Personally, I feel that the current system whereby setting a planet to wealth production makes everyone happier is a silly penalization of high-production and high-research worlds and over-encourages high-wealth worlds. Plus, it doesn't even make that much sense. The government shut down all its factories (or converted them to compete with the private market) and labs and upped the tax rate, and I'm supposed to be happier because of this?
If you're going to create an approval modifier based on where your settings are on the wheel, make it so that the more out of balance the wheel is, the higher the approval penalty becomes, rather than creating a big glowing sign that says "specialize all planets in money and just rush all projects in the future." There's really no need to unduly encourage purse worlds; they were already my most common type of planet in GCII because you really only needed so many lab worlds or factory worlds, and more money was never really a problem. Beyond that, GCIII already has a mechanic to encourage specialization - the adjacency bonuses. Do we really need a mechanic that encourages a specific type of specialization? How about a mechanic to discourage specialization to counterbalance this, rather than saying "this type of specialization is good, but those two types of specialization are bad" the way the current high-wealth = approval bonus system does?
I mean, yes, it's decent that this setup discourages the factory planet and the lab world, but is it really better to replace the factory world and lab world with factory world and lab world, just with enough of the slider set to wealth to cover the planetary facility maintenance costs and perhaps a bit of what the approval structures and tax rate slider would have been covering in GCII? Is it really better to use a system that actively encourages purse worlds over factory worlds, lab worlds, and vaguely balanced worlds and that reduces the need to bother with morale structures?
My question was: Is it possible that the various Approval-related bonuses that Tigz mentioned and that come down to a "+2%" is actually the Approval change per turn? So, in Tigz example, he has a +2% and is sitting at 73% approval now, so next turn he would ahve 73+2= 75% approval? Is that how this works?
It does not appear that that is the way in which approval works. I have a planet with a net -35% approval and a current approval of 65%. On the next turn, it's still sitting at 65% approval and a net -35% approval, and it's the same way the turn after that. As a result, I suspect that, when the approval system is working properly, approval is supposed to be (100 + bonuses - maluses)%; changing the wealth setting on the planet to change the planetary wealth approval modifier causes the approval to change in a manner consistent with the formula in the preceding sentence (although I did not look at how the approval changed after playing with the wealth slider if I had hit end turn). I have however seen some cases where the numbers do not add up correctly, though I haven't looked at them carefully enough to see if there was a consistent pattern.