Approval vs morale ?

They are related, but not the same thing.

Morale buildings and resource mines affect how approval is calculated (from the "base morale" for a planet). There's discussion of the underlying DL and DA math at the wiki.

GW is totally correct but it's important to stress the distinction between the two.

Approval is the value displayed on a planet by planet basis that determines the population growth rate for that particular planet. Also the average (population weighted) approval of your civilization is what is used to determine the outcome of elections for forms of government above Imperial.

Morale is an ability to which various buildings, techs, wonders, racial abilities and morale resouce mines give a bonus.

The point is that the approval of any planet is based on morale as listed in the formulas in the wiki article that GW references. As GW implies, any morale bonus is depreciated by a planets "base morale" which is solely determined by population. These depreciation values are listed in the Wiki article as well and can be significant.

If you have a morale bonus of 40% on a planet of 20B then the actual approval bonus you get is only 16% (40% bonus * 40% base morale for a pop of 20B). Base morale varies between DL and DA (and perhaps ToA as well).

The point is that there are two things that are direct bonuses to approval as opposed bonuses to morale. These are the 10% *approval* bonus that you get from going Neutral and the other is the 10% *approval* bonus you get on any planet PQ11 or greater.

These bonuses don't really sound like much but since they are not depreciated by a planets "base morale" they are way more powerful than they seem.

Quick question - the Secret Police center super project claims to boost "base morale" does this refer to an approval bonus (like neutral/pq11) or is it just another morale building? I ask because an expensive entertainment building isn't much of a super project.

Hi!

The last time I checked (DA 1.8) it was just another morale building, and a rather crappy one. Better save the game before you build it in TotA. May save you a tile for STH more usefull.

BR, Iztok

Iztok's reply is correct as usual but again a subtle distinction is in play. The Secret Police center is certainly broken in DL and DA and as he suggests it's best to save before checking this out in ToA. But an improvement to "base morale" as this should be is still not the same as a direct approval bonus, but clearly a bonus to "base morale" would be a very big benefit if it indeed worked.

The thing about base morale is that it depreciates *all* sources of morale bonus other than the two direct approval bonuses that I mentioned above. If something actually worked as a bonus to "base morale" it would essentially do nothing by itself (as a direct approval bonus would) but would make all other sources of morale bonus more effective. By doing that it would probably be far more effective than a direct approval bonus.

The thing is that having "base morale" depreciate all forms of morale bonus makes for a very strong dependency of approval on total population. You build morale buildings on planets to boost approval as their population increases. But as the population increases further the actual benefit of these building declines. This basically gives you a situation where it's impossible to have a range of populations on different planets. 20B has become an absolute limit and in smaller games with less morale mining resources even 13B can be an absolute limit.

I've always maintained that it would be better to reduce the bonus of any morale building but decouple the buildings benefit from base morale basically making it a smaller bonus directly to approval. This would make the function far more linear and allow you to build a range of planet populations dependent on individual PQ and food/approval bonus tiles. Sure the buildings (now) approval bonuses would need to be tweaked but this would add variety to what has become boring sameness.

Just my opinion.