IDIOT'S GUIDE TO FED2

PLANETARY ECONOMIES

PLANETARY DISAFFECTION

The Causes of Disaffection

The population of your planet can be a fractious bunch and if you don't keep them happy, disaffection will start to build up. Founders don't have to worry about the effects of disaffection but once you promote to Engineer, it becomes a big concern. If you don't placate your grumbling citizens, they will riot. You need to keep an eye on the approval/disaffection level which appears on your planet display. A satisfactory approval rating equates to zero, which is what you start out with; if it gets higher then it shows as a percentage approval rating. If your approval rating drops below zero, it turns into disaffection, which has all kinds of nasty consequences.

There are two main causes of disaffection: infrastructure builds, and unemployment.

Infrastructure builds can have an effect on disaffection in a number of ways. Some builds cause disaffection; some reduce it. The absence of some necessary builds can also increase your disaffection levels. Check the information about builds in the next section of the Idiot's Guide carefully to see which ones are necessary, and which have unpleasant side-effects which need to be offset. Since resource planets need some builds which cannot be done until you promote to Engineer, you should make sure you have enough groats to do the builds right after the promotion, to stave off disaffection - the same applies to promotions to the higher ranks, too.

Unemployment is more straightforward - workthings without jobs get unhappy and if enough of them get together to moan, they can have a serious effect. So long as your unemployment rate remains below half the available workthings, the grumbling will remain just that.

Once the unemployment rate reaches 50%, then 5% will be added to the planet's disaffection. At 60% unemployment, the extra dissatisfaction will be 10%. Then it'll jump to 15% should unemployment go up to 70%, and so on, up to a 30% increase should there be no work at all on your planet.

This means it is going to be all the more important for resource planets to attract factories to your planet, so as to provide jobs for the boys (and the girls and the things).

You can see how the disaffection or approval rating for your planet was calculated at the last reset with the 'DI DISAFFECTION' command. This doesn't show any changes due to things that happened since the game fired up.


What Happens if there's a Riot

Careful management should keep disaffection at bay, but if it does rise then you could be in for some trouble. The disaffection figure is a percentage, and the higher it gets, the higher the chance that something horrible will happen. Every day at reset, the game will generate a random number between 1 and 100, and if the resulting number is lower than or equal to your disaffection figure, there will be a riot. For example, if your disaffection is at 20%, then there's a 20% (1 in 5) chance there will be a riot.

If there is a riot, a number of things could happen. First, one of your stockpiles will be wiped out at random.

Then things get more serious, and one of the following will happen:

Rioting doesn't make the citizens feel any better, it just encourages them; unless you do something to lower the disaffection, the riots will continue. So it pays to keep disaffection at bay and deal with discontent before it gets out of hand.


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