So How Exactly Does Approval Work?

Its because the game calculates it as (Flat-Values - LEP)* Percentage-Values

 

if i understood it correctly LEP will be gone with 1.5, but for now the best way is to simply build economy starbases (you can get up to 12 around 1 planet, each of them giving +5 Flat-Moral) or tke the patriotic-trait

 

you can also mod it out:

copie GalCiv3GlobalDefs.xml to a new mod folder and search for GlobalInterColonyMods, then change Value from -0.2 to 0

How do you get that many starbases around one planet?  Doesn't there have to be a 5-tile zone between them?  I can never fit more than 4 or 5 around a planet.

In the engineering-tree(or similar/the orange one^^) under the life support techs there are the techs called "Support Field Mastery" and "Exploration Extension",

they give you acces to starbase modules which increase their range by 2 each.

 

u can actually get even more military-starbases around one planet, since they get a +4 to range from the start giving them a total range of up to 13 (thats really big )

Maybe your game is glitched?

 

I am pretty sure it is as simple as (Morale * Bonuses) / Population = Approval%, not to exceed 100%. The easiest way to increase your Morale is to build Approval improvements, such as a Stadium. Your population will continue to grow until it hits the cap determined by your Farming improvements. If your current population exceeds your current Morale, you will naturally lose approval.

 

I have never seen a negative Morale value, however. Try building some Approval improvements and see if this value changes.

Interesting responses. mortili, thanks for the equation. Haven't checked the math yet, but that looks right. Very helpful. I don't think my game is glitched. I just don't get the approval arithmetic. As you can see, I've already built lots of approval improvements and I'm still stuck (on that planet) with negative approval. Maybe some races are really pissed to get conquered and there's an unseen negative modifier? But I conquered the Drengi capital of Drengi and it's at 100% approval. 12 or 13 starbases around one planet? I've never managed more than 4. Still, in my current game I have hundreds of those obnoxious structures. (Obnoxious because so much spamming is involved to build them all up. I'd like to see a set-up option that permits a player to limit them to one per planet.) Thanks for the tip on modding out the large empire penalty! I always used to do that in Civilization IV and it's time to do it here!

The key is in how you arrange the starbases. At the default effect radius of 5, you can have up to 5 starbases influencing a single planet if you build all five at maximum distance from the planet. This will prevent you from increasing the number of starbases influencing the planet when you gain access to the area of effect radius increasing modules later in the game, however; there are two such modules, and they each increase the radius of the zone of effect by 2 (so 7 with the first module and 9 with the second). To get the maximum theoretically-possible constellation of 12 starbases at default maximum zone of effect radius (9 tiles), you have to put three starbases three tiles from the planet you want to cover, and then you have a choice between fitting a further three starbases in a ring six tiles out and the remaining six in a ring 9 tiles out, or fitting all 9 remaining starbases into the ring 9 tiles out from the planet you want covered. There's a thread or two around somewhere with images depicting starbase locations for constellations of 12 covering a single point, if you're really curious, but I don't really feel that it's worth the bother.

Military stations are special and get an extra 4 tiles on the radius of the area of effect and so can increase the total number of starbases influencing a single planet beyond 12.

The product of the colonization event decision.

Fifth trait in the Affinity branch of the Benevolent tree (the branch that starts with Elevated).

Actual approval rating will only increase with increasing population as long as the total morale bonus of the planet is negative. However, a negative overall morale bonus can never produce a positive approval rating however large the population grows, and any actual approval rating less than 0 is in effect an approval rating of 0. It therefore does not matter* that increasing the population will increase the actual approval rating of a planet with a negative morale bonus; the effective approval rating of the planet cannot be changed in this way. Also note that if the overall morale bonus is positive, increasing population will reduce approval as expected.

*Sort of. The approval penalty to production is actually kind of weak, and it's entirely possible for it to be better, at least for maximizing overall output, to just accept the approval penalty and build more farms or factories/labs/markets instead of building entertainment centers, especially if you've built multiple economic starbases around the planet or have built one or more of the handful of improvements that provide a bonus multiplier to the planet's production, as these things provide a bonus that stacks additively with the production penalty from low approval.

 

Overall, the planet looks like it should have

(5 + 4 + 3 + 1 + 10 - 24.8) * (1 + 1.6 + 0.5 + 0.1 - 0.2) = -1.8 * 3 = -5.4

morale, which is exactly what you say the game tells you the planet has. Approval is the ratio of morale to population ([morale] / [population]), bounded between 0 and 1 (expressed within the game as percentages, so 0% and 100%).

joeball123, awesome response, thanks. I have just one question. In your final equation, where does the "* 3" term at the end come from?

-1.8 is the sum from the first set of parenthesis, 3 is the sum from the second set, in the morale equation.