The no moral building strat

The Death of Morale Buildings

The Flawed GalCiv2 Economy

I did an interesting experiment in DL last night, i had a large planet (16 unterraformed) with a 300% farm bonus and a morale bonus. I had about 3 morale buildings plus the political capital and an econ capital. The planet was making about 400bc a turn and my tax rate was on 40%. I decided to build more farms and load the planet up with population in transports, figuring that the population in transports may as well pay taxes while their not invading worlds. Every time i replaced a stock market with a farm, and boosted the population, the money still went down. I took the planitary population up to 60b and ended up making around 200bc a turn instead of the 400bc a turn it was making before.

Ok so i'm obviously much better off having my population sitting in transports not paying taxes at all, go figure!

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.

Has this changed at all with the modifications to morale buildings in 1.7?

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.

Perhaps they could make a trade good that only boosts morale buildings? that could dramatically change the game dynamics?

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.

not each update! There are few updates that dramatically ruin the game such as spies.

Yes population is quite limited now which only serves to reduce the dynamics of the game. I think this is basicly your problem, which i do agree somewhat.... Stardock limiting game dynamics while trying to cut down on cheese/increase difficulty.

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.

I tried an experiment where on a planet with a 300% farm bonuus and 1 morale bonus with 40% tax rate, i took the population up to 60 billion, replacing stock markets with farms as i went along. The higher population over 25 bilion did not require any further morale buildings but even still, the higher the pop went from 25 billion, the less money i was making!

Because i had several planets with 20b populations, i could not increase taxation above 40%.... It seems as though the steep morale penalties of populations around 20b seem to kill off any benefit from planitary morale and farm bonuses. I think i would have been better of totally ignoring farm bonuses and morale bonuses are irrelevant along with them. That way i would have been in a position to increase taxation above 40%.

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?

Actually looking at this from the other side of the pop range you say you started at 25B replacing a stockmarket with a farm. The tax formula predicts that 32B with 4 stockmarkets will have a higher income than 25B with 5 stockmarkets (you can easily check this for yourself). In order for 32B to produce less taxes than 25B then you must have started with 4 stockmarkets or less.

Since it's doubtful that you started this process with only 4 stockmarkets then it's clear that there is something wrong here. One possibility is that you weren't getting 7B per farm. If the farm you're using gives only 5B then the 4 stockmarkets in the above example becomes 6 stockmarkets. Another possibility is that your looking at net income and not just taxes. IIRC the maintenance for a high end farm is higher than that of a stockmarket. So as you add farms you're increasing the planets maintenence cost.

Admittedly this is a small increase, however the increases and decreases predicted by the formula are rather small as well, particularly at these high levels of population, and do depend on the other terms in the tax equation (racial bonuses, DA/DL constant and tax_rate).

Another possibility again relates to the small differences in these changes and the fact that there certainly is some level of approximation in the tax equation. From my games I've found that the tax equation tends to slightly underestimate low income levels, slightly overestimate higher income levels and then back to underestimate for the highest levels. This could easily be the source of small variations that run counter to that predicted.

Another thing is that you do need to wait until the population stabilizes at its maximum value after each replacement of a stockmarket with a farm before you make your income comparison. However, assuming that you did this and assuming that you replaced stockmarkets with farms on a one to one basis from 25B to 60B (as long as you initially started with more than 5 or so stockmarkets) and that as you did this the taxes went down *noticably* each and every time then your data doesn't disprove my analysis but does disprove the tax equation as stated in the Wiki.

I think the biggest thing is that your data is taken at the high end of the effective range and that the differences implied by a one to one replacement of farms for stock markets is small. As an example in the data that I have for 13B versus 20B the difference implied by the formula for a 1 tile replacement of a farm for a stockmarket is an increase in income of 3% more at 20B with 1 stockmarket over 13B with 2 stockmarkets. Dramatically increasing the number of stock markets increases the differences but not greatly. In the same 13B/20B example a 20B planet with 10 stockmarkets should give 16% more taxes than 13B with 11 stockmarkets.

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.

Well the real point I was trying to make was that there is some benefit in some cases of using morale buildings.

When Wyndstar made his post about the death of morale buildings it had two major assumptions. One is that it was based on morale in DA and the other it was based on doing the same for all planets and not micromanaging based on bonus tiles that may be present on some but not all planets. I agree with his base finding that on DA with the assumption of no bonus tiles it's not worth using morale buildings. However even on DA I do believe it's worthwhile to use morale buildings on planets with a food and/or approval bonus or two.

The problem with actually doing anything quantative with it is how everything influences everything else. By breaking it down to a relationship between how much income you gain from the sqrt of the increase in population versus how much you lose by having to have fewer economic buildings on the planet, I think it's simpler to understand and to use to your benefit.

Certainly there's major differences between DA and DL in how morale works which then relates to how many tiles need to be given up for a particular population increase. But the core part of the formula is the same in both DA and DL so if you can empirically determine the tradeoff you need to make in your game you can then use the reduced formula to find out which is better.

Actually, I have a particular bias and look at things a little differently than many folks. More income implies a higher score. Also more population implies a higher score as well. So if your point is to maximize score you're looking for the highest pop you can get that doesn't significantly reduce your income. So if I can get the same or even only a little less income from 20B than 13B then to me 20B is superior. Whereas someone less concerned about score would rightly say that you hardly get any more income from 20B over 13B so why go to the trouble of getting to 20B. It's just a matter of perspective.

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!

Square root of the population...

Why must all of the numerical stuff in this game be so counterintuitive and/or utterly nonsensical?

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!

Neither counterintuitive nor nonsensical.

The square root is actually about the simplest method to introduce a logarithmic relationship.

I suppose some could see this statement as proof of your statement, but it really is the simplest and most intuitive way to get a result that depends upon a variable in a weak way that gets weaker the larger the variable gets.

What does get maddening is when a square rooted value is then empirically "tweaked" to get subjectively better "balance". One prime example of this is how your score is calculated in the official metaverse where the sum of your depreciated scores is divided by the number of submitted games to the 0.4 power.

0.4 power? Where the heck did that come from?

Well I'm sure it started out as the 0.5 power which is the square root of the number of games submitted. However, in empirical use it most likely just seemed too "strong" a relationship between score and number of games submitted and was "tweaked" to be a bit weaker.

But what about the square root in the first place. Actually this is very obvious and intuitive. There are two basic choices for defining a "hall of fame" type score. One is a person’s average score which is the sum of scores divided by the number of games. The other is merely the cumulative total or sum of scores. The sum of scores divided by the square root of number of games is merely the obvious and logical compromise between these two extremes that therefore has elements of an average score as well as elements of cumulative total.

Yet again to the mathematically un-inclined I'm probably just digging the same hole deeper and deeper but with even the most minimal grasp on basic mathematics the square root is both obvious and very intuitive. Just be thankful I don't try and explain convolution to you (i.e. Laplace transform).

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

So doing this without morale buildings you shoot for the minimum approval rating? 40%

Basically what i do now is have one farm, eventually fully upgraded for a population of 13B and the have only one moral building. With resources and trade goods my mrale rating is usually like 70-80 +/-. I used to see the idea that you needed 2 moral buildings per farm.

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   

Heh, not if you fire off your pop from your homeworld like a machine gun. Ahh, superbreeder transports   

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.

Just because it achieves the effect that they want it to have in game does not mean that it is neither counterintuitive nor nonsensical.

Could you imagine being at a meeting for a restaurant chain and then hearing this sentence: "Our number of customers over the past two years has increased nearly sixteen-fold. Consequently, sales are up 400%."

Counterintuitive...and nonsensical (and I realize that my example is not EXACTLY the same thing number-wise, but the difference is actually irrelevant if you think about it).

What I mean is....if you didn't actually LOOK IT UP or ACTUALLY TRACK IT IN GAME, you would think that the taxes would have a linear relation to population. The game itself does not tell you otherwise (at least as far as I know.) That, good sir, is counterintuitive and nonsensical.

Also, thank you for your implied derision, but I am quite good at mathematics, including calculus, although I cannot say that I have a degree in the subject. Anyway, no, I understand how square roots work, and I understand WHY they did it that way. Nevertheless, a non-linear relationship between number of people taxed and taxes yielded is counterintuitive. Anyway, isn't diminishing returns on population already the idea of the approval rating? If they want a logarithmic relation, it should all be there. At least it's not quite as blatantly illogical.

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.