Greetings all,

I may be 11 years late to the party, but while playing this wonderful game and learning something new every day, I hadn't come across an in-depth tutorial on the politics section of the game specifically regarding influence (the ones I had come across were either too basic, or told you to abuse the system in the first few turns of a campaign when you are protected from civil wars and can mess with the senate as you please, or talked about things you could do in older versions of the game you no longer can, like Adopt members from another party (now you can only do so via Entice), so while Rome II initially released in late 2013, and the Emperor edition that introduced the politics panel releasd in late 2014, the final form of the Political Intrigues as they currently are, was only patched in 2018 to accompany the Rise of the Republic DLC, therefore many guides out there are outdated and so I have decided to write one myself for the current and latest patch (2.4.0) and share it here with you. A while ago I made a shorter thread with tips on how to avoid a civil war (found here https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/214950/discussions/0/510701523638987052/)

And the tl;dr version of it was, that the main purpose of the politics panel is to keep all other parties’ loyalty to yours in the positive numbers to prevent both Secession (one party seceding from your empire and the provinces alloted to its family turning hostile) and a full blown Civil War (ALL parties basically forcing YOU to secede from now their, formally your, empire, by all their provinces turning hostile except for yours) as either of these tear your holdings apart and basically reset your campaign progress, I realized the much more challenging side-quest is to at the same time also keep increasing your own party’s influence in the senate, as you need a minimum amount (65%) to one day be able to transition the republic into an empire not just because of the additional edict and military technology research rate boost and additional factionwide recruitment slot it brings, but because it makes you the IMPERATOR – the real endgame achievement after all the toils of you having campaigned for your faction and conquered half the known world for what is otherwise an entitled Urbs full of ungrateful plebs.

So, while I covered the basics on how to avoid a civil war in the above linked thread, in this one I want to go deeper into faction politics to show you how to increase your party’s influence in the senate as well, without brute forcing / duressing a party into secession and then conquering their provinces; so this requires more finesse than just keeping the other parties loyal.

Ideally, you want as many members as possible in your party and as few as possible in the other parties, but the game knows this and has mechanisms to prevent it, like whenever it forces you to immediately replace a general/admiral for a stack that has lost its leader by only making members from other parties show up for hire, or decreasing your senate influence each time you choose to hire one for your own party instead.

The first step in understanding politics is that actions against other party members can only be done by YOUR party members, for the obvious reason that you are playing this game as your party. Other party members can only be tasked with duties that benefit your faction as a whole, like being sent on a diplomatic mission to improve relations with another faction, or hold games in a province to boost its happiness level etc, but not do anything against other parties or against your party, while your party members can. Furthermore, even looking only at the abilities of your party members, many actions can only be done if your party member wishing to do it, is idling in the senate (wearing a toga) and NOT a general leading one of your armies or fleets (wearing a helmet), as most options are greyed out for the latter who are serving at the frontier, far away from Rome. This newfound freedom to do shenanigans (expending their accumulated pool of gravitas), is the reward for retiring your party members from military duty before they die (by opening up the general/admiral panel and clicking on REPLACE to swap the leader for someone else) and thereby sending the experienced fellow back home to harass people in the senate, as it opens up options for them that aren’t available to newcomers, because many of these senate actions are furthermore also locked behind a cost in gravitas or a needed minimum attribute value of authority, cunning or zeal – values your party members usually only pick up by having served in the military and won battles and having leveled up, representing knowledge acquired over the course of a career on the frontier.

And lastly, another hurdle is the targeted party member’s authority, cunning or zeal, and the matchup certain actions demand, like the initiator’s cunning that has to be 2 points higher than the target’s zeal and so on. Keep in mind attributes are not just boosted or docked by the senate actions I will explain further below, but also raised a little bit by attaching the proper ancillary to a party member, allowing for example Rome’s women to at least do some basic politics (“lobbying”) in the senate, with the help of these male ancillaries/advisors etc. Likewise, you shouldn’t forget to detach any stat boosting ancillary from the party member you are targeting if you have to lower their attributes a bit for it to work. As dictator, god, or divine spirit playing the game, think of it as you having the power to make that ancillary miss the fateful senate hearing or find themselves purchasing groceries at the forum rather than remain in an advisory role at the victim’s side on that day.

One more thing you need to pay attention to, is that the game will punish you for doing the same political action more than once during the same turn, as the gravitas or monetary cost of subsequent attempts will be exponentially steeper than the previous time, so you get your best value if you keep it to once per turn, e.g. marry once per turn, not twice, even if you have spare income in the treasury this turn.

The final thing to keep in mind, and one that people often forget, is that expending gravitas to do fun things in the senate actually makes your faction weaker in the long run, because gravitas is being spent from your party members' collective pool to get you some immediate, but short term effects, like boosting your treasury or improving other members' statlines or weakening other party members' statlines and so on, but doing nothing while just accumulating gravitas is in its own way a good thing as your party's influence keeps increasing that way - which is what you ultimately want, and not the shenanigans.

Still, let's move on to the things you can do:

Hire (new) politician – assuming you have already reached the maximum amount of generals/admirals determined by your Imperium level, you may ask why would you want to do this, if you can just go to the raise army/fleet tab and hire a general/admiral there once you are below strength again? Because the gravitas of politicians sitting around in the senate adds influence to their party, and not just the gravitas of serving generals, of which you can only have a finite amount, determined by your Imperium level. But there is no upper limit on politicians. They also accumulate gravitas each turn despite doing nothing, while a general or admiral only increases his via battles – gravitas he then can’t use, because he is serving on the frontier. Yes, it costs influence to hire a senator for YOUR party, but if you keep him in the senate, the gravitas he accumulates and keeps adding to your party’s tally after some point will outweigh the initial influence you lost to launch his career. Also, you can always turn a politician sitting in the senate into a general/admiral for 0 gold (denarii) and therefore don’t need to pay to hire generals/admirals at all, and so just go ahead and hire a male politician for your party whenever you can afford one, and appoint him to lead your forces when the need arises, like during a future turn when you have just enough income to raise an army and a general’s bodyguard unit, but not to also hire a general to lead it. Until then, they shall remain in the senate and every point of gravitas they have (and keep accumulating) will also keep increasing your party’s influence. Hiring a new senator for your party, whenever available, is therefore more rewarding than spending that amount of denarii (usually just over a thousand) in upgrading one building somewhere on the campaign map. Also keep in mind that you can’t predict when a general or admiral dies of old age, but when they do, the game immediately forces you to pick a new general/admiral and then you may find yourself forced to appoint (or gods forbid, create) a member from a different party, ruining your quest to keep their influence small.

Seek spouse – for most of the game, the discount method of hiring a new gravitas generating senate politician (and if the initiator is female, also potential general/admiral). Rather than paying the full cost in the raise army/navy or the hire politician panel, clicking on the seek spouse button (which requires an unmarried party member) will generate a politician for the same party that member belongs to, for cheaper, who you can then use to lead an army or navy (he will cost 0 denarii to lead them, as he is already in the senate rather than having to be created). When playing as rome, telling a male to find a spouse is less rewarding, as the spouse will be a woman who cant lead armies/fleets and thus only has a limited role in the senate. But marriage also grants each of the weds several bonuses (or sometimes downsides) shown in the spouse card. Only seek spouses for your own party members, NEVER instruct rival party members to do so, or you will only crowd their roster with more members generating gravitas and thus more influence, unless you have some elaborate plan where you want to strengthen a weak party who has a lot of loyalty to yours, so that both of you can put pressure on decreasing the influence of a big party that doesn’t like you and could snatch a lot of territory from your empire if a civil war breaks out. Only in such a case does increasing the member count by telling people in another party to seek spouses and have you reap the marriage bonuses granted by each spouse to their significant other for your faction, do more good than harm. Well, there is one final reason to seek spouses for rival party members, and that is when their stats are too high for your own party members to manipulate them (e.g. raise their party loyalty to yours with Improve Relations) which can be easier to do on the newly created spouse which usually only has 3 authority, cunning and zeal.

Political marriage – primarily done to keep the loyalty of another party permanently higher than it otherwise would be, for as long as the married couple is alive. It requires the targeted party to have a minimum loyalty of 10 and your initiator should have more gravitas than the target of the opposite gender, as well as paying for it (more expensive than seek spouse and doesn’t grant you a new party member, so only do this if the stability of your empire needs to rest on that long term loyalty bonus).

Gather Support – increases your party’s influence by 2%, but requires an authority of 7 OR zeal of 7 and damages all other parties’ loyalty by -2 for the next 4 turns AND costs money. Consider this the sledgehammer method of increasing your party’s influence, usually only doable by your faction leader who has money to spare and most other parties' loyalty is in the positives. The great thing is it can be done by generals who are serving, and doesn't even cost any gravitas, making it one of the most useful actions in the entire politics tab when it comes to increasing influence, and worth every penny.

Promote - Because the first rank is free, promoting is one of the most effective methods of increasing your faction strength both in terms of economy and influence in the senate, but you have to be careful about when you do it. When playing as Rome, men and women have different tiers of promotion, but the first rank is always free, while subsequent ranks cost an increasing amount of denarii. Therefore, it is always better to promote everyone before promoting the first character a second time.

For women, the first tier, Influential Woman, gives her +3 gravitas per turn, +3% wealth from all entertainment buildings in all regions of your empire, and a permanent +3 loyalty from her party if it is a different one to yours, for as long as she is alive.

For men, the first tier, Military Tribune, grants a +3% tax rate for the Province under your control they are in (regardless in which region under your control of that Province he is in). Military Tribune also makes his land units cost -2% upkeep (so it doesn't work on admirals), and finally, he gets +1 gravitas per turn even when he is leading an army or navy. However, promoting your own party member brings with it a -2 loyalty from ALL other parties lasting for 2 turns, while promoting a different party's member grants you a permanent +1 loyalty from that party for as long as the promoted character is alive, making both options worth considering.

Higher tiers of promotion are basically multipliers of the same list of bonuses, i.e. the next rank, Quaestor, would be +6% to province tax rate instead of +3%; -4% army upkeep instead of -2% and so on, but now costs money to promote, so it may take around 10 turns to make back in gold what you initially spent as a lump sum to advance the tier. Only during the first third or so of the game, when you can field only a handful of generals because you are limited by your Imperium level, is it worth it to promote them to higher tiers, if you take extra care not to get them killed on the battlefield. One last thing to keep in mind is you cannot promote your faction leader. When playing as Rome, this is the Dictator. He is also your family leader, but sometimes the two titles can be split, and then you may end up with a different family leader (who you can promote) and faction leader (Dictator, who you can't promote).

Embezzle – if your (non-serving) embezzling party member has 6 or more cunning and a fair amount of gravitas, they can basically print free money, as clicking on embezzle will give you a big cash bonus that can come in very handy during desperate times when you are at war and need the cash to immediately swell the ranks of one of your armies with mercenaries without having to cancel your infrastructure projects that are nearing completion elsewhere. The cost of embezzling is a loss of gravitas (that increases with every repeated attempt) and therefore a slowed growth of your party’s influence in the senate over the course of future turns, and all other parties losing loyalty to your party by a small amount, so I wouldnt call this a cheat code as you also cant repeat this again and again with the same character and need cunning politicians to begin with.

Adopt – usually required if your faction leader wants a male heir, but hasn’t been able to biologically create one yet. Or perhaps you want a more talented one to be your heir than that weak son of his. Or perhaps you just want to spawn more children – as the prerequisite for that are adults who have been adopted into your family, because adults in other parties or even in your party, but outside your family, cant make children. And children, once matured into adults, are free senators/generals/admirals from your party, i.e. no hiring cost and no loss in senators/influence. Adoption is also the only way to add more members to your family, rather than just to your party (being the list right of your family tree, where senators/generals/admirals hired for your party are usually found). Also, there is the risk that unadopted party members found a new political party, should your faction have too few in the senate (like after your rookie mistake of trying to lower the amount of parties by provoking one to secede and then eliminating them in a blitzkrieg, only to come back to one of your party members having founded another party). However, each time you adopt a new member into your family, the gravitas of all eligible heirs already in it will sink by 5 points (who the eligible heirs are, is highlighted by those portraits not having faded in color when you click on “make heir” and then hover the mouse over your family tree, and using the mouse wheel to zoom out in case it is too big). The adopter can be anyone in your family and not just the faction leader or his heir, so you can expand your family tree in any direction - horizontal or vertical, by deciding who the "parent" of the adoptee will be, as long as the adopter has 2 more authority than the adoptee’s zeal. This is why sometimes your faction leader can’t adopt, but someone else in your family, like his heir, can – cause he has more authority than the target’s zeal, which your current faction leader may not have. Remember you can Insult the adoptee to lower his zeal, or Praise the faction leader to increase his authority.

Declare Heir - only available to your family member who is marked as the Family Leader (yellow shield with white crest) which usually is, when playing as Rome, the Dictator (purple shield with white crest) and hence overriding the yellow shield, over the course of a game these two titles can split, and then you will realize only the Family Leader can declare the heir, and not the Dictator. Anyway, when the Family Leader dies, one of the eligible heirs is chosen by the game to be the next Family Leader. But if you want to ensure that only a certain person is chosen as the next Family Leader, you can do so by Declaring the Heir - an action that costs the current Family Leader 20 gravitas to declare and requires the person he is declaring as heir's zeal to not be more than 2 points lower than his own zeal. So if it is too low, you can bump it up with Praise, or lower the faction leader's with Insult. Also, upon being declared as such, the new Heir gets a shield of his own telling others he has been made the Heir and a 10 gravitas boost.

Educate – only decreeable on children, and only by the faction leader or heir (even if they are leading an army) you pay a large sum to give them a +2 stat boost on either authority, cunning or zeal, decided randomly, once they become adults. While noble and commendable, it simply isnt worth the money as it can go in the thousands of denarii. And I believe it increases with every child you have already educated, or by Imperium level, not sure. What’s more, some of them can die while being tutored, thereby making it a complete waste of money.

Assassinate – Since you can’t use your agents to do this to your own faction members, and getting them killed on the battlefield comes with a massive loyalty penalty of -15 if it was a party member and -30 if it was the party leader (dying of natural causes doesn’t incur these penalties) that only decreases by 3 after each subsequent turn, the best place is instead to kill them on the senate floor (et tu, Brute?) but only as a last resort, i.e. if civil war is unavoidable and the disloyal faction has some high tier generals in it (remember, you can disband armies, but not generals, who then return to just being senators which the AI can recruit back into leading armies). Assassinate, which requires the person ordering it to pay money AND have a higher cunning than the victim, comes with a surprisingly low loyalty penalty of just -5, perhaps because from a gameplay perspective you’re deleting your own characters, and from a lore perspective the victim party not really knowing which rival party ordered the deed. If you have reduced a party down to just one member, assassinating this person won’t make the party disappear. The game will instead immediately spawn a new senator for that party who becomes its party leader. Then why reduce member count, you ask? To keep that party’s influence low and help your own party reach the threshold to transition from republic into monarchy, as I mentioned the goal of this whole sidequest is.

Also, pay attention to the party trait each character has, which only becomes relevant when the character becomes party leader. You can see this on the party overview panel. Some party leaders can have a really horrible party trait, like "Hates Barbarians" which offers no bonuses, but incurs a cumulative -2 loyalty penalty to your party for each Barbarian faction you have any kind of treaty (trade agreement, non-aggression pact, military access, defensive alliance etc.) with, that can go all the way up to a permanent -10 loyalty of his party to yours for as long as he is alive. The party overview panel also tells you what the trait of his successor will be, and if it is a much better one, like "Traditionalist", which gives you +1 loyalty from his party for every Province where your culture is dominant, then that's another good reason for assassination.

Self deletion – while you can even assassinate characters belonging to your own party, it costs money, whereas convincing them to off themselves is free and gives ALL other parties +2 loyalty to yours for 4 turns, making it - at first glance, the better choice. Obviously you only want to get rid of useless ones in your party, so only characters with 1 or less gravitas have the hemlock (poisonous plant) symbol left of the portrait to tell them there is no place for noobs, scrubs and bottom feeders in your group of chads, so please treat yourself to some tea. On a more serious note though, having low gravitas per se isn’t an issue, as there isnt an upper limit on how many politicians your party can have, which might have otherwise made you weed out all those who contribute little to no influence, and since gravitas plays no role on the battlefield and increases each turn in the senate, keep men with low gravitas for their other attributes unless they have some negative traits like being flaccid, foul mouthed or inbred. Low gravitas women however are pretty useless, since you can’t tell them to seek a spouse because of the 30 gravitas threshold, nor use them as roman generals, so go right ahead and delete her to get that loyalty bonus from all other parties. At least, during the first leg of the campaign. But during the mid to late campaign when you have enough income at the start of each turn to keep Securing Loyalty every couple of turns and topping it up with Improve Relations, Loyalty edicts, Flirting and, once the loyalty is in the positives, Sending Gifts and Political Marriage, your own party will have also grown in size, and a single self deletion carries with it a massive, massive penalty of -5 gravitas for ALL your party members, so if you have 20 other members, you just lost upto 100 gravitas (assuming nobody else had less than 5 gravitas) and therefore the temporary 4 turn +2 loyalty boost to all other parties by the sacrifice will no longer be worth it.

With Entice, you can steal other parties’ members and add them to your own party, making it obvious who was behind this, and therefore slapped with a bigger -8 loyalty penalty from the affected party. The enticer has to spend at least 30 gravitas, and needs to have 2 more cunning than the targeted member’s authority, so usually you will want to steal non-active duty party members (e.g. roman women) with high gravitas and low authority, as adding them to your party will help you grow your senate influence over time, which in turn results in a greater share of territories being alloted to your party, and thus a hold over more territories in a civil war. If these women were married, even better! Because their non-enticed husbands from the victim party will now be treated as if the enticed women had always been from your party and had engaged in a political marriage, i.e. you get some loyalty back from the enticed party because of the marital ties. The in-game balance of this stealing is that Entice halves the targeted character’s gravitas. Someone having switched sides loses face and their credibility and standing in the senate, after all. But if their gravitas was very high to begin with, not only did you rob the entire amount from the targeted party’s pool, but have now added half of it to yours, making it a more rewarding action long term than to just strangle the individual. Entice is also good, if redistributing gravitas isn’t your primary concern, but rather grabbing a particularly talented general who is serving a rival party. He may have low gravitas, but otherwise good stats and abilities, and it would be a shame if you were forced to fight him in an upcoming civil war you already know cant be avoided because of how low their loyalty is to your family. Entice is therefore an essential tool to weaken a rival party who is already disloyal to you by taking their best and brightest (as well as the entire army they lead!!!) before the civil war starts, more so than assassination which also costs money, while Entice doesn’t. You can’t entice the party leader, so the party will have at least 1 member left and therefore disappear from the senate only by seceding.

Send Gift – costs the initiator money, only leaders of other parties can be targeted, and gives a small bonus of +2 gravitas to the initiator, but the main reason you do this is because it stabilizes the targeted party’s loyalty by +2 for the next 4 turns. Since Secure Loyalty grants 5 times the loyalty bonus for the same amount of turns, but doesn’t cost 5 times the amount of denarii to do so, gift sending is only worth considering if you are short on cash and/or have already secured loyalty and need this to top up the loyalty, but gift sending can only be done if the targeted party’s loyalty is 0 or higher, while securing loyalty can be done even if the loyalty is in the negatives.

Improve Relations - an action that costs the initiator 30 gravitas and lots of money, what it does is not only improve the loyalty of the targeted party by +2 for the next 3 turns, but also costs the person from the other party you spoke to, 5 gravitas per turn for the next 2 turns (so -10 gravitas in total). It is worse than Send Gift, because not only does the same +2 loyalty boost last for 1 turn less (3 instead of 4), but while it lowers the gravitas of the target by 10, it lowers the initiator's gravitas by 30, meaning you lose more than the targeted party; it is also twice as expensive in terms of money and furthermore, requires the initiator to have 2 zeal more than the target's cunning, where Send Gift has no such complicated preconditions. However, the big advantage of Improve Relations is it can be done even when the loyalty of the target party is in the negatives, while Send Gift can only be done if it is a positive value. Another reason why you may choose Improve Relations over Send Gift is when you want to dock your initiator's gravitas on purpose by 30 to drop it to below 20, so that his spouse can then file for a divorce because one of the two had generated a really bad trait in the other's profile (e.g. 3% corruption).

Do a Favor – an action that costs the initiator 20 gravitas, it increases the targeted character’s authority by +1 if he is from your party, or grants him +5 gravitas if he is from a different party, and on top of this the attempt costs a lot of money, so NEVER do this to someone from another party as there is no loyalty reward. No doubt an oversight by CA. A prerequisite is the initiator must have 2 more authority than the target’s. It makes sense to do favors to roman women with high gravitas but low authority, since they cant increase their authority by campaigning, but once they have enough authority, can unlock actions that require a base level of authority to perform, like go on Vacation to increase their cunning, or Adopt someone (which requires 2 more authority than their zeal), or the best one - Gather Support for your party, which requires an authority of 7.

Praise – increases the target’s gravitas by 10 and zeal by 1, but costs the praiser 30 gravitas. If someone from another faction is praised, you get +3 loyalty for 3 turns, making this (aside from killing off your own characters or Flirting) the ONLY other way to increase another party’s loyalty that does NOT cost money, as all the other methods do, but at the cost of permanently empowering your foes (unless it’s a battlefield general whose zeal you actually don’t mind being buffed). Praising members from your own party does not incur a loyalty penalty from other factions, so Praise sounds like a good idea for zealous veteran party members with lots of gravitas to “level up” the zeal of newcomers – even though doing so within your own party still results in a net gravitas loss (you expend 30 to gain 10, i.e. lose 20 and what’s more, only non-military politicians can praise and if you praise one of your own generals who is serving, you lose 30 gravitas but the 10 he gains isnt added to your influence because the person you praised is on the frontier and not in the senate right now), it is worth it for the zeal level up, and opens up new venues for the praised person, like getting enough gravitas to be able to seek a spouse (30 needed) this turn, or someone with high zeal but low gravitas praising someone with high gravitas but low zeal can bring their zeal level high enough that you can then use them to start doing actions that cost gravitas but also require a minimum amount of zeal, like praising others themselves - multiple times due to their high pool of gravitas. Therefore, a sort of praise chain reaction. However, one more prerequisite is the person praising needs to have 2 more zeal than the cunning of the person being praised. Therefore, it is a weird but workable solution to first Provoke the one being praised (“your parlor tricks don’t work here in the senate!”) to lower their cunning aka self-esteem, only to then praise them (“nah fam, just kidding, your speech yesterday was really good”) to increase their gravitas and zeal, resulting in a net benefit for the victim, as they gained more (+10 gravitas, +1 zeal) than they lost (-1 cunning) while the zeal buff now allows them to praise others themselves, if they meet the zeal is 2 higher than target’s cunning criteria themselves.

Vacation – increases your character’s cunning by +1 and gravitas by +5, but costs a lot of money and requires an authority of 6 AND zeal of 6, so very few characters in your faction will fulfill both stat requirements while sitting around idly in the senate, to be sent on vacation with a bag of cash, all only to increase their cunning by 1 and a tiny boost in gravitas.

Flirt – is performed on a married couple from a rival party, and by one of your party members who is not married to someone else from your party, and if single, also isn’t interested in getting married soon, because flirting makes everyone except the target lose gravitas – i.e. you (reducing your chances of getting married unless you have enough gravitas to waste on flirting), your spouse (wont happen if you are unmarried), and the target’s spouse, but not the target, so flirting to a single is almost useless. Flirting is tricky, as it requires the flirter to have 2 more cunning than the target’s authority, and also costs the initiator 30 gravitas, meaning newcomers to your party are too unskilled to flirt, and it is unlikely that one of your high gravitas party members is still single (unless you deliberately never married them off, or their spouse died recently), as you usually want to marry them off when they are young to be able to maximize the chance of being able to bear children (happens only if they have been adopted into your family) and/or just enjoy the bonuses they (you) get from them having a spouse (and the spouse getting bonuses from them, so basically x2 bonuses) for as long as possible. The flirter gains back 10 gravitas (meaning they only lose 20 gravitas per flirt) and the target party’s spouse loses 10 gravitas. Flirting is therefore bad for both our party (20 gravitas loss) and the targeted married couple (10 gravitas loss), as only those parties who were not party (sorry) to this action keep their gravitas intact, and hence their influence in the senate, undamaged. So flirt if your party already has a lot of influence. Flirting with a rival party also gives +2 loyalty for 2 turns from that party, meaning you can weaken it without making them more disloyal.

Flirt can be even better if the flirter is from your party and already in a political marriage with a rival party (whose loyalty to yours has been boosted via the marriage). By flirting, the flirter can now reduce the gravitas of upto three parties, thus ending the scenario with your rival parties having lost as much gravitas as you (20 vs 20, as you lose 20 gravitas, while your spouse who is from another party loses 10 gravitas, and the targeted party’s spouse loses 10 gravitas). There is also the possibility of flirting to a married couple from the same party your flirter already is in a political marriage with, making you lose 20 gravitas, while the targeted party loses 20 gravitas as well - 10 gravitas deducted from your spouse of that party, and 10 gravitas deducted from the spouse of the other person of that party you flirted with. In such a scenario you'd want to evaluate whether you want to lower yours and the (second?) biggest party in the senate's influence, or lower yours and the weakest party in the senate's influence, whichever is more beneficial to you.

Finally, the benefit of lowering one’s own gravitas or one's spouse’s gravitas via flirt allows the flirter or their spouse to then file for a divorce, if he or his wife have created a really negative trait as a result of their marriage, like a factionwide increase in corruption. This brings us to...

Divorce – as mentioned before, when you seek a spouse, just like in real life, the ensuing marriage may play out well or be a bad thing, once each character’s “intimate nature” is revealed as traits in the spouse card of the character they are married to (who they are married to is shown if you hover your mouse over the small white silhouette of a face in profile, in the lower right of the spouse card), traits that previously played no role in their daily affairs. These can give bonuses, or be a strain on your faction, for example a naggy wife lowering her husband’s authority or gravitas, or worse, insisting on expensive baubles that are a drain on the faction treasury in the form of increasing factionwide corruption (even a small increase like 3% can cost you hundreds or even thousands of denarii per turn). So instead of waiting “till death do us part”, a divorce ends these traits for both husband and wife, leaving your faction’s fortunes for the better. Even though the divorcees don’t die, their “in the sheets” traits will disappear, so you can still keep them in your party without suffering the problems their marriage had caused. However, to be able to file for a divorce, you need money, and the initiator’s gravitas also needs to be 40 or higher, while their spouse’s not higher than 20, and whoever files for the divorce will lose a further 5 gravitas per turn, during the next 2 turns, while the divorcee loses 15 gravitas immediately, but is then free to go. You can lower gravitas in preparation for the divorcee via actions that cost him/her gravitas, as long as he/she has a high enough level of cunning (Flirt or Spread Rumors), authority (Do Favor) or zeal (Praise, Provoke, or Improve Relations).

Another reason why you may want to file for a divorce is so you can immediately remarry and thus generate another party member for your own party, if there are none available in the hire politician panel and none of your party members are single. After all, the goal is to avoid filling the other parties with more members. Or perhaps you want to file for divorce and then enter a political marriage to quickly boost another party's loyalty after you have done everything else in your power to raise it.

Insult – drops the target’s gravitas by 10 and also lowers the target’s zeal by 1. Zeal gives a boost to the general’s bodyguard unit’s combat stats. While this may not be all that impressive for a small unit of horsemen, if the general’s unit is a big blob of Triarii, debuffing them will help in a civil war, albeit marginally. Insult is mainly used as a prerequisite for other actions that require the target’s zeal to be lower than one of the initiator’s attributes, for example if you want to adopt one of your own generals into your family, but his high zeal is preventing it (“how dare the entitled brat refuse the generous offer!”). Insulting a different party member comes with a -5 loyalty penalty lasting for 2 turns, the same as Assassinate, so it's really not worth doing that. Insult is also useful if you want to push your own party member’s gravitas down to 20 to enable a divorce, but do this only if they cant do any political action themselves that cost (lower their) gravitas or flirt because they lack cunning.

Spread Rumors – costs the initiator 15 gravitas, lots of money, requires 2 more cunning than the target’s zeal, and incurs a -3 loyalty penalty that lasts for 4 turns, all only to lower the target’s authority by 1. Authority is the radius of the general’s morale buff circle. Easily fixed by moving a bit closer to the unit he wants to hold the line if the ring is smaller, I’d say lowering this is even less relevant than debuffing zeal via Insult. However, if there is a different action you want to do (like Flirt to damage their gravitas, or Entice to completely make them switch sides) both of which require the target to have lower authority than the initiator’s cunning, then spreading rumors about them first, is the prerequisite needed to allow you to do those things, which would have otherwise been almost impossible (as Spread Rumors as preparation for Entice is much easier to do than raise the initiator's Cunning via Vacation, which in turn requires them to have high authority and high zeal).

Provoke – costs the initiator 20 gravitas, requires him to have 2 more zeal than the target, and lowers the target’s Cunning by 1. If the target was from a different party, you also incur a -3 loyalty penalty for 3 turns. Again, you’d think this action makes little sense, but some actions require the victim to have a lower cunning than the initiator, like Assassinate (a different party's member), or Praise (your own party member) and therefore this acts as preparation. It also increases the chance of a political incident happening next turn. But in most instances, only Provoke if you plan on assassinating the target, but need to lower their cunning to be able to do so.

Ursurp Legacy – the weirdest of all actions, what it does is allow the initiator to make themself the heir without having been made an heir. On the rare occasion that your faction leader has chosen an untalented hack for his heir, and is old and has run out of gravitas for having spent it on other actions, and therefore cannot make someone else his heir, a strapping young lad with a promising future can ursurp legacy to make himself the heir by force. It requires the faction leader to have less than 30 gravitas, and the ursurper to have 3 more authority than the faction leader, and comes with a hefty penalty of +10% influence for all other parties and -10 gravitas for all your party members. Unnecessarily harsh, while the reward for ursurping legacy is negligible. I think CA had some plan for this but then lost their bearings and left this needlessly expensive action the way it currently is.