Some advice please

Hello all,

I've just recently ( last week ) started playing this great game, and I am having some difficulties with keeping my people happy and my approval rate decent. Here is what I did.

1. Played on a large map
2. Simple difficulty ( my first game afterall )
3. I chose human race, and started as "technoligist" the research boost sounded like a good idea.

I then built a bunch of scouts...and had them explore fast, and then sent out my colonizers ( had them built with impulse drives by then ) and grabbed up about a third to 1/2 of all the immediately usable planets my scouts had found. Then I set up a few trade routes for some more income ( impulse drives ).

The Altarians at this point were getting pretty aggressive and were the only major force I had to worry about, so I went and took care of that and I wiped them all out. At this point I switched my govenment over to "republic" as well.

None of the other races were anywhere near me tech wise by this point , so I started to hit "research and turn" a bit to get quite a few of the techs I wanted. Also I started up a few more trade routes, to the max I could have. Soon I noticed my approval rate was down from about 78 percent to around 50%. I can't understand this, as my cash flow was in the green ( not by much, but not defecit spending ) I also had embassies and "extreme stadiums" for pleasure on almost every world. Yet every time I hit turn to research, the approval seemed to drop more, even though no war mongering was going on, my cash flow was good and all my planets well fed and happy...WTH?

Any tips here, or suggestions as to what I may be doing wrong, and how to keep my populace higher in an approval rating. Thanks everyone for any help on this !!

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Davabled

Join Date 11/2007

+11

What is your treasury at?

Once your treasury hits 10,000 BCs, you trade income is reduced (by half I believe)
When it hits 20,000 BCs, all of your income goes down significantly, somewhere between 20-50% depending on various factors.

As for morale, look at the population of each planet. If you have even one planet above 20 billion people, that can bring your overall morale down quite a bit.

Generally speaking, a population of 20 billion is about the most a planet can (somewhat) happily sustain even after all of the morale-boosting technologies have been researched.

Hope that helps.

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Thanks Davabled, that may explain much of it, I had at least 5-6 planets with considerably more than 20 billion. I had assumed as long as you had enough farms / food to sustain them, and the morale boosting techs that "more" people were better...larger tax base and all ( I kept the tax rate fairly low...below 30% ).

So, I guess, from what you are saying here, that never put farms on planets, if they already have a large population base, as that just increases both the amount of people and the corresponding morale drop...

It would be nice if the manual explained that over-population drops your morale. IRL situation I can see the same thing happening, but didn't consider it since this is a game.

Any other tips / advice from you veterans out there, in proper gameplay is highly appreciated.

Thanks !!

Fal

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18 billion is the max for me, but some try and squeak out 20 billion people.

Are you playing Dark Avatar or Twilight of the Arnor, in TA once you get 20,000 BC in the bank, your income will plummet, so spend such that you don't cap.

If you get a yellow food tile (300% bonus to food) DONT put a farm there

Research the +morale techs

Build Trade Goods or other special buildings that give a CIV-WIDE bonus to morale. Harmony Crystals, Spices, etc.

Find MORALE RESOURCES and ECONOMIC RESOURCES (Little floating crystals on the game map yellow and green respectively) and UPGRADE THESE

So many new players fail to realize that you can send more constructors to these to increase the civ-wide resource extraction (there is a limit of course, for a total of 6 I believe, but you need certain techs to unlock most)

Those are tips for morale and economy. Thinking about morale and taxes as two sides of the same coin is a good thing to do, since afterall, a higher morale will make you more money by being able to increase taxes. As a rule of thumb I try to stay around 65 percent morale. Be sure to either save frequently (in case you lose an election) or decrease taxes when elections near if you play with lower morale.

NOTE: Planets will grow faster by having a high morale, so early in the game many experienced players purposely lose money by decreasing taxes to 0 (or whenever the 100 percent morale hits) to grow people to tax at an incredibly faster rate.

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I'm playing TA, patched to the latest version of course. At least I have all 3 games installed I mean...I'm currently starting on the first chapter / game the Dread Lords though.

Thanks for the tips so far, sure that they will help tremendously !!

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I suggest also re-doing your stats (or attributes) so that your civilization naturally has a higher morale. You are able to change this when you start a new game. This doesn't help you in your current games but I think it will help most new players (as it does for me) deal with the issue of morale. (you will have to re-arrange your attributes and will end up getting rid of or lowering the points on other attributes to have some for the morale attribute)
Also, you can mouse over your approval rating on the planet development screen and it will show you how your morale is applied per planet. Things like morale improvements(buildings), planet quality (must be 11 useable tiles or higher for a 10% bonus) and natural ability (like those anomalies you survey which give small bonuses to morale or if you picked +morale attributes before you started the game or have morale resources being mined) are shown as positive percentages. Your negative morale will come from taxes and population.

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