Large Empire Penalty

How many planets do you have and how are they populated?

pretty sure it's just a flat -0.2 per planet. maybe it's subtracted before the % modifiers, not really sure about that.

I have 91 planets -- The one with 37% approval has a population of 10.8 million people

Chris

It's a flat -0.2 per planet, applied before the morale value is divided by pop.

The % bonuses from things like relics etc aren't added to the final %  they're applied to the numerical value instead, prior to the division of morale by population. This seems to go a bit funky when things turn negative (as will happen when you have -23 from LEP but only +13 from buildings).

Get Patriotic.  Problem solved.  

Patriotic?

When making your custom race, choose the Patriotic trait. It 100% eliminates the large empire bonus. Overpowered much?

The patriotic attribute can be selected when creating your own custom race. It eliminates the LEP.

ok -- No other way of doing that?

Chris

Out of curiosity are you using the Malevolent ideology approval building? I've found it to be pretty powerful on Insane maps. That said I haven't gotten an empire quite that large yet.

you can also dip into the upper branch of malevolence. one of the traits gives you bonus approval for each conquered planet. that's also a bonus that scales nicely with map size. 

Approval is computed as

([flat morale bonuses] - 0.2 * [number of planets]) * (1 + [approval bonus]) / [planetary population]

If the large empire penalty is large enough to reduce the planet's flat morale bonuses to zero or less, the Intimidation Center will not help you; it provides +50% approval and +10% approval per level, but +50% (or +100%, or +100000%) of any number less than or equal to zero is still going to give you a final approval rating of 0%.

Personally, I feel that the large empire penalty in GCIII is poorly implemented; penalizing approval is simply an indirect way of targeting manufacturing (which I tend to feel should be more or less unaffected; my factory takes longer to produce goods locally from locally-sourced resources with local labor because why, exactly?), research (which I feel would be better targeted by going after tech costs), income (which already has a size-dependent penalty in maintenance, though it's arguably the case that the maintenance costs are too low), and then penalties to growth/influence/resistance which are either trivially easy to counter or not really worth bothering about since the approval-related modifiers to these last three stack additively with the bonuses you can obtain for those from improvements. On top of that, I feel that the current large empire penalty over-encourages the taking of the flat morale bonuses in the Governance specializations and significantly reduces the value of farms on larger maps.

While I can't argue with any of that, the Intimidation Center + adjacent morale buildings + flat morale from techs IS a helpful solution to the problem.. up until a certain point at least. Realistically they need to implement a cap on the large empire penalty or rebalance it somehow depending on map size. It's definitely broken in its current state.

Thanks -- I appreciate the information -- They really need to rebalance the game with the Large Empire Penalty

I will try patriotic and see if that helps

Chris

Absolutely, on the bigger maps it is completely crippling, madly, madly broken.

But they don't seem willing to acknowledge this problem.

Build starbases around your planet and put morale enhancements in the starbases.