Politics, how do I keep them all in line?

[fokke85]

The politics system in Attila is a huge improvement in my opinion. In R2 i played about a dozen campaigns and not once did I even bother to give it any thought. Never did it make any impact in my campaigns whatsoever so that it is the case in this game is a big deal for me. I actually know the names of my Generals now and care about their wellbeing. I've had some pretty interesting things happen like being pretty bummed that one of my biggest and most baddass generals suddenly ran of with some Armenian girl who was supposed to be my satrapy. The system is not without it's flaws though and I'm having a bit of trouble with certain aspects of it. Maybe you guys have the awnsers?

Other Nobles, usually I have about 3-5 Family members (whom some of them are married) while there are a dozen and a half of other nobles. They are all inherently hostile towards me which means I manually have to keep them all happy. I do that by either gathering support through my own people (which always costs influence and sometimes control but is not always a guaranteed succes but more on that later) Or I could appoint them as governors and give them offices. This way you secure their loyalty for a while but in the process make them rack up so much influence they get out of control really fast and in the end the loyalty drops again.

Your faction leader is key here. He should have the most influence for a number of reasons. First of all if other characters (including your own family members) have more influence than their leader their loyalty drops pretty fast. This makes sense since they essentially are more powerfull them him. But the other reason why your faction leader should have a high influence is where it gets tricky. Every political action one of your own family member's make costs influence, this can be a fixed number or for some actions it is based on the affected target's influence. This still makes sense, it's much more difficult to adopt or assasinate someone who has a lot of influence. Now the thing is, for all the political actions you make, I think about 50% of them backfire, I'll try to explain this by using an example.

One of your governors his loyalty is wavering, you use one of your own Generals who has 44 influence to gather support which costs 30 influence. The next turn you get a message that something went wrong and this leaves you with 3 options. Option 1: Let your General solve the problem for an additional 15 influence, this is not an option right now because you only have 14 influence left. Option 2: Use your faction leader to overrule and solve the problem, -15 influence for your faction leader. Or go with Option 3: Do nothing: and lose 4% control.

You see that in many cases you need your Faction leader to clean up the mess of your political actions. This way you use up his influence pretty quickly which in turn causes a drop in loyalty among characters who have more influence than him. I had a campaign as the Jutes where I thought I was doing pretty well untill I suddenly got no less then 9 messages about wavering loyalty among other nobles. I just didn't had enough influence between my family members to keep all of them in check. I held out for a few more turns but after that I had 4 settlements rebelling taking half of all my own armies along in the process.

It just felt off since I had a small but steady empire, both PO and Sanitation where in the green for all of my provinces. I had a steady income, flourishing trade with my neighbours and their was food enough for everybody. It just seemed strange that I'm dealing with these huge loyalty issues among my own people. Maybe I'm just doing something wrong here. I really feel that it's a big step into the right direction but the politics need a little tweak here and there!!

[The Dude]

I started as WRE and made Honorius a governor in Cartaginensis. I thought that the passive influence gain from holding the office would make him powerful enough. Nope, to use his influence to settle disputes even once or twice already dropped him to abysmal levels, and in no time my generals were rebelling.

Second try. I restarted the campaign and made him a general. Now he was no longer Flavius Honorius the Twit, but Flavius Honorius Augustus Saxonicus Gothicus Borderpatrollicus, ie he absolutely kicked the hell out of German tribes with his full stack and gained in popularity like a naked blonde at a frat party. Now I'm about 40 turns in and my generals are all fine, my lowest loyalty is 5 for one single general, the rest are all six or seven. On my Visigoth campaign it was no different; just put your faction leader in the field and rake in the influence. You will get a rebellious general every now and again, but either you manage to succesfully assassinate him (as Visigoths the culprit managed to survive, even beat back, a total of three assassination attempts, which was dire), or you beat him in the field.

I'm not having that many problems with the situation.

[WelshDragon]

...gained in popularity like a naked blonde at a frat party.

Quote of the week... lol. I have the Emperor in my current WRE campaign as the governor of Ravenna and he built up a nice stack of influence without any fighting. Though he blew a lot of it when his wife died and he couldn't seem to find another woman... maybe he has a hidden trait like "repulsive" or "erectile dysfunction" somewhere in the mix I can't see...

Using wives to do the dirty work of the family is great if they have decent traits. I agree that you should only burn your faction leader's influence when you have to. Also, castration is a great way to keep a general loyal

[fokke85]

Yeah that's the thing.. All of my family members are either Generals or Admirals and see plenty of action and rack up influence just fine. Still they have to contend with so many rogue nobles that in the long run they just don't seem to have enough influence..

[The Dude]

That's why the assassination option exists, I find. It's smart to adopt characters actively, so that you have plenty of people who can perform these assassinations. With my Visigoths I had at least three characters at 200+ influence. The fact that this one guy at far lower influence then managed to dodge assassination three times was just a fluke, in theory I should've been covered And though I've never done it, I wonder if assassinating the faction leader so that rule passes down to his heir doesn't also stabilise disloyal generals.

[GhirYear]

In the early game this only seems a problem for the big factions that have to employ a lot of characters that don't belong to their family. They start with low dominion and consequently a low power-rating. As WRE a very simplistic approach worked very well for me: I daisy-chained adoptions.

Most political actions have more cons than pros as far as I can see. They all cost influence for your family members. Thus taking these actions will lower your dominion. In consequence, only those political actions are worthwhile that will either lower the influence pool of the non-family characters in return (assassination) or expand your family (adoption). The latter is more effective, especially if you only use it on characters that have more influence than their adoption costs. Whom I adopt is thus purely dependant on their influence levels. If a character brings less than 40 points of influence into my family, adoption is not worth the cost.
If the adopted character is unmarried and you can convince some friendly faction to provide a bride, you can further increase your influence gains and thus expand your dominion.
Ideally a newly adopted character has to have enough influence to immediately adopt another character. 4 years into my WRE campaign, my emperor had already an adopted great-great-great-great-grandson.

Most other actions just seem like a waste. Occasionally I use a woman to rise control. My faction leaders rarely take actions at all. Their influence is purely reserved as fail-safe when some other family member fails in pushing an action through.

What I am not quite sure about is whether it is worth to use the offices? The boni are good but it burns influence (especially valuable faction-leader influence). This weakens my dominion if I favour my own family members too much (at least short-term). My current policy is to use office appointments as a balance tool (burn influence short-term if a character has too much and keep an equilibrum between family and non-family influence to keep my power rating in the golden zone).

Overall I do not like the political side of the game. It lacks flesh, is easy to game and quickly becomes stale.

[Slaists]

A good place to learn the politics game is a Hun campaign.

They do not have governors so, that (variable) part is out of the equation making the mini-game more streamlined.

As a general rule, the only thing you really have to worry about is the overall power (the average of dominion and control). As Huns, you have 100% dominion as there are no opposition members so the only valve you have at your disposal is control. You can vary that by spending influence to embezzle, etc. whenever you fail: control will drop lower. Alternatively, if you're too low, spend wives' influence to gain support. Basically, you want to be in the middle where there is no loyalty hit on the high side and now other maluses on the low side of overall power level. For Huns at the start: 100% dominion x 50% weight + X % in control x 50% weight = overall power. No matter what you do you'll have 100% dominion so only one part changes.

That's a simplistic approach, but quickly shows you the ropes.

As to offices: they're very useful but you have to plan it out. Tend to give them only to your very active generals (as Huns, you'll have many); preferably the ones who have boosts to influence gain (wives, traits). Why? Because, when their term is up, they'll need a ton of influence to be reinstated or go higher. They'll not take it kindly if you promote someone who has a lower rank as long as the high rank general is unemployed. As long as you're able to plan it this way, things go well.

Then, of course, there are times when the fate works against you. For example, your general may gain a trait which limits his influence gain or he might run out of battles to fight... But that's expected.

Overall, as Huns: try to preserve the influence of your high ranking generals (unless it gets higher than the one of the monarch); spend influence of the characters you do not expect to fight battles (characters with governor traits which are useless for Huns or wives).