Growth = bad?

[Kinjiru]

Okay, I have played four games with two victories and two crushing defeats.

It seems that a very large factor in my defeats has been growth. On planets with bonuses to agriculture, building one of the farming structures leads to veyr rapid growth.

So, more people means that you can produce more ground troops. Should be a big advantage right?

Well, the trouble is that morale drops very substantially as your population grows. So much so that it quickly becomes impossible to maintain any order, even with the tax rate down to less than 10 percent. With taxes that low, build times become staggeringly long and research efforts grind to a halt.

In my last game, I started off really well, jumping out to a lead and maintaining it quite a while. However, as my pop started to climb I had to keep reducing my tax rate further and further, which meant I quickly fell behind.

So, I thought, well, let's just remove those farms. Immediately my morale jumped back up to near 100% and I was able to crank my spending back up as well. Within fifteen turns I was back on top and proceeded to dominate.

The question then, is how can one manage growth effectively?

A) Reducing taxes: if you pop is stable, this can work. If you are growing though, this only buys you two to three turns of grace before morale begins to drop again.

B) Facilities: There are a few facilities that can increase morale, but I have found that they do not obviate the morale penalty from an ever increasing population.

C) Starbases: Perhaps I have not researched the proper techs, but I am not finding the kinds of morale bonus structures I recall from GC1. Do they exist? If so, are they powerful enough to offset a growing population?


Okay, talk amongst yourselves...

[Tennyson]

At this point I'm still exploring whether growth is worth it at all, versus just establishing factories and labs instead of farms.

I haven't tried to muster a lot of ground troops yet.

[takatok]

I haven't played gal civ2 yet -- soon though. However, from Gal Civ 1 perspective, I think your problem is worrying about keeping 100% morale. Having a 60% morale wasn't at all uncommon in the first game, and as they designers pointed out many times was often a good approval rating for any leader

Try keeping your tax rate going and growth and just don't worry about planets till they drop below 60. In the original game tech came along later that usuaally allowed you to raise morale up above that.

Takatok

[Kinjiru]

Actually, I aim for keeping my morale at around 70% overall.

The figure of 100% came up because as my pop grew, my morale was sinking down into the 30% range regardless of how many morale improvements I built or how low the tax rate dropped. However, when I demolished the farms, the population immediately crashed down to the natural levels supported by the planet. Since I still had all the morale boosters present however, this meant that my approval rating jumped upto 100% and stayed within a few points.

[Fosse]

Growth is not bad, but you do have to be careful. I avoided growth for a while, but my game has improved a great deal since I've been paying more attention to carefully growing my planets.

Planet population is the most important factor in revenue and influence calculations, which is why you don't want to ignore growth.

I think it's a good rule of thumb to always build one morale enchancing facility for every non-bonus-tile farm (unless you have a nice approval bonus tile, then you can make it 2:1 for that one).

Not every planet needs to grow beyond 5 billion, but some do. Any planet that is a signifigant source of revenue should definatly get at least one farm, any any planet that's involved in an influence battle should as well.

I build farms on a planet that's:

My Economic capital
My Political capital
An end of trade routes (other civs' routes too, if you can)
On the border of another civ
Near a minor world (so influence can flip it).
Over Class 10 (or Class 8 with substantial tiles for improvement)


The added population on select worlds means that you can maintain a lower tax rate because you are taxing more people, you can concentrate influence, economic, and approval social projects on your 10B + planets, and you fare better in the United Planets.

-Fosse

PS. The advantage of being able to put more soldiers into transports is pretty minsiscule, as simply loading them on planets that already have hit their growth cap means only waiting 10 or 20 turns (depending on transport size) before you're back at the cap. Also, you'll probably always have a few planets under your approval low-point, so you can load from them. There is a bit more advantage if your larger planets are the ones being invaded, as it's a lot easier to grow a big planet than it is to mount a D-Day style invasion with lots of transports in big enough fleets.

[Tennyson]

I'm finding that it requires at least a 2:1 ratio of entertainment to farms to keep approval at respectable levels. And at 4:2 the approval is even worse - I don't think they stack linearly.

Farms on bonus tiles are the bane of my existence.

I build a farm if I've already built the following:

2-3 Factories
1 Embassy
1 Shipyard
2-3 Research Labs
1 Stock Market
1 Entertainment

THEN maybe a farm if there's room for more entertainment after. I may add defensive structures to the pre-farm list; so far I haven't needed them.

[bovine cannibal]

Tennyson- What do you find to be respectable levels?

[Fosse]

I am not aware of any impact the approval rating has on the game other than control of the senate. Thus, for me, a good approval rating is one that keeps my political party in control of the senate.

Does it impact the rate at which taxes are collected? It did in a rather obvious way back in GalCiv 1, in which if your approval dropped below a certain threshold your taxpayers would vanish in huge amounts, but I don't see that in the sequel.

I try not to dip below 60% for more than a couple of months, but some planets can fall way below that sometimes.

[Tennyson]

Originally posted by bovine cannibal
Tennyson- What do you find to be respectable levels?

So far I like overall around 70 or so in peacetime so I can engage in wars and boost spending if I have to. Plus that's when the UI shows a green approval rating and I'm new to the game.

Given that some planets will be 100%, that means I'd like to keep the lowest planets above 40%. That also gives me breathing room against sad faces. Ideally I'd like all my planets to be at least 50%.

This all depends on the overall tax rate, of course. That fluctuates so much based on what's going on in game (resource harevesting, tourism, etc) that I don't have an ideal target for that yet.

[tetley]

I like growth. I simply haven't been having serious morale problems. Sure, there's the occasional 30-billion planet with 39% morale, but I've got other planets with approval bonus squares to make up for it.

[Gufnork]

The main point of approval is to keep the overall approval above 50% (55% to be sure, I've lost elections at 52%). The secondary point is to keep it above 40% on all colonies. I like to build atleast one farm on each planet, with an entertainment center to match. This way my colonies are hard to conquer for the dumb AI and I've found that approval ratings dip really quickly at high populations, thus making a spread out population more desirable. The exception is the economic capital, that I want to have a slightly higher population (a planet with many entertainment bonuses is preferrable).

This is extra important for me, since I never protect my colonies, the only ships I build in peacetime are slow ships with tons of weaponry that I place above a spin control center to scare the other civilizations into obedience. In general, I have plenty of time to build up a fleet before the AI figures out how to invade even one of my planets. It is also helpful to spread your influence.

[MojoJojoUK]

Just a quick note - it's not worrth building farms on PQ4 planets. Think the lowest value planet worth building a farm for is PQ7, but may be remembering wrong. Low PQ worlds have a population cap that is lower than the default amount of food produced. Thing the pop cap on a PQ4 like mars is around 2.5 billion, and enough food is produced for 5 billion people by the colony.

[Peets]

I never build a farm under PQ 10

[bovine cannibal]

Things will be changing in the next patch. They haven't settled down yet in the beta either.

Anyways, I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I'm a slumlord. I either aim for 50%, (just enough to keep growing) or 100% (just enough to keep growing really fast).

Your normal approval rating doesn't matter in elections. Since morale changes are instantaneous, unline hegemonia or spartan, just drop your taxes before an election. Cynical, but it works, if you can remember when the elections are coming around.

[tetley]

In the beta I'd say growth is definitely not bad. The bigger problem is the overpowered population growth racial ability.