Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares/Strength through Joy

No, this is not about Hitler's state-controlled leisure organization - but it's based on the same principle: happy people are more productive.

"Morale" is MOO II's shorthand for all the factors that affect how well people work.

To what empires does all this apply
Unification governments have no morale - nothing makes their populations more efficient or less efficient than they are at the start (their populations have in effect higher than average morale to start with). But players who use Unification governments should still understand this page. For example if a Unification empire captures a colony from a non-Unification empire, it should scrap all morale-raisng buildings, starting with the most advanced (each colony can only scrap 1 building per turn), in order to:
 * save maintenance and get some cash back (0.5 BC per PP that the building costs to make).
 * reduce the value of the colony if another empire captures it or if the colony rebels and returns to its original empire.

Morale and the techologies that improve it are very important to non-Unification empires and especially to Dictatorship or Feudal empires, because their basic morale is 20% below that of a Democratic empire. Dictatorships' or Feudalisms' homeworlds have "average" morale only because they get a free Marine Barracks at the start of the game. Newly-founded colonies of Dictatorship or Feudal empires struggle at -20% morale until they build a Marine Barracks (or an Armor Barracks, but that's higher-tech and more expensive).

Morale is both the weakness and the strength of Creative empires, because:
 * Creative is a very expensive race design option and therefore the best government many Creative empires can have is Dictatorship.
 * Most non-Creative empires forgo most morale technologies because they usually prefer something else at that level, such as improved research buildings. But a Creative empire gets all the techs at each level and, once it has good morale technologies, rivals a Unification empire in farming and industrial productivity and rivals a Democratic empire in research productivity and cash income per citizen.