Quoting admiralWillyWilber,
kind of see the point of large empire penalty ranting. I understand why we should have it on smaller maps. On smaller maps it would prevent both the player and Ai from taking over the whole map for a challenging game. On rare habital planet settings I see the same thing. Now I like to play on big maps with abundant settings. When the game gives me eight players on a excessive map that is scattered with abundant settings then a large empire penalty makes no sense. Here's what I propose the map settings should be devided in half. The habitality devided in half. On maps that are small, or hability settings that are rare then their should be a large empire penalty. If you wanted to you could add after so many opponents added. When you have large galaxies on abundant then their should be no penalty. If you like to play rate settings, or small galaxies then this would be fine. I doubt that the people who wined about expanding Ai were people who liked abundant settings on big maps. Because if this is true then you like empty galaxies full of pirates.
No, LEP shouldn't exist in it's present form at all. It's ridiculous, unfit for purpose, and is attempting to kill two very different birds with 1 stone. Approval works well to prevent concentration of power on one build queue. It will not work well for preventing creating lots of small build queues without reworking significantly (so significantly it would stop working as a brake on individual planets). There's no reason to try and use one mechanic to do these two jobs, and it fails miserably to do so as a result.
my question is what does no approval do to you. And how does the gameplay option affect the game.
0% approval will give you:
a)-25% growth. This does pretty much nothing. Since growth is generally around 0.2 (very rarely higher), 25% is a rounding error. The %-based growth bonuses really achieve almost nothing when growth sits determinedly in the low 0. range.
-25% production. This might seem painful, but really isn't, since you receiving far more than that in free production from many colony capitals.
c)25% less influence, but again you receiving more than that free from all the colony capitals - and it's coming from a dense overlapping lattice of planets.
d)75% less resistance, though the way invasions work you need such an enormous number of people on 1 planet to defend it that you're going to have 0% approval there anyway (or else spam so many military buildings that you can't build up any population or approval buildings).
If you're playing on very large, many-planet maps, then you're going to end up with terrible morale anyway, so it's never, ever worth buying entertainment buildings - just build more farms. Until the 4th they're better than the penalty anyway.
