Total War: ATTILA

Total War: ATTILA

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Politics: Maintaining Loyalty and Balance
By Voth
How to easily keep your faction characters in check, happy, and loyal.
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Intro
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 and Influence
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
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.
Power
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.

Mid to Late Game
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.
Political Actions
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
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.

Absolute Adoption
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.

Pros
  • 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.

Cons
  • 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.
Tips
  • 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.
TLDR
  • Keep your Dominion as high as possible.
  • Keep Control at 50% early game and 60%+ late game.
  • Keep power balanced.
40 Comments
simonblixt 10 Mar, 2022 @ 2:41pm 
If a character with no adult children adopt a high influence character, that character can adopt an other one that adopt an other one and so on... the adoption chain makes the family tree look very funny tho. good if you need more family members fast with good wifes they can embesel alot of money...
Jet 13 Jan, 2020 @ 1:13am 
@funky only higher ranked nobles mind when you give offices to lower ranked than them. Same rank is fine, but the actual office rank has to be higher for the higher ranked nobles. Affects idle nobles as well.
𝓕𝒖𝒏𝒌𝒚 30 Jan, 2018 @ 7:08am 
Just want to ask: Will other generals and statesman get mad if you assign an office to somebody in your family? for example your office is total empty and now you add an 5 stars general in it, will the idle/waiting generals (5 stars and above) in the pool get pissed? (office given to subordinate)
Fanstar1 21 Dec, 2017 @ 7:15pm 
Visigoths and ostrogoths may be threat to Illyricum. and quadrians and eastern germans will be threatening your eastern lands.
Fanstar1 21 Dec, 2017 @ 7:15pm 
IF britannia falls, celts and other factions will focus on gaul, correct. Northeastern gaul (Belgica and that other state) will probably be attacked. Suebi and vandals may attack aswell, and huns will be issue later on.
Silver Eagle 99 3 Sep, 2017 @ 10:16pm 
Thank you and much obliged mate!
tiberiansun371alexw 21 Aug, 2017 @ 7:17pm 
As the Western Roman Empire, which army gets the most action (and influence for the general) if you plan on holding Brittania to the death?

I hear holding Brittania essentially makes North Gaul a quiet front, seeing little more than a raiding party every 30 ish turns, but the Rhine front remains hot until you lose or stabilize it.

And Aquiella tends to get smacked a lot
GuessMDK 19 Aug, 2017 @ 10:35am 
A few things.

First, adoption is by far the best political action. You wont always have family that can do the job and a secure loyalty the next turn fixes the loyalty issue. Half my current family is adopted and i have NO loyalty issues with family members.

Secondly, non family members should be governors. Your family should be admirals and generals. They will gain more influence this way. This will allow you to burn up the little influence non family members get thru promoting to political positions.

Thirdly, your highking should gain more influence then anyone, to have then sit on a mountain of influence is wasteful.

I have 7 men in my family, 4 are adopted. I use my influence as soon as i can, and promote non family members ASAP to lower their influence. Wives are used to gain control and secure loyalty. (not a single wife has gotten pregnant from doing this)
Vilbobo 7 Mar, 2017 @ 6:08am 
Thx for the guide! That is really usefull
Stratigeni 22 May, 2016 @ 11:44pm 
If you notice, your dominion & control bars act in sync with each other unless you have a skewed set. Such as, 1-3 family members & 20 generals. One rises as the other falls accordingly. You achieve the perfect balance when you have
1. Strive to keep a balanced power bar
2. A good "non-family to family member ratio". (Dont have too much of either, etc)
3. A highly active king
4. Stay at war with someone.
5. Dont change your religion unless absolutely neccessary.
6. Dont keep generals in the field too long. (they tend to turn arrogant).
7. Dont just promote your generals when they area bale to be promoted. Because many of them become dis-loyal when they are promoted too much or too quickly.
8. An unfluential king causes widespread disloyalty. And, disloyalty eats at cotrol faster than anything. So be slow to promote generals to the highest offices.