1.3 MORALE STILL COMPLETELY BROKEN

Either pick a faction with Patriotic or be Malevolent and invade the crap out of people for unlimited Morale. For the really big maps, there aren't really any other choices.

Star bases also provide modules that bonuses to the morale. And they generate a lot of it and a single star base can cover multiple planets, and they stack with each other.

On larger maps your options are either Patriotic or Malevolent.  There are no other choices.  

It destroys AIs as well, they continually have shit morale. 

Or use terraforming and build a second stadium.  You just cant put all factories on a planet.

For benevolent make sure you use your missionary building adjacency bonus with your stadium or other morale building. It has a +2 bonus. And the pragmatic defense building gives +2 as well. I usually stack them both next to my aproval building. The pragmatic building is a level one so its easy to get as well as the malevolent approval building. The three give a nic bonus when stacked together. 

I never had any problem with morale. The key, in my opinion, is to use economic starbases extensively, with their stackable +5 morale bonus, and also use the malevolent approval building/ideology generator while making as much use of adjacency boni as possible. Finally, don't forget to pick the two passive +4 boni in the tech tree.

In order to save future confusion, it's perhaps worth bearing in mind that the current game version is 1.03, not 1.3.

I find it kind of disturbing, that game that uses ability to create huge galaxies as one of its selling  points do not know the meaning of word "scaling".

Okay, so first off - 109 planets is a retarded amount of planets. I play on immense maps and unless I am going for a full conquest victory, it's hard to get above 70 planets without eliminating 3-4 other factions. If I'm going to war monger like that, then do exactly what one of the other posters said and take the Malevolent ideology trait that gives you +1 morale for every invasion. That's exactly why it's there.

Also I'm going to flat out state that the morale penalty itself is no big fucking deal. It's not terribly harsh, in fact I don't find it to be a limiting factor even when my morale is crap across my entire empire (straight 0% across the board). It'd be one thing if shipyards shut down or planets rebelled, but they don't and you don't need to worry about the resistance penalty if your empire is that freaking huge anyway because you'll always be pumping out more influence than the AI. I actually hope they make this harsher in future patches because it doesn't actually limit over expansion in this game which causes the early game to be 100% about colony rush and then by turn 80 onwards everyone is just sitting on their colonies until someone goes to war. It's very predictable and kind of boring and if you're a war monger like me it usually means that the AI has dozens of colonies near you that it can't possibly defend. They might as well just give them to me.

This is sort of embarrassing, but I have 295 hours played in this game (Yes, I have been obsessed since launch) and I have never found morale to even remotely be a problem even with large empire penalties that amount to -20 morale. I mean, really, you can easily get +200% morale bonus from a building or two and then the rest of technology or artefacts and at that point a single stadium will cover the cost of your empire penalty before you even account for the +4 global morale technologies (which together in this scenario turn into +32 global morale).

I mean really, OP, I don't get why you are having problems. You want a huge empire but you don't seem to think that you ought to have to put the resources into it in order to maintain it. It's not like you need 109 colonies to win the game and even the it's entirely possible to manage that if you wanted to. Please tell me you are building amusement parks as well and not just stadiums???

Dunno. I played on Immense map of Scattered  type with occasional habitable planets on Challenging against 5 Gifted AI in 1.02. By the time i met everyone i had like 70 colonies without even obtaining extreme colonization and had no room to expand. Later i get around 90 due to AI colonizing extreme planets in my ZoI. And AI was on my level in colonies numbers. Later i had to  attack Altarians because otherwise they'll get Research victory due to insane amount research from Relics and in middle of war i have like 110 planets. So such number are normal on big maps. And again, scaling different gameplay aspect depending on map size seems like standard practice. 

Completely broken? All leaves on Stardock revoked? This must be a satiric comment on the shouting and mega-galaxy abuse post-spam of marigoldran, right?

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.

my question is what does no approval do to you. And how does the gameplay option affect the game.

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.

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.

b)-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.

thanks I was playing with no morale for all my games, and wasn't. Seeing anything at least I know morale does something. Still think large empire penalty should be for smaller maps, or rarer planets. That way if you want a large empire penalty then you could set if. If you don't. Then you could set it. This way we don't. Have to make it an option.

I don't see why having a large empire should affect morale anyway.  You would think being part of a large civilization would help a citizens morale.

No not necessarily. As you expand and expand, each planet may easily begin to diversify from each other, Planet A may begin having a very different culture than Planet B if transit and communication are not very tight, and they may do so anyways.

Generally, different cultural values will lead to very different views on how the empire as a whole could/should be managed. Another possibility, is that as the empire grows, it begins to service individual colonies less and less well, and the bureaucracy causes discontent.

There are a million arguments for and against both of these, and you can always say "its the future so it isn't a issue, X technology fixes it" but would that be fun?

The problem with morale is that it is both A) meaningless and difficult to scale.

You could fix this by instituting rebellions which then become neutral planets, and having the LEP have a max penalty size and tweaking some buildings outputs. I'm sure they will do these things in time, but it isn't there yet.

Is LEP fun?  I can think of a few words to describe it (meaningless, arbitrary, annoying), but 'fun' ain't one of them. Nor would random irritating rebellions which you simply can't avoid on large maps without a very special race build and/or ideology choices.

A lot of peeps have been complaining about how research gets way too easy mid-late game.  How about a research inefficiency bonus?  All of these researchers on different worlds contributing to an empire wide project, without ANY malus?  Hell, from working 20 years in the global wireless telecom environment, just waiting a few hours between east coast and west coast, let alone having to sync between Europe and Asia is a complete ass pain.  The game should get harder the bigger you get, on ALL facets, else you hit a tipping point and its a ROLFSTOMP.  It already does that with production (as it is fairly localized with decay malus for shipyards).  I laughed my arse off when someone was complaining of playing insane galaxies wanting "star gates" to instant transport ships around their gigantic empire.  Jeez, nothing is free....

They indicated that they wanted to put in a flat research cost increase per world in the dev stream on Friday. tbh, I hope they don't - there's smarter ways to prevent big empires from going overboard on research, and a flat increase creates a time limit on new colonization - with even a small increase, colonization becomes hard to justify after a couple of hundred turns. It's the equivalent of using a sledgehammer where a scalpel is required.

Ah, "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." (by Oscar Wilde)

and of course "The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency." (by Eugene McCarthy)

And my personal ones:

"Bureaucracy is very efficient at making the voice and will of the people meaningless."

"If you want to control people give them bureaucracy and tell them to voice their desires and complaints through the proper channels and procedures."

"Nothing stops discontent people like a stack of unclear and bewildering forms to fill in."

"The true art of the bureaucrat: The ability to create procedures that appear reasonable, but lead to nothing."

"The bureaucratic prime directive: Do not throw any papers away, for when someone ask about the progress you can then tell them it is still being processed."

"The bureaucratic secondary directive: If an undesirable outcome of a petition is likely, lose the paperwork and ask the petitioner to reapply."

Look, it's not completley broken, it's just not working very well for huge empires because it doesn't scale to galaxy size and/or total habitable planets, and it doesn't work great for 'wide' empires as its balancing is a bit janky still, as Naselus has described.

The whole thing needs some adaptation from a flat rate to a scale, and on this one I'm pretty sure we'll see fixed in a Soon(tm) patch.

Also, I'm never going to get tired of seeing people list things like A) this thing, this other thing, and C) this last thing on this forum.

I was just c&ping from the other thread because he asked for the exact answer I gave there, tbh. I even had to do a couple of edits afterward because I'd left in bits that references other stuff in it

UPDATE: 

So now I am 269 turns in, I now currently own 132 planets, my overall Morale is at 2, I have 6 harmony crystals, and 100% bonus from relic starbases, and I have maxed every single morale tech there is. I just got contentment and built the Virtual reality world, and that didn't make my morale move at all. Also I only own about 1/5 of the total habitable planets on this insane map, so yeah currently on very large maps morale is completely useless. 

As I said on the other thread I'm playing a insane map and I've only got 17 planets and its already janked my morale my 17th planet started with only 17% morale if I colonise the 18th it'll probably instantly rebel on colonisation?