Oh.  Well then.  That would explain a lot.  

Research costs SHOULD be higher for larger maps, I think.  

Economy is not scaled, as tourism is in no way affected by approval on a per planet basis....which it obviously should be.  Watch expansionist players' tourism income grind to a halt with 0% approval, or when at war, or both.  

Many ways to skin this cat.  But until they have numerous individual and separate LEP types of penalities, approval remains the best generic method to affect all facets (except tourism at this time).  If they increased the LEP penalty, modified tourism to take approval into consideration , the effects would better IMO.  Large empires are INEFFCIENT in all areas, as all are large entities.

If LEP was based on percentage of colonisable planets in the entire galaxy controlled instead of number of planets controlled it would work much better. Of course negetive approval actually has to matter enough too. But neither of those is inherently difficult or hard. It's all about how you set it up.

Civ IV got it right and used MONEY to limit expansions.  

GCIII should follow in that path.  

The steam thread replies from Brad (as posted by Rhonin, http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/617336568065171463/#p1)  seem to suggest that he believes tourism is a bit OP, and its a bit too easy to have enough money in the game.  Having not mentioned any change to LEP, I am assuming they will simply nerf economics as I suggested above.  Adding economic penalties as done with Naselus' mod can achieve nearly the same thing with the exception that it only penalizes economy, however approval in principal affects nearly everything (except tourism currently), and therefore I continue to believe approval is the proper long term solution (that approval curve may need tweaking if it still doesnt have the intended effect).

One interesting comment on LEP, he did say that his vision was to have even more buffs down the road for resource use, including to have Promethean Pleasure park to completely eliminate LEP on a specific planet.  I've been pretty much ignoring resources my last few games except for Elurium (I like beams), so it would be interesting to see what other uses they come up with.  I'd like to see them have it such that its very necessary to take control and mine resources from enemy starbases, to help continue your campaign.  As of now, it seems you just ignore enemy resources and blow through their empire.  It would certainly make that mid game more challenging IMO.

@Naselus - Good description showing approval vs. planets vs. equal pop - but doesnt this prove that LEP should be larger, to further penalize your 4 planet scenario to make it more competitive with the 1 planet scenario?  Changes in 1.1 IMO certainly break tall vs wide, 4x 1 pop worlds is exactly the same pop:prod efficiency as a single 4 pop world.  If we went back to 1.03 rules, pop is most efficient at 10 pop, and if the tall empire grows beyond 10, wide empires win.  Eventually, wide empires should win in the long run - that peak efficiency I think is used to help balance tall vs wide, as well as the current LEP system.  Maybe the peak efficiency should be higher than 10, or just change it to a simple diminishing returns method, where the break point is more dependent on the buildings and techs you have.

But approval will always have hard-caps on the top and bottom. Once you reach a certain stage, these hard caps mean that any number of planets over X will always start with such a large negative penalty to morale that they cannot be brought to positive approval without an extreme cost in land. This makes all future planets 'free', i nthat you already cannot afford to build enough approval buildings for it to matter - so LEP ceases to matter at all. Furthermore, they cannot actually make approval turn production negative; it just causes a -% effect to base production (the other effects are largely meaningless, since resistance is useless anyway, growth is such a small number that penalties are ineffectual, and influence is handled entirely separately from the other stats). It's the combination of the soft-cap effect and the approval penalties ultimately being more restrictive to 'tall' rather than 'wide' empires (which it always will be) that makes approval fail.

The big advantages of using maintenance instead are that a) it effects wide more than tall - tall empires never pay maintenance per planet than wide in the mod, since buildings are free and per-planet cost is calculated based on total number of planets, and it can make taking a bad planet into a net loss for the empire. You have to pay to support it until it develops, when it becomes useful. Approval-based LEP means the planet is still a net increase in empire productivity from the get-go.
 

I agree completely - I want to see resources much more important. Currently the mod uses durantium for larger hull sizes; this means that acquiring durantium is pretty important; I did want to make the other resources do the same sort of thing (so elerium for all higher-level beams etc) but it's going to take a lot of AI blueprint edits to make this work properly.

 

You could just increase the stack on LEP... but this just pushes the limit up a bit, rather than solving the problem. Moreover, it just makes you reach the point where you may as well not bother sooner - if LEP is set to 0.5 per planet, then after 6 worlds my colony hub is cancelled out, and for every 12 worlds beyond that I need another stadium per planet to cancel it out again.

Paradoxically, this makes entertainment buildings less valuable the higher you make the negative effect, since the more of them you need to reach 0 approval, the less effective each one is compared to the other buildings you might go for instead. If we have LEP at 1, then by the time you have 20 planets each one need 3 stadiums just to get to 15% approval (before adding farms) - so 3 buildings to gain 5% production points. This is absolute garbage compared to other possible choices. That's the funny thing, really; 0.2 LEP is not a bad number for the mechanic; any lower would be too small to impact on most games, and any larger would make approval buildings worthless in larger maps. The problem is the mechanic itself, rather than the number it's set to.

I'm not staying approval is working well in its current condition.  Some fundamental changes I see needed:

.Approval needs to affect tourism income (fair and realistic)

.Approval curve needs to be designed to harshly affect the "I'll just always ignore approval" scenario.  -50%, -75%, -200%?  I think people would then care to stay out of the low end (sad). The opposite can be done for the high end, +50%?.  

.The pop:prod curve needs to be logarithmic to greatly diminish returns at ridiculously high pop. The current 2*x^0.7 formula just doesnt flatten off well enough IMO.  The current v1.1 "straight line" of 1 pop = 1 prod, I think is simply ludicrous.

More approval buildings per colony needed to counter LEP, means that each colony will have lower manf/research/econ/growth/influence/resistance ability, due to the loss of tile(s).  Approval affects all of these attributes as well.  Without redesigning the approval curve, yes I get it, there are plenty of scenarios where running 0% approval or no approval buildings would be better than addressing it.  There will always be breakpoints to find the optimal config, but I dont think its the spirit of the game where that optimal config means zero approval buildings...ever (except up to a certain pop level which would consider a colony in an "infancy stage", giving it time to build a few buildings prior to its first approval building).

Tourism is what is keeping planets in the black economically for a VERY VERY LONG time.  As stated by Brad, its OP and will be to be reworked, probably from scratch.

All of this is frankly moot until they decide to fix the approval calculation, which will multiply positive approval bonus to the positive flat bonuses, prior to subtracting the malus.  This was confirmed by Paul to be a defect.  Once done, LEP will have even less impact, so wider is even better.  This in fact might be why they havent fixed it already, because its a trivial fix, but unfortunately exacerbates the current problem.

Just needs a slight redesign.

Remove LEP. Heavily increase maintenance, and maybe add some sort of tech penalty or even production penalty.

Sharpen the approval stick and re balance the values. Keep prod - population 1:1, and then use a smooth approval curve to regulate.

ie, if you want to have a 80 pop planet, you better have a ton of both food, and approval.

to regulate overpopulated planets (pop > food cap), just add a severe approval penalty.

Also they realllly need to nerf the ancient trait. The raw research points provided by crystals is downright insane. My current game has 50ish planets, each pumping 100 research while having research set to 0 on each! just player-wide techs and crystals and relics.

@naselus: Been busy in the other thread obviously so not had time to get back to you here.

Your examples are a great example of exactly what the kind of affect i talked about would prevent, assuming it was implemented correctly. Spread it across twice as many planet and you get the same approval as if you where on one because of the swing in LEP modifier. I didn't go into too many details in the first post because i'd really need to sit down with a couple of spreadsheets for a couple of weeks to work out the specifics. 

I don't know about your Tall and Wide Empires but on my last Insane game I had only 17 planets and all their pops were under 10 except for my HW which was 11 and the 18th planet I colonised approval started at 0% which made me a unhappy bunny and I had a LEP of -3.4

The general consensus appears to be that, with the exception of dansiegel, LEP with morale is fundamentally a bad idea.  

There are other better ways of balancing the game.  LEP with MONEY is a serious damper on massive early game expansion.  I've tested it. It does it perfectly:

It provides a hard upper limit to how many planets you can colonize WITHOUT developing your worlds.

But it encourages further colonization and expansion AFTER building up some of your worlds.  

Besides changing LEP to MONEY, I believe there should be inflation in the game where the LEP increases WITH TIME.  The reason is your economic worlds are going build up over time and they're going to significantly increase their income to the point where maintenance becomes pointless again.  

Add in increased research costs with more worlds and I believe we have a functioning multi dimensional GC 3 Economy system.  

Almost NO ONE likes the LEP system with morale.  

Until then II will use Naselus's changes because they are significantly better than the current system. 

Test it out, on insane abundant/abundant with 20+ races.  Try Naselus's mod. I've tried both systems so I can tell you his system is much better.  Don't dismiss the other idea without testing it out first.  

One of the primary advantages of Naselus's change is that it's a very simple fix that happens to have DEEP implications for the game.