Popularity balancing

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    • Popularity balancing

      I've have been watching popularity closely and this is my second post in regards to popularity. studying my own popularity against other players within my maps is something I've been keeping my eyes on.

      For example: my present map, its day 2 and I've declared war once, following the diplomacy channels and I've been penalised 20 popularity points. Bringing my overall popularity down to 61%. Whereas, my neighbour has performed 3 perfidious acts of war and is currently sat on 56%.

      After weeks of watching similar situations transpire, I'm still convinced that something just doesn't add up with the popularity rating. I've voiced it many times in global and help chat and always been given the same advise:

      1. Give nations RoW
      2. Trade in the market
      3. follow diplomacy channels and declare war before invading. (which still carries -20% penalty).
      4. Go to Forum.

      I agree that elite A.I. make more interesting game play but when your in a 25 player game with 2 active players with a popularity rating of -10%, it leads to some extremely frustrating game play. The advise given to raise popularity is a farce. Never once in nearly 8 weeks have i seen any improvement in popularity from trading (I've said it once, I'll say it again, I believe this is pure myth. I've not seen a single thread of evidence that this works with trading). Row works to some very tiny degree by increasing it by %1. Declaring war penalty is far too steep in my opinion and i believe that a more balanced rate of Increase/decrease should be addressed. I'm not convinced, that anything works for increasing popularity to any beneficial effect. I'm not even convinced that it works properly considering the difference between the actions of my neighbouring player and myself during the round I'm in. It make no sense how he could have attacked 3 nations without warning and still sit at 56% while I follow popularity protocol and be sitting at 61%. Nothing about it adds up, or makes any sense.

      Yawnsy
    • When you say your neighbor is at 56% popularity I believe this is not his popularity but is your popularity with his country which is about your global popularity of 61% (note I cannot be authoritative on this so hopefully a more informed person will reply).

      To boost your popularity at the start of the game, set your relationship with all small AI nations to ROW - on a 100 player map this is worth about 15%. Later on you can set them to Share Maps and probably harvest another 5%. Make sure you declare war (as you say) - each time you do this it costs about 8%. The fact you lost 20% probably means you actually declared war a couple of times or did a surprise attack by mistake. Note I have had this happen when a province rebels to a player I am at peace with and I have a unit ordered into the province before day change - the unit keeps moving and hey presto, you do a surprise attack by mistake (very annoying and given that the game stops all your movement when you join a coalition even with players you already have ROW or Share Maps with you would think the game would do the same when a province rebels!!!). Carefully check the paper to see who you have declared war on and how
    • This is the point I'm trying to make in regards to percentages. The percentages you stated above are not the percentages I'm seeing. I'm checking before and after each action. They simply just don't add up to the percentages you've stated. You say 8% for declaring war, I see a 20% penalty (Yes, declared before attacking). The 2nd war I declared (before 61%, after 50%) saw a penalty of 11%. There's doesn't seem to be a set number from my studies. The figures I seem to be getting are purely random and I can't fathom how they are calculated. What is the % ratio based on? Why do you get different results for the same actions?

      Try it yourself. Next new game, check before and after each action and post your results here. I would like to see what percentage increase/decrease you find to see if you can make any sense of the randomness of the results.

      Yawnsy
    • Not declaring war before attacking does not add any negative modifier, so its the same if you declare war or just attack (since November 2019).

      Each action in the game adds either a positive reaction or a negative reaction to the AI, with a certain reaction value. The popularity percentage is then calculated via this formula:
      (positive reactions +1) / (positive reactions + negative reactions +2)

      Meaning if declaring war would add +1 negative reaction (just a hypothetical number, can also have decimals) then the percentage drop would get smaller and smaller with each additional negative reaction because of this formula.

      I don't know the values for all the reactions on top of my head, have fun figuring them out. :)