"put down rebellions,"

[Randallw]

I have an interesting question. To my knowledge I have never had a planet rebel against me (probably because I place military police everywhere) but If they did I'd either drop more troops on them or just nuke the population if they cause trouble. If I bomb or "Deathstar" the rebels does my Empire's happines drop because my own people take damage or go up becuase I have defeated another empire?.

[Alneyan]

1) Your homeworld cannot go below Angry. If you are playing with more than one homeworld, the others might riot, or not. I am not too sure here.

2) Happiness is the main factor to determine production. Jubilant gives +20% to production, Indifferent gives nothing (which could be argued to be a loss compared to Jubilant), and Angry gives -20% to production. So going from Angry to Jubilant increases the production of this planet by no less than 50%, and going down from Jubilant to Angry decreases your total production by one third. And obviously, once you are Angry, the massive riotings are waiting for you.

Your happiness is, to the best of my knowledge (the happiness.txt file) not affected by glassing enemy planets or destroying Empires. Even if you have lost one of your planets, glassing it will decrease the happiness of the player currently holding the planet, and not yours. Capturing a planet increases your happiness, however (and lowers the happiness of the other Empire).

[Randallw]

Capturing a planet increases your happiness, however (and lowers the happiness of the other Empire).

Yet another reason to capture a planet instead of glassing it.

[Atrocities]

Glassing is always a good alternative though. It feels so good to bLast the population of your enemies strait to hell where they can be sorted out by whatever paigon god they worship.

[Alneyan]

Glassing also makes it easier to bring the other side down to full rioting (you only need to glass five planets per turn to reach the happiness loss cap, assuming the enemy has UPCs III everywhere; six planets or seven if they have some troops on all their planets), but it will be difficult to actually use this advantage in diplomacy.

"Our direct assaults against enemy colonies are indeed not crimes against alienkind; instead, we were following a rational decision to maximise the impact on the enemy, thus bringing a swifter end to the colony. The fact that one billion aliens died in the process is irrelevant." Somehow, I have the feeling this declaration will not convince your outraged allies.

You need to capture nine planets per turn to reach the happiness loss cap (with only UPCs III everywhere), and the figure will be increasing with enemy police troops. Since I am such a lazy leader, I seldom capture planets myself; building nine troop transports and their reinforcements doesn't have the same subtle implications as using a Battlemoon filled with Planetary Napalm (with the Planetary Core mount). Dashing nice 960,000 damage points per turn on their planet (for a fully filled Battlemoon) is so nice; it is also quite useless, except as a display of your Imperial Ego.

[Atrocities]

[Yef]

I wish we get more diplomatic options in SE5.
Granting independance, real rebellions, as in civil wars, with half your fleet going over the rebels, political simulation, with everything from political parties, dinasties, castes, megacorporations buying politicians and mining in non-controlled space, independent colonists, random pirates, trade lines, letters of privateer, and so on.
I can see myself passing laws against independent colonization.
I wish we could influence, and define an empire, by passinf laws. That would be awesome.
If our world today is politically complicated, imagine an Space Empire with 100 planets.

I can see certain colonist exterminating the local predators, while a animal rights group on the Homeworld trying to get to goverment to stop them, not to mention colonists getting in trouble with local primitives, and local primitives buying a nuke from some gunrunners, and nuking the colony, and full out war, and at Last when the goverment intervine it actually tries to separate the sides, but the colonists see that as treason from the gov., as siding with aliens, and so on, and so on.

Heck, I'm dreaming too much today.

[Randallw]

Come on Atrocities, fess up, where'd you get that image?. Is it perchance a secret SEV still?.

[Fyron]

Alneyan said:
1) Your homeworld cannot go below Angry. If you are playing with more than one homeworld, the others might riot, or not. I am not too sure here.

Only the primary homeworld is immune to rioting. All other "homeworlds" count as colony worlds. There really isn't an easy way to determine which HW from a multi-planet start is the primary HW. It might also be immune to some planet-affecting events, such as planetary core instability. It is not immune to being destroyed by events such as star destroying ones, however.

[Atrocities]

I remember when I started a game, and within two turns my planet core went bad. I posted about this. (1.49)

Then in a PBW game, my homeworld core went bad around turn 60 or so. That ended poorly as well.