What to do about Morale

[Belanos]

How did you lose your city to poor morale?

Well if I knew that, I wouldn't be posting in frustration. I got a message telling me there was unrest and when I looked my Morale meter was maxed out, and it continued to max out until there was no city left. I tried reducing my taxes to 0, which is the only thing I was able to do at the time, but it had no effect. Within a few turns there was no city left.

If the city is a different color than it got invaded by your enemies.

There were no enemies, I hadn't even discovered any of the other factions at that point. Nor had I been attacked by any aliens. Just as the city disappeared, I got a message saying along the lines that the city had auto-razed itself. And I'm pretty sure I hadn't hit the Raze button. But I'll keep that in mind if it happens again.

[jdmillard]

If you lost your city and it wasn't invaded by enemies, then it was because your population decreased slowly each turn until the city disappeared. Here is a list of everything that could cause population decrease (in no particular order).
-Build a colonizer (a unit that creates another city). This brings your population down by 1 point every time you build one. I think we can rule this one out.
-Weapons of mass destruction. We can rule this out because you were early in the game.
-Aliens attacking an ungarrisoned city. This may have happened.
-You don't harvest enough food each turn to feed all the people. In this case, you lose one population point per turn until you balance your food by either placing more laborers as farmers or using formers to construct farms. This may have happened, but it couldn't have been the only thing because eventually you would have had enough food again because there is an automatic +2 food bonus that the capital gets. So even if you disabled all you farmers and lost a lot of people to starvation, your capital still would have leveled out around size 2.
-You accidentally clicked the "raze" button which deliberately slaughters 1 population size per turn. It keeps doing this every turn until the city disappears or you turn it back off.

It's difficult to conclude what happened in your case. I'm thinking that you either ran out of food (down to size 2) and then got attacked by aliens or you were razing your city on accident. You will be much more informed if you read all the notifications at the right-hand side of the screen at the beginning of every turn.


About your morale issue: There are a few situations that will give you an automatic -20 morale (more or less).
-State of starvation (this is possible)
-State of being razed (this is possible)
-State of recently being captured by enemies (this is not possible because you started with this city.
As I mentioned in that other thread, morale will give you percent bonuses or penalties to everything you harvest, mine, produce, research, and tax. So having such a huge negative morale would account for your "nothing's getting done in my capital" situation. You tried to lower your tax to balance things out but the truth is that -20 is just too huge. You need to find out what is causing it and fix it. Like I mentioned before, hover over the morale in that city and read the tooltip. It will tell you where all the negative morale comes from.

I'd just like to reitterate everything I said on that other thread (the second page of this thread).

Also check out this thread about Morale.

[Belanos]

-Weapons of mass destruction. We can rule this out because you were early in the game.

Most definitely not. As I mentioned before, I had not even made contact with any of the other factions yet. And none of us would have been advanced enough to build any WMDs.

-Aliens attacking an ungarrisoned city. This may have happened.

No. I had 2 units of Colonial Troopers there at the time, and there was no alien attack.

-You don't harvest enough food each turn to feed all the people. In this case, you lose one population point per turn until you balance your food by either placing more laborers as farmers or using formers to construct farms. This may have happened, but it couldn't have been the only thing because eventually you would have had enough food again because there is an automatic +2 food bonus that the capital gets. So even if you disabled all you farmers and lost a lot of people to starvation, your capital still would have leveled out around size 2.

That may have been part of the problem though, if lack of food contributes to Morale failure. I had been short of food just before that.

-You accidentally clicked the "raze" button which deliberately slaughters 1 population size per turn. It keeps doing this every turn until the city disappears or you turn it back off.

While I don't think so, it is possible that I may have accidentally hit the Raze button. That would explain the message I received after the city disappeared at any rate. I had been reallocating some citizens because of the previous food shortage so maybe I clicked the button by mistake.

[jdmillard]

Yeah. I wouldn't worry about it too much. Just load to an earlier turn or start over. Go into it with a bit deeper understanding of growth, morale, emigration, and what buildings affect them.

Remember, when increasing the difficulty of the AI, all it's doing is giving them a flat morale bonus in all their cities. Over the course of the game, this will add up to a considerable research and production bonus. So if you'd like to hedge their inherent lead, try to keep morale pretty high. But don't feel like you have to reach that point super early in the game. In the early game you are concerned about staking your claims near special resources, defending against aliens, and establishing infrastructure. Once you hit Mechanization Era, start making morale a bit more of a priority by curbing pollution, avoiding really bad habitation issues, and constructing morale-boosting buildings. It will pay itself back in spades.