The Death of Morale Buildings

The Flawed GalCiv2 Economy

It's not really a strategy as much as it's not really necessary to build morale buildings. Get a hold of the trade goods and happiness crystals if you're neutral, and keep your taxes under 80%, your populations at or under 12k and you will have a happy populous.

The only "morale" building that I would consider building is the counter-espionage center, because on the harder difficulties I tend to get loaded down with spies if I don't.

The morale building change was very minor, subtle even. It's an early game boost. I don't remember the numbers exactly but it was something like the entertainment center now gives a +15 bonus instead of +10 and the next building gives a +20 instead of +15.

That's it, basically nothing has changed.

Each update they just ruin the game even more. They just keep tweaking the stuff that made the game fun and great to play. Remember when morale building meant something you could have a pop of 80b and still have 100% happy people. They put the 20,000bc penalty in but the AI's have 80,000bc and more. Morale is a joke cause they set a limit on it. I am playing a game now in DA I have a 42 Class planet with +510% morale on planet, +409% morale civ wide, tax rate at 39%, pop @24.67b and morale is 80% on that planet.
Plus you got to get rid of that symbol of stacked ships. The old way was better you can see what ships were being stacked. now you got to move over it to see what they are.

You can use the tax equation to determine whether it's better to have a higher pop with fewer economic buildings versus a lower pop with more economic buildings.

The tax equation is

34.5 * sqrt(pop) * tax_rate * (1 + planet_econ_bonus) * (1 + racial_econ_bonus)

where 34.5 is a constant for DL that changes to about 24 for DA.

However to determine whether its worthwhile to have a higher pop with fewer econ buildings the only two terms that matter are

sqrt(pop) * (1 + planet_econ_bonus)

because your racial bonuses, the tax rate and the DA/DL constant is the same in each case.

Basically this highlights that to get a higher pop you have to give up tiles that could otherwise be used for economic buildings.

Certainly the other terms of the equation as well as various morale bonuses and whether it's DA versus DL may impact how many tiles you need to give up to actually support the higher pop but for purposes of determining whether or not it's economically worthwhile to do so requires only the above two terms.

As an example I am currently in a DL game. Based on the morale bonuses and mining that I have in this particular game, I can support a pop of 13B with only one farm and no morale buildings or I can support 20B with two farms and two VRC's. I can use the above listed terms to determine which it's better to do economically. Note that in any game DL or DA, small or large, many resources or few resources, I can use the same two terms to determine what's right to do. How many tiles I have to give up to achieve this balance will change but this limited equation is still valid.

Anyway, in my example I can gain 7B of pop for a cost of three additional tiles. So this becomes a comparison of two products.

If (sqrt(20B) * (1 + N*0.25)) > (sqrt(13B) * (1 + (N+3)*0.25)) where N is the number of stock markets (i.e. the planet_econ_bonus) on the high pop planet, then it's economically worthwhile to have the higher pop.

Also note that the number of tiles that you will have to give up to achieve this same balance will depend on the planets bonus tiles. The above relationship holds true if there are no food or approval bonuses on the planet. However if there's a single +100% food or 100% approval bonus then instead of 20B requiring 3 extra tiles it will only require 2 extra tiles. In the same way if the planet has both a +100% food and a 100% approval tile then 20B only requires one extra tile. This changes the N+3 term in the above to either N+2 or N+1 which dramatically changes the outcome.

Anyway the above equation can be easily entered into Excel and the value of N can be varied to determine for what values of N it's better to have 20B versus 13B.

The answer is that for the N+3 case where there are no food or approval bonus tiles N=9 which means that as long as I have 9 or more stock markets on the planet along with my 2 farms and 2 VRC's then you get more income from the planet at 20B than at 13B. If I would have 8 or less stockmarkets on the planet at 20B then I make more income at 13B.

However, in the case of bonus tiles that use the N+2 and N+1 terms the result is very different. In the one bonus tile case (N+2) the result is N=5. If a planet has 5 or more stockmarkets then 20B is better than 13B. In the case of both an approval and a food bonus tile (N+1) then the result is 1. In this case as long as I can have at least a single stockmarket then it's better to have 20B than it is to 13B.

As I said these results are only dependent on the number of tiles you need to give up to achieve the higher pop value and are otherwise independent of DA/DL, number of econ or morale resources or any other game to game differences.

Unclear where exactly you're going with this line of reasoning. You are talking about a long sequence of replacing stock markets with farms at various unspecified population points.

I need to know how many stockmarkets you had at two population points and from that I can tell you which the formula predicits to be the better thing to do. Looking at a random datapoint when going from 53B to 60B by replacing a stockmarket with a farm which implies single tile difference then the formula predicts that you would need to have at least 12 stockmarkets on the planet at 60B to earn more than a 53B planet with 13 stockmarkets. If you had 13 stockmarkets on the 53B planet and replaced one with a farm and then had less income at 60B with 12 stockmarkets then perhaps you've disproved the formula. However if you had less than 13 stockmarkets on the 53B planet than the decreasing income is predicted by the formula. So the question is how many stockmarkets were on the planet and at which specific populations?

Nice posts Mumble!

I wasn't trying to disprove your formula, i think the key factor for me is that my tax rate was only 40%. I will go back in tonight and restore all the populations on other planets to 13 billion by moving farms off farm bonuses (it's crazy farm bonuses are useless i know!). Then i can probably increase taxes upwards of 70% and see what happens.

I have billions of population on transports so it is very easy for me to play around with a large population experiment.

Ic

Personally i don't think about score, since i always get way too bored with the mopping up stage of the game to ever complete a victory!

For the same reason laws are going mad to stop loop holes for lawbreakers, Stardock are going mad to try to stop cheese in their game!

Hi!

Mumble, please step down from your gigantic galaxies, and try to remember that owning 7 fully mined morale resouces is only possible there.

Seriously, one simply can't increase pop from 13 to 20B without having SEVERE repercussion with approval on the planet. Especially because at 20B the morale building will "work" with less than half its stated bonus (can't check just now, but it's probably closer to 20% than to 50% of its bonus). Until the late game, where one plays just for increasing victory points, building the second farm means a shoot in his own foot. In my experience with early and mid-game I'm simply too short of money and morale ability, to afford increase of pop even over the BASIC farm, and still keep high taxes and breeding pop on most planets.  

BR, Iztok

2 morale buildings per farm to end up with the same morale rating as before the farm + morale buildings
I guess that means that before your morale rating was simply above 70-80?

I think they overshot the mark in DA with the increased population cap on your home planet; it's almost unavoidable to build 1 or 2 morale buildings on your home planet to keep its morale anywhere near the other planets   

Actually, with the Metaverse league games I've been playing medium galaxies and smaller, so I have been playing other than gigantic. Admittedly, I am still playing DL which as we all know has less of a morale problem than DA.

Even with only two fully mined morale resources, 20B planets with only two VCR's (well maybe it was 3) and approvals in the 50's to 60's is not unreasonable. I've used 20B planets in medium galaxy games with exactly this setup (again DL not DA). And yes AFAIK at 20B the base morale is .2 which reduces the 40% VRC approval bonus to 8%. However a simple 100% approval bonus tile makes this 16% which is nothing to sneeze at.

In the case of those gigantic games of which you speak the typical is 6 morale resources and that allows you to keep your approval in the high 80% range on 20B planets even with 79% taxes. In some games I've only had 4 morale resources and then had to have 3 VRC's to be able to have that extra farm and had to accept a lower approval to boot, but that still didn't mean that there weren't a goodly amount of high PQ planets where I could have the benefit of 20B planets and a higher income because of it.

As far as when I build the second farm, I certainly build it in advance of when I know I can support the final pop's approval because it does take some time for the planets pop to get there. In the case where I'm a bit premature in building the farm there's no real approval problem. As soon as I reach that 40% approval mark on a particular planet then the pop stops growing until I can improve a morale resource or build frictionless clothing or otherwise improve my racial morale ability. In most games from small/medium galaxy MVL games to my more normal gigantic abundant all games I pretty much start building the 2nd farms on my high PQ planets by the 3rd year (2nd reported game year). This is by no means only a late end game play.

Don't get me started on *that* topic. In any case, I agree.

I play with limited use of morale buildings. I do use them on high class planets that can support a 20b pop, a sprinkling of VRC's, and a lot of stock markets. Otherwise, I build one farm and no morale buildings.

I did try to determine what's better, stock markets or population. From what I can tell, a class 14 planet with one farm and the rest stock markets earns about the same as a class 14 with two farms, a few VRC's, and the rest stock markets. It seems like six of one, half dozen of the other. I can go either way. I usually go for the population if there's morale and/or farm bonus tiles on a higher class planet, good for stocking transports.