Politics: Maintaining Loyalty and Balance

In Rome 2 control on the political system was tenative at best with an internal trigger to force a civil war with enough Imperium. In Attila it is infinitely more easy to keep an iron grip on your internal strife, to a point, there is none.

To To get a basic understanding of the political system please visit here.

Dominion is a very important stat to maintain, thankfully, maintaining it is easy.

Since Dominion is a reflection of your influence over the influence of your court, simply keep your influence high and the court's low.

How to gain influence:

• Assign your family members as Governors. While I don't see it noted anywhere that governorships grant influence, it slowly creeps up while they are in office. It also grants the character XP, levels, traits, and households, all useful things.
  
• Have a family member lead active offensive armies. I usually reserve my main attack force for my faction leader as this role tends to accrue the most Influence the fastest, assuming you are an active attacker.
  
• Assign household items that passively grant Influence to family members.
  
• Accept, not seek, wives that grant influence.

How to deny influence:

• Defensive armies stationed as deterrents or more likely, to maintain public order, should be lead by none family members. These armies see little to no action and will not accrue influence fast, if at all.
  
• Promote non family members to the "Companion" office when they hit 20-30 influence. The office requires 20 influence to attain and if there is a complication, it will cost the person you are promoting 10 additional influence, reliably reducing influence. If they don't have the 10 extra to cover a failure you will have to lose control or 15 of your king's influence.
  
• Non family character's with less that 20 influence can often be ignored until needed, they likely won't gain influence and won't have any real impact on your Dominion.
  
• Have non family members seek wives that deminish influence. The seek wife action uses influence to execute, and a bad wife is good, for you.
  
• In the rare case you just cannot bring a non family member's influence under control, adopt.

Control, mechanically, functions as a multiplier for dominion to determine your faction's power. Control is harder to maintain than dominion. While many things allow you to gain dominion, only one thing allows you to gain control, the Gain Support political action.

Use Gain Support sparingly as too much control is counter productive. Ideally control should be kept at 50% with your dominion kept high. This gives a good balance of power.

When a political action or office promotion has a complication you can opt to ignore it for -2% control, this is an easy and manageable way to reduce your control if it is too high. If your control gets too low this can be a downward spiral. The Gain Support political action reduces your control by 4 on a failure and costs a lot of influence, effectively reducing you dominion and power as well.

Ideally power should be kept at Balanced. Balanced power offers +2 loyalty with no penalties to growth or public order. The -1% tax is negligible. Anything below blanced is effecting army integrity which can lead to mutinies and poor morale. Anything above blanced suffers from negative growth and public order modifiers, growth being very important until all your settlements are maxed out.

In some cases with extreme dominion and 50% control you power will be higher than balanced, this can be rectified by spending your characters influence. Secure loyalty is a great way to dump influence.

As your empire grows you will need more governors and generals than your family can support. This will cause a surplus of non family members to accrue causing it to be harder to raise dominion due to the sheer ammount. To counter this you will need to raise your control as you get into mid and late game. For me 60% Control was enough to keep power where I wanted it.

I managed to achieve victory conditions without a single civil dispute or mutiny.

Most of the political actions are highly situational or of questionable use. Since these actions use your families influence, ultimately impacting dominion and power, they should be carefully considered.

Assassination: The cost of this action varies but the minimum is 25. The price goes up based on the descrepency between the target's influence and the one who carries out the action. When to use it: kill a highly problematic High King (he's blind and has -5 to all stats, and triats reducing public order, loyalty etc). When someone's loyalty is red and they have horrible stats and traits.

Secure Loyalty: Base cost 25 plus influence modifiers. When to use it: the most I've seen it increase the loyalty is by 5, so any target with 5 or less loyalty is fair game. Tho it is only necessary when their loyalty reaches red.

Gather Support: Base cost 25. I have seen it cost as much as 40 tho I'm unsure what caused the price jump. When to use: If your control drops too low it's very bad and hard to recoup, only use this if your dominion is very high and you have plenty of room to fail this action a couple times. If your dominion and control are below 50% its a downward spirial or a very slow recovery.

Diminish Popularity: It's a trap. Just assign the target to a companion and make him pay for his own failure. If a non family member's influence is getting out of control, please see the Dominion and Influence section of this guide.

"One additional tip about "Diminish Popularity". If successful, it brands the target with the "Out of Favor" trait, which has more detrimental and long-lasting effect than the desired one-turn Influence adjustment. Even worse, it puts that target at significant risk of being lynched by a local mob. Great way to inadvertently lose an otherwise-useful character. Ran into this a couple of times early in first campaign, haven't touched that political action with a 10-foot pole since." Bramburough

Seek Wife: While this sees little use it is very important to keep your high king and heir married so they can produce heirs themselves. After exhausting the diplomacy options this is a good last resort.

Adoption: Sometimes you just don't have enough family to cover all the bases and a non family member is gaining exorbitant amounts of influence. It may be easier to adopt this guy, but beware if will make biological kids lose loyalty.

Embezzle: This is an easy way to lower a character's influence who has more influence than the high king assuming the character is already in an office.

The rest of the actions are covered well enough in other guides or are relatively useless.

Never use your high king to pay for political actions. You need his influence to cover failed actions and promotion complications. If any character's influence is higher than your high king's it causes loyalty problems. (I took my high king on a tear thru the western roman empire sacking everything I passed, at the end he had over 400 influence, I realised this rule was not absolute. Use your own discretion)

Loyalty is something that changes based on random events, traits, wives, adoptions, and foreign agents actions. Therefore it is less about controlling it and more about reacting to it. This section will go through what can cause the loss of loyalty and how a fix it when possible.

Office given to subordinate: This happens when a character of a lower rank than the effected's has been given an office of equal or greater rank. The worse the loyalty hit the more egregious the affront is to the character. I.E. you made him a companion and a lower rank character was given judge.
Fix: Simply replace him as a general or governor and "office given to subordinate" goes away. Next turn you can return him to his original post if he is best suited to it, and his loyalty will be back to normal.

Traits, Household, Spouse: This is a catch-all category and you'll have to hunt the culprit down. I.E. In my current game, my hier has -1 loyalty from a trait that my high king has.
Fix: Traits cannot be changed and therefore you must use the Secure Loyalty action to counter a trait problem, but it does not go away. If a wife is the problem, it's probably a wife you started the game with and you could divorce or kill her. If it's a household item, simply replace it with a better one.

Adopted sibling rivalry: You biological children get this when you adopt.
Fix: Secure Loyalty can counter the effects but it will not go away.

Power and Imperium: This is usually an indicator that your balance of power is too high or too low, I have not yet reached max imperium to know if that can cause it.
Fix: Ideally if you are using this guide you should never see this, but if you do you need to move the balance of power to a more central point.

Another option that has some pros and cons associated with it is the idea of absolute adoption.
Note that 3 of my 5 family members are adopted and there are no other families, just candidates. This gives the ruling family absolute Dominion.

• You can spend your family's influence on embezzle without losing dominion.
  
• There is no "bad" influence as long as your High King has the most.

• As reflected in the picture the balance of power goes well into your favor causing public order issues.
  
• You will most likely have to lower Control or Taxes to maintain public order.
  
• If done incorrectly adoption will destroy the loyalty of your family.
  
• Very hard to achieve absolute adoption in larger factions.
  
• Adoptions are very expensive if they fail as you lose a lot of influence and control, therefore the balance of power can go in the wrong direction fast.

Note: Do not adopt multiple character under the same "father" as this will destroy loyalty fast. Keep it to 1 adoption per "father" character.

• Never use your high king to pay for political actions. You need his influence to cover failed actions and promotion complications. If any character's influence is higher than your high king's it causes loyalty problems.
  
• "High King has a baseline non-scaling cost to secure loyalty." RoadsideGamingCo
  
• Use your females to secure loyalty, the seem to be very successful at it. Sometimes it causes b@stard children tho.
  
• The non political assassination: make problem character an admiral with no fleet, sail into enemy territory.
  
• The higher a character's influence the more successful they seem to be at actions, for crucial actions use high influence characters.
  
• Active generals and governor's should be family.
  
• Inactive generals should be non family.

• Keep your Dominion as high as possible.
  
• Keep Control at 50% early game and 60%+ late game.
  
• Keep power balanced.

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