I'm Genuinely Confused About Political Influence

[Tiny]

Playing as Rome - Nobiles, I am at Imperium Level VI. I have stacked the characters entirely to my party save a few extras for the Equites. My characters have infinitely more gravitas than any other party. I have total political domination.

Wait, no, I don't. I have 47% influence. Equites have 1%. Patricii have 2%. Plebians have 50%.

Yes. 50%. Despite having three characters with less than 300 gravitas added together. What the hell!?

I just don't understand. I have not promoted anyone in any other party, only my own. Almost every general is from my party. Every victory is won by my leaders. All the ladies who can be are Matrons, and I have a huge family tree full of kids that further my interests. Granted, I have not gone for "political animal" with every character, but by the merit of their actions, they have gained tons of gravitas, and should WAY overpower all other parties.

So why are the Plebians beating me out? Why are they contesting me in and winning influence? Just, why? Are they getting the Ruling Party Influence buff from technology and imperium level!? WHY!?

I'm not trying to whine and moan, I'm just totally confused and flustered by this. In all my time, I have never gotten enough influence to become an Empire as Rome. Into Max Imperium, I am always a Republic, and I am always struggling to maintain control.

Is there any way to just directly change the influence I have in a save? I'm tired of playing fair with this crap, and just want to see how the game flows as an Empire. Additionally, I feel like I've been robbed of political domination by this game's bizarre mechanics. Where is my glorious empire with (practically) a one party system? I want a glorious totalitarian dictatorship!

To those who are gracious, wise, and kind: please help me. Do I just need to employ some l33t strats? I'll admit that politics have always been a sideshow to me, and that I really care about the economics and combat, so I could have a lot to learn on this front. If it's just broken, then I want to effectively "turn it off" by rigging the influence in my favor and just focus on loyalty.

[Dardo21]

Not sure, but I think influence not only depends on your gravitas, but on your ambition too. Your leader with the highest ambition and gravitas should be kept at the capital/non-military to increase the influence growth. Could be wrong though :p.

[Tiny]

I have nothing but ambition in my party though, that's what's crazy. In fact, I've recently whacked everyone except a lady with 2 ambition and a man with 1 in the Plebians camp, while I have several people with 3, and even more with 2. I'm seriously scratching my head at this.

[Jake Armitage]

Never seen such unbalances and never had major problems contolling faction %.
Can't say, are you using a lot of intrigues?

Think saveparser (never used) might help you cheating this.

[Basilius]

You and everyone else.

After 5 years and even a politics overhaul, still no one understands how political influence works.

[Jake Armitage]

Alien things.

[Tiny]

You and everyone else.

After 5 years and even a politics overhaul, still no one understands how political influence works.

I figured this was the case, sadly. I really was hoping there was some secret knowledge out there that I was missing, but not a single person on the internet had an answer except, "Well it's Gravitas per turn that matters, not raw gravitas."

Right, and when the Plebians literally have two characters and I have ~20, I'm sure they have more gravitas per turn than I. FFS.

I'm guessing the DeI team doesn't have wisdom on the matter, given I've heard much of the political system is hardcoded? It sucks how this stuff is a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

[Fluke]

I figured this was the case, sadly. I really was hoping there was some secret knowledge out there that I was missing, but not a single person on the internet had an answer except, "Well it's Gravitas per turn that matters, not raw gravitas."

Right, and when the Plebians literally have two characters and I have ~20, I'm sure they have more gravitas per turn than I. FFS.

I'm guessing the DeI team doesn't have wisdom on the matter, given I've heard much of the political system is hardcoded? It sucks how this stuff is a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

Great opportunity for a submod that just totally negates the whole confusing system.

[Tiny]

Great opportunity for a submod that just totally negates the whole confusing system.

Indeed. I have investigated in the save files, by the way. I found the tables for campaign_politics and tried to swap out the number of senators each party has, essentially giving myself ~65%. I made sure that it all had a sum of 500, lest the game crash from it not working properly.

I then ended my turn. By the next turn, the number of senators immediately reset to the previous values. Cheating, it seems, won't be so simple. I tried to determine what number corresponds with their effective "influence per turn", if you will. Sadly, upon editing the test save I established, it crashed to desktop, so I dunno what I was messing with.

I would really love it if someone knowledgeable about the political system could put in their two cents. Like I said, I'm not sure there's much to know because it's hardcoded, but if someone on the DeI team at least knows the basic values, or if we could create meaningful improvements by say buffing "Ruling Party Influence" stuff from tech and traits, we might be on a road to making sense from this mess.

If not, a "turn it off" submod would be sufficient for me.

[Basilius]

Somewhere on these forums users have discussed what is known, but I don't have the time right now to dig for those posts.

IIRC, gravitas contributes to influence (it adds X influence per turn), but winning battles is the primary way of gaining influence: a successful general gets a bucket full when they win. So if you want your party to be influential, you need to have that general winning lots of battles and having high gravitas. Vice versa for the opposing parties.

The "influence pool" that the parties contribute to never resets. So as the game goes on, it becomes harder and harder to change the percentages each party has, to the point where you can just ignore the system. This is probably why your cheat didn't work: the following turn the game checked the influence pools, and assigned senators accordingly.

[Jake Armitage]

Dunno, I can make different scripts to recieve bonuses/maluses from ruling power (which affects political influence), so you could choose to use one of them depending on the situation.
I could link that to faction leader effect, so it will be activate together and you have a possibility of "cheating" in-game too.
Anyway, as I said, I never had real influence issues, maybe you're doing something wrong. Or have some "corrupted" file.

[Obscure_Polygon]

Lol it is so ridiculous that no one on Earth fully knows how this system works.

I wish we could even have something crazy like a comprehensive gravitas per turn tooltip so you could easily identify who's accumulating what. Hover over gravitas: (+X gravitas/turn). Too much? Not enough vaguery?

[Tiny]

Well this is becoming a little bit of an obsession of mine.

I did more thinking about the values in the save editor. I'm going to attempt at conveying what I've deduced thus far, and maybe someone with more freetime and a more mathematically oriented brain can take this somewhere useful.

CAMPAIGN_SAVE_GAME > COMPRESSED_DATA > CAMPAIGN_ENV > CAMPAIGN_MODEL > WORLD > FACTION_ARRAY > FACTION_ARRAY - 0 > FACTION > CAMPAIGN_POLITICS > POLITICAL_PARTIES

Follow that thread, and you'll find the mess of data (considering I had to stumble my way to it to find it, I'm sure some folks would like to know where the data is). Keep in mind "FACTION_ARRAY - 0" could be for Roma itself as a faction, or for the player faction. I don't know which would be true. All I know is I found the right one for the purposes of editing my saves.

I do not know what the vast majority of these values mean sadly. Yet I was able to determine the relevance of the second from the top. Its type is system.single . I have a very amateurish understanding of what that means, fyi. So there's no direct explanation as to what the value is or what it does. I suspect it is the influence of a party quantified, and I have the evidence to suggest just that.

I discovered a curious mathematical constant. The value is TIED to the number of senators (the row directly below it), meaning if you divide it by the number of senators, you get a number that represents what one senator equals in said value.

Does that not make sense? I should've paid attention in math class. Here's the equation:

x -> value in influence column
s -> # of senators
I -> actual influence per senator
x / s = I

So here's a real example from one of my saves way back when I had some semblance of political dominance:
Solving for "I" for POLITICAL_PARTIES - 0 (Nobiles)
x = 15920, s = 241, I = ?
15920 / 241 = 66.05809...
So, with rounding, I = 66.0581. Cool. That was a lot of work for something simple. Well, the cool thing is that "I" is universal across political parties...sorta?

Solving for I for POLITICAL_PARTIES - 3 (Plebians)
x = 12683, s = 192, I = ?
12683 / 192 = 66.05729...
Rounded, I = 66.053
Why this varies slightly is beyond me, yet it's the closest thing I have to "real influence value". It could very well be the result of a rounding error in the influence per senator shown in the editSF, but this is officially over my head.

One last thing that perplexed me: "I" is NOT universal from save to save. It can change with every single turn potentially. So, many turns later...
Solving for Nobiles again:

22813 / 247 = 92.3603...

"I" has distinctly risen, as you can see. I am going to do more to see if "I" really is the influence per senator. Given the lack of information on the subject, I hope this might be a small stone toward building a solid understanding of the politics values. Of course, this could all be solved in an instant if CA were to give us the info we needed, but alas, they have a penchant for creating poorly explained and hobbled together systems (cough BATTLE STATS cough) before throwing them to us to figure out and fix.

[~Seleukos.I.Nikator~]

But shouldn't that be the other way round? That each party's influence determines how many senators it has in the senate?

[Sonny WiFiHr]

Huh every general is listed there. Sum of Gravitas and numbers of senators.

Number of senators is influence. If you sum them you will have same number every turn
How do you get more senators in not clear. Other numbers are not clear

Hitting gather support should add 2%.

Strange Carthage is having -999999 income

[Tiny]

Huh every general is listed there. Sum of Gravitas and numbers of senators.

Number of senators is influence. If you sum them you will have same number every turn
How do you get more senators in not clear. Other numbers are not clear

Hitting gather support should add 2%.

Strange Carthage is having -999999 income

Intriguing, albeit more confusing. I don't know what to say about Carthage either; the bonuses should fix it? lol

But shouldn't that be the other way round? That each party's influence determines how many senators it has in the senate?

That is correct! My math is merely my attempt at deducing the value's relevance, much like how you'd do some math backwards to find an original value. So yes, influence should determine the # of senators if our assumptions are correct.

[Cheradenine]

CAMPAIGN_SAVE_GAME > COMPRESSED_DATA > CAMPAIGN_ENV > CAMPAIGN_MODEL > WORLD > FACTION_ARRAY > FACTION_ARRAY - 0 > FACTION > CAMPAIGN_POLITICS > POLITICAL_PARTIES

Follow that thread, and you'll find the mess of data (considering I had to stumble my way to it to find it, I'm sure some folks would like to know where the data is). Keep in mind "FACTION_ARRAY - 0" could be for Roma itself as a faction, or for the player faction. I don't know which would be true. All I know is I found the right one for the purposes of editing my saves.

Just wanted to weigh in on this little point: Faction Array 0 is always the player (Host player in MP), no matter what faction he has. Array 1 is then either the "normal" order of the factions, or client player, again independent of the particular faction he chose.