approval/ morale question

Approval affects Production, Influence, Pop Growth, and Resistance. It's very important.

Approval doesn't impact production directly. Unless you are arguing it impacts pop growth. I think it used to. I wouldn't mind it returning so I would need to make sure approval buildings are in the mix. 

Approval only affects organic population growth, resistance and influence and has been this way since Beta 5.  Previous to that it did affect production.  

Thanks for the conformation.

What do you think of the way it works now?  It seems you can mostly ignore approval buildings.

I don't like it and if it stays that way at release I plan on modding it out of the game.  At the moment I generally ignore morale with Synthetic races but try to keep it at a reasonable rate for Organics just to keep the growth bonus.

Dont ignore approval buldings! Unless playing Yor.

Trust me, Approval affects everything, if you loose it, your empire stalls. It doesn't affect manufacturing but it affects buildings that affect factories- so yes- indirectly it affects everything. It also gives a big boost when your planet is fully happy.

Happy planet- no problems- unhappy- empire problems!

Not really.  You'd have planets not growing as you build/upgrade farms and not generating as much influence as they should, therefore they risk flipping to another nation's side.

I say you can ignore approval buildings very early in the game, while you're rushing for colonies and very late in the game, when planets are fille to the rim with people.

When I start a new game, my Capital has 20.5 Production. If I get my Approval to 100%, I have 25 Production. If you think that Approval doesn't affect Production you aren't paying enough attention.

There is no tooltip that says approval affects production...however brad did say it does in one stream.

i have seen some prod numbers I couldn't explain so this might be it

Sounds like a bug?

It appears that it does indeed still affect production.  Not only that, but research as well.

I have a simple Before and After below:

I ran across an anomaly that finished my research on a +4 Morale tech, giving me a perfect Compare and Contrast.  Thus the only difference in the two screenshots is approval.

If it does affect production it needs to say so somewhere and reflect it with whatever bonus or penalty it applies.  Further the penalties are generally pretty minor for growth, resistance and influence until you get under 15% approval.

It affects income as well.  Curious, I decided to go back and raise my planetary slider to 33/33/33 and then run the experiment again. 

Before and After from planetary tooltip:

Before on the Planetary Wheel:

After on the Planetary Wheel:

Makes me think it is affecting Raw Production (I think that's the one at least).  There's been quite a few problems with that and tool tips.  If it's not Raw Production, it's whatever the term is that described what goes into the Planetary Wheel.

EDIT:::  And, no, it's not because I was running an Economic Stimulus.  I ran the experiment yet again and this time looked at a planet that was producing improvements as normal.  Its income went up as well (no screenshots this time).  So approval is absolutely affecting things. Not sure what the percentage is though.  I want to say 25% since that's what everything else is, but the math doesn't work out right.  Though since Raw Production (IIRC) is on a curve, that might be messing things up.  I'm sure someone with better math chops than I might be able to reverse engineer it, especially if they have the formula for pop to raw production on hand.

I have taken the attitude that this is one of those balance things that probably won't settle until some time after release.   But whatever it ends up it is going to be helping, so I set my planets to have decent morale, 100% if it doesn't mess things up too badly.   Sort of the attitude I am taking toward a lot of stuff, not trying to carefully min/max because it will keep changing for a while.

None of this is meant to minimize the importance of getting this particular issue right and in addition to letting the player know what is going on via tool tips, etc.  I might add that a lot of this kind of information has been being added in the patches lately and it is a very good thing, but, as here, some things still lack.

I generally favor the idea of a direct effect on production that makes approval a higher order of business, although I think it helps significantly even as it currently is; a bit more seems right to me.

Oh, I absolutely agree that approval should affect production.  I was irked that it apparently hadn't as of Beta 5.  Now that it is shown to change things, I feel better.  Just wish I knew exactly what was going on.

Ah, 

Gotcha, actually I seem to recall working on a spreadsheet replying to another post and couldnt figure out why my math was wrong...I was drinking at the time so figure I'd better sober up first. I actually prefer approval to effect production so joy. 

Approval only affects production when you are at 100. When at 100 I believe you get a 50% boost or 100% boost to everything. However below that all the way to zero you will not take a hit to production. 

Thus its in you favor to get as many planets at 100 approval as you can. This is one major reason why I play with very few habitable planets in game. On very large maps with common planets you will end up with over a 100 colonies and at a 1% disapproval per planet you will sink happiness faster than talking about Hillary for Pres......

On that note I found that one approval building and a starbase with a rec center will generally do the job for that solar system. Also approval relics are a must have actually as their bonuses 'should' stack....

I believe this came up on last week's dev stream, and they seemed to agree that it should be addressed at some point. They briefly discussed scaling it according to size of map, or simply placing a cap on the max penalty that can be accrued.

Doubt it'll make it in for release, but I wouldn't be surprised if they do something shortly afterwards.