Exactly. It added a lot of intrigue to the game that could have been further expanded.

Take the poor old Birth of the Federation (BOTF) game. There, some (peaceful) races would get significant morale penalties for declaring war or bombing an enemy planet. Other, warmongering races for concluding peace. And I think Cards got really huge morale blow every time they lost major battle or ship, which forced you to plan your conquest carefully, because otherwise you would face internal revolt.

I was looking forward to all of this in GCIII...hopefully, not all is lost and Stardock has some kind of suprise in their sleeves.

Less freak out guys, this is Stardock we're dealing with here. Trust that if they've taken away something, they've given something far better in it's place! I would be very surprised if they take away individual planetary approval ratings without putting something better in, the result being a better, less exploitable (because we did all exploit it) gaming experience - remembering that it is a multiplayer title now!

Fate,

You kind of described why I think it's something of a wonky system.  Moral is a control on your population in addition to farms in addition to planet number in addition to colonization techs. You have several systems all basically trying to do the same thing of limiting how many people you can have. It's a tad worse when you consider that population count only mattered in taxes and in invasions. Also moral had that gangly bit where you could easy over build farms and by the time you knew you did, you would have no space to counter act the moral plummet. Lots of stuff you could complain about with moral in GC2.

I do like the idea of moral being like the defense to influence though. Only problem with that is that influence also works as a defense to influence. I think that may be what is happening. If moral is gone, I see it having being rolled up into influence. There is a lot of crossover between the two in theme, tech and buildings.

I don't think the systems are there to "Try to limit how many people you have".  Its like in the real world. Demographics are affected by a multitude of parameters. You say it in a way that tries to make it sound like it is a bad concept but I do not think so.

It also matters for trade routes and influence.

You kind of described why I think it's something of a Fun system. :p

If you build stuff randomly without knowing what you are doing you will naturally end up with a badly functioning empire. Part of my fun in GalCiv2 is have my empire work optimally. For this you need just the right amount of everything. Over do something and it will end up unbalanced. 

Once again I do not see why this is a "problem". You seem to think that a parameter being affected by several parameters is a design flaw.

In conclusion, I am not whining about what I see in the GalCiv3 screenshots. I have fate that StarDock can make a great game even if it is different than the predecessor. I am simply responding to those who say " Good riddance" to the planetary approval system because I am one of those who liked it.

YES. Most of the time I have to mod the tech trees to give me morale bonuses so that I can finish a game! It will be nice to actually be able to have that 32b population planet and not have it have a 15% approval rate. That doesn't even make sense to me. If I can provide enough food these people should be happy. As futuristic as this game is I'm sure living space is not a problem. WHY ARE THESE PEOPLE UNHAPPY? Adjacency bonuses?? What are those?

I also think I read that we won't have a slider anymore but the ability to better distribute our economy. I would love that. I find myself losing money quite often and would like to be able to ax things from my budget but just have to either tax more or spend less overall. I find myself with a surplus of money sometimes and it would be nice to ONLY funnel that money into research, so that I get researches faster.

It does get somewhat cumbersome when getting around. It would be great if we could say delete several ships at once. I know you can do that when you delete or make a ship design obsolete, but what if I want to wait a little bit to decommission ships? It would be nice to be able to decommission a group of ships at any chosen time(unless there is a way that I haven't figured out in goodness knows how many years). It also would be awesome if the espionage screen gave us a better way to see what they've researched and what they're doing. Not just all text, but a graphic possibly. And not ALL the researches, possibly just the most recent ones?  

I've been playing (just yesterday actually) on my 1080p monitor and though some of the text is blurred sometimes, all the ship and planet textures (and tooltip textures) look great!

You like the gangly bit.... That is not surprising at all actually. The way entertainment buildings and farms relate to each other is a classic example of hard to learn easy to master. Because well it can be hard to figure out why your empire seems basically to brake mid way through the game, but after you figure it out that is basically it. It's a problem you solve that can really only be solved one or two ways. You end up with just a odd calculation rather then a fun choice.

Sounds like you are playing in lower resolution than 1080p, which is what I do too. And honestly its looks fine despite the upscaling. If I set the resolution to 1080p though everything becomes too small and it strains me eyes!

Frogboy has said that planetary output (research, production and money) are going to be directly related to population. Structures are going to be giving percent bonuses on top of that base rather than giving fixed output per building. I can foresee some really cheezy 30+ billion planets cranking out ships absurdly fast if they remove the primary control factor on an individual planet's population.

The colony control topic is in the founder's forum, so you may not be able to see the topic. But it was the opening post, and it has been confirmed by the screenshots released in the founder's vault recently.

That may not necessarily be the case. If the base output of the population is relatively small, then you need the percentage bonuses from the improvements in order to increase it. Therefore, you won't have the space to build lots of farms.
Take a look at the PlanetScreen-alpha01.png from the vault, for example. Earth has a population of 24.5 (of 30), two Advanced Factories, and one (two?) Research Centers (one is definitely still being build), yet the values for Manufacturing, Research, and Wealth, are only 13, 8, and 3 respectively. I don't know what settings for the spending are used, but those values seem pretty low to me, considering the population.

Besides this, there are other ways to limit the population too. For example, the PQ and the type of planet you colonise.

Still, I'm really curious about what the devs have in mind.

In GC2 terms, it only took 1 advanced farm on a +300% tile bonus to get to 32 billion population. If you were willing to do it, the Thalans could get 40 billion by dropping the matrix on one of those tiles - and if you did it on a class 25+ planet, it would leave a lot of room for factories and such. Clearly population isn't going to work quite the same this time around since Earth is at 30 with no farms at all, but ramping up to really large populations can be done very easily on certain planets.

Take a look at the level of bonus provided by those labs. With such a small base, those increases will be trivial. There's something else going on here mechanically, and we don't know enough to speculate properly yet.

Since this is getting pretty heavily into founder's information, we should probably move this discussion there. Or just wait a couple weeks, but what's the fun in that?

Morale being part of the influence? That is interesting idea. But removing it completely and pretending that in the future everybody is happy, content and there is no dissent would be not worthy Stardock grand strategy

BTW I did like some randomness in the approval in Galciv II. I think it well corresponded with the reality of social system, which can be never aůways predictable.

Is it random? I don't think it is. It works on a very odd formula that most people won't understand unless they look it up, but it's not random.

 As I see it getting rid of the GalCiv2 morale system is an improvement because the AI had a huge problem dealing properly with it. 

Gifting advanced pop/farm techs to the AI without them being at the proper morale and production tech levels and watching their planets' improvement building/economic/research  meltdown was to me a tacky strategy a player could use that the AI couldn't. This problem is discussed in depth in the GalCiv2 Modder forums. 

It was one of my least favorite parts of the game - only surpassed by the horrid corruption model in Civ3.  If anyone can improve the gameplay and  also AI sophistication, by making a better mousetrap than the GC2 moral system to control excess population etc.,   I'd trust Brad to do it. 

Reserving judgment until next month. 

Also, I like the new  adjacency bonus' Brad mentions if I interpret what I see  in the planetscreen-alpha01 png in the Vault correctly.  Along with improvements really being bonus multipliers instead of adding research/manufacturing/moral/trade points in and of themselves is a cool idea - can't wait to see how it plays out in the Alpha.

On Edit: Holy timewarp, Batman!     I just noticed my join date in my profile caption and it has not seemed like 8 years since I discovered GalCiv!  Heck, I am still playing  one of my gigantic GC2 game I started in 2011 off and on ...  I gotta get moving if I wanna clear the decks for GC3 next month!

I am actually at 1080p and the words are somewhat small, but I sit fairly close to my monitor. I do notice at places like the start screen that there are texture glitches, but that isn't a problem as it's not in-game. I am surprised that the different aspect ratio doesn't crash the game. Some of my older games have to be played at a lower aspect ratio (not 16:9)!

I could handle influence with morale, but can some one tell me how this would affect galactic council, or how does star base modules make my people more happy.

It makes perfect sense that over 20 billion people on the planet earth would be unhappy. I'm not saying they would make a system better. I actually never had a morale problem unless I raised my taxes to high, but this would have to be higher than 70%.

I really would like to see my population affect research, and production.

I would like if the morale from Galactic Civilizations 2 returned, with less/none of the 'diminishing returns' of its execution. You see, when I built a morale station for +15% morale, it only ever gave me a few percent (~+7) because of all the maluses associated with population levels. Once I hit 15 billion people on a planet, almost every building that increased morale significantly was useless, even the Torian Hot Springs (+50 morale). I would like if that mechanic was scrapped in favour of a flat increase like they did with the Secret Police Center.

At 15b the base approval is 56%, meaning a Hot Springs would provide a bonus of 28%. That's hardly useless, in my opinion.

Actually, I couldn't play without the planet/ship tag. When I am in colony rush stage, occasionally I will miss right clicking on a "colony ship done' icon, and the ship won't launch. Every 20 turns or so I will page through my colony ships and see if one or more are still in orbit. But that's the minor use I have.

My main use is still during colony rush. Launch a colony ship, click planet/ship tag, click planets, click on the 'unowned' tag, scroll to the top of the list then click on the planet itself, and your colony ship is now speeding off to the highest rated planet that you know of.

Oh yes, Froggie! That's the way to go to improve on GalCiv3!

To each his playstyle i guess.

I just use the main map for all my colonizing. When you zoom out its easy to see everything at a glance. Such as if you have ships in orbit and what the planet qualities are. Besides its really hard to forget a brand new colony ship in orbit in early game imho. Especially with GNN making it big news. You'd have to be really sleepy or something.

TotA has an auto-launch feature. You can set it so colony ships are automatically launched from orbit once they're finished.

That's roughly 50% efficiency lost. And you say you like to micro? For shame! :3

But really, cost/effectiveness drops like a stone after 15 billion no matter what you do. Under 15, I'm golden, but over that, you have to build too many structures to maintain an acceptable morale rating. Considering I keep my taxes at 70% with 100% approval, my allowance for error is very small.

It's a loss of exactly 44%. Which is acceptable.

I also said, that the Yor are my favourites. Their economy is population-based, because they don't have spammable economy structures. Tech-trading is out of the question for me too (I've disabled trading and stealing of those techs in my mod).

The limit is 20 billion. Your morale-bonuses are reduced by 66% at that point. Once you go over that, the effectiveness of your morale-improvements drops rapidly until it hits the minimum of 10% at 25b.

Sounds like you're doing something wrong, if that is the case.

A tax rate of 70% reduces your approval by 107%, but doesn't provide any more money than a tax rate of 69%, which reduces your approval by only 96%.

If they do keep moral, I have doubts they will leave the math the same. The math was just bogglingly awkward.

Considering it was designed to do exactly what you're complaining about, I'd say the problem is at your end.

Early iterations were absurdly broken without diminishing returns, and the game was better with a soft cap on population. DR might not be the absolute best way of capping population, but it needed to be capped somehow.

Besides, you do realize tax income is based on the square root of population instead of being linear, right? 15b only gives you 37% more income than 8b, and 22b only gives 21% more than 15b. I usually top out at 15, with a few exceptional planets hitting 22. Mainly planets that have a +100% food bonus (so I don't have to waste 2 tiles on farms) and at least 1-2 morale bonus tiles. Any planets without specific bonuses simply isn't worth giving up a stock market or two.