Thanks for the info, I'll see how some of it applies in my current campaign. Do diplomats help here? I see you mention general attributes benefiting quite a bit.

I remain troubled by the change, this narrows the options a player has in his/her campaign, from a game design standpoint that's not the choice I'd recommend taking on the strategic level. And if CA wanted to take this route they should have made it make sense to the player with a direct way of addressing that involved trade offs. This to me feels not unlike their civil war "fix" which I find nearly meaningless since it's so easy to avoid.