Influence points What are they for???

They are the points used to figure out how much of the UP vote a civilization will have. They can be useful especially early on when a bad UP vote can screw up your entire game.

They've been nerfed a bit to prevent cheese tactics, but they can still tip the balance in a trade. If you don't trade them, then you use them when the UP issues come up to vote.

It differs from cultural influence in that cultural influence is the degree to which your influence has saturated other cultures.

So, basically, influence points are your votes at the next UP meeting? Do you get them back after that meeting? Or, once sold, then gone forever?

You use them up on UP votes, but they are generated monthly (or turnly, if that's a word ) by your systems.

I am not sure about thsi; but my total IP points available to trade varies with each race; you can even give trade them to minors (what they will do with them i havent a clue). But short of giving them away I havent gotten any trade value at all from them.

Never give them away. Buy them.

~SDC~

I think it is a cool concept. You can certainly 'buy' influence in the real world, makes sense to have it in the game as well. A few techs, some money can lead to the influence from a race to tip a vote your way. Awesome feature.. maybe it can be integrated further somehow with a patch or mod in the future! For instance.. you can use them as leverage to force an AI to join you in a war, etc. I dunno.. neat aspect of the game, imo.

fleabitfox

I think the concept would have more strategy to it if you new, say 2 years in advance, what the next UP vote would entail!

That way, if it's a super important issue, you could eschew money for more influence (the AI would do the same, I hope).

As it stands now, since you don't know what the issue will be in time enough to do anything about it, there's not much rhyme or reason to getting influence before money.

I think the idea of knowing the UP vote a turn before it occurs is great! Certainly would add another strategic element to the game?

Yeah, I agree, as it currently stands you have way not enough warning about ANY vote coming up at all -- maybe if you knew you had 6 months instead of next turn, even if you didn't know the specific agenda, you could think about maneuvering for influence.

Being able to spend a ton of influence to initiate a vote would be the ideal feature here for me.

Now THOSE sound like good ideas. It would definately give you sense of dynamics about galactic politics. If you could use IP to actually even get a specific issue up (for your IP) would be even better. LOL maybe a way around it would be that UP sessiosn actually have 2 votes: one for the current issue and one for the whatever should be the issue for the next would be. However, I spidey sense tells me that would involve quite handful of AI reprogramming.

dawg

There are a lot of great ideas flying around on this thread and so I thought I'd add my two cents:

I love the idea of being able to get a little bit of notice about the UP agenda (so I can know whether I need to sell my soul for influence points). Also, it's possible that such information could be linked to certain techs (e.g. Advanced Diplomacy gives you one month notice on UP agenda, Some other tech gives you 6 months notice).

Thanks,
- Matt Lepinski :->



~SDC~