Political influence and gravitas

**Gioseppe** · June 09, 2020, 04:10 PM

I need help bringing down the influence of a political party. The leader that had high gravitas died but his successor still sits comfortably at over 50% influence despite having very low gravitas. What can I do to balance the influence between the parties? I thought only gravitas matters but now I don't know if I should even try boosting gravitas of other parties because it looks like it's not important since the character with lowest gravitas holds over 50%.

**Ptolemaios Soter** · June 10, 2020, 07:28 PM

This can get really complicated, but the short answer to your issue is that influence is based on the total aggregate gravitas of all characters in that party over the course of the campaign. So the dead general is still considered. As you can imagine, that means that early game it's really easy to move influence up or down by increasing the gravitas of your or opposing characters. But by late game, it becomes almost impossible to meaningfully alter the balance.

The long answer (I'll circle back with more if I have a chance)... Influence is calculated by gravitas multiplied by the character's ambition, and also modified by whether the character is a general (deployed) or politician, obviously with more weight to the latter. That forms the "base" influence balance, but it is also modified directly by certain actions. For example, the political action of gather support directly increases your influence, while purging a rival party directly decreases theirs. Hiring characters of your own party decreases your influence. And lastly, various political actions seem to have a small hidden effect (basically anything that increases a character's gravitas will have a small short-term penalty to their current influence to counter-balance it). There's also a bug/feature that anything that decreases the player's party's influence transfers that not equitably, but all to whichever party holds the third slot. As such, over the course of a campaign the third party will usually have teh highest influence regardless of the gravitas of the the various characters.

So if you want to have high influence, level your characters up early, then pull them off the field and let them serve as politicians. Take any high gravitas/high ambition other party characters and put them on garrison duty, deployed without the opportunity to earn gravitas in battles. And obviously the inverse if you want to have low influence. Hope that helps. Hit me up (or Jake, he's the most knowledgable), if you need any more info.

**jonnymo_ph** · June 11, 2020, 10:05 AM

I'm in 231 playing as patricii for rome, i have no problems with my own influence it's right at the level i want it to be. What im confuses about is the plebeians have a single character and 46% influence in the senate with Nobiles and Equites sitting at 0, despite the fact that there's 2 each of nobiles and equestrian characters and only a single plebeian character (2 women for all 3 parties as well if that mattera).

The primus inter pares (now labelled dictator) for this entire time has been a equites character with gravitas of 1824 and an ambition of 2, while the sole plebeian character only has an ambition of 1 and gravtias of 1091.

For nobiles there's 2 characters both with gravitas around 850 and one has an ambition of 3 and the other of 1. Why is the senate my party and plebeians only? The other 2 have literally no senators.

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**Jake Armitage** · June 11, 2020, 12:12 PM

2 things to keep in mind

1) it seems that (at least someone said so months ago and he was probably right) that the 3rd other party has inherited some hardcoded bonuses coming form per political patch. There are some slight workaround for that like transforming an intrigues into a power removal (like PIGS does) or build a custom effect that rebalance gravitas depending on the party, but this could work for deployed generals only, not politicians
2) the only power value that really counts is the ruling party one, except for some minor features 8political traits) there is no difference at all if some of the other parties is at 0%, 50% whatever

Also, the give gift (or whatever it's called, can't remember now) intrigue assigns power, remember it, the value is hidden but it is moddable

**jonnymo_ph** · June 12, 2020, 02:01 AM

That must be what it is then. Early on I had to keep giving the plebes gifts because they were always bordering on falling into negative loyalty, while equites and nobiles were always very high so I rarely ever gave them any.