it's -0.15, which is rounded to -0.2

When you have 100 colonies, that's -15 morale. Brutal without a couple of approval improvements.

When you get to 650 colonies? -100 morale. Good luck keeping those class 4 planets happy.

EDIT: Actually, it's -0.2 now. When it was being discussed it was -0.15. 100 colonies, -20 morale. 500 colonies, -100 morale. GG

Every Harmony Crystal gives one +1 morale.  On a map with 1000+ planets, you're going to get a LOT them. At the very least, one can trade for them. You're also going to get a lot of Approval Relics.

Cautiously optimistic about this change, actually.  Flat is FAR easier to overcome than percent in this game.

EDIT::: Also, let's not forget the Malevolent trait that gives a boost to Approval for conquering planets.  Last I checked, that was still flat.  Thus get that trait and one is golden.

Well on a Insane map with over 200+ planets I hit 0 Morale so it is too large. and yes I had the Ideology trait and had 9 starbases for morale!!! My large empire penalty was over 200% with 200 planets.

  Don't like it, as it resembles a hard cap.  +4 morale = 20 more planets.  I liked % more because you could offset them with +% buildings.  Just need more +% morale techs and fewer +x techs.

  New system really hurts new colonies, while barely effecting older colonies. -20% of a pop 5 colony is much less painful than -4 base morale.  For a built up colony, that can be offset by a single building.  Also renders +% building irrelevant.  +100% of zero is zero.

Well... I would say that when you have a large empire it should not be very hard to rush buy an entertainment center or two on a new world to offset the penalties if they are too large. Low class worlds are not that problematic later on when you can terraform many tiles as well, you just have to use different strategies at the start and end of a game.

I also don't think that it is necessary to be able to colonize the whole map if you play an insane map. Just taking a part of that map is OK for me it makes a game much more epic in the long run. Insane maps should come with 30-60 AI opponents so you don't need to settle several hundred planets to win the game.

After playing a while on an insane map with 50 opponents I must say I really like this new change... you can't expand too fast too quickly without investing in approval technologies and improvements in some way. Already after just a couple of planets you need to think about your overall approval ratings or else you will gimp your growth and production.

It was simply too easy to expand up to 30-40 colonies as it was before and then it started to hurt quite allot. Now it is more a linear progression as long as you invest in approval technology or use other means to gain approval.

So... in my opinion a nice change... I also don't think it should scale too much with map size, Some but not in a way that you can have hundreds of planets on an insane map without much effort.

On today's devstream Paul mentioned that the empire penalty was changed from 1% per planet to a flat -.02 and that he thought this was far too small and that he would be looking at it again.  This makes me think that the current .2 was an XML error and in fact NOT working as intended.  But the chat was extrmely laggy and had to be rebooted several times, so I can't confirm everything he said until/unless the YT replay goes up in full.

He did mention that he still wants to tweak it so it is variable per # of habitable on a map, which I think would address a lot of the concerns here. 

The initial change idea for LEP was -0.15, so I'd assume -0.2 is correct. -0.02 would be too little - you'd have -2 with 100 colonies.

He did also mention that he'd try and get it so it scales with the # of habitable planets, which would be the ideal solution. How else can you balance it on Tiny-Rare planets vs Insane-Abundant? Having 200 colonies vs 20 at the same stage of the game?

And yes, Patriotic races just laugh at it

I don't like abilities such as Patriotic that get rid of ALL penalties like that. Patriotic should only receive half the penalty or something. Abilities like that can be abused to a very high degree, pretty much the same problem as the Engineering trait before that was changed.

The best algorithm to use here is a slowly rising one to reduce base morale.  Personally, the best one I can think of is Logarithms.

A good example would be something like 0.25 * log2 (# of planets).    That is, the log base 2 of the size of your empire, then quarter it. Which means, you get a 0.25 penalty to morale every time you double the size of your empire.

So, at these sizes, you'd see the following morale penalties:

Size     Penalty

1         0
2         0.25
4         0.5
8         0.75
16       1
32       1.25
64       1.5
128     1.75
256     2

Personally, I'd be in favor of removing the morale penalty entirely and replacing it with something else. For example, scale technology costs with the number of colonies you have and add an empire administration cost that scales with the square of the number of colonies you have. Alternatively, make the morale bonus multiplier apply before the morale penalty, as this allows percentage morale bonuses to be useful in counteracting the large empire penalty, whereas under the current system the number of colonies at which morale goes to zero is invariant with respect to the morale multipliers at a colony.

The current model is effectively a double penalty. You need to build more morale structures to counteract the morale penalty, which reduces your base production or production multipliers, and if you don't build morale structures, your average approval is reduced, which reduces your base production or production multipliers. You lose either way; how much you lose and whether it's better to lose in one way than the other or balance somewhere between them depends on the exact numbers. It'd be better in my opinion if it were just a straight cost.

Additionally, and less importantly, it's not a model that makes a great deal of sense. I'm less happy because the state of which I'm a citizen is bigger? Uh, why? I don't think US historical average approval rates differ significantly from UK historical average approval rates, and yet the US is a significantly larger state than the UK.