Convert industry to approval

One of the things that can make a running game entirely unplayable is drop in approval. You don't really see it coming. And there's not that much you could do about it anyways (you probably had all the approval buildings built and the approval laws don't seem to make a meaningful difference in this situation). The resulting riots and forced changes between governments pretty much make it impossible to recover.

I guess you could abandon your systems to raise approval again. But that this works is the dumbest thing ever - both thematically and from a player perspective.

When I reach this point I usually try a bit longer to stabilize (with means that make sense) and when that fails I quit the game without saving and don't play for a few weeks...

I have two ideas on this. The first is a bit more difficult to implement (but is an actually solution). The second should be fairly easy to implement (and should have been in the game anyways, but is more of a workaround).

1) What I think would be better is that instead of your entire empire revolting just ONE of your systems revolted (probably one of the ones with the lowest approval) once overall approval sinks. 

That system would then break away from your empire - which puts empire approval back to "normal" (from which point it might naturally decline again).

So if you got into the downwards spiral you would lose and recapture single systems over and over again. Still very annoying, but the game would still be playable.

2) There should be an option to "convert industry to approval" (from tier 2 empire development science (or something fairly early)). This would stop the system from building anything, but keep it stable. 

I feel like this is something that should have been in the game anyways (even if option 1 is also implemented). 

In the first game you had the tax slider to do this, but in this game global tax sliders have been replaced (functionally) with the system "convert industry to ..." build options.