I like the idea of having approval based on all the settings on the wheel, as described by joeball123. E.g. if your Research setting was too low, you could get disapproval because of Illiteracy or some such, or because of unemployment if production was too low.

Properly balanced, I feel that would make the game more varied.

1 MP costs 15 BC to buy, so "producing" only 1 BC instead of 1 MP means taxes are indeed very low.

The problem with this reasoning is that the way that the wealth slider behaves is exactly what you would expect of a spending slider or a tax slider. Increasing the wealth setting instantly increases governmental net income from that particular world, which indicates either spending cuts or tax increases. If it's supposed to represent the government cutting taxes or spending more money on economic stimulus, then the expected result would be an immediate decline in governmental revenue, potentially followed by an increase in revenue later on due to economic growth. Increasing the wealth setting could arguably represent tax cuts and spending cuts, though the net effect is still that the government is taking more money out of the local economy than it's putting into it, which I still don't see as something that should necessarily make the populace more happy - after all, given that the military upkeep is not reflected in planetary income, planetary revenue increases from tax cuts and spending cuts indicates that the government has cut local services, such as health, education, sanitation, or law enforcement, or spending on local infrastructure, such as highways or spaceports.

Beyond that, the 15 billion credits per manufacturing point is an incredible increase in the cost of production when compared to Galactic Civilizations II, where each point of manufacturing cost 1 billion credits out of a factory. It's not an incredible increase in the cost of contracting the work out, however. Given this information and knowing that a world with equal wealth and manufacturing multipliers will trade 1 manufacturing point per turn for 1 billion credits per turn, do you think I'm going to assume your figure of 15 billion credits per manufacturing point or something closer to the GCII figure of 1 billion credits per manufacturing point?

Of course, the new system also messes this conversion up a bit because there exist worlds where the multipliers differ, in which case I could be trading several manufacturing points per turn for 1 billion credits per turn, or several billion credits per turn for 1 manufacturing point per turn. Even so, I still see no reason to assume that the cost of a single manufacturing point is all the way up at 15 billion credits, nor do I see why the wealth setting, which happens to be the setting you turn up if you want to squeeze more money out of a planet, should at all translate to a lower tax rate.

There is one tech which reduces population pressure but they have it disabled in version 0.40, called something like "Supportive Population", although I think they only set it to give a 10% reduction if I remember when it was active in Beta1's first download.

What I can't understand is why building monetary improvements gives negative modifiers to approval ?

This is the cost of rushing production : 15 BC for 1 MP.

And judging from GCII, the cost of rushing production has little bearing on the actual cost of producing that manufacturing point in a real factory. Beyond that, it's an utterly incredible difference in expenses - if I have a world that can produce 30 manufacturing points or 8 billion credits per turn, your model assumes that I've started spending 450 billion credits per turn, covered by an increase in the tax rate to cover that amount. There is no rational way to explain that kind of tax hike; that's 55.25 times more tax revenue than the 8 billion credits per turn that you'd earn otherwise, meaning that the tax rate on the 'extract money from this planet' setting would need to be no more than 1.81%, assuming the tax rate is capped to no more than 100%. Normal tax rates for modern nations are on the order of 20% to 50%, and I see no reason to believe that the normal tax rate of GCIII is significantly different, not when it was entirely normal for the tax rate in GCII to be somewhere in the 30% to 50% range (at least for me; perhaps you played differently, but I have a hard time imagining that you normally ran a lower tax rate than 30% or so).

As such, I do not regard the cost of rushing production to be a reasonable standard by which to judge the cost of producing manufacturing points. GCII set the cost of a manufacturing point to 1 billion credits per manufacturing point, if produced by a factory rather than rushed. This is a significantly more reasonable estimate of the cost of one manufacturing point and does not assume absolutely ludicrous variability in tax rates based on where the slider happens to be, or the incredibly strange assumption that when I'm trying to make money off a planet I actually start giving them tax breaks. It is further supported by the fact that, on a world with even multipliers to wealth and manufacturing, increasing the manufacturing by 1 point without touching the research costs me 1 billion credits per turn.

I judge a game mechanic motly by its gameplay value, and I still feel specialized planets were overpowered in alpha.

Are you somehow under the impression that I want to make specialized worlds better? Because that's not what I asked for earlier. What I want is for the system to not favor one form of specialization over the others. I want all three forms of specialization to be equally discouraged by the morale system, rather than having wealth specialization unduly favored as it is currently.

Well, you make a lot of asumptions about GC3 economy. I could explain why I don't make the same asumptions, but truth is I don't make any asumption at all.

Yes, I acknowledge that I make a lot of assumptions about the GC3 economy; you too make assumptions about the GCIII economy. Even if you do not acknowledge that assuming that the rush price of a manufacturing point is its normal production cost really is an assumption, you've still assumed that the other potential conversion rates readily available within the game are not valid. There's a case to be made that the cost of a manufacturing point varies depending on the infrastructure of the planet it's on, there's a case to be made the cost of a manufacturing point is a flat 1 billion credits per point, and there's a case to be made that the rush value of a manufacturing point is its actual production cost. One of these assumptions results in a ludicrous variance in the tax rate and a ludicrously low tax rate for the "I want all the money I can get from this world" setting, and the others do not. Of the offered assumptions, I'll take either of the first two before I take the third, as it is simply ridiculous to assume a system where changing the spending ratio alters the tax rate by a factor of 50 on even a moderately specialized world, and the first two assumptions are more in line with how the system worked in GCII anyways.