Have you EVER built a fookin approval building in all your games??

Which is why you look a little silly stating this. Morale buildings do not give a % increase, it's a flat bonus.

Their adjacency bonuses are also flat bonuses, so putting a 2 happiness entertainment Center next to your colony hub gives it 1 bonus, for a lovely 50% increase in effectiveness. 

Choosing 'the most efficient option' would probably be helped by actually looking at what options are available to you rather than glancing at them and assuming they are non-viable

You're right, the LEP as a flat rate per-planet works very badly for big games.

As for morale buildings never being a good choice, well, there's a range, but in the majority of cases it's probably not worth the build slot. I usually go with 1 next to my colony hub because it's hard to pass up the large % effectivenss bonus

Getting Patriotic does rather take away the need for approval buildings, indeed - at the opportunity cost of not having one of the other useful abilities. So, they're 'completely useless' if you discount the value of having Intuitive, Colonizers, Adaptable, Prolific, Starfaring, Synthetic etc. Caveats all over. How badly are you 'screwed' if you do not chose patriotic and get a huge empire?

I.e., what is the downside of going to 0% approval?

-25% population growth. -25% production. -25% influence growth, -75% resistance to culture flipping/invasions.

Which of those, exactly, do you give a damn about if you have 100 planets? Why are you doomed with no approval?

Approval building, albiet only flat bonuses, at high tech levels can get very powerful, especially if placed in terrain improvement plots.  There are only a few morale % techs, but I usually dont take them myself.  There is a simple solution which you have yet to explore with all of your games, so please stop whining about LEP in every other thread.

Okay, let's close down cinemas, theme parks such as Disneyland, TV stations, radio stations, games development industry, games arcade, etc.

And build manufacturing factories in place of all these.

Therefore the proper way to balance LEP then is to INCREASE the malus, to force you to pick approval buildings over that extra factory.

Actually, when I ran the numbers a while back for a Q12 planet, the morale building was the BEST building to build first when starting a research planet if your approval isn't maxed.

The production and growth bonus compound each other, and is stronger than a factory first, flat out. That was before population was buffed, so morale should actually be even stronger now.

I was going to do this just to theorycraft it a little, but I don't know where the morale bonusses are actually listed - they appear to be hidden in-game :/

Not really. The problem is, you're still gonna hit the capping point sooner or later, and when you do the approval buildings become useless, so you may as well not waste time building them in the first place (besides which, an extra farm or two is almost always a better choice anyway). It's a mechanic which basically breaks conquest games on maps with over 100 planets, and it will continue to break them regardless of where you set the malus.

Much as I hate to agree with Marigoldran (at least until he stops endlessly producing extra threads to say exactly the same thing), he's right.

You get -0.2 approval per world, right? And only +2 approval from the basic entertainment center. So if you have 40 worlds, you have -8 approval for starters. You need to build 3 entertainment centers just to get any benefit at all (+1, which you then have to divide by the colony's population); you need 5 to hit 100% approval once the colony has filled the colony capital pop limit. That cancels out the -25% production and gives you the maximum +25%... But so does just building 2 of the correct production type for whatever you're specializing the world in. That's 2/5th of the land cost for the same result - and that's if you don't build any farms. Every farm you build gives an eventual 40% bonus to production compared to the base colony, and so is much more effective.

Run the numbers. You have 40 worlds, I have 40 worlds.

I colonize a planet and build no approval buildings. I add 5 farms into the empty slots. I have 15 population with a -25% penalty to production, giving me 11.25 population's worth of output.

You colonize the planet and build 5 approval buildings. You have 5 population with a 25% bonus to production, giving you 6.25 population's worth of output.

This carries on all the way up the scale til you hit the 30b population cap on a planet. You're better off just getting farms.

You need an extra approval building for every single farm on a planet, and an extra approval building for every 10 planets you have, too (which is yet another example of why wide empires are better than tall ones). This means that approval buildings actually lose value in relation to other buildings as the empire expands. Once games go over about 20 planets per player, approval buildings have lost so much value that that you should never buy them because you can gain the same bonus much, much cheaper elsewhere.

This is an unavoidable problem with the mechanic, and requires an additional punitive external mechanic to deal with it (i.e., worlds rebelling, a research cost increase, maintenance penalties). And once you have an additional mechanic for that... well, why bother with using approval? You already have something to punish over-expansion, so what's the point in dragging approval into it on top?

Your doing something wrong....  How many planets do you have?

Quoting Bellack,

reply 14

Quoting marigoldran,

reply 2

Quoting dansiegel30,

reply 1

Have you EVER built a fookin approval building in all your games??

As a matter of fact, I haven't.  Because they take up space and are otherwise useless.  Much better to build factories and conquer planets to get the approval bonus.  

I always choose the most efficient option.  If the option doesn't appear efficient I WON'T EVEN BOTHER TO TEST IT BECAUSE I KNOW WHAT WOULD HAPPEN ANYWAYS.

Mathematically, there is LITERALLY NO REASON AT ALL to build morale buildings in the first place.  

Ok well no wonder. You argument is now invalid. And I have won on Insane (since it is the only map size I play with the exception of playing on Huge for MP) without Patriotic or Malevolence Lvl 2.

 

Actually, no it doesn't make my point invalid.  My point is that building factories and getting Patriotic for larger map sizes with lots of planets is the MOST EFFICIENT way of winning the game.  

There are in fact other ways of winning but you'd just be handicapping yourself.  The fact that you chose to handicap yourself to win the game on Insane is a big achievement.  

@Naselus - well said, without proprietary formulas!! .  If the capping point is 5 approval vs. farms, then the approval malus should be increased far higher than -25% when at 0% approval.  Frankly, in a society where 100/100 people are completely pissed off and depressed, I dont see how any work would get done, including any bedroom action.

Looks like an entertainment center IS the better thing to buy if you have >23 population and no LEP. This is also only with the base buildings (of which, you'd need 9 to reach this total). With the higher-level ones, the balance doesn't change much, but you'll hit the 30b population cap sooner, at which point farms become useless.

Of course, you're still literally always better off building a factory or research center, since the 25% bonus they provide to whatever you're specializing in is as good as the benefit of maxium approval, or at least cancels out the minimum approval penalty. If you want the growth (ha), resistance (even more ha) or influence, then you just have to build those buildings instead; this becomes more space-efficient than approval by the time you have about 20 planets.

EDIT: Even if you have exactly enough LEP to cancel out your existing colony-given approval, and so go from 0% to 40% morale (the biggest jump possible in table-terms),the farm is better - by 0.25 production (it's 5*1 vs 7*0.75). 

If the only time morale is really kicking in at all is on huge population worlds with no Large Empire Penalty at all, or with widely divergent tech (which requires multiple upgrades), then I think we can probably just say morale isn't even close to balanced right now.