When I conquer an enemy planet, it gets very high unhappiness. You can hover over the approval rating in the empire screen or the planet screen to get a breakdown. I have seen values as high as -115 unhappiness from "ownership". I monitored a few systems over a few turns, and it appears to drop at around 4% per turn.



Does anybody know how the initial unhappiness value is computed?



Does anybody know if anything can affect the rate at which it drops? Techs, races, buildings, hero, anything? Most of these show up as a separate +happiness rating (such as the hero ability) but they do not seem to affect the drop rate.



I am curious to know if adding population (say, from a transport) affects this. Suppose I conquer 10 population points of enemy, and I have transports around, and I add 5 more population points (say, onto another planet in the system). Does this affect unhappiness at all? Percentagewise, the unhappy, recently conquered aliens are a smaller contribution to the equation.

This is one thing I have no idea about, I assume that its lowered more quickly by building things, but then again when I check it doesn't seem to get lower any quicker, I'm just counteracting it by adding improvements.

I think it may be set in stone, that that's how fast you can drop it, I mean, the existing residents aren't going to warm to you too quickly are they?

Well, I am thinking about improving diversity among the races by varying (a) how large the initial drop is, and (b) how fast it comes back. For example, different types of bombardment might make the enemy more or less unhappy (nuke == bad); and lots of occupation soldiers or mind control might make the unhappiness drop faster. Hopefully somebody knows the details of what happens today, or can try an experiment.

and I have transports around, and I add 5 more population points (say, onto another planet in the system). Does this affect unhappiness at all?

Really doubt that helps currently.



In theory happiness buildings, and more so the "recovery from invasion" building type should help this, though there have been reports at least that the Local Apocalypse one doesn't actually change the value in a positive way as it claims yet.

The happiness buildings add happiness, for sure. But that isn't related to the depth/speed of "unhappiness due to ownership". AFAIK, and I am not positive, it also isn't related to "recovery from invasion". These buildings "should" restore your defensive hitpoints between turns of an invasion, or if an invasion is repelled without conquering the planet. Based on the tech names, there is no reason to think these should help the new owner, after a conquest. See this thread for other types of orbital bombardment, and the second thread for ways we might use varying the depth/speed of unhappiness due to ownership:

/#/endless-space/forum/29-archives/thread/13541-suggestion-orbital-bombardment-choices

/#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11946-suggestion-improving-replayability-with-better-racial-techs

Based on the tech names, there is no reason to think these should help the new owner, after a conquest.

As the new owner that's exactly what I thought "recovery from invasion" types would help me do since thats what I wanted the planet to do, recover from 'my' invasion.

Well, I'm not sure "localized apocalypse" will make the people any happier. Could you try an experiment? As you take over a planet, save the game. Then hit "next turn" a few times to see how the unhappiness from ownership changes. Then reload, build the whatever buildings (buyout if possible) and see if it's any different. I had asked this a few weeks ago, but at that time, nobody knew.

So I did some testing as Davea suggested.



*The defensive buildings don't help or hurt happiness (post invasion or likely pre for that matter) at all.



However, they do HURT invasion recovery times, they seem to have the exact opposite effect they are supposed to have on recovery. I say supposed too because they do indeed have an effect it's just that it's negative like that other guy mentioned in a thread I'm too lazy to go find atm. (bug??) There is one case that I'm not sure of though were I suppose this effect could be viewed as a feature, that is if they work as expected on one's own system when unsuccessfully attacked, vs what was tested here, a claimed system from the enemy, the later could possibly be an intended malus where as the first (again - untested for this post) may.. work as expected.





*Now as for happiness buildings they do HELP recover post-invasion happiness faster then not having them.



The data sets (limited I admit) are in the attached spreadsheet, as well as the baseline gamefile used but here is a quick summary:

Kratz system - post take over it had no defensive buildings full pop and had suppermarkets\Colonial rights\ and unlimited infohighways

Me: fervent galaxywide 50% taxes; turns 114-122 tested, build all things during turn 114 via purchase



Baseline system without touching it = +1.9 happiness per turn; + 7.8 ownership per turn

Baseline + Impervious Bunkers + Community Shields + Local Apocalypse + Perm Vacations + Corporate freedom = +5.7 happiness per turn; + 2.2 ownership per turn

Baseline + Impervious Bunkers + Community Shields + Perm Vacations + Corporate freedom = +5.7 happiness per turn ; +3.7 ownership per turn

Baseline + Impervious Bunkers + Community Shields = +1.9 happiness per turn; +3.7% ownership per turn



So if you want quicker ownership recovery times and quicker happiness recovery, build happy buildings, remove or do not build defenses (for now, until you recover or behavior is changed in a later build).



*Note if you're loading the gamefile start a fresh copy of the the game exe. (it's about a fleet or two short of maxing out the heap and takes a few minutes to load)
Test_results_xls.zip
TestRecovery-Takeover_a.zip

Just a quick thought on this one:

Perhaps ownership has a separate "value" and "percentage". The bar represents the latter, as your numbers do, while hardier colonys do gain the former.

So the absolute ownership value regain would indeed be fastened or stay constant with defensive buildings, while the relative percentage regain could be lowered, due to the higher absolute value.



Any thoughts on this theory?

Great work! The other thread you are thinking of is here, in alpha tech support:

http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/showthread.php?3287-0.30.5-System-Invasion-Recovery-value-not-changing

If you are pretty sure of one word in the subject line, the "advanced search" lets you search all forums, just thread titles, and it only runs for a second or two.

The effect you describe cannot be intentional. So I guess my answer is, currently nothing affects the "unhappiness from ownership" term. Furthermore, there is a bug. And also, you have suggested another variable I may want to use in my racial diversity thinking, which is the rate at which the ownership itself increases. I suppose the population could be happy (due to drugs/mind control) but not owned; or it could be angry, but owned (due to occupation troops). I have to think about that some more.

Perhaps ownership has a separate "value" and "percentage"....

Yes it seems separate, when I spoke of ownership in that post I meant the "recovery from invasion number" not the direct ownership % value which I didn't really track during the test but from eyeballing it during the process seemed to move at +4% no matter what the situation was (don't quote me on that just yet), the 'recovery from invasion" number though appeared to have no effect relating to that actual ownership percentage in the mouse over of the system. That in itself I thought weird but not related to happiness recovery as far as I could tell so I didn't pay attention to it at the time. But yes, as the systems' "defensive power" increases there is a decrease in the rate of invasion recovery so your overall theory though may apply to that figure, sort of what I meant with the mention of a malus in that post. I need to do more tests with that, with buildings that do not claim to have invasion recovery attributes vs ones that do to see if things truly have the opposite effect or it just looked that way in these select cases tested, and also to see if I can get that 4% number to move at all, I was more focused in the above exercise on what effect or lack there of any of these items had on happiness-recovery, less so on system-recovery. Confused yet?

currently nothing affects the "unhappiness from ownership" term.

No no, building happiness buildings did help moderately (note the +1.9 vs +5.7). It's just that defensive buildings with "invasion recovery" claims did not help happiness-recovery, seemed to hurt system-recovery time if anything but more testing is need on the later. (see above post)

I don't understand your statistics then. In the overall happiness measurement, there are several terms. One term is "happiness from ownership" which is zero (not printed) for your own systems. When you conquer a system you get a term for this with a high negative value, like -100. Each turn this unhappiness term decreases slightly. Is this the term where your 1.9 and 5.7 apply? If so, this is strange; you get a straight +30 happiness for the building (depending on which building), plus then you get an additional benefit in the rate at which ownership unhappiness decreases? So the *rate* of ownership unhappiness is affected by the *absolute* plus happiness buildings?

"happiness from ownership" meaning unhappiness from ownership decreases by those amounts.

I think I made a mistake assuming those looking at it would understand what I meant from the context.

So the *rate* of ownership unhappiness is affected by the *absolute* plus happiness buildings?

Exactly. Building more happiness buildings increased the rate of reduction in "ownership unhappiness". Hope that's clear.

OK, thanks. So the only knob you can use today to make a system happy faster, is to build more happiness buildings. This gives you a double positive; you get the base happiness, plus it increases your rate of reducing ownership unhappiness.