I am playing my first game of Endless Space and have taken over several planets by different means: Siege, Troops, trade during cease fire. When I look at the value of Ownership Disapproval as it varies with Ownership % I see some odd ups and downs for no apparent reason. Below are 6 graphs of ownership disapproval VS Ownership % (the disapproval values were actually negative but I just plotted the positive value). What would cause the strange ups and downs?





Also, I just took over the Home world for Horatio, and the disapproval level was initially -2.9, then jumped to +70.3 on the next turn, and dropped to +33.2 on the next turn - what factors cause these ownership disapproval changes?

This is good question, I've been doing some tests by attacking the same system with troops and reloading the game then attacking again.

every time I ended up with same ownership % but different ownership approval.

few times was the same approval however.

switching population from planet to planet had no effect.

for now it looks there is no pattern that could be taken into account



edit:

Ignore the above.

I figured out what changes ownership approval

two things:

1. amount of approval (not percentage as shown in tooltip)

2. ownership percentage (remaining ownership, 100% - current %)



Formula:

( 1 - ownership% ) * approval



You can calculate approval manually when hovering a mouse over approval.

then calculate 1 - current ownership %.



for example if there is 45,5 approval (45,5% will be shown in tooltip)

and you have 60% ownership:



( 1 - 0,6 ) * 45,5 = 18,2 ownership disapproval (note this is positive value!)



now if you lower the tax rate then ownership approval % will became a negative value but overall approval will be much higher...

However in that case the formula is:

ownership approval = -total approval * 0,1



In other words 10% of approval (negative value)



You can test this out by modifying tax rate and applying the above 2 formulas.