One MT food feeds 1 billion people. If you have 20 billion people, you will need to have enough farms to produce 20MT of food.

Unhappiness will cap at 27 Billion or so - after that no mater how many more folks you add the unhappiness rate will not go up. The more folks you have up until that point, the unhappier they tend to be.

It generally takes me 1 Morale boosting building for every two farms ( at the same level - i.e. higher tech entertainment buildings at the same tech level as the farm; if one is higher than the other this ratio will be different) to keep up a decent morale rate - but if I am not a republic or if I do not need the planet to grow I really don't care about the approval in ver 1.0x. 42% is fine - you don't start losing population until it drops below 30% I beleive. You just don't grow fast.

Also try to get Morale Resources and mine them - they make a huge difference. I had two in one game with fully equipted mining starbases and I was able to tax at 79% and still have an approval rate in the 60's with very few entertainment buildings on my planets.


You could also build troopships and load excess population onto them or transfer them to another planet. Or Colony ships if you don't want to pay the upkeep and don't plan on invading anyone anytime soon. Of coarse, you loose the tax revenue for those poor biscuits sitting on their duffs in space...

i played a game where i had 1 morale bldg per farm, but some of my planets still had much lower approval than others. when i added an extra morale, the approval typically only went up by 2%. the manual seems kind of outdated on this issue - all it says about approval and population in the "bread and circuses" section is:
-default approval is 100%
-higher population lowers approval
-higher taxes lowers approval
-having a negative balance in your tresurey lowers approval

culture also seems to have an impact on approval, for sure. i just can't seem to pin down what it is - maybe it's only as IP builds?

according to the quarterly reports in the game, having a bloated military budget has a bad effect (i've only got this report in games where i've built expensive ultra advanced fleets... the last one was using about 80% of my tax income).

and of course the morale resources. seriously, i'd rather have one of them than an economic resource.

After reading my post I need help with my spelling and sentance structure too.

Write your posts in a Wordprocessor like Microsoft Word and then copy & paste them over.