Can someone explain internal politics to me?

[Sp4]

How does it work, how do I make my people more influential, why do I keep losing influence when I assasinate, bribe, denounce and whatever else, everyone else.

[Profound]

How does it work, how do I make my people more influential, why do I keep losing influence when I assasinate, bribe, denounce and whatever else, everyone else.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but some diplomat was up to like 94 gravitas and I would actually gain influence if I married them.

[nearchos]

Maybe I'm mistaken, but some diplomat was up to like 94 gravitas and I would actually gain influence if I married them.

Do you mean a dignitary?
I wan't undererstand the internal politics either.
maybe its just waste of time trying to keep high influence within your state, in order to engage in civil war during the campaign.
But thats not right.

[Bramborough]

I haven't been able to make much sense of it either. It costs a lot of money and senate influence to bribe/assassinate/etc other families' members. The downside of such moves is obvious...the upside is obscure and ambiguous. The target loses "gravitas" (or is eliminated entirely), which I presume means that their family will then gain senate influence more slowly in the near future. BUT...you have to give up immediate Senate influence NOW in order to affect their ability to gain influence LATER. Whether or not you come out ahead in the long run is completely unclear.

On a much more fundamental level, it's not clear to me that Senate influence means much at all in the first place. About 150 turns into first Rome campaign, my family has had a low of 9%, and a high of 62%, currently about 55%. I have discerned no tangible rewards/penalties across this range, other than the ability to get some political rank character perks (such as praetor, etc). These are very expensive to the treasury, however, so am not sure they're even worth pursuing. By the time your family's general ranks up enough to qualify for the higher political posts (e.g., consul, governor), he's old as dirt and going to die off soon anyway. Other than that, I haven't seen any impact from senate influence on my faction's public order, military or economic performance, etc.

I'm going to keep playing around with different aspects of the family power politics for the remainder of this campaign, just to see if some "a-ha!" moment comes along which reveals why it matters. As my campaign goes on, however, I'm getting less optimistic that's going to happen.

Final note. Although it hasn't happened in my own campaign, I did get the impression from a pre-release review that one family getting high enough Senate influence triggers civil war. I don't yet know where that trigger is (or even if it really exists). IF that's true and civil war can be avoided, then perhaps it's worth paying just enough attention to politics to avoid that occurrence, but no more than that.

[Jarmam]

Then you're the lucky one, Bramborough. I had 70% or so Senate control *just* when my army cap was going from 6 to 9 due to my expanding in the barbarian northwest, when BAM "Senate Loyalists" got 6 stacks of fancy Roman troops right next to Italia - one of them was my own! They proceeded to completely wipe out 3 entire legions, leaving me no choice but to pull everything from the front (had 1 military province and that was Rome - 3 units per turn is not fancy with 90 units barrelling down your door ^^).

I am still not sure *why* this happened, but I imagine I had a mixture of a high ambition general combined with too much power in the Senate - or something. Either way it saved the campaign from getting boring. If only I understood why it happens, I would happily approve this system.

[Bramborough]

Yeah, even though I didn't really know what might happen or why, that one half-remembered nugget I read has kept me nervous about letting my senate influence get too high. Every time I've edged above 60% or so, I've married off some nieces to the other families in order to get back down to the low/mid 50's. I suspect this might be only truly important aspect of Roman politics, along with the probability that I presume 0% means you get fired. So I'm guessing that 0 is bad, 70+ is bad, and therefore politics really only requires attention when one strays outside, say, the 10-60 window. Within those limits, however, I'm still unconvinced that there's really any point to worrying about it. Is there a qualitative difference between, say, 25% and 55%?

This is still totally conjecture as far as my own campaign goes, and Jarmam's experience seems consistent with it. Anyone else out there with corroborating (or refuting) evidence?

[JeromeBaker]

Will the senate loyalists eventually appear no matter what you do or is there a posibility that if you keep things somewhat equal between houses that you can avoid this?