Questions

1) How on earth (or whatever planet ) do I stop my people from randomly dropping to 60% approval? It's like I'd have to fill the planet with extreme stadiums and ish just to get them to stay at a reasonable level...

As far as I know the things that affect approval are a high tax rate and a high population. One common mistake is to build too many farms. So far I've played the game and won at crippling difficulty and can see no real need to build more than one farm on a planet.

I don't bother with morale buildings at all, the initial xeno entertainment tech gives you a civ wide 15% bonus and later ones give a further 5-10% in total iirc. These combined with the morale/approval trade goods and (if you're lucky) a morale resource, mean you can get a very good bonus which should more than suffice for most games.

Also assuming your overall approval is high, 60% on planets which already have a high population isn't that bad and in the overall scheme of things won't make that much difference.

  2) How do I delete old ship templates from the game, I don't see them anymore in either tab in the shipyard YET when I research technologies related to them I see them on the list .

Never tried it - so I don't know.

  3) Is it basically a give in that small ships are not going to have boosters or armor or anything like that? I sometimes feel like I'm missing something obvious because I swear the AI always has better ships than me.

The AI may have bonuses you're not immediately aware of - a military resource or a race advantage with weapons/armour. But generally small craft don't have enough space to be anything other than flying missiles. Don't underestimate them though - in large fleets they can be devastating and if you have them in the AOE of a military starbase it's easy to magnify their effectiveness.

As the game progresses and you improve your miniaturisation they will be able to support armour and more engines, but by that point I usually have so much production that I produce medium+ ships instead.

  4) Is there any way to take a rank 0 planet and up it? Any sort of gaia transformation option ala Master of Orion 2 ...that was a sweet tool.

No - though some special events will make such planets habitable. These events are so random that it’s not worth taking them into account.

  5) I assume military slider is for building ships, research is for ... research, and the social is for building buildings? Do any of these three sliders make people love me? I need a fourth slider for "pleasure palace" or something.

The closest you'll get to a pleasure slider is the tax rate - those citizens love low taxes.

2)  Under TA (and perhaps the option got ported back to DA for 2.01?) the computer will makes ships every time you get new weapons/armor/hulls/miniturization etc.  The old templates under DL (and DA if above isn't true) are opened up whenever their pre-reqs are learned.

If they bother you enough, you could just click at the top of that column on the "User" or "Custom" button to just show ships you've designed.

3)  As howserdowser said, small ships don't have too much room on them.  However, this can be altered by learning the Minituization techs, which will effectively add more room on the ship to place things (counter-intuative...miniturization increases size of ship space, but due to rounding and such, you'll like this outcome much better).

If you are running TA (and DA if it got the AI building ships designs for you), then there is a focus slider you may also want to look into to make sure it's building ships with the types of weapons/armor you wish.  Engines however are normally quite lacking, so you may need to just suck it up and build your own for that.

Autodesign is TA only.

Unfortunately you can't choose which random or mega events can occur.

Ah ok, Wasn't sure if that got ported back in the 2.0 changes or not.  Haven't touched DA really since the TA beta lol.

So my getting two of these events in 20 turns(one increasing PQ of 15 in a 2 sectors radius, the other +11) is highly unusual?

Extremely unusual.

In the options menu, you can turn off the autodesign feature entirely. Then you will only get ships you design yourself, along with a handful of starting ship designs.

What I meant was say I designed a ship named "Weppypetta" and decided later I don't like it and I mark it as obsolete or delete it and its template.

How do I get it to not show up in research in later games because I keep seeing them still

I've never used the template system, so I can't tell you. Usually deleting a design prevents it from showing up in later games. Marking it obsolete removes it from your current build list, but it DOES show in later games. I don't have a clue how to remove templates.

Thanks all btw, I was using too many farms .

I just finished a game with influence and almost 100% 100% approval (as in at all times) .

You can find the templates in your games folder and physically delete them . That's what I did.

Played the original GC, now have GC II Ultimate.  Does it need patching or an update?  Bought it right out of the store, installed it and went to click the update button and it seems like I am getting the run around from impulse to stardock site.  Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Ultimate is fully updated