded, the people get very cranky and it's very hard to deal with. So the simple thing is to just starve the complainers

^^^ just to be sure, though, it also means less revenues from taxes? I shut down nearly all of my farms and also the sudden I went into deficit spending. I could not afford all of my ships.

Yep. You only need to dump enough farms to get your morale under control, though. So long as you can keep the morale decent, you want as much population as you can get.

So advanced farming techs are borderline worthless? I mean, it sounds like MAYBE one farm upgrade is worth it but then it just hurts you. I don't get why there would be a whole tech line that you should have to avoid.

I wouldn't say they're worthless, I have one advanced farm (the best I can research) on all of my larger planets, including the capitol.

My taxes are at 20%, and the population of my capitol is 22 billion, with 52% approval (most of the other planets are between 70 and 100% approval, population 16b or less). My tax income is 2K or so a week and I'm playing on challenging. I only have one entertainment center on each planet(I don't remember the exact one, the one you can research after the stadiums). I also research every trade item or achievement that can increase happiness.

So farms aren't worthless, it's just a matter of play style. I use my capitol to fill up 8 adv transports at a time, so it takes half of the planet's population to fill one invasion army.