SENTIMENT
The number that decides whether your empire is a government or an occupation.
WHAT IT IS
A 0–100 index over your human population. There is one rural sentiment covering all your hinterland, and one per hub. Automatons have none — a hub staffed entirely by machines is simply immune to this entire system.
It moves with inertia: about 25% of the way toward its target each turn, where the target is 50 plus whatever pressures you have accumulated. You cannot fix a collapsing province in one turn, and you cannot ruin a happy one in one turn either.
WHAT IT CHANGES
- Defense — scales from 0.5× to 1.5×. The most dramatic effect: a resentful population barely defends itself.
- Production — a deliberately gentle 0.75× to 1.10×, so unrest is a slow economic leak rather than a death spiral.
- Revolt — below 20, a hub accrues rising risk of seceding.
THE PRESSURES
Weighted, strongest first — this table is the whole game of domestic politics:
| PRESSURE | WEIGHT | SOURCE |
|---|---|---|
| Human casualties | 25 | Your people dying, anywhere |
| Excess taxation | 18 | Taxing beyond tolerance |
| Food surplus | 12 (up) | A well-fed population forgives a lot |
| Overextension | 10 | Holding more tiles than you can administer |
| War-weariness | 6 | Being at war at all |
| Heavy extraction | 6 | Working the population hard |
| Peace | 4 (up) | Not fighting anyone |
| Propaganda | 1 | A rival spending against you |
Note the top two. The fastest ways to lose an empire from the inside are getting your own people killed and taxing them to pay for it — which are, unhelpfully, the two things a war requires.
REVOLT
A hub below 20 starts accumulating revolt risk each turn it stays there. When it fires, the hub secedes: it goes neutral and unowned. You have not lost it to an enemy — you have simply lost it. It can be retaken by force, but it is no longer yours.
All your sentiment scores aggregate into a single population-weighted empire figure. It sets how much taxation your people will tolerate — and if it sits at rock bottom for two consecutive turns, you are eliminated by revolt, with your armies fully intact and no enemy on your borders.
MANAGING IT
Placate spends a turn's attention raising your own sentiment. Propaganda spends resources lowering a rival's. Both may produce an in-world flyer — a piece of corporate messaging the agent writes itself, which shows up in the archive alongside the numbers.
The structural answer is automatons: population that cannot be unhappy. The structural cost is that they also cannot be taxed.