So as an Emperor, you will have numerous ways to influence your leaders under your rule, ranging from benevolent to merciless. An important lever you will have is using your sector governors (and to a lesser extent, your system governors) to actually enact and guide your policies. The end goal of Imperia is that your sector governors should be both your potential largest levers to run your empire, as well as your greatest threat should they turn against you. The military system, both in the ground and in space, will start to show this in .410 with the addition of ground forces, armies, and fleets that can potentially be controlled by sector governors.
Another concept that will be present in .410 is the idea of using leverage from your sector and system governors to run your planets. Characters can exert pressure or persuasion on characters that are subordinate to them. Persuasion is less effective but is not considered tyrannical. Pressure is considered tyrannical and only allied leaders with tyrannical leanings will do this. Pressure/persuasion is ‘pooled’ for each character who is being influenced and can be used as ‘currency’ to improve the odds something will be done or used to speed up an Edict. Characters that are pressured are unhappy and will generally like you less, as well as their superiors. Points in these pools raise the chance of success for one point per persuasion point, and 3 points per pressure point. Characters will remember being pressured. Points will decay by 25% per month if not used.The idea is essentially that you are approaching your most powerful governors to give their support for key requests in the near future, without having to be immediately specific, but seeing the effects of their promise fade over time. That way, you have some ability to deal with events as they occur and this should result in less micromanagement overall.
This system will give the player more flexibility to set up situations with a better chance of success, at the risk of an unstable leadership structure in any given sector. A military army on the ground can also create pressure (but this is mighty Tyrannical) equal to the army’s suppression rating and must be in a Suppression stance.
On another note, I have been working quite a bit on the game over the last week or so and there are a lot of new additions big and small. I will be putting out a revised changelog tomorrow!
-Steve